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Interspace Assault is a Grimdark Si-fi Skirmish game that will have adaptations for campaign and full scale battle(See WH40k) modes. all of the Armybooks and lore are being made by one person and the only outside help will be a professional to help with the models(seeing as I'm kind of rubbish at this sort of thing) and few friends and family members to help with playtesting. so seeing as I'm on my own it would be much appreciated for you to give your feedback and possibly help with the much waves of playtesting this project will require before it will be done


Above is a first draft of the basic rules, it is nowhere near complete but I though I would share what I have so far. feel free to criticize me all you want

above is a PDF of the current Fiou troops, I will add the weapon rules Tomorrow but I'm too tired tonight.
Also the name is temporary and if its taken, tell me.

I don't want to discourage you but I do want to warn you on directly comparing yourself to another game. Let other people draw their own comparisons but to establish as your own, it is better to use as few comparisons to other games... because it draws the question of, "Why play this vs the other?".

With that in mind, if you want to describe the futuristic style, instead of saying "futuristic style of 40K" you are probably better describing it as "Grimdark" as that is the genre/setting of that type of game. I would also not call your faction or army books Codexes.

How do your upgrades do? For example replacing a Fusion Rifle with a Fusion Blaster (Heavy), does it +/- an existing stat?

I'm not a huge 40K player but currently based on what I am seeing, it looks like you've renamed some things replaced Balastic Skill with Aim and Toughness with Armor.

This is usually the part where I will ask what is the goal and scope of the game design? Is it to create a new game to sell, new miniatures via retail? Or is the goal to create a clone/modification/updated version of an existing ruleset?

Again I'm not trying to discourage you, but just trying to prepare you for questions that will be asked as you go through this journey.

 Dark Severance wrote:
I don't want to discourage you but I do want to warn you on directly comparing yourself to another game. Let other people draw their own comparisons but to establish as your own, it is better to use as few comparisons to other games... because it draws the question of, "Why play this vs the other?".

With that in mind, if you want to describe the futuristic style, instead of saying "futuristic style of 40K" you are probably better describing it as "Grimdark" as that is the genre/setting of that type of game. I would also not call your faction or army books Codexes.

How do your upgrades do? For example replacing a Fusion Rifle with a Fusion Blaster (Heavy), does it +/- an existing stat?

I'm not a huge 40K player but currently based on what I am seeing, it looks like you've renamed some things replaced Balastic Skill with Aim and Toughness with Armor.

This is usually the part where I will ask what is the goal and scope of the game design? Is it to create a new game to sell, new miniatures via retail? Or is the goal to create a clone/modification/updated version of an existing ruleset?

Again I'm not trying to discourage you, but just trying to prepare you for questions that will be asked as you go through this journey.

Don't worry bout it, it's a Day into development and I'm the only one working on it right now, I was just giving a preview of what o have on it so far and it will be constantly improving. I was planning to remove the comparison to 40k after I made a solid storyline but it's still a bit fuzzy and generalized at the moment.


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In addition, the rules were meant to be a fusion of the simpilistic rules of AOS and the more complicated rules of 40K.

On first impressions I'm not at all surprised by the influence from GW's systems since it really stood out to me on my first read through and it looks like a fairly thinly veiled, tweaked copy of GW's basic rules systems. Much less of an issue if you're intending it to just be played among friends, but as something you want to sell to the general public I personally would find something a bit more distinctive and different more appealing. YMMV of course.

Have you considered not limiting yourself to a 1D6 system? D10/D12 give a wider range of results and 2D6 gives a bell curve rather than a linear range of results if you absolutely have to roll cubes.

How are you going to handle unit activations? IGOUGO? Alternating activations? Other?

As with the previous poster, I don't wish to discourage you and I do appreciate that it's very early days.

Do not worry. many people's first attempts end up being a re-skinned 40K. It is all part of the evolution of being a game designer. I salute your ambition and remember to not try to make games for anyone, but to please yourself.

I recommend, before going forward with further development to really get a feel for the marketplace by reading lots and lots of rulesets.You can find a bunch on the Freewargameswikia. This will help you start to think differently about mechanics and rule interactions. In addition, go back to your core concept and really think about what youare trying to simulate i.e is it about shooting, maneuver, stealth, small-scale, larger scale, etc. etc.

Good luck and thank you for sharing.

You talk about resin and plastic minis, so I assume you see this as a commercial project. If you have the capital to develop miniatures (and, presumably, art) and as it sounds like the setting is your first love, you might be better off concentrating on what you enjoy (writing the setting) and finding a professional game designer to develop the game according to your brief.

Alternatively, you may have more fun re-skinning an existing or in-development game to suit your particular setting.

 precinctomega wrote:
You talk about resin and plastic minis, so I assume you see this as a commercial project. If you have the capital to develop miniatures (and, presumably, art) and as it sounds like the setting is your first love, you might be better off concentrating on what you enjoy (writing the setting) and finding a professional game designer to develop the game according to your brief.

Alternatively, you may have more fun re-skinning an existing or in-development game to suit your particular setting.

I have the capital to do it myself, definitely not to hire a professional at this stage. But I love game design as a whole, think of what I'm showing you right now as the stage before a tech demo of a game, it's barely even started and it still has a log. Way to go and a lot of development in store.


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First bit of concept art for the crests(still very rough), the H.I.A crest needs work but I'm actually quite happy with the Fiou one.



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playing around with the idea of smaller models, around the 10mm mark instead of the original 32mm concept, it would make it much easier to produce and much faster for me to design which means I can get more to you faster

I don't want to sound disrespectful, but it sounds like you are woefully underestimating the capital involved in developing a miniatures line. If it's any consolation, so did I and now I know that I won't do it again until I win the Lottery (which I don't play, so don't hold your breath) or a formerly-forgotten-to-existence distant uncle dies intestate leaving me an unexpected windfall of so many millions of pounds that, after sending my children to private school and university and filling every tax-efficient savings scheme and pension I can think of, and finishing my home renovation and having enough left aside that my wife and I will never have to work again and yet I still have money left over that I literally can't think of anything else to do with it.

By contrast, flinging a few hundred quid at a game designer to develop a decent alpha-level system ranks somewhere below the cost of paying the artist to do the cover art (let alone the internal art) and even further below paying the graphic designer to do the layout work.

Without looking at your mechanics, let me share a few thoughts on miniatures scale.

Moving from 30mm (which isn't 1:35, btw, it's more like 1:54, see here) to 10mm (1:161, incidentally) isn't just a question of using smaller minis. The size and scale of miniatures you design your game around have a profound effect on how the player engages with the tabletop. Whilst I know friends who've designed 6mm skirmish games or "pocket Space Hulk" games, these are not and never will be anything more than a curiosity. The reason why 28mm (and its larger relations, 30mm, 32mm and 35mm) are so popular is that they represent a happy medium between table size and miniature size that allows identification of miniatures at a glance.

Smaller scales are successful when the scope of the battle expands, hence why they work for Dropzone Commander, Horizon Wars and Dystopian Wars that aim to capture battle at a grander scale and to introduce gargantuan war machines that don't really have a place at the median scales (unless you're GW, obviously, although even there it's hard to argue that war machines larger than a knight titan are anything more than "event" pieces used more to say that you did it than because they offer a truly interesting gaming experience).

15mm is something of an exception. Historically the level of detail has only just been adequate to offer a reasonable skirmish experience, but recent developments in sculpting and casting technology mean that companies like White Dragon Miniatures are offering 15mm minis of exceptional quality and detail. So if you want to go smaller for reasons of economy, go to 15mm. But you'll still need to be prepared to invest heavily in the sort of quality of design that WDM are offering their customers.

Finally, it is a good rule of thumb that game designers who aren't themselves artists should not share their concept art with anyone other than the artists whom they are paying to make it look good.

Before you determine scale, you need to flesh out the rules more to know more about what you are dealing with. Smaller scale are small typically for reasons to fit more units, squad/company type battles which is different from what you initially described which was more unit based. Usually the game rules themselves are designed for the scale itself in mind. What works for 28mm wargames, may not necessarily work for 10/15mm wargames.

There are a few discussions on design theory that I would look at. Some of them are various discussions about multiple design aspects with different point of views and perspective. I highly suggest this topic to start with: Delta Vector: Wargame Design Series. It covers most of the basics on what to consider on multiple aspects of creating a wargame.

Once you flesh out the rules, playtest it, adjust and playtest it more then you can look at what scale those rules work best with. I suggest playtesting segments in this early part of the stage, so you don't necessarily have to do the whole game. Figure out how you want to do deployment, activation, movement. Test it. Then when you think it works out, work on your combat. Test those parts, then when you are fine put them together. Ask yourself, "Do they mesh well together and does it flow well", then make adjustments as needed and test again.

I honestly don't even bother to look at art at this point, other than inspiration or thinking about if the types of units I want to incorporate. Are they infantry, power armor, vehicles and do they change combat, are there special rules. Then once you have that, you can look how how you plan to bring that medium to life via casting.

I have to say that it looks like you're doing things more than a bit jumbled up. Before you even consider miniature size you really need to nail your rules down a bit more solidly and decide what sort of battles you're trying to represent. If you're looking at platoon level engagements with maybe a hand full of tanks and individual customizable characters (which from your initial post seems to be the case) 32mm or 28mm is fine for that. If however you're looking at larger scale engagements with maybe an entire battalion or more on the tabletop then 10mm is likely the way to go, but at that kind of scale you'll almost certainly have to go with basing miniatures as squads and abstract your current rules a whole lot more, individual officers/characters at that kind of level probably shouldn't be that influential on the tabletop.

In short, I'd strongly suggest deciding what you want your game to be first and then get your rules written around that, then once they're quite a lot tighter you can decide on an appropriate scale. Otherwise you'll probably just be wasting time and potentially money.

I also have to agree that it sounds like you're underestimating the costs and the amount of work likely to be involved in getting a project like this to production, even assuming you can do all the writing, designing, sculpting, production and art work yourself.

Again, I don't want to sound too dismissive or discouraging here.

Thanks for all the feed back!
This is less a commercial project and more a personal one, the mini's are more there because I want custom mini's and ok sorry if what I said was misleading, I'm not doing it alone, I'm just going to be pulling in help and favours when I need them.
Additionally this isn't going to be a short process so I'll be able to work this out over the long Dev period

 Easy E wrote:
Do not worry. many people's first attempts end up being a re-skinned 40K.

There's no shame in reskinning 40k (or whatever) as one's first effort. There are already 7 versions of Warhammer 40k proper, not to mention the family tree of obvious derivatives like AoS, Flames of War, Bolt Action, etc, etc. So, if you go down this route, what makes your different / special?

I always like to see a summary of what your design goals and objectives are. Explain what you're trying to change, why it needs changing, and how you want to go about it. You'll get a lot more help if you can be clear.




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In this part, I get into specifics.

Scale - a typical person stands 1750mm tall. 32mm = 1/55 scale; 1/35 = 50mm tall.

Fiou troops - these sound like regular troopers. What is the opposition?

Recommendation: if you're fusing AoS and 40k, start with the minimalist AoS ruleset and add individual 40k items as you "need" them.

d10 and d12 (also d3, d4 & d8) are effectively identical to d6, so it's rather pointless to look at any of them as a significant change in how the numbers work; either go big with d20 or stick with d6s.

There is nothing wrong with Igo-Ugo per se, although it's good to experiment with other activations, simply to see what they do to your game, whether the typical slowdown is worth it. Watch out for unbounded reactions that bog the game.

28mm (and larger) figures have the advantage of being individually visually impressive, but are otherwise terrible for scale wargaming; they distort ranges and battlefields horribly for anything other than CQB simulations. 10mm (1/175) -15mm ("1/100) are better scale if you start moving into moderns (WW2+). There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking your game back to the roots of 40k as a 28mm CQB fight on a 5'x3' kitchen table.

Playtesting is very important, but you need to have a clearer notion of what you want to do. There are an unlimited way of doing things, and probably 2 or 3 similarly good ways. Which is 'best' depends on what your objectives are.

Fixing on 28-30-32-35mm figures is good, if only to have one thing that's clear. Also to have a huge selection of visually impressive figures to work with.

Good luck!

d10 and d12 (also d3, d4 & d8) are effectively identical to d6, so it's rather pointless to look at any of them as a significant change in how the numbers work; either go big with d20 or stick with d6s

Oh, dude. Shots fired.

As a statistics/probability nerd I cannot disagree more with the suggestion that a d4 or d10 are identical to a d6, "effectively" or not. And obviously any attack on the holy d12 is a heresy that must be trampled upon and put to the flame!

Seriously, though, you can do a helluva a lot with a shift in your mean distribution. A good example can be seen in Tomorrow's War which uses a system similar to that of the Savage Worlds RPG, where every roll is looking for a 4+, but the quality of your troop determines whether you roll a d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12 (TW doesn't use a d4, but SW does). Not only do the odds of success change dramatically with each dice step, but in SW you also have an exploding dice mechanic and a margin-of-success mechanic. So as your dice grows in sides, your odds of success increase, your average margin of success increases, but your odds of an exploding result decrease.

This creates all sorts of fascinating interactions.

Meanwhile, to blow my own horn, Horizon Wars uses d12s exclusively. The higher value on the d12 compared to the d6 allowed me to create a shooting system that entirely did away with different weapon types, boiling all shooting down to one stat and a single opposed roll: something that simply wouldn't have been possible with a d6. It might have been feasible with a d10, but the connection between the 12 and the primary unit of measurement, the inch, is intuitive for players. Also, the d12 is a Platonic solid, unlike the d10, so its display face is easier and clearer to read.

A designer's choice of dice can be absolutely integral to the feel and granularity of a game. Duels have been fought over less!



R.

If your game is a d10 game, or a d12 game, or a d3 game, or a d4 game, merely substituting a different sized die for the d6, then it will play pretty much identically to a d6 game. 40k with d10s provides no significant gameplay difference.

Die-shifting is a completely different mechanic compared to using a different-sized standard die, as is exploding. I see TW's use of die shifting and exploding as gimmicky, a couple flashy mechanics that increase complexity and resolution time over a standard die size.

I won't get into Horizon Wars here, aside to say that the d12 isn't the only way to implement opposed rolls. .

good progress on everything! almost done V1 of the Fiou army book. I'm working on finishing that up as I start creating the preliminary designs for the models. the I have to do the HIA then its up for the first round of playtesting to see f the rules work! would anyone be willing to playtest the rules? (using proxy's of course) so I an see how others like it

I agree that dice mechanics are dice mechanics, but I have to disagree with all dice being the same. Thje probablity curves shift a lot.

JohnHwang and I fundamentally disagree about d20s. I personally hate them and think they give you a false granularity where 2d10 gives a better bell curve of results.

However, people are people and are free to disagree. Use the tool that gets the results you want for your game.

Oh, don't get me started on bell-curve versus linear dice results. I can start frothing at the mouth from sheer excitement.

I take John's point on the substitution idea, but I still disagree. Different dice choices will cause different distributions, even on a linear dice mechanic. It is, actually, possible to play HW with d6s - I wrote a system to do so, early in development, for people to try the game out without buying a load of d12s, but it caused a noticeable shift in certain probabilities in the game. Yes, it was still the same basic mechanics, but with twice as many critical hits and twice as many successful defence rolls, the game shifted in ways that made it definitely not fee like HW any more. Hence why that fix was never published.

R.

Halving the crit rate will feel a little different, but this is really hair-splitty. It's still the same dX hit / dX wound / dX save mechanic that centers around a 1/3 - 2/3 success rate.

Of course, mathematically it's extremely similar. But in game terms, it produces very different emergent behaviour from the players. It's classic chaos theory at work!

I have the second version of the Fiou Armybook finished, this is actually play ready apart from minor editing because it has all the basic components for the game.




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just though I would add the general rulebook to the mix, it has stuff that's mentioned in the Fiou book but its still largely unfinished and very bare-bones

tell me what you think of the Fiou Book so far!

What does everyone think of the Fiou Book? I want to know before I do the HIA book so if I made a mistake I don't make it again.

You're reskinning 40k, so, if I might ask, who are the Fiou? Are they Tau? Is the HIA the Imperium?

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
You're reskinning 40k, so, if I might ask, who are the Fiou? Are they Tau? Is the HIA the Imperium?

In essence yes but it's not simply a reskin, it will be completely different when it's done, I'm just starting with a 40k 'reskin' as framework and expanding and changing it from there. I'm using 40k as framework because it's what I grew up on and this is my first actual Tabletop game project, although I have been doing personal hombrew rulesets and even entire 40k codexsfor years.

OK, though there's nothing wrong with reskinning 40k as the core of your game. However, if you're intending to have something that is 40k-like, using 40k models, then there will be an implicit expectation that the models play roughly akin to their 40k counterparts. If your "Fiou" are basically reskinned Tau in your 40k reskin, then I'm going to expect them to have excellent shooting and lousy HtH, etc.

Fiou are very good at shooting, so good that the reason they have an Aim of 3 and not 4 is because they were just to good to be balanced, and they still aren't I'm playtesting them and tweaking them as we speak

the full version of Pre-Alpha 0.1 this download link contains the General Rules, Fiou Armybook(updated edition) and the HIA armybook. take a look and play a game using proxies while I'm making the concept art and contacting the sculptor

So? What does everyone think of this version?

So, I have my first model 3D printed for testing, both size testing and playtesting and here is a scale comparison to a space marine




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Sorry bout the bad quality of the 3D print, I only have access to the gakky school 3D printer and this is about as good as it gets without getting bigger (and I can't get bigger because this print already takes 6 hours and I have 7-8 school hours. I would need to send it To a third party to get better quality but because of the cost I will only do that for the final version.

 Xjax1 wrote:
Don't worry bout it, it's a Day into development and I'm the only one working on it right now, I was just giving a preview of what o have on it so far and it will be constantly improving.

Then you're doing it in the completely wrong way. At day one of development you shouldn't even be considering specific mechanics like what number you have to roll to hit. The first thing you need to be doing is building the foundation for your game at a higher conceptual level: what is the game experience like, who do I expect my customers to be, what are my main selling points compared to other games, etc. It sounds like what you're actually doing is making stuff up as you go along, which is how you end up with a convoluted and bloated mess of poorly balanced rules like 40k.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Xjax1 wrote:
Don't worry bout it, it's a Day into development and I'm the only one working on it right now, I was just giving a preview of what o have on it so far and it will be constantly improving.

Then you're doing it in the completely wrong way. At day one of development you shouldn't even be considering specific mechanics like what number you have to roll to hit. The first thing you need to be doing is building the foundation for your game at a higher conceptual level: what is the game experience like, who do I expect my customers to be, what are my main selling points compared to other games, etc. It sounds like what you're actually doing is making stuff up as you go along, which is how you end up with a convoluted and bloated mess of poorly balanced rules like 40k.

Well what you see now in terms of basic rules is about as complicated as it's going to get, no convoluted stuff, the special rules might make it slightly more complicated but if in play testing something is to confusing or convoluted then it will get dumbed down or removed entirely. Well, I'm doing My best anyway, I don't have all the time in the world, because of school (I mean I'm only 15, my school and job get in the way of doing this) but in the end, I'm posting it on here to see the reaction and from that I decide wealthier or not to sell, this was originality conceptualizer to just be something for me and my friends to play and it has been good fun playing the previous versions (the others were more towards reskinning 40k) but I'm just asking for specific feedback and improvements, not general things which your presuming I haven't though at all about, so if you do have criticism or comments of that degree please do elaborate, otherwise there is really no reason for you to be here at all

-sincerely xjax1