On screen, you SEE what's happening, and it ends up making no sense. In a board game/PnP setting, much of this stuff is in your imagination. In the PC setting, though, people are more used to the math being hidden to the point that you won't have a character fire a gun at point-blank range and miss the target due to a bad roll. People accept that level of abstraction and how balance is accomplished, because that's what's necessary to make the game work in that setting. Like I said, I think a lot of it comes down to the abstractions of PnP/board games. To me, what it sounded like was "It sucks when I fail a dice roll because that doesn't really track to the 40K fluff that's out there." Which is true, but is also essential to a board game where you need balance for both sides (Termies and 'Stealers). In particular, they noted how the Terminators in the new game were far more resilient and deadly, but that Genestealers could still sneak up on them and destroy them if they weren't careful. Whereas the new game seemed more like a "true PC game" or somesuch. What they described was that the first game was basically just a board game on the PC, and that they found the dice mechanics to be really frustrating. There was a review posted for the new Space Hulk: Ascension game, by someone who played the first Space Hulk game released by Full Control. Yeah, risk management is critical, but I also think that players find board-games-to-PC translations jarring. If you properly hedge your chances (doing movement for normal players first, then 3 die blocks, 2 die blocks, 2 or 3 die blitz, etc.), then you shouldn't have too many chances for the dice to mess you up.īasically: risk management is your best friend when playing Blood Bowl. Yet, players often think, "I can do this, no problem!" If you do the math, it's a fairly risky play. Blocking with one die has a 1/6 chance of failure if you have the Block skill, a 2/3 chance of failure if you do not. Like trying to "go for it" two squares and then doing a 1 die block.Įach "go for it!" has a 1/6 chance of failure. Usually when it's a cry of "jack dice!" it's usually because it ws the big, risky plays that didn't pan out for the player. However, I lost those games because I was outplayed up until the point of needing those die rolls. I've totally lost games because of bad die rolls. Originally posted by Foghorn Dickhorn:It's basically because they're terrible at the game. For folks not used to board games.that's kind of a rude awakening. It's still basically just a board game with D6. The computer rolls the dice for you and spits out a result faster than humans would, but otherwise that's the only difference. As a result, people who've grown up playing board games less and computer games more are used to either being in control of the outcome, or at least having an illusion thereof.īut Blood Bowl is really just a computerized board game. With computers, the math behind the outcome is (a) largely hidden, and (b) almost never random. People tend to accept these kinds of dynamics in board games, because they recognize that dice are a convenient, fast way to determine outcomes. You could have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TANK go up against GUYS WITH SPEARS, and the spears would win. It was very infrequent, but whenever it happened it was glaringly obvious how out-of-control the game really was. Nowadays a spearman can't beat a tank, but back in the days of Civ 1, the RNG COULD give you that outcome. People assume the stats should control, when it's more like the stats modify but don't determine the outcome. This gets magnified when you have a mixture of stats and an RNG. When you remove that control from them, it irritates them. Most of that means it's things under people's control. turn-based strategy games), but most games are about pitting the strength of this unit against the strength of that unit, or about who has faster reflexes and a more powerful gun, or about clicking a button at the right time. If you think about the way most PC games work, it's usually not a matter of a RNG determining the outcome of an event. It's because they're used to games not appearing quite so random.
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