RE: SG:AC discussions (was: Official - More re GZG news update - NEW RELEASES!)

Good morning, I've not done much commenting in the last year or so, just
"lurking" but I thought to toss in my two cents.

In my opinion, the targeted players are those who wish for more context
than
simple "head-banging" face up matches. There have been comments above
inconclusive games. These happen (sadly) all too often when you're using
point based, matchup games. It becomes the challenge of the presenter to
build a good scenario that provides victory conditions or success
criteria
that challenge the players to do more than body count. 

I'm long been a fan of GZG games, and greatly enjoy the scalability
inherent
in the rules. Our group, here in St Louis has conducted several
mini-campaigns as well as linked games with the scale of the engagement
with
the "campaign" determining which set of rules we've used. The transition
from epic to tactical (DS to SG and back) as the size of the engagement
fluxes can add a flavor not seen elsewhere. There are issues with these
rules and I concur that point based rules can and do generate
tournaments. I
must confess, I too have a 40K army that occasionally sees the table in
local tourneys' but it also is more likely to be used with other rules
than
GW.

So, let's consider rules than can do more than just build points but an
approach that can both add context (scenario's that aren't just
randomized)
but also allow for the occasionally beer and pizza face2face
"head-banger"

Patrick Connaughton

"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival"-W. Edwards Deming
E-mail - ptconn@earthlink.net
Skype - j.patrick.connaughton

-----Original Message-----
From: Damond Walker [mailto:damosan@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 10:06 AM
To: gzg@firedrake.org
Subject: Re: SG:AC discussions (was: Official - More re GZG news update
-
NEW RELEASES!)

textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Ground Zero Games <jon@gzg.com> wrote:

>
> Interesting - I have a copy of CoC, but haven't done more than glance
> through it so far; I'll give it a better look when I get the chance.
>
>
I played CoC once -- and it was a tremendous bore.  Granted it was a
prior
version of the game but at the time it seemed like we spent the entire
game
just pushing units back and forth e.g. on my turn I shot unit Z and they
fell back and on their turn unit Z advanced, shot my unit and I feel
back...ad infinitum ad nauseum.  Maybe it's better now?

> Perhaps the most important thing as a first step is to actually
> define the target players for the game - if anyone wants to chime in
> with some thoughts on that, feel free!
>
>
I think the better question is what kind of community do you want to
build
up around the system?  For all their evils the point based games tend to
invite tournaments.  Earlier I mentioned that the core rules shouldn't
be
intimately tied to the background but there is nothing saying you cannot
have "The complete guide to NAC" style "army" books.

I will point to the local success of Bolt Action which I cannot explain
based on the rules alone.  There is a rather large and vibrant BA
community
near work who meet weekly to try new armies or combos.	I ask myself
"Those
rules...do you know any better?" and in some cases they probably do not.
In other cases they possibly overlook the rules happy to have a local
community to game with.  The BA folks will be producing a Scifi version
in
the near future and will probably see success.

If you want to target the same set of folks who got into SG2, DS2, and
FT
then the outcome, for you, will probably be the same.  You may be ok
with
that but you may also be losing a commercial opportunity.

Your shop your rules after all.  :)

D.