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Author Topic: Best Fantasy Skirmish Game?  (Read 16176 times)

Offline jon_1066

  • Mad Scientist
  • Posts: 909
Re: Best Fantasy Skirmish Game?
« Reply #60 on: February 08, 2016, 10:23:49 AM »
What you say here is true. And obviously this side of it appeals to you, and many others. But to me, boiling everything down to a few profiles removes the fantasy. It removes that variety, or the racial differences. Why shouldn't hobgoblins fight as well as chaos warriors? Because they are crappy fighters whereas chaos warriors are truly elite? There's no room for the differences I became accustomed to in other fantasy systems. There's no quirks, no depth. It's a decent enough starter system, and I think it works well in the medieval setting, but it's a little bland for high fantasy. I don't really think that adding in that variety necessarily leads to list building and min-maxxing - it can do of course, but it could also lead to more depth, more variety. Horses for courses and all that. It's a nice lite system with some flexibility, but it lacks crunchy bits.

The way the crunch comes into Dragon Rampant are the options.  The basic profile is there but you can modify it.  So a unit of Heavy Foot could be Fearful, could be Offensive, could be Venemous, could have Shiny Armour, could cause Fear, etc.  Combine a few of those and you can have multiple different units that do vary considerably within the basic frame work.  eg the Hobgoblins could be fearful heavy foot and the Chaos Warriors Offensive Heavy Foot with flaming weapons (Venemous upgrade).  I would also argue that Chaos Warriors are clearly Elite Foot!

Offline Hobgoblin

  • Galactic Brain
  • Posts: 4912
    • Hobgoblinry
Re: Best Fantasy Skirmish Game?
« Reply #61 on: February 08, 2016, 02:21:52 PM »
What you say here is true. And obviously this side of it appeals to you, and many others. But to me, boiling everything down to a few profiles removes the fantasy. It removes that variety, or the racial differences.

Yes, it's clearly a subjective thing. And there's certainly nothing wrong with your view!

Why shouldn't hobgoblins fight as well as chaos warriors? Because they are crappy fighters whereas chaos warriors are truly elite?

I suppose my points here are (a) "according to who?" and (b) "how do the miniatures look?". I mean, D&D-style hobgoblins are militaristic, well organised, warlike and physically bigger and tougher than humans. Not "crappy fighters", in other words. If we go on literary origins, they seem to be essentially a supersized version of Tolkien's Uruk-hai. Chaos warriors owe something to Moorcock (where they're generally the leaders of armies of mutated wretches and beastmen, rather than rank-and-file troops, if I remember correctly), but are largely a Warhammer invention. Now, they are extremely powerful in Warhammer, but the miniatures haven't always reflected that. And a generic game shouldn't automatically reflect that either - although it should permit the possibility. As to how the miniatures look: my Chronicle hobgoblins dwarf most of my Citadel chaos warriors (from the same era). If you asked non-gamers which looked fiercer, they'd probably go with the hobgoblins, on the grounds that they're heavily armoured with nasty weapons and are big muscular monsters, whereas the chaos warriors are just relatively normal-looking chaps in weird armour. The same point could be made with many orc models versus many elf ranges - and so on.

What a generic game like Dragon Rampant allows you to do is to escape the confines of (for example) the Warhammer hierarchies and follow visual logic. At the weekend, I played a game of DR against a friend who'd never played the game before. And we had hobgoblin and chaos-warrior Elite Foot as our respective leader units. Their equivalence would have jarred in the Warhammer world, but in a generic game it worked just fine - there wasn't some arbitrary reason why the big, heavily armoured monsters had to be "crappy fighters" while the heavily armoured humans were innately superior.

As an aside, I've sometimes detected in a few recent conversations about DR (not here, I hasten to add!) a reluctance on the part of GW-conditioned players to accept that an opponent's lizardman chief's guard might be just as potent as their own Tremendous Whirligigs of Khorne or whatever. "But my guys are SPECIAL ..." etc. I'm not suggesting that that's your argument here, of course, but I've been thinking about this as some of my son's friends have been drawn towards the AOS box set and will probably end up in a game of DR at our house at some point. My solution will be to suggest that the Topless Spike Fetishist of the Blood God are used as Bellicose Foot but in reduced-model units, thus (I hope!) satisfying all parties.

There's no room for the differences I became accustomed to in other fantasy systems. There's no quirks, no depth. It's a decent enough starter system, and I think it works well in the medieval setting, but it's a little bland for high fantasy. I don't really think that adding in that variety necessarily leads to list building and min-maxxing - it can do of course, but it could also lead to more depth, more variety. Horses for courses and all that. It's a nice lite system with some flexibility, but it lacks crunchy bits.

I'd agree with jon_1066 that the fantastic rules do add a lot of possibilities for "crunch" and flavour. The Venomous upgrade is very potent, as jon_1066 has said, and there are also the Spellcaster and Wizardling upgrades - plus Blessed/Cursed Weapons, etc. To my mind, Moorcock-style chaos warriors (Jagreen Lern and guards, or whoever) could be well represented as Elite Riders or Foot with a magic-using upgrade (Summoner, maybe, for full Moorcockian flavour).

As you say, it's horses for courses. But I think DR (and SoBH to an even greater extent, for that matter) provides huge freedom to come up with a warband that really reflects both the look of your miniatures and how you want them to play. An example: I've been gradually painting up a sizeable horde of 1980s Citadel night goblins. Most look like complete rabble: Light Foot at best, and most likely Ravenous Hordes. But then there are some that are distinctly fierce-looking and robust (with thicker, stronger-looking limbs than humans and huge fanged heads), and others that are even wearing uniforms (horned helmets, horned-skull shields). For these, Bellicose Foot and Offensive Light Foot suggest themselves, but there are other options too: Elite Foot using 12 models instead of six for the goblin king and his guard, for example, or even Heavy Foot (again, possibly upping the model count to 18). And, best of all, they don't have to be the same thing each time. I think that ultimately provides more choice and variety than games that have rigid "factions".

Above all, the freedom that DR brings means that it's a pretty well-balanced system. No points system can be perfect, but DR certainly benefits from the high cost of upgrades and the fact that both sides are free to choose whatever they like.

 

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