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[AndySlater]

Having pushed open a heavy door the team find themselves in a narrow corridor (at point A).  They pass along it and find themselves at the end of a gloomy cavern.  Coming out of the gloom towards them they see a row of beasts.  And what's this?  Another row behind those!  Time to leave methinks.

Here's a map:



Use Core 1.0 rules.  Bogies that are killed return to play at the back of the cavern.

Obviously the team players top priority is to get the team safely behind the door, but how many bogies can they kill before they leave?  How long dare they stay?

Things to try:

1. I've based the dimensions of the cavern on the chess board test but it's probably a good idea to try caverns of different lengths and widths.  I've also guessed at what might be a good length for the corridor to you might want to try altering that too.

2. Try limiting the number of bogies who can come back into play on each turn and/or changing the total number of bogies allowed in play.

[ghetti]

just to verify, at the start of the scenario the human units are prety much in the middle of the grid? and are you think fast or slow bogies (something that i'll play with)

[AndySlater]

The five heavy arrows on the map are my suggested start positions and facings form the team while the lighter arrows are the swarm at the start of play.

Fast or slow as you prefer.  The image in my mind is like something from the movie Pitch Black (fast) but they could just as easily be a swarm of zombies or some other slow moving piece of nastiness.  We'll end up needing different numbers for fast/slow but quite what will work best I don't know.  I know how we can find out though.  Play.  Play.  Play. 

[ghetti]

Well i've played a few games now of the basic scenario just running. generally if i just run i will always get one guy out, if not two.

i've only played a couple games of shooting and both were quite different if not equally futile.

in the first the rolls went well and i mangaed to keep the bogies at bay for a few rounds. but as soon as i started trying to get guys to run, my chance to hit is cut by 20% for each guy who went into the hall... the bogies swarmed and i didn't do any better than just running. the second game the rolls went bad and the bogies had me fast.

however as this is just a scenario chess board test, i went back to the chessboard to ty something. using a 10x10 grid i played a couple games of 5 humans vs 15 fast bogies. results the same, humans can manage and this seems like a reasonable balance in open space: 3 fast bogies to 1 human.

so i began playing with slow bogies on the same 10x10 grid with 5 humans. first i tired 20, then 30 slow bogies, the humans mowed through them. but the magic number that keeps getting similar results to the 15 fast bogies has been 45 slow bogies. the humans still win and with some creative shooting and movement normally wont have a loss.

it would seem that 3 slow bogies = 1 fast bogie. and that if a human can handle 3 fast they can handle 9 slow. and interestingly fast bogies have 3AP while slow have 1AP.

of course this is in open space, but this ratio might still hold true in the labrynth environment.

taking your scenario of BBD you say start with 15 slow bogies or 10 fast. if we use the above ratio and the scenario is balanced with 15 slow bogies, then maybe there should only be 5 fast bogies to start in BBD?

[AndySlater]

As I've posted in the BBD thread, Debs and I have been experimenting with increased APs and at the moment it's looking good.  I think however that the suggestion of reducing the max number of fast bogies is interesting.  BBD with increased APs felt harder for the team against fast bogies than it did against slow and I suspect that more play will suggest that fewer fast bogies and increased slow bogies is a good move.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want the number of slow bogies to get too high because a) it will make it harder to keep track of which have moved and which haven't and b) it would mean buying lots of figures.  Certainly 45 bogies to oppose 5 characters is way too many.  I think it might be better to make the slow bogies harder to kill and wonder what difference it would make if the slow bogie save were improved to 3+ instead of 4+.

I'd also be interested to know the effect of increased AP on the chessboard.  To some extent the increased AP of the bogies is offset by the increased AP of the team.  With APs of 1, 2 and 3, a slow bogie is 50% slower than a human while a fast bogie is 50% faster.  With APs of 2, 3 and 4 were looking at 66% and 33% so the difference is narrowed.

[AndySlater]

My new year resolutions for 2008 include making more terrain and enter a few of the competitions over on TerraGenesis.

Since posting the proposal for this scenario it occurred to me that it might be more interesting if there were a few random rocks strewn around the place.  Further more it occurred to me the the cargo hold of a space ship (with random barrels and crates) would make for a good sci-fi alternative to a cavern.  It just so happens that the cargo bay idea fits nicely with TG's current competition so that's what I'll be doing:

http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31505