Quirkworthy

I’ve had a few queries about cards in the upcoming Deadzone Redux, so I thought I’d answer them here by explaining my current thinking on the topic.

When we started looking at updating the rules, I read a lot of comments online and talked to a lot of DZ fanatics about what they saw as strengths and weaknesses in the game. The chaps at Mantic also had ideas about what they thought had worked and what had fallen short. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and allows you to see all sorts of things you could have done better 🙂

I took this collection of broad notions and started working on mechanics that would make them happen in a final product. After some experiments I pitched a series of different versions to Ronnie and the crew, and they liked one that was quite dramatically modified from the original. Well, it is and it isn’t. The vibe is recognisably Deadzone and the core rules are sometimes identical, it’s just that I’ve done a great deal of streamlining to make it faster and bloodier so it feels more heavily changed that it actually is.

Regardless of the technicalities of the rules, what’s great for me is that everyone who’s tried the new game raves about how much they love it 🙂

In the process of making these changes I’ve replaced all the existing cards with processes that simply work better. Like I said, some dramatic changes.

I’m not going to tell you all the details just yet, but let me explore some of the basics.

Cards in DZ fall into 3 types: stat, battle and mission.

As I mentioned in my overview of the new army building, this is now focussed firmly on the commander’s character, and for this reason the individual trooper stat cards are no longer as useful. What I’m experimenting with currently is an army reference sheet – one per commander – that has all his army’s details on. So, if you had reference cards for 3 different Enforcer commanders there would be considerable overlap, but each would be different. This army reference sheet would therefore be used both for building an army and playing the game, which I find quite appealing. In terms of size, I’m thinking no bigger than both sides of a single A4 sheet, and smaller if we can get all the info in less space (or on one side). This would include the stats for the army, unit selection options, weapon stats, army special rule and missions.

Battle cards have been replaced by a more dynamic system that avoids some of the cancelling effect the earlier cards had: I play a card and you play a counter which takes time but has no actual effect on the tabletop. I don’t mind this approach to card play in the right place, I just think that the new approach is far superior for Deadzone. You’ll notice how I didn’t tell you exactly what this approach was. It’s one of the core changes in DZR and I’ll come back to deal with it in its own post so I have the room to discuss it properly. Stick to cards for now.

The final type of old cards are the mission cards. I really like the idea of faction specific missions and felt it could be developed further. The new army building approach is commander focussed, so I wanted to make the mission characterisation that level too. I’ve kept a couple of core missions that anyone can do, but with more individualised missions the definition is at the commander-specific army level, meaning that these will be on the army reference sheet I mentioned above and will be appropriate for that specific army. Obviously there will be overlap between factions, it’s just that the specific combination of missions can be tailored to suit each commander, which should allow us to balance the armies better.

So the old cards are superseded by better ways to do similar things. You still have stats and missions on hand to refer to, and can still change the course of the battle in your favour by carefully using a limited resource of tweaks and buffs. It’s just all slicker now 🙂

I answered a question on this in the comments of an earlier post. However, knowing how often these things get missed, I thought I’d pull it out and make it a post for everyone to see.

We’re not done with this yet, so expect more details over the next few weeks as it gets more refined. Overall, my aim is to include as much character within a simple process as possible. For the moment, it works like this:

You start by choosing a commander. This choice then influences everything else. Each faction will have several commanders to pick from, each with their own way of winning battles. Some commanders are more assault-oriented, and others more shooty. Some like balanced forces and others go all-out for a single type of troops. This is all reflected in the next step.

Your choice of commander determines the troop, weapon and equipment options you can pick from. So, if you pick Sergeant Howlett as your commander you’d have access to lots of assault troops and specialists that back up that way of fighting, but much less of everything else. As you’d expect.

Unit choices are currently along the lines of you can take 0-1 of these or 1-3 of those, with the options and upgrades being allocated on a per-commander basis to maximise the character of each force. So, to stick with Howlett, he must take some assault Enforcers. Anything else would simply not reflect his character.

One of the nice things about this approach is that we can simply add a new characterful force list if we make a new commander. So the Warpath background can expand as it needs to, and Deadzone can grow alongside it.

Another nice facet of this approach is that it can be used to limit the cherry-picking approach that is designed purely to win at all costs and ignores the story and character of the universe. Instead, the forces can be designed to include both advantages and disadvantages which makes for a much more interesting tactical challenge on the tabletop. Howlett is really nasty up close, but he struggles at a distance because that’s simply not how he fights. And overcoming that struggle is part of the fun 🙂

Deadzone Redux, or DZR to its friends, is the current name for the updated and improved version of Deadzone.

I’ve been working on DZR for a few months now, and it’s still being tested so there’s not much in the way of detail I can tell you yet – best to wait till things are a bit more nailed down. However, it’s hard to keep the fun entirely under my hat, and I can say that we had a cracking game yesterday, as you can see from Ronnie’s happy face 🙂

In case you’re wondering, he’s pointing out a Pathfinder that’s about to do something nasty to my sadly misunderstood rats…

All the old DZ fun is still there, with Ronnie making good use of the odd gaps blown in his newly-painted scenery to snipe at my rats from beyond the range of their weapons. Pesky humans. See if you can spot the nasty Pathfinder lurking in the distance (click for a bigger pic).

DZR is a faster, bloodier and easier to learn version the original, and I’m looking forward to our next stage of internal testing when we add all the armies into the mix (so far only been using parts of a few to test the core mechanics).

As an illustration of the sort of carnage we’re making, yesterday’s game ended with this fight between an injured rat and the last of the pathfinders (their boss). We’d both largely ignored the objective markers and concentrated on slaughtering the opposition, and slaughter we did. At the end of the game there were 2 models left on the table out of 12 that started.

Stay tuned and subscribe, bookmark or whatever suits your reading style as I’ll be back with more as soon as Ronnie says I can spill some beans 🙂