Warmachine Musings

Recently I've begun getting back into a game that was one of my passions. Back when I was in the navy I used to play a decent amount of Warmachine. For those who don't know Warmachine is a miniatures based wargame that takes place in a type of steampunk world. (Although they don't like the label steampunk, they prefer Full Metal Fantasy.) I enjoyed the game and was pretty okay at it. I could even hold my own in most competitive circuits.

So like I said I'm getting back into the game again, with some gusto. I'm finishing up painting all of the things I've had sitting around for the last 5 years and I'm relearning the game so I can start picking up the competitive game again. The last time I played they had just introduced the official second edition of the game which brought about huge changes and add in my six year hiatus from the game you can see a need to find a way to catch up fast. So I've started listening to some podcasts about it.

Today I listened to an episode of the Chain-Attack podcast. Specifically Episode 215 where the last half of the episode was dedicated to the opinion of one of the competitive players of the four man group they normally have on the show. He's a very skilled player with a firm grasp on the meta-game and theory behind it, definitely someone who's opinion is worth a listen. I disagree with the somewhat elitist attitude taken by this particular group of players, but that's always a complaint of mine with the way certain circles of competitive players talk about their chosen game.

Anyways, the last half of the podcast was about a valid complaint about the competitive circuit of Warmachine. The tournaments can have a rather random feel to them because of the haphazard way tournament brackets are created by Press Gangers essentially by pulling names out of a hat. This can lead to the final pairings in a tournament to be lopsided depending upon how the first brackets lined up. If the two most competitive players in an 8 man tourney face off first round you essentially know who is going to win the overall.

The player wanted a different way to approach competitive play. His primary suggestion was creating an Elo style ranking system to determine matchups better. Elo is a system that essentially ranks a player based upon their skill levels and attempts to take that into account when determining matchups and how valuable a certain win is vs an opponent. Your number of games played and your win-loss ratio is what helps determine this ranking.

Which in theory sounds great from a competitive standpoint. He gave some wonderful examples of other games that use these types of systems. Magic, Chess (where it originated), Poker, and League of Legends were mentioned specifically. All of which have very strong competitive structures. There are a few problems with translating this to a wargame though.

In Chess every single move in competition is written down to make sure theres no cheating, League is a PC game hosted on servers controlled by the company and monitored for fairness, Poker and Magic have some very strict conduct rules and similar measures in place to ensure that no one is cheating. Every single one has very strict judging criteria, professional, or semi-professional judges, and a code of conduct as well as ways to ensure fairness.

In order to ensure fairness in a wargame you'd have to have every single move able to be measured and recorded and have official ways of measuring outcomes like officially built, weighted, and measured dice. There'd also have to be a professional judging staff rather than the amateur volunteers that make up the entirety of Privateer Press' tournament staff.

Another major difference between those other games and Warmachine (and really wargaming in general) is the size of the player base, especially in competition levels. Warmachine probably has less players in total than what Magic alone has that play in competition. It doesn't have the literal centuries of time that Chess has had to build up a player base, or the ease of access and large financial backing that any of these games have.

To be completely honest there's not enough money in the entire game to really make implementing that type of system worthwhile even if it weren't for the fact that it would change the way people play the game.

And oh boy would that change the way people play the game.

I don't play MOBAs like League or competitive Magic specifically because of the player communities. Magic was no longer fun to play one I got into the competitive play (my attitude towards it got even worse when I had to judge Friday Night Magic as a DCI *shudder*). It draws a different crowd to the game and really affects the way the meta is presented and the attitudes of the players at the tournaments.

All in all I feel that a change like that will make it an even higher entry barrier as the elitists in a game that's already tough to get into even harder for new players to get interested in.

Suddenly Awesome News Appeared!

HOLY WTFBBQSHIT!!! One of my favorite authors, Larry Correia, is the one writing the Faction novel for my favorite Warmachine faction. The novel will be called Into the Storm and that’s about all I know about it other than the fact that it is back in his hands after the final edits were added. He’s even calling it a badass book, and he usually doesn’t gloat over his work like that.

 

I am quite literally trying to contain my fanboyisms right now and it might be a losing proposition.

 

We have a man who is one of the rising stars of the genre, who is also a big fan of the game, and happens to be one of my favorite authors of a couple awesome book series writing the novel about my favorite faction in one of my favorite games in one of my favorite settings. I had multiple nergasms reading the announcement. I am going to have to try and figure out how I’m going to pre-order a copy because holy crap-balls.

More Warmahordes!

My recent foray back into reading up on Warmachine/Hordes has prompted me to start looking at the old Iron Kingdoms RPG. That's never a good sign. It means I'm going to be coming up with a basic outline for yet another campaign that will never be.

Always with the ideas, never with the follow-through. Not always my fault, right now I don't have the players to run anything I already have, let alone a newly forming campaign idea in a setting that might not be people's first choice to play in.

Anyways, enough about of my problems. I'm really on here to talk about something I was doing for fun last night because of this WM/H reading. I brought up my old work on a conversion for WM/H stats from the game to the D20 version. There is still a lot of estimations and guess work involved in designing the weaponry and abilities but the statistics are pretty easy to work with.

It's a very simple thing to convert on some things. Like Hit-Die for 'jacks, very easy conversion, you just take the number of Hull boxes they have and change that directly to Hit-Die. From there you can easily extrapolate the Base Attack Bonus and Base Saves. All of this is in the Liber Mechanika as I later found out... which made some of the things I was doing easier. It still didn't answer specifics on weaponry or abilities and since I don't have any of the older issues of No Quarter that have the d20 conversions for Warjacks and such in them I still have to make do with my best guesses.

Which isn't to say that I don't have fun doing these things. It gives me a better feel for the mechanics of the game and lets me be able to play with new concepts and ideas for a campaign.

Okay, I really just need to get the new Iron Kingdoms RPG as soon as I can, that will just make things easier...

Warmachine, Hordes and the Iron Kingdom RPG

While I was out in Washington for this last install I did something I haven't done in a long time. I bought a new issue of No Quarter Magazine, Privateer Press' official propaganda periodical. Guess I decided to pick up the right one because it showed me things that made me want to play again. It also had in it a generalized set of rules for the new version of the Iron Kingdoms RPG in it.

I didn't stop playing Warmachine due to lack of interest or money, I stopped playing because I don't have a place to play or people to play with. Since I can't play it I don't keep up with it like I used to. That annoys me. I have only been able to play a handful of games since MK 2 came out and I wish I could play more because of how much that revamp killed the power creep that had taken hold. It made everything simpler and brought 'jacks back into the limelight.

Now they took the next step to appeal to those who like 40k's sets of giant models by implementing exactly what I have been predicting since I first read about them in the fluff, Colossals.

Source: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/427713.page

That makes me want to get back into it with the quickness. Can't justify the money I'd to spend though to catch back up with all the things that have changed in the 2 1/2 years (Holy crap, really!?!) I've been out of it. Can you imagine what Kraye, Stryker, and Darius could do with that guy in that pic? How many POW 10 Damage rolls can I inflict? Is there anything Lightning can't solve? I also want to see the new Epic version of Nemo, that intrigues me. New epic versions of casters? This should be interesting.

And here I am without money for hobbies like this, let alone time and places to do them...

Anyways, the other thing that caught my eye was the new Iron Kingdoms RPG. They created a brand new system from scratch based upon the system used in Warmachine/Hordes. In fact, this reeks of a system that could easily be used for a Vehicle Design Rules type of system for the IK/WM/H setting. 

It uses 2D6 that can be enhanced up to 4D6 with abilities and special points that you spend during gameplay. You add that to whatever important stat is required for the action you're taking to determine success. HP is done similar to Hordes' Life Spiral system for Warbeasts. So you have 3 aspects (Body, Mind, Spirit) that determine the penalties that you may receive from damage. Easy to understand, easy to pick up, and I bet the War game stats translate over very easily so you can setup encounters on the fly without much effort (as long as you know the tabletop game).

The book is supposed to come out at some point this summer, and boy do I want it. I love the setting and feel of the world. I'm loving these teaser mechanics. I love the overall story going on in the world that can give you plenty of inspiration to draw off of. The only problem I have is the same one I have right now, no matter how awesome a system or setting (or both) is I don't have players or someone to run a game. 

I've run into the same problem with a few other systems, like the Dresden Files RPG. Love the system, love the setting, no one to play with. That's life though. I mean I'm loving the current Pathfinder group I'm in. It's the most fun I've had with any D20 style system in years, and we're only 2 sessions in. I'm not a fan of D20 systems in general because of the tendency towards less Role Playing and more Roll Playing, but it's generally the automatic flavor that people will default to. 

We might not like it, but everyone can agree on it. Pathfinder is better than vanilla DnD but, still, just something about it still doesn't sit right with me. That's what I get for starting with Everway and the World of Darkness for my first games I guess.