Happy Father's Day to ME!...and all others.

Nothing happening on the Rules front...Father's Day turned into Family Weekend so...yeah. I did get a bit of painting done on those Gnoblars though.

I'm back? Kinda? Maybe?

So in my available time since I've finished the school year, I have been trying to clear my modest painting queue. Here's a finished "squad" of Ogre Bulls. A few I'm not totally proud of, but I did start painting them almost a year ago when I didn't have a fleshed out style, and color palette (just look at how ugly that Bellower is compared to the Standard Bearer and Crusher).

Ogre Bulls Ranked Up

Board Game Design, Miniature Painting...and a welcome!

My name is Kris (though I usually go by Ino on the various forums I belong to) and welcome to my Bloggity Blogger Blog. I had one of these things ages ago when the forums had(?) a bad name, the House was just a twinkly twinkle in Lauby and Dethtron's eyes, and I was 30 pounds lighter. So I'm older now, I've got a kid, and more time on my hands that I know what to do with. Ahhh being a student is fun! So enough about me, now on to the meat of this blog, and what it's going to be about.

Like I said I'm a student, and what I'm a student of is Computer Programming and Game Design. As such, I'm going to use this space to explore some of the Board Games that I'm designing and the prototypes that I'll be making to playtest those games.

First off is going to be a slow leak of my board game (working title) "Heroes United".

From reading other board games rules, the great articles by Mark Rosewater (Magic the Gathering Head Designer), RPGs, and even Miniature Wargames (ala 40k/WHFB, WarmaHordes, Infinity) having a mechanic that is both easy and memorable is important. The problem that I have with Games Workshop's for instance is the different type of dice rolls that are to be made in the course of a game.  Knowing this I knew that I wanted my dice mechanic to be simple, efficient, memorable, but not too swingy. Here is the mechanic for "Heroes United" that I though of:

Rolling Off: 

Pick 3 20 sided dice (d20) and roll. On a roll of a 1 you've failed at your task. On a roll of a 20 you've succeeded critically (If this is an opposed roll, only another Critical Hit can negate your roll)! If you happen to roll both a 1 and a 20, they cancel out and you take the value of the third dice.If you roll neither a 1 or a 20: If 2 dice are valued between 2 and 10 take the LOWEST valued dice.If you roll neither a 1 or a 20: If 2 dice are valued between 11 and 19 take the HIGHEST valued dice.Henceforth this outcome is known as a "Result"

Pretty much this negates the linear outcome of rolling 1 dice. Having a bell curve as many game designers have shown leads more towards "real life" averages. On top of this it allows me the design space to "fudge" outcomes to either the high or low side to signify a greater probability of success or failure.