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[AndySlater]

Brock Shothouse is not a happy man. Somebody has stolen 6 bottles of Jack Daniels from the paniers of his Harley and made off down a nearby drain cover. Eager to 'have a chat' with this individual, Brock and his four pals have entered the drain system (at point A on the map) and followed the trail to a little room (point B) where they discover 5 of the 6 stolen bottles.

At almost exactly the same time an apparently drunken individual staggers into view at the end of a short corridor. Brock's first instinct is to greet the individual and politely ask for the return of the remaining bottle of Jack, but something makes him hesitate. Perhaps it's the rank smell wafting towards him or the strange moaning sounds coming from their new found friend. Then again perhaps it's the fact that half of the individuals face has been chewed off and there's a hole in his chest big enough that Brock could put his fist through.

Luckily Brock has seen a few zombie movies in his time and the appearance of two more at the end of adjacent corridors is enough to persuade Brock that it's time to be getting on home. The team are also fortunate in that they remembered to bring their pistolas and a change of underwear. So, each armed with a pistol and a bottle of Jack which they may ignite and throw, or save for later consumption at their own discretion, they make for the exit.

1. Use version 1.0 core rules.

2. The 'voids' rule should be used for the enclosed rectangular areas.

3. The team player uses 1 team of 5 characters who start in the room at B on the map. 3 of the characters start out facing the oncoming bogies from the positions indicated. The team player may place the remaining 2 team characters anywhere in that room.

4. The swarm may be used as a slow swarm in which case the swarm player may have up to 15 bogies in play, or as a fast swarm in which case the swarm player may only have 10 bogies in play. The game starts with 9 bogies in play at the positions shown. Additional bogies come in to play at the points marked with a '+' at the rate of 2 bogies per turn if a slow swarm is used, and 1 bogie per turn for if it's a fast swarm.

5. Two games should be played such that each player gets to play the team and the bogies. The winner is the player who gets the most team members out of the drain system. If both players succeed in geting the same number of characters out of the drain then the winner is the one who has the most bottle of Jack Daniels.  If that number is also equal then the player who killed the most bogies wins. If both players also killed the same number of bogies, the match is a draw.

[AndySlater]

This is the first scenario that I created and it initially lead me to believe that there was a flaw in the core rules.  I am no longer convinced of this however after a number of games as described in another thread I decided to make a couple of changes to this scenario.  First of all, there's a new map:



Things to notice about the map is that we now start with 10 bogies in play, and that there is a long corridor to the north which limits reduced the number of access points available to the swarm.

The second change is that the scenario should use the Panic Fire Rule

[AndySlater]

Well it looked good for a couple of games but all it takes is a slight change of tactics from the swarm and the team are once again, unable to get past the first junction.

The change is simple: rather than all moving in the directions in which they initially face, 2 of the bogies turn and head along the north corridor to reinforce the one nearest to the first junction.



It takes the team 3 turns to reach the first junction and only 2 turns for the 4 bogies highlighted in blue on the map above to move onto the dark blue squares.  With the bogies on those blue squares the teams chances of getting into the hallway are very slim.

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgh! 

[ghetti]

i'm starting to think that the map in this scenario is just too restrictive to be used with fast bogies and that with the spwan rate of the bogies they will always be able to 'clog' up the intersections, so even if a few human units make it past the first they wont make it past

i think the scenario needs changing. the map needs to be opened/widened a little, or there needs to be less bogies to start.

a possible optional ruel to create greater mobility could be allow units to move through sqaures occupied by thier own team? although i still dont think that would help in this case....

[AndySlater]

Today we switched to slow bogies for a change.  We haven't played with them in a very long time and I guess we've learned a few things about team tactics since then because the bogies didn't stand a chance.  We played 2 games and there were never any doubts that the team would get out.

So we decided we needed to change something.

We considered increasing the slow bogie save to 3+ but as we are aware that there are also problems with fast bogies we wondered about an increase in AP.  Thus we increased the slow bogies to 2AP and the team to 3AP.  This seemed to work rather well.  So we wondered how it would go with the team at 3AP and fast bogies at 4AP.

We tried the 3AP/4AP on the v1 BBD map but it didn't help with the problem at the first junction.  So we switched to the v2 map and had what turned out to be a rather interesting game:

The problem I described in my previous post (of the swarm being able to put 4 bogies into that first junction rather quickly) is made worse by the increased AP however it occurred to me (I was playing the team) that if the northernmost member of the team tosses a bomb into the north corridor then, provided the get 5+ on 2d6 they instant kill one of those 4 bogies and block the entrance with flames.

The team then have to rush for the junction and one of them is forced into melee.  He lost (unlucky) however it drew the bogie out where I could shoot it, and I got 4 characters into the hallway.  There were a couple of scary moments in the hallway when I thought it might turn bad but in the end I managed to get 4 characters out of the labyrinth.

We're too tired to play again today but we both came away from that last game thinking that we could have done better, or worse, i.e. it was not obviously biased one way or the other.  Only more play will tell for sure.

i'm starting to think that the map in this scenario is just too restrictive to be used with fast bogies and that with the spwan rate of the bogies they will always be able to 'clog' up the intersections, so even if a few human units make it past the first they wont make it past

i think the scenario needs changing. the map needs to be opened/widened a little, or there needs to be less bogies to start.

I think your findings with the COD scenario are providing an interesting insight here and that perhaps 10 fast or 15 slow are the wrong numbers to use.

Debs and I will play a few more games of BBD with the increased APs to make sure we don't uncover any major problems.  If we don't then perhaps we'll tweak the max number of bogies to find numbers that the team can only just about manage to deal with.

[ghetti]

increased AP might be the way to go, but as a newbie i really like the low AP. it keps unit choice simple and turns fast.

my tests showing 9 slow bogies to one human is a little scary to think that you might have to have 45 bogies in play at once, but its not that bad. i've been play testing a zombie scenario with a friend where i have fast medium and slow zombies. i have at time had up to 25 units is play, but at one action a unit it is still fairly simply and fast to play.

and again the 45 is in an optimal chess board scenario where the 5 human units can take 10 full shots round after round. in a maze or labrynth like BBD, 20 slow bogies may be the right number.

changing them to 3+ survival on ranged defense may be a good solution.

another thing is to consider the humans base range 2d6 instead of 3d6.  since escapepath so far is maze based i cant think of too many scenarios where a human will get to shoot from 18 sqaures away. most encounters will probably happen with in 8 to 4 squares and a 2D6 still gives a solid chance to hit.

my two cents is that if you increase AP you only Increase choice, which will slow down play.

[AndySlater]

In my previous post I reported a rather interesting game however we realised later that we made a mistake.  We were playing fast bogies on BBDv2 with 3AP/4AP max 10 however we were refreshing at the rate of 2 bogies per turn.

Since then we've replayed it 3 times with refresh=1 and found it too easy for the team.  It might be good for a novice team player versus an experience bogie player but otherwise it's too easy.

So we switched back to refresh=2 for a couple of games and that's REALLY challenging for the team player.  I managed to get some of them out each time but in the last game there was only 1 who made it.

The bottom line is that we now feel that BBDv2 is working quite well with fast bogies.  We also feel that 3AP for the team and 4AP for the bogies is good, and that while max=10 refresh=2 is a tough game we feel that reducing to max=9 refresh=2 might be just about perfect (and if not then max=8 should do it).

Well come back to that because the we want to play a few slow bogie games next.  Initially we'll be trying them with 2AP and 3AP for the team however we may also try increasing the slow bogie save to 3+ instead of 4+.

We're feeling like this is really starting to come together and I'm now hoping to be in a position to be able to publish Core 1.1 by the end of the month.

[AndySlater]

Debs and I played 3 games today with slow bogies using AP2 and the team with AP3.  In the first game we had the bogies save at 4+ but felt that it was too easy for the team.  For the last 2 games we improved the bogies save to 3+ which seemed to work very nicely.

So, to summarise:

1/ Increase APs such that:
 Slow Bogie = 2AP with 3+ save
 Team = 3AP
 Fast Bogie = 4AP with 5+ save

2/ Use the panic fire rule.

3/ Bogies refresh at 2 per turn whether fast or slow.  Max bogies in play at any one time is 10 for fast bogies and 15 for slow bogies.

Have Fun.