Barnyard Brawl: Combat, Other Thoughts, and Warhammer

After living in large cities my entire life I moved to the middle of nowhere for my wife’s career. Living out here drove me through stages of depression and horrid loneliness. I admit, my wife has been a cornerstone of support, but the lack of jobs and poor economy has left me at home and alone a lot. Given this time to think I gained many insights into why it took me so long to ever get anything done.

Now, I don’t know how you work. I don’t know if you even have any kind of structure to your projects. Speaking as one designer to the other, don’t lose focus.

While the original vision of the project may fade there are methods of design that can break you out of these doldrums. Maintaining focus and forcing yourself to complete your work is the single hardest thing any game designer deals with. In my case, I’m far too aware of the number of war games that already exist. Because I cannot deny the reality of this I push myself to constantly re-invent the wheel and Innovate.

I know many budding designers have their ideas at work. This is incredibly common, but their are other times where your ideas will grip you. For myself, I had my best ideas during thunder storms, or late at night. You should push yourself to harness these times. If you’re devoting yourself to the practice of innovation and design then make the changes in your life you need to in order to accommodate it.

After you’ve found your premium work time, generate an environment. Music, heat, availability of water, coffee and food all contribute. Keep in mind that the reason many “young” designers come up with so many ideas at work is because they are forced into an environment where they often have little use for their imagination. I’m not sure when your ideas come to you but analyzing and replicating that environment may be in your best interests. For myself, I have few distractions. No TV, videogames etc. I remove anything that I may fall victim to; because my own desire would distract me from my goal.

By placing yourself in an empty environment, with the drive to write, your imagination will take over once boredom sets in. If I placed you in a featureless white room with only, a lamp, a notebook and a pencil; I assure you, something would end up on the paper. Do this for yourself.

E

As someone who has been working on a wargame for longer than he would like to admit (but if you're curious, http://stumpsfirstgame.blogspot.com/), I should warn you that character creation is really the easy part, and pales in comparison to trying to playtest and balance those characters.

I would actually advise you to not try to develop too many characters at the start. In my game, everything is class and ability-based, rather than point-based. In early games, everyone was limited to making parties from 3 classes, with just a couple abilities per class. I didn't even have magic or animated creatures in my early games, because I wanted to see if just the melee and archery systems were balanced. With just this, I was able to make major headways into fixing a lot of the early problem with the mechanics (and have had to greatly modify or throw out a lot of abilities). As one example: it took FOREVER to balance ranged attacks, and I feel like if I had started the game with a dozen range abilities, I would have needed to throw out or rewrite all of them.

So, my advice: create 10 creatures/characters, tops. Less if you can get away with it. Keep them simple. Just enough to play a game. Find some friends, and play a game with them. After a couple test games, you'll see, a) if the game is worth pursuing (since sometimes games that sound good end up really being no fun); b) what rules are obnoxious or broken, and need to be thrown out; c) what abilities are broken, and need to be thrown out; and d) how to actually price your characters. Repeat this process again. Try not to add much in the way of characters each game, until everything you have is balanced, or close to it. Once you really have this, then you can branch out and make more characters (and hopefully by then, you'll feel more enthusiastic about making more characters, or can get friends who'll want to help).

Simon

Pretty much.
A Knocked Down model lies face up on the table. On its next movement phase it can stand up (thus, forfeiting movement), after which it can attack as normal.
A Stunned model lies face down on the table. On its next movement, it can flip over (to become Knocked Down).
Any model that is lying down (i.e. Knocked down or Stunned) gets a big penalty if it is attacked in melee.

I quite liked the knock-down mechanic in Mordheim as an alternative to having multiple hit points. In particular, you could assess the state of the battle simply by looking at the table -- you didn't need a separate record sheet of hit points / energy / ammo / etc. In contrast, while I quite enjoyed Battletech and Heavy Gear I didn't like the amount of record keeping they required.

There are plenty of variations you could make on this concept, depending on the rest of your rule-set. I just thought I'd throw it out there as a thought-provoker.

Hope that helps,
kos