Idea for a skirmish game "gimmick" - modular weapons, Borderlands-style

[Cherno]

(Please move to appropriate forum in case it's the wrong one)

So I just had sort of an epiphany

Take a game like Doom - The Board Game, or similar (skirmish) miniature games where each player has between one and three "hero-type" character models, going around and shooting bad guys in a sci-fi environment. Now think of Borderlands, a game that has one gameplay gimmick that sets it apart from other first-person shooters: All weapons are completely randomized. That means a shotgun might have a random rate of fire, random damage, random ammo capacity, and random damage types (normal, fire, acid, energy).

Put 'em both together!



I could imagine that each time a weapon is dropped by an enemy, or found in a crate or similar, the player draws cards from several decks (one deck for ammo capacity, one deck for damage type, etc.) and puts them in front of him or her and voilá, a new weapon that will be unlike any other weapon in the game. You could also just roll on various tables to find out the weapon stats, and write down the results on a blank weapon sheet, or the players randomize a bunch of weapons before the game so there's a weapon pool ready and the game is not interrupted, or the game master creates unique weapons by hand-picking the stats, or, or...

I think it could be a lot of fun and it's something I have never seen so far in a game. Come to think of it, it could be adapted to practically any game of that type, even fantasy games! You found a weapon in that treasure chest? Oh my, it's a flaming sword that is also blessed and has 10 charges in it, and it does 8 points of damage! I guess this kind of random item generation is common in pen & paper RPG's, but not so much in miniature games.

I don't play much board or miniature games at the moment, but I would love to play a coop campaign of "Borderlands - the miniatures game"
I hope that one guy who did those awesome Borderlands papercraft terrain pieces sees this thread as well

[Momotaro]

The boardgame "Awful Green Things from Outer Space" had exactly this mechanic.

The game was about alien eggs hatching and growing on the good ship "Znutar", and the crew's efforts to stop them.  When you picked up a new type of weapon and shot an alien with it for the first time, you picked a chit from a cup to find the effect.

Sometimes the weapon stunned the alien, or killed it, sometimes it made the alien bigger or split it into lots of little ones.  Hilarity ensued...

[Cherno]

^Interesting, although it only affects the general effect the weapon has. Then again, a weapon's characteristics would probably need to be simplified for the tabletop

[Bazhell]

There is borderlands papercraft out there

To the googles