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What do they get for those extra credz?

Bounty hunters get some unique options:

-permanent access to some rare items (Rarity 11/10/8 for Leader/Champ/Ganger)
-each fighter class can choose from 4 different profiles, human/squat/Goliath/Van Saar.
-can carry 5 weapons instead of 3
-can choose what skills to have access to
-can buy House Legacy for individual fighters to give them access to a house weapon list

This gives you the opportunity to start a gang that includes any skills you want, fighters who start with BS2+ or T4, Chem Thrower and Harpoon Launcher, meltagun, missile launcher, all sorts of stuff. You can start with most types of armour, fields, extravagant goods, I guess even pets?

They have zero turf and can never gain any. If they capture anyone they have to sell them to the guilders but get full value instead of half. I forget what else.

They also get a bonus to the capture roll to see if anyone got caught in the first place, and a regular income that’s directly related to their reputation.

But yeah, they sacrifice cheapness for immense flexibility across the campaign.

Venator Champion have terrible stat compare to other gang's champion. Only one profile had 2+ BS, the rest have 4+ BS, with the "good CC" profile have BS 5+.

Ganger also cannot buy Special weapon.

They do benefit from short turf war cycle, which allow them to collect gang income base on Rep instead, which increase easier and faster than turf.

Let's be honest, Turf isn't really a big deal.

I'm more annoyed at them getting a bonus for permanently killing off enemies, it encourages dickish play and is a bad sign that GW is on the road to enabling the crowd who get off on making everyone else miserable (Enforcers, Spyrers).

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I'm more annoyed at them getting a bonus for permanently killing off enemies, it encourages dickish play and is a bad sign that GW is on the road to enabling the crowd who get off on making everyone else miserable (Enforcers, Spyrers).

TFG's are quite fond of the Enforcers in some of the local places. I'd just be happier if they weren't using junk models.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
it encourages dickish play and is a bad sign that GW is on the road to enabling the crowd who get off on making everyone else miserable (Enforcers, Spyrers).

Maybe people need to grow some coping mechanisms?

I am an old school Blood Bowl player and I miss the 3rd edition rules with special play cards that permanently hampered your team and players (peaked, stolen treasury, bad habits etc). Somehow we survived and loved the game (including those cards).

Since then rules for many games have gone all 'touchy-feely' concentrating on bonuses for your own side and only temporary negatives for opponents. Its a blight on many games and goes to show that people struggle with negative outcomes.

The more you pile on negative consequences, the more often I re-start the gang. Gives less continuation, less progress.

That's why y'all should play the original Warhammer Quest. That game was unfair, by design, and it was incredible.

Baxx wrote:
The more you pile on negative consequences, the more often I re-start the gang. Gives less continuation, less progress.

Lightweight. I've never restarted a gang in a campaign, no matter how badly mauled. Takes the fun out of it.

As for removing other gangers from the campaign, do the Venators get to capture more gangers than usual? After all, you get one at most, if you hold the field at the end, and then the other side gets to do a rescue mission. And once they are sold, that's what the prison break scenario is for.

Every gang is encouraged to take the other gang's member out of action. Especially when said gang is short on ganger, like Venator gang. It is a good way to earn XP. Why would you not want to take people out of action?

Venator do not gain any special modify to the opponent's Lasting Injuries roll.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That's why y'all should play the original Warhammer Quest. That game was unfair, by design, and it was incredible.

The advanced monster encounter rules were great. What’s that Timmy? You say you accidentally walked into a nest of D3 bloodthirsters as level one characters? And your absolute best attack rolling maximum damage doesn’t even get halfway past their damage reduction? That’s amazing Timmy!

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

Baxx wrote:
The more you pile on negative consequences, the more often I re-start the gang. Gives less continuation, less progress.

Lightweight. I've never restarted a gang in a campaign, no matter how badly mauled. Takes the fun out of it.

As for removing other gangers from the campaign, do the Venators get to capture more gangers than usual? After all, you get one at most, if you hold the field at the end, and then the other side gets to do a rescue mission. And once they are sold, that's what the prison break scenario is for.

Losing the leader and having both champions in Recovery with -1T / -1BS / -1W takes the fund out of it. How fun would our 2nd game be? You won the first one, devastated my gang and now you get to rape a small gang consisting of only survivors? I don't get to play more than a handful of games per month. Therefore I insist those games should be of quality. I'd love to have enough games that I can just plough through all the losses.

I think I'd have bottled out after two out of the three went OOA, unless it all happened in one round.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I think I'd have bottled out after two out of the three went OOA, unless it all happened in one round.

It all happened in one round.

Look like a victim of Van Saar superior BS2+

 Mr_Rose wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That's why y'all should play the original Warhammer Quest. That game was unfair, by design, and it was incredible.

The advanced monster encounter rules were great. What’s that Timmy? You say you accidentally walked into a nest of D3 bloodthirsters as level one characters? And your absolute best attack rolling maximum damage doesn’t even get halfway past their damage reduction? That’s amazing Timmy!

Bloodthirsters? Pfft!

The journey home was more dangerous than Bloodthirsters. Staying in town was hazardous too.

I've lost more permanent Toughness stats to random events than I ever have from walking through a dungeon. And the "a fire burns half your gold" event is infamous in our group (we blamed the Elves and their hair spray), such much so that I wrote a blank event called Aelfyre, which randomly burns half your gold as an Event Card.

Chainsaw Warrior was brutal like that too.

Even Advanced Heroquest had its moments. Fell into a pit trap, and no-one left up top has a rope? Time to roll up a new character. I've also seen a character in WFRP 2e spend a fate point to avoid death in the very first combat encounter, not ten minutes after filling out the character sheet.

Back to Necromunda, if one of my Champions goes down, then I will be much more careful with the others. Let the faceless mooks take the chances, there's more where they came from.

Baxx wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

Baxx wrote:
The more you pile on negative consequences, the more often I re-start the gang. Gives less continuation, less progress.

Lightweight. I've never restarted a gang in a campaign, no matter how badly mauled. Takes the fun out of it.

As for removing other gangers from the campaign, do the Venators get to capture more gangers than usual? After all, you get one at most, if you hold the field at the end, and then the other side gets to do a rescue mission. And once they are sold, that's what the prison break scenario is for.

Losing the leader and having both champions in Recovery with -1T / -1BS / -1W takes the fund out of it. How fun would our 2nd game be? You won the first one, devastated my gang and now you get to rape a small gang consisting of only survivors? I don't get to play more than a handful of games per month. Therefore I insist those games should be of quality. I'd love to have enough games that I can just plough through all the losses.

Which is why you play Necromunda Campaigns with more than one player, you absolute melt.

Sure, someone is gonna get the suspiciously sticky in a different way from the rest of the stick end of the stick - but that's inevitable. At some point, someone is going to be the first gang to take an absolute kicking, and start taking real casualties.

But the balance comes when there's multiple players, so the one lucky enough to have been on the donating end of a ROFLstomp doesn't just continually pick on that same Gang.

It isn't inevitable that they have their gang devastated though.

If the game allows people to be so badly beaten that the rest of the campaign isn't fun anymore then it's a failure of design.

I haven't played the current campaign to say if that's the case or not, but in general there should be mechanisms to help recovery and stop run away success.

Vorian wrote:
I haven't played the current campaign to say if that's the case or not, but in general there should be mechanisms to help recovery and stop run away success.

There are ways to do this. One thing is, we have played where if you get so far ahead that there's no way anyone can catch up to you- we just stop. There's no point. Something about denying TFG an obscene lead tends to keep TFG away.

Also, our current Arbitrator has a Venator list (that's actually just the old Enforcers). If a gang gets 'too notorious', they can come in and wreck something.

One particular experience was with me playing TFG. I wasn't too far behind but this guy was not fun to play against. Normally, at a certain reputation level, the Arbitrator's 'gang' had a chance to come in on the mission. At any round of the game. So, I lucked out playing TFG. The Enforcer 'gang' shows up on the second round and I make it a point to duck and hide (I was far back and shooting, anyway). Normally, both gangs would 'team up' to remove this new threat from the table- but I just sat back and let him get slaughtered.

The interesting thing about Necromunda is that it's easy to get 'TFG', but if someone is being 'TFG', it's just as easy to run him off. It's not a perfect gaming system, it's got quite a few exploits and no FAQ to clarify things (that I know of). I don't recommend doing PUG or campaigns with total strangers. The game is best played with friends over beer and pretzels.

For instance, in the private club we have a campaign. We believe 'honor begets honor'. If I capture your ganger, you can buy him back (his gear gets sold on the market, though). I won't coup-de-gras a Champion or Leader. We also allow ONE reroll on the Out-of-Action rolls after the game for the entire phase for the entire gang. We also allow selling items to other gangs (as long as they aren't house specific). It's a friendly campaign, more so because we understand that all of our players don't have the cash to buy more models, only two gangs have weapons upgrades, and some of us are using old models and legacy rules.

In short, Necromunda is a game you'll hate if you're not playing with good people.

At that point you are having to house rule because the game doesn't work.

There are some pretty simple mechanisms to keep everyone equal - limited numbers / gang rating per scenario, upkeep, bonuses to those that are behind (convert gangers to champions if they all die, gain juves/gangers if you fall below certain size, have free hired guns / tactics cards if ratings are hugely different.)

I like being able to do damage to the other guy, I like things to actually happen in the campaign and for it not to be like the A- team and they all get up after the battle.

The rules just need to accommodate that without it ruining the campaign for people (or artificially games mastering stuff).

It is a game that has some stiff penalties for you if you fall behind, and if you get ahead the rewards for doing so make it easy for you to stay ahead.

One rule is with cards, the underdog always gets an extra card or someone with an obscene lead can get only one (or none).

Other fun ideas: "Enemy of my Enemy". Gangs that are significantly far behind one guy can band together to battle him. It kind of makes sense: "I want to kill you, but I could use your help before this gang kills us both".

At risk of being the one to trigger the buckaroo, there are underdog bonuses to get you back on your feet - from scenarios which only use a handful of fighters (or one fighter in the extreme case) so you can let the rest of your fighters recover and avoid taking multiple casualties, to scenarios which give you additional tactics and/or reputation for fighting a gang with a higher crew value or gang rating.

In Baxx's case, I'd do a shootout or the one-on-one knifefight scenario (fair enough, he might not have had access to those if he took that doing before GW3 came out), and bottle out sharpish if it went pear-shaped. Or I'd have done the spook harvest or similar scenarios which give additional readies to recruit new fighters.

I'm not in such a bad state as him, but my Champion with chem-thrower misses every second game and has four serious injuries so far. I had a Blood Bowl team once where six players were missing the next game. That next game, my seven players on the field got thrashed 4-0, but they still put in the appearance.

Underdog gang have more chance to choose scenario which they might want to choose some scenario like ambush, allow them to inflect heavy casualty to the enemies team.

The fact of the matter is, once the leader is out, you can never be at the same competetive level, because the leader is priced so cheap, no other fighter can level-up without a much higher impact on gang rating.

This was not a problem in old Necromunda, because the leader was overpriced. When the leader died, the gang could actually be more competetive because the new leader may have started as a juve who level up to become better than the leader, but with a much lower cost.

Other games like GorkaMorka and old Necromunda had fun ways to motivate to keep handicapped fighters. You had the mad doc which could 'fix' things (for example giving bionic arm when operating a leg injury, or squig brain transplant). Old Necromunda had bionics. Now, once a fighter gets that devastating stat decrease, I just rebuy the fighter. Money is cheap in N17.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I think I'd have bottled out after two out of the three went OOA, unless it all happened in one round.

Wait a minute, my original argument was it's better to restart the gang than playing with crippling injuries. The response was restarting the gang takes the fun out of the gang. Then I said playing a crippled gang with the same gang rating as undamaged gangs takes the fun out of the game. Now you're telling me that instead of restarting the game, you instead Bottle out faster and more often?

Is that really more fun, to play much shorter games at a heavy disadvantage without getting any sort of underdog balancing?

IMO? yes. I don't agree with the sort of play that involves challenging a higher-rating gang then bottling ASAP just to farm the underdog bonus - you've got to try to attempt the mission, at least - but if stuff starts going wrong? Yes, I'll run. If my leader's dead and a Champion has a sucking chest wound, then my one remaining champion is going to throw in the towel. Give it a couple of "side games" and they'll be back. If you're just re-starting the gang at the first sign of trouble, why not just play skirmish mode all the time?

There is underdog compensation, though, isn't there? bonus Reputation or tactics cards, anyway.

Bionics in Necromunda '95 weren't much cop as a balancing mechanism because they were rare. I had a few, but most of my injured gangers just struggled on with the missing body parts.

This isn't me speaking from a position of lofty strength here - my champions have missed as many games as they've been in, I've got a collection of reduced WS and S fighters and I've got a rescue mission to do (thankfully it's only for a ganger). I'm doing my dues at the bottom of the leaderboard.

That's fine if you enjoy it. But a significant number of people will just lose enthusiasm and stop playing the campaign.

The campaign system should always result in games where both people actually have a chance at the start of a game.