I think I’ve put up more posts today than ever before. Apologies for the inundation.
Anyway, one last post from me today. Promise tomorrow will be saner (I often say that) 🙂
Starting at 6pm UK time (BST), Ronnie and I will be live online discussing the Dungeon Sagas KS with Andy Ransome from Chilling Wargamers:
Quirkworthy 
The Skeleton with Scythe was from Heroquest. (Advanced Heroquest just had monopose plastic Skaven)
See how my heat-addled brain betrays me!
😛 Enjoyable interview. 🙂
When you were describing about you would like the option to create your own Heroes to get funded, does that go for the Bad Guys.. I want to Create My own Villains….
Absolutely. If the good guys can have bespoke Dwarf Fighters then the Necromancer should be able to have bespoke Troll Shamen…
Enjoying this interview loads of info and insight
Oh and one reason people may want to buy mass plastic skeletons is Mantic doesn’t sell any other plastic Skeleton bowmen. I’ve heard several people say they want to buy 20+ of them.
Ah, I see. I think the problem here is that the new ones will probably end up on a single sprue for lots of the models. It’s not efficient to do just the smelly archers on their own. If they offered just the archers on their own then they’d have loads of random other bits they’d need to bin.
Aw man… It’s over an hour long! Between work, painting minis, and family obligations, I’ll never make it through this!! Could someone kindly summarize the key points regarding the current Dungeon Saga kickstarter?!?
Hmm. It was kind of all about the DS KS (even the poem at the end), so it’s hard to summarise. Much of it is covered by the articles here. Many of the other things that people asked about (various other models, board clips, etc) were a case of being on our list of things we’d like to do and we just have to wait to see if they get funded. It’s not an exciting answer, but it’s true. Most of the rest of the details will be explained as well in the Alpha rules which go up today (technology permitting).
Why don’t you listen to it while you paint? I know a lot of people who do that with gaming podcasts. There’s not much to see in it so there’s no visual distraction.
An excellent point, and perhaps I’ll give it a go if I can get the technology to work properly. Tonight’s paint table it is, then…
I’m sorry I missed participating in sending questions in for this, I’m on the opposite side of the planet and at the time, curled up punching out Z’s…it was a great interview to watch afterwards though, thanks for taking the time to do it.
Jake, how quickly will the game play flow in DS as opposed to DKH?
The combination of balanced forces, fairly equally balanced model stats, having to stop adjacent to enemies (and being forced to break from them at significant disadvantage), and the use of action tokens and only allowing a single move/action per model (not counting Follow-Ups), can see combat in DKH take quite some time and almost become a stalemate in some circumstances…which can be challenging and fun during a pure tactical miniatures game, but when dealing with heroes in a game more focused on adventure, I feel a more cinematic game play speed for resolving combat would be called for.
I absolutely would not expect large and powerful creatures (zombie trolls for example) to crumble easily to heroes, even powerful heroes, nor would I expect far less powerful creatures (basic skeletons for instance) to drop simply by a harsh glare from a hero…but I feel that the heroes need to be able to carve their way through the lower order of monsters a little more quickly than we see combat resolved in DKH.
I’ve heard you mention abilities and feats a few times now. For a smoothly flowing game speed, will these game elements allow heroes to wade through low powered creatures and clear a room more quickly than you would see in DKH? Will the heroes stats be representative of individuals above the average for their race/profession, enabling them to more easily lay the smack down on low level bad guys down?
I feel that a DKH game play speed would cause large dungeon layouts to become quite lengthy games.
Thanks Danny. Timezones are always an issue with the global community. Happily the recordings let everyone see the thing, even if you have to slum it and ask questions here 😉
As Heroes are significantly better than normal models the fighty ones do indeed carve their way through low-level undead pretty effectively. Wizards and so on have much more trouble in a fight, but then that’s not their job and in any case it’s a great way to encourage co-operation between the Heroes. Each has their role, and needs the others to do something else to make the group work as a whole.
In terms of time, the training scenarios take 10-15 minutes when I run new people through them. The campaign scenarios take anywhere from 30 minutes to an estimated 90 for the longest. I’m guessing there as it’s not finished yet. That’s the expectation though. An average would be about an hour, assuming that the players are familiar with the rules.
Having watched many games of this, the big time sinks tend to be discussion between players and thinking time. The mechanics themselves don’t take much doing – it’s coming up with the cunning plan (and persuading the rest of them to go along with you) that requires the thought.
There is no token deck for the Heroes, so their turns are simpler. They still have a limited amount they can do, but their choices are more focussed on how they implement those options on the board rather than deciding what to do in a wider sense. Of course, this does depend a bit on how many people are playing. If you are playing all 4 Heroes yourself then you have to coordinate their efforts on your own. More thinking, less debate.
Feats typically enable a Hero to do the kind of thing they do normally, but better. You’ll see what I mean when the Alpha rules go up later today.
The time required to play DS is mainly a function of the size of the dungeon, the number of monsters, and the people playing it. Bigger dungeons with more stuff in obviously takes longer to deal with. However, a lot of unnecessary time (if one was being strictly efficient) seems to get spent on doing things like chasing down every last skeleton rather than completing the mission.
The aim is to get the average time for the narrative scenarios to be an hour or so. If people are building bespoke scenarios of their own with three tile sets and dozens of monsters then as you say, it could get quite long. It would be an epic adventure though!
Ah so Hero’s have a set movement now? Guess we’ll learn more shortly. 🙂
Thanks again for taking the time to respond to peoples questions in full, it’s much appreciated.
As with my previous questions on exploration etc, you’ve again put my mind at ease here. I’m not at all adverse to sitting down for a 3 hour dungeon bash, as long as the game is moving along one way or another. Although I very much enjoy DKH, I’ve experienced numerous times where myself and my opponent have had two or three models each in a corridor or intersection struggle which has taken several turns to resolve. I enjoy these times in DKH as thematically, you have basic troops facing off against basic troops with similar combat capabilities and game wise, you have two players continually trying to gain advantage. For an adventure game though, I just feel that heroes (the combat focused heroes at least) need to be able to drop basic enemies a bit quicker.
Very much looking forward to both the Alpha rules and game play clip being released 🙂
Got to sit down and listen to a good fraction of your video while painting up a pair of GW dwarf pirates, a reaper bones female dwarf and some other wee reaper female fighter fig. Great to hear more details – and it may even be a bit out of date now given how well the KS is going.
I was a bit disappointed to hear that KoW minions may not make it into the advanced rules as options for the bad guy (or the bad AI), but I reckon that makes sense. But it does sound like there’s hints of a few other factions making it in there – Chris Palmer popped on over to boardgamegeek where I waste most of my wasted time to hint at the abyssals and the orcs.
Could you comment on this? Would you anticipate a new bad guy boss (an orc version of Mortibris, some great orc warlord perhaps?) with a completely new set of bad guy cards, spells, actions, etc? Would the Orc warlord come with his own AI deck, or would the bad guy AI deck be suitable for any bad guy? What are your thoughts on expanding DS beyond the undead?