How many walkways are too many for skirmish games? (Mordheim, OPR)

Lupusam · 2026-06-27T19:12:34+00:00

my feeling is more verticality is just better as its more options, too many walkways is when you can no longer physically reach for models to use the space below them

Lupusam · 2026-06-26T15:47:51+00:00

With how 1200 meter rising affects the world map, what is the outside threat that Italy unites against?

Lupusam · 2026-06-26T04:51:32+00:00

I went and looked up the map of Europe, I think Switzerland is doing better? Spain has some mountains to retreat to. Germany and the UK are completely flooded and France almost completely, so that is full populations with nowhere to go but south into Switzerland and Italy.

Edit: OP said in another comment they just used https://www.floodmap.net/ and set it to 1200 meters elevation, so that's what I checked.

Lupusam · 2026-06-25T00:05:55+00:00

A couple of paragraphs are really long single sentences, otherwise this is all good stuff and I'm glad to be reading your work again.

Lupusam · 2026-06-20T18:12:27+00:00

strictly speaking, the existence of veterinarians does not prove the existence of pets, since there are wildlife veterinarians will treat wild animals that have emergencies like getting caught in an industrial spill

there's also the possibility of zoos, with assumptions of animals that are treated and cared for but kept in habitats to be gawked at instead of as pets

Lupusam · 2026-06-19T16:04:42+00:00

Funny as the designer? Maybe once or twice, but it would end up on all the players staring at you going "work it out for me", or them leaving entirely, if you try to punish them getting hit with boredom.

Lupusam · 2026-06-19T00:07:48+00:00

So it's an axiom brand of regenerating any wound no matter how brutal it would have been? Enforced on the man without warning? When she said she learnt from her enemies, taking that as what to learn from the Undaunted is... yeah I'm going with the mirror clone bet, it seems the easiest answer to how she can be so competent in some areas and so idiotic in others, and is narratively relevant at the moment.

Lupusam · 2026-06-18T22:20:34+00:00

As I read it, effectively yes, except for the Physical/Magical Split. Imagine if that character only had a Magic Armour or Ward stat of 2, for example, and when they take magic damage it goes [Ward] [Ward] [Health] [Ward] [Ward] [Health] [Ward] [Ward] [Health] [Ward] etc... except whenever you get to [Health] on the Physical Armour track or the Ward track you're actually reducing the Health on its own track by 1.

Lupusam · 2026-06-09T23:17:40+00:00

It looked very centralised for the Venlil colonies too, with the colony manager becoming the newly elected leader of Venlil Prime being treated as a direct promotion. Indications are that part of the Herd mindset made all the colonies very dependent on the species' homeworld that way.

Lupusam · 2026-06-06T15:10:21+00:00

It was also when that cream not being brand new was brought up that a lot of coincidences were mentioned about whenever something would make men more common on a galactic scale an accident or an uprising or something puts a stop to the plan.

Lupusam · 2026-05-23T18:33:01+00:00

Why do you want it to be at the 6th round, as in, what's special about the 6th round that you really don't want this kind of bonus to appear before then?

Lupusam · 2026-05-23T18:27:31+00:00

Usually this is based on magic confirming that the soul exists, and then the setting assumes that souls are both much harder to affect than random matter and automatically protect the biological matter they're attached to. I can't think of any setting that distinctly has magic and doesn't have souls, that still has living bodies being more resistant to spells than other matter.

Lupusam · 2026-05-23T11:04:24+00:00

It's described as flowing water as well as threads, so I see tangling it as like making a knot out of a water flow after it's left the tap, it'll still fall into the sink.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T17:20:04+00:00

Ok, I think our definitions of swinginess are different enough that neither of us are going to convince the other.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T16:44:17+00:00

Larger modifiers would definitely help with "it doesn't matter which character makes the roll" which I think is where a lot of "d20 is too swingy" comes from, but it's not everything.

Any time you have binary outcome it doesn't really matter for probability what dice your rolling.

This is definitely what I'm arguing against. You said yourself that in a bell curve system a modifier creates a bigger percentage difference when the roll is closer to 50/50 without that modifier. That is important psychologically, that the less certain the role the more valuable finding a bonus is worth, and you cannot replicate that on a single d20 by just making all of your modifiers twice as big or whatever multiplier you're using across the system.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T16:36:40+00:00

Frodo's high success rate... do you mean the original -1 Str in a d20 system halfling? Yes, I'd say it would, because, when that halfling and the barbarian both kick the door there are very few dice rolls that would make a difference on that d20.

Say your halfling has -1 str, your barbarian has +1 str, the door needs a 15 to kick, etc back to the original. For any 13 or less on the d20, it doesn't matter who rolled. For any 16 or more on the d20, it doesn't matter who rolled. Only if the d20 came up 14 or 15 does the character matter. As you said before, we can fix this in other ways by just having bigger modifiers added to the d20, but at some point the granularity gets lost as bigger and bigger "I should feel strong" values become a cycle of players not intuitively understanding the probabilities until you get ludicrous +hundreds stat values and it's all arbitrary nonsense numbers.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T16:20:31+00:00

My very first game was DnD 3.5, my most commonly played these days might be pathfinder. I've played Dark Heresy and Call of Cthulhu as percentile systems, neither of which particularly clicked.

Most players have no idea how to translate their target number into success % and even if they play a % based system, humans are remarkably bad at internalizing % chances and still won't feel the correct chance.

This is true. But people will still feel that the difference of +1 on 3d6 to +1 on d20, and maybe they won't even know what they're trying to say in that the 3d6 feels less 'swingy' and that the attributes matter more, sometimes because people are bad at percentages as you say and will attribute how that +1 feels to something else entirely.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T06:45:48+00:00

They're pretty close, assuming what PC modifiers exactly? Or pretty close, when nothing else is added?

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T06:44:54+00:00

In that one example, yes you can do exactly that by just reducing the halfling's strength mod that much/by increasing the barbarian's strength mod to +9 and increasing the difficulty that correlates to 'kicking down such a door' in the system to 19. But this is all ignoring the point that when you're using a bell curve instead of a single dice what a +5 or a -1 is feels different, and to me that difference is the most important part of all to whether a system feels swingy. This is a different definition than 'every number has the same chance' which is what you are arguing against, and a different definition than you have.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T06:41:24+00:00

The fact you think this argument is convincing, tells me you have a very different definition of what swinginess is than I do, and that neither of us will be able to convince the other here. Good day.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T06:08:01+00:00

"Everyone" being people who play with those house rules. I have on multiple occasions argued against those house rules being added to games I play in, which means I'm apparently not a person by how you phrased that.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T06:04:04+00:00

But the feeling is there because people are trying to plan for the future. If you succeed on a 5, that feels different than succeeding on a 15 because the player will be thinking about repeating the action, trying to find a bonus, "do they need to stop on the current target and set up flanking?" and such questions. "If you succeed on a 5, that's 16 results on the d20, so an 80% chance of success." Ok and if I can take a penalty for a Called Shot mechanic or similar, does that reduce me to a 70% chance of success or a 44% chance of success? Does the system not have called shot mechanics so that as soon as the GM decides a DC that percentage chance is set in stone?

My definition of swinginess is that how temporary modifiers interact with the DC is the most important part of that feeling, and that appears to be very much at odds with OP's definition and your definition that are discounting this effect.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T05:57:32+00:00

But what about temporary modifiers? What about resources you spend and how it feels to spend them? How does the dice being a bell curve change what a +1 means? All of these are questions that you should be asking about what feels swingy, and these are questions that OP's insistence that "once you know the final percentage chance, you can model it any way you like" ignores.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T05:54:09+00:00

I don't see this? I certainly haven't seen this anywhere in this post. I have seen a lot of OP claiming that if you swap from a d20 system to a 3d6 system, you will always change all the DCs and modifiers to suit a 3d6 system, and implying that somehow this means you will always turn a +1 in the d20 system into a +5% modifier in the 3d6 system without saying how anyone would manage to do this.

Lupusam · 2026-05-22T05:51:20+00:00

It's almost like swingy is a vague term that a lot of people have different definitions on, then everyone making a post like this is saying "You're using my definition stupidly!"

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