Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Arranging The Numbers... Stat Lines

I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to present our unit stats, and after trying a bunch of different formats, I think I'm finally on the right track.

 Option 1: The 40K System

Excerpt from a supposed Japanese leak of one of GW's codices.
We're all familiar with how GW presents it's unit stats. Units are defined as collections of models, and each model has an entry in the back of each codex listing it's stats. Ranged and Close-Combat weapons stats are listed on different tables, and you have to assemble them in your head as you play the game.

Everyone is used to it.
  1. Difficult for players who haven't memorized every weapon/model already. Which is nobody for our game.
  2. Requires a lot of redundant stat-lines in the unit entries, where only one or two numbers change.
  3. Inflexible in regards to weapon effects, since they have to be interchangeable. So sniper rifles can't give you a bonus to hit without a special rule being added.
  4. As GW adds new weapons to increase variety, their weapon lists are getting VERY long. It would be nice if all the info that you need for a unit were in one place.
Version 1

I toyed with the idea of duplicating this system, and did to an extent. But in testing I've noted a lot of confusion and back-and-forth checking of different lists as we play (Con #1).

Since I do want weapons to affect your ability to hit and whatnot, we would either end up making BS/WS part of the weapon entries (with a version of each weapon for each faction/army), or having a modifier entry for the weapon which would require more in-game math. Meh...

Option 2: The Flames of War System

Flames has a much more broken up system for building armies.

Except from Battlefront's free Tunisian Tigers PDF.
This is a typical unit entry, which consists of a diagram showing what each section of troops looks like, and a couple of cost options for different numbers of sections. There's not actually any stats listed here at all.

Except from Battlefront's free Tunisian Tigers PDF.
To get a model's stats, you turn to the reference section for your army faction and look it up in the 2-3 pages of listed units.

All of your stats are in one place.
  1. All of your stats are in one place; which is a 2-3 page section. There's over 30 models described in the free PDFs alone. Which have limited numbers of units compared to the full campaign books.
  2. This system only works because all of the models are fixed. There's no customization allowed beyond swapping one model type for another. You can't mix and match weapons, for instance, on a model.
  3. The relative simplicity of the unit entries above comes at the expense of a butt-ton of standard rules. Instead of Movement values, for instance, you get standard terms like Fully-Tracked or Half-Tracked.
Excerpt from Battlefront's free Version 3 Reference Sheet PDF.
You can see how this quickly gets a bit out of hand. "What's that vehicle considered to be? Jeep or Wheeled?" (Looks it up) "Now, what's that do?" (looks up the Jeep, Wheeled, or whatever distance)

It works, but it's not as elegant as I think it could be.

Option 3: Come Up With Something Different Than Both Of These

So we need to have something that puts all of the information for a unit in one place. Please don't focus on the stat numbers themselves, as they're still in flux. Instead think about the presentation of the information.

Version 2

My first thought (above) was to combine each model's shooting and melee information into one line. This is their ranged attack info, and this is their close-combat info. The stats are baked into the model profile and weapon names only matter so that you can tell one model apart from another.

But what about multiple ranged weapons on a model?

Version 3

That would require a second line. But then you have a bunch of blank spaces, and the melee information is just sort of crammed in there. Not clean at all.

Versions 4-6

So I tried to clean it up a bit. Moving more stats from the model to the unit as a whole, and making what weapon is what more clear with labels before the stats.

Version 7
More stats got moved to the unit, and things look much clearer here.

Version 8
But then it hit me. Why not have ranged and melee stats for all weapons? I mean, a rifle can be used in melee too. Why not have stats for that on the weapon profile? If a model has another weapon, like a sword, we can add another line for it. But most troops will just be pummeling things in melee with the butts of their rifles. So why make up names for separate weapons to give them? Like "Standard CCW" or "Bayonette".

This also lets us bake in BS and WS bonuses for each weapon and tailor things like Snap Fire stats without having to have a bunch of special rules that limit our flexibility with blanket effects.

And when we get to the strange Turid and Colser weapons, we can have hammers that shoot lightning, and other odd weapons with both ranged and CC effects. Which will allow us to more easily do things that other games can't.

The visual layout above still needs some work, but I feel like I'm on the right track now.

What do you think?

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