40K Friday: Grinding Away at Grey Knights

 

I should probably post something about all the new rule reveals but in my experience it's very difficult to draw any real conclusions when you only have part of the picture. Sure, we've seen the contents of the big box for the new edition, and some of the new combat rules, and WarCom is banging away every day now with details on some detachments and it's a lot of fun ... but it's not enough to actually play a game of 11th and until I can do that it's all speculative and incomplete. I may put up a post about it next week but I'm still not sure there's a ton of value there. I'm watching and reading for sure but it's a little early to say one army is going to be terrible or that another will be amazing. Nobody who knows anything can talk about it yet ... so we wait. Looks like the new stuff is coming out in June so we will all get a chance to check it out then.

In the meantime ...

• Primary focus has been the Grey Knights because theoretically they are the closest to completion. As often turns out to be the case, getting them from "almost" to "done" feels like a whole bunch of work because I want it to look a certain way and until it does it is not "done". It's not quite perfectionist - I outgrew that a long time ago - but it is still amazing sometimes how much more work a "90% complete" model takes to finish. Some examples: 
  
  
  

  

  Those extra antenna things stick up just far enough and are just fragile enough to be absolute nightmares over the lifespan of a miniature trooper.

  
  
• My Interceptor squads - I had 3 completed before - took a little bit of a beating, probably in the move and while one of them was good and is now in the "done" case the other two had some weapons break (@#%@#$@$ force halberds!), some arms pop off, and those little teleport nubs on their power packs broke off on multiple models. So now I'm very slowly working through the process of matching up broken weapon heads with broken shafts, weapon arms with bodies, and figuring out how exactly I want to deal with the power pack situation. Yes, it is very tempting to just remove the remaining nubs on the broken ones and call them Strike squads but I'm trying to make it work without throwing in the towel like that. We will see if my resolve holds.
  
  
  

  

  See without the gun the piston/support plugs right into the arm ...

  
  
• My "painted" Dreadknights took a beating as well so I am fixing broken bits here as well. One that was fully painted did not have a second arm weapon - in the age before one could save some points by not paying for a second gun and just charging them into melee. In the points-less now, you might as well load them up. The problem is that adding an arm-mounted cannon is blocked by one of the many cables on these things. If you put the gun on first, the support/piston/cable plugs into it. If you do not, the thing goes directly into the arm. So now I am working out what I have to cut to do the last damage to the paint and still get it on there. Of course I also need to paint the gun too. Cut and reposition the support? Cut off half of the gun? I may just give up and say there's an invisible incinerator there and not cut or paint anything.
  
  
  

  

  ... but to attach the gun that same support plugs into the gun - which is tricky to do when it's already there.

  
  
• The Paladins and Terminators - <sigh>. The variable number of these guys in a squad has kind of turned into a pain because I have multiples but some are 3, some are 4, and some are 5. You can still use them that way in 10th edition, but I know there is a big reset coming for the GKs in 11th and I hate to do work that won't matter in six months. Of course, that could apply to the whole army so who knows? I'm getting to the point now where I'm just going to finish them up in whatever numbers they are in and build some new 5-man  squads to try and be ready for the redux. My concern is that even if they leave most of the army structure intact - no guarantees there - that they might get weird with say, Paladins and put them in 3-man squads. There is no assurance that all of the current squad types and character types and vehicles will say as they are or even stay in the army at all so it's probably pointless to try and pre-game this stuff. Ah well, one of the perils of trying to update an older army going into a new edition. It will all be playable in older editions so that's my ultimate refuge I suppose. 

Anyway I'm working through this stuff and will hopefully finish soon. I have started looking at my orks and counting up numbers and types because yes, they are the poster-fungus for Armageddon and I'd like to get them on the table again. I expect some model and unit updates here as well so it's another battle of "what will still be useful" for the new edition - I'll talk about that next time.

Time of Crisis Completed!

 

Well we wrapped up our jump into Mutants and Masterminds last weekend and it went pretty well. I had one last minute miss (Providence's player) but Heavy Metal finally made it back after missing an entire arc.  To recap the structure of Time of Crisis:

• There is a kickoff involving a robbery by a team of villains at a casino. It's well done but I replaced it with a bank robbery involving fewer villains and more mooks since some of my players were new to the system and the rest of us were shaking off some rust. 
• Then most of the omniverse is destroyed but the characters are pulled into a surviving fragment by a powerful entity and given the task of saving it all by hunting down and disabling a set of cosmic bombs created by Omega, Lord of the Terminus. This involves traveling to various parallel earths and dealing with the inhabitants while searching for this larger goal. 
• One setting is the classic scenario where America lost WW2 and is now occupied. It's a chance to punch Nazis and fight various villains, robot tanks, and help the Resistance, and possibly set up a brighter future. Special guest star: Dr. Tomorrow. 
• Another setting is Earth-Ape which ... you knowwhat's coming, right? Another comic book trope where the world is inhabited by intelligent apes instead of humans and yes you do eventually get to save the world here. Special guest star: The Primate Patrol
• The third setting is pretty much a Mirror Universe where the good guys are all bad guys and run things for their own personal benefit. It's "The Tyranny Syndicate" in place of the Freedom League and one man, a villain in the normal Freedom-verse, is the lone superhero. You have a chance to change some things up here too. Special guest star: Mind-Master.
• The final chapter is back at home on Earth Prime, home of Freedom City and the League and the other heroes and villains of the Freedomverse. This is also a showdown with Omega himself, coming to make sure his final bomb completes its mission. Being a Power Level 19 character facing a bunch of Power Level 10 characters it could be pretty one-sided but their prior experiences give the team some tools that give them a fighting chance.

  It was a lot of fun and all of my players liked it. We spent 10 sessions working through it and after having tried to run it multiple times over many years we actually managed to finish it this time, and with an appropriately climactic battle against Omega. People were battered, bad guys were beaten, and in the end the Lord of the Terminus went down to concentrated efforts and smart thinking by my players. Some high points:

• Our first parallel world was Earth-Ape and everyone got a kick out of the inhabitants, the heroes, and the terrible, terrible puns scattered throughout this adventure. Boom Gun Brandon was back in town for this and got to play a Glitter Boy from Rifts which made him happy even if the "boom" effect that happened to everyone around him every time he fired made everyone else less happy. Definitely a feature to be worked on in the future. After the main villain went down an attack by an Omega drone - part of how the GB ended up here - gave everyone one more chance to show off their combat skills and to team up with the recovering Primate Patrol. This is also where our two tech-genius heroes figured out how to defuse the bomb for the first time.

• We went to Occupied America next and this part gave U.S. Patriot a chance to make a -lot- of speeches about America ... to everyone within earshot, accompanied by various renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner courtesy of Heavy Metal. It was cracking all of us up so it was a fun run.

• Next-to-last was Evil Earth which opened with a fight against their own evil selves. Heavy Metal was not present for this one - but his evil doppelganger was! Taking down the team's toughest member was an interesting exercise and White-Out was very on-board with razzing him for a) not being at this fight and b) letting him know who it was that finally took him out (it was White-Out). While fighting the evil Freedom League Thunderbolt (evil Captain Thunder) was tanking almost the entire team and frustrating them more than a little bit. Later, the team made a really good effort to reform Mind-Master who was ready to blow his own world away regardless of whether Omega was the source of it or not. This was probably the most interesting run of all.

• In the finale they tracked down the bomb fairly quickly so we spent most of the session's game-time working through the fight. The whole thing happens in a park where there is a giant statue of Centurion and with Patriot having a personal connection with Centurion it was a great location for drama. Once they figured out Omega's weakness ... well the fight did not last long. He hurt some of them in the process but they had multiple rods (IYKYK) and were not afraid to use them. Soon enough the city, the world, and the omniverse were saved, thanks were exchanged, missing heroes reappeared, and the movie was over. 

Since we had some time left, I started the discussion on how they felt about the system and if they wanted to continue the game as a more traditional superhero game. We went around the table and while they liked it, I would phrase it as they didn't love it. One comment was that it dragged a fair amount in combat. As we talked through things it became apparent that there were some other options that interested them more than "more" M&M. 

I had pretty much expected this as I felt like I was probably the most excited person at the table for most of this campaign. There were bursts of excitement here and there as the game went on but I never felt that next level of interest coming from my crew. That tipping point where they are consistently talking about the system amongst themselves away from the table just never quite ignited. It's interesting because I was feeling overwhelmed when we started but by the last few sessions I was finally feeling it and seeing the possibilities for a real, ongoing campaign. Not this time though.

As for me I was happy to make some kind of run with this game again as it has been a long time. M&M is a hugely important game to me and to anyone who loves supers campaigns - even if they don't play it or like it - as it has become "the standard" IMO for most players - especially if they've never played Champions. It's been a consistent long-term presence with a lot of stability as far as rules and availability. I know that I could have done a better job in several ways - mainly rules mastery and keeping things flowing during the game. It would have had more impact if we had spent more time getting to know Freedom City before blowing up the multiverse but I wasn't going to risk not getting to do it. That said I'm not kicking myself over anything in particular. I do really like the game and I especially like the level of support it has for actually running the game. From NPCs to creatures to equipment to locations there is a large set of pre-built things to throw into your game and with a supers game that is especially important.

That said I'm probably not quite as in love with it myself as I was ten years ago. I think it's a great game but one does have to guard against some "sameyness" leaking in when you have a bunch of characters at the same power level. The trappings and descriptors matter. The combat can drag a bit as the team stacks bruises on a villain and hopes for failed saves on other effects. Some of the powers, particularly Afflictions, can be tricky to decipher and distill into "what does this look like when it's fired off?" I think with more in the system this would be less of a problem but there is a definite curve to get through to where the mechanics take less processing power and more can be devoted to "style." I doubt I have run my last game of M&M, probably not even my last game of 3rd edition, but I'm OK setting it aside for now. 

So what did we decide to do? Well the siren's call of D&D did not take hold but the siren's call of Savage Worlds and the prospect of a complete run of Necessary Evil did make it through. I'm happy with it as it's a)more supers-action and b) a chance to complete yet another thing we have started before but never finished! With some schedule choppiness ahead Variable Dave is going to run some Dungeon Crawl Classics for a session or 3 - so I actually get to play something - and then in June we will head back to Star City and kick off Necessary Evil: The Third Attempt!

Yep, right over there ...