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I'd love to see Key words added & cleaned up


Da Git

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So this is probably something for the next Edition, but I'd love to see the key words get cleaned up.  This goes across all factions, but I think it's particularly relevant in Ressers with their summoning. 

Almost every master should get their own keyword, an example of some new ones

  • Nico - Zombie
  • Kirai - Yurei (means ghost/evil spirit in Japanese)

This would help clean up these two masters' theme crew and make future releases much easier to balance.  Every new Spirit & Undead minion needs to be balanced around these two masters' summoning, but also as hires.  Hanged are the classic example of terrible hires but amazing summons.  But really though, they don't fit either of the above maters theme crew and probably should be summonable to begin with.  Then their cost could be modified to make them decent hires (Seamus would be thrilled!).  I would guess that Lampads were made an enforcers partly to prevent Kirai summoning (although I could be completely wrong here).  If she could only buff and summon Yurei (& Nico only Zombies), we could broaden the scope of Spirit/Undead minions available to be released.

The elephant in the room here is of course Molly.  Her Horror theme is fine, but the Spirit side of her never really sat right for me, being able to summon all of Kirai's ghosts of vengeance and hanged...  Personally, I think she's sitting in a really good spot with Horrors that I'd be fine for this to go away, but I know this would really, upset a lot of players.  She probably should have a key word to limit which spirits she can summon though.  Otherwise, just give the appropriate spirits Horror, and just have the one set.

McMourning's themed stuff (Seb, Nurses, Chihuahua, Canines, Little Gassers, Fleshies, Kentaroi), could also have a key word and open up the Moonlighting summons somehow.

Tara, Reva, Semus and Yan are all fine with their keywords off the top of my head, though I wouldn't mind some Resser Void models as they're all out of Faction for Resser Tara.

Just some thoughts I had.

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Good post.

Your points were all argued pretty forcefully already during the initial open beta when we transitioned to M2E, however.

I personally always felt every summoning action should be limited to a pretty restrictive keyword too better control which models you allowed to be summoned, and by who. The developers at the time didn't agree and here we are. I have no idea what the current developers believe and even if they agreed with that sentiment given the current increase in summoning and models who can summon every wave after every wave, I wouldn't hold out hope for such. The economics of money and player enthusiasm also both work against the idea of restricting summoning. How many models are cool looking that have terrible hiring stats has Wyrd sold just because you might want to summon it at some point? I'd imagine it would be a hard sell as a purely business decision to restrict it.

Personally, I hope when and if there is a M3E they just gut and get rid of all summoning. I for one am excessively tired of the issues it creates, the perceptions it undergirds, and how every time there is a brainstorming session for future models or changes the most common is "I want to be able to summon X". Better to just gut it as a mechanic and balance models without having to deal with that ability in my opinion. And I say this as an almost exclusive resser player.

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As much as I get mad at summoning I wouldn't want to kill it off entirely. I think stuff like Sebastian getting a canine for an ap + a corpse marker and such is fine, it's just the flood summoning and especially resourceless ummoning that has takrn over a bit too much. If summoning masters had good abilities but could summon from a restricted pool as a (0) or something it might be interesting again. The kind of summons that force you into stuff like burning and poison are also interesting because they five the enemy a way to react. Masters summoningtheir totems alao seems finesince they are usually lowpowered models.

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I agree with Ludvig, summoning shouldn't be removed from the game as it's part of at least five (six if you take the Dreamer upgrade, there might be more too) masters' core mechanics (I'm not sure if summoning is part of Sandeep, Ulix and Somer's core mechanics)...  However, I also really hate the summon factory approach people seem to love.  Maybe if summoning was limited to one non-peon model summoned/turn/model summoning. 

This would instantly shut down the Molly/Kirai/Nico/Asami/Dreamer summon factories and actually get them to use their AP to do other stuff.  It's seriously unfun when 3 Hanged/Shikome/Punk Zombies/Jorogumo materialise out of thin air...

This would need to be a change in the core rule book.  It wouldn't effect Ramos, because card rules overwrite Rulebook rules (to my knowledge anyway).  That's what I would do anyway.

Although that would mean cheap summons would rarely, if ever see play, but for me at least, I'm usually only summoning big stuff anyway.

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I think actually capping most summons at low stone models would make it easier to handle. No balancing hiring va aummoning hanged, you simply stick to getting atuff like mindless zombies, canines etc. Most summonable modela could be made peons from the start to avoid a lot of overwhelming scheme mechanics and simply just allowing a lot of crap activations. Stuff like canines and spiders that debuff would be interesting as peons in future iterations. Yan Lo getting one ancestor at 10ish syones back could qctuqlly be considered a massive thing if it was unique.

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Might be your meta but while summoning can be a good move most players here deal with it just fine. More so when guys like Von shill show up and goo go gadget fling your zombies to the steam trunk.

That being said with molly she mechanically summons but thematically it's just the unquiet dead being drawn to her. With that and kiria's friendship It makes sense to summon spirits as well as horrors.

Many things in ressers are costed for summoning, I think trying to narrow down their summoning pools would only hurt the game and making key words for them seems completely redundant as they don't care about any key words.

 

If we are talking about adding key words, what about making he convict gunslinger a bandit?

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I'm not sure why the designers would want to eliminate summoning. It's one of the most unique things about Malifaux when compared with other games. Waves 4 & 5 have almost doubled the number of models capable of summoning so it doesn't appear to be their strategy anytime soon.

Even if a new Ressurectionist player decides to only ever play one or two masters, they will still (currently) feel obligated to buy at least some of their available summon options, Mindless Zombies (My Little Helper alone is just that good), our Emissary, and something decent for its (0) March of the Dead. 

Our intimate connection (some would say reliance) with summoning surely makes Ressurs the most profitable faction. How would you make a Mindless Zombie ever worth hiring if it couldn't be summoned? How would you inspire a new player to buy 5 of them? If summoning were to be removed outright Wyrd would sell far fewer Ressurectionist models, outright.

Keyword wise I agree with OP some work could be done but I can't see any easy fixes that don't drastically impact Shikome and Hanged, especially as far as summoning is concerned- do you make them exclusively one keyword or another? Shikome are already juggling 3 keywords...

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I just don't feel that mechanically summoning breaks things so heavily it needs to be gutted. Yeah, there are some drawbacks and caveats but that makes it unique and flavorful. Additionally, if Ressers were totally broken and an auto-win because of summoning mechanics, they'd be dominating GG2017, which doesn't seem to be the case. They are, however regarded as being the most balanced faction. 

I wouldn't want to sacrifice the flavor and style in all masters for total balance. I've played mostly balanced games, which seem to lack depth and cannot hold people's interest. GW LotR SBG comes to mind as an incredibly balanced game, but after about a year, even the beautiful models and the Tolkien-base couldn't keep me interested. 

To be honest, I really like Wyrd's approach of balancing the schemes and strategies to both reinvigorate the yearly objectives while shaking up what the top masters are capable of. I think  it is a brilliant way to find a happy medium in which all masters have a fair chance to be competitive and stay current. I'm unaware of another miniatures game out there that encompasses what Malifaux does.

Anyway, I hope this wasn't too much of a rant. 

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3 hours ago, Thulis said:

I just don't feel that mechanically summoning breaks things so heavily it needs to be gutted. Yeah, there are some drawbacks and caveats but that makes it unique and flavorful. Additionally, if Ressers were totally broken and an auto-win because of summoning mechanics, they'd be dominating GG2017, which doesn't seem to be the case. They are, however regarded as being the most balanced faction. 

That's the thing. I don't think summoning in Ressurs was really the problem, it's all the new models in other factions that summon, often for fewer resources, that have caused the problem. Ressurs and our summoning had been around a while and while it can be very strong is at least partly balanced (there may be too many ways to get free corpses now). It's the glut of other factions and new ways to summon that I feel have caused the concerns. 

I wouldn't want to see summoning go away completely, but I do think it needs a good long look at for M3 whenever they get there. 

 

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9 hours ago, Merchant said:

Many things in ressers are costed for summoning, I think trying to narrow down their summoning pools would only hurt the game and making key words for them seems completely redundant as they don't care about any key words.

 

If we are talking about adding key words, what about making he convict gunslinger a bandit?

Did you read the original post? The suggestion was to cost them so they were reasonable hires so basically every minion in the entire faction would get cheaper and then change the summoning actions to make them relatively harder. Part of the suggestion was also to make the summoners not summon "undead" or "spirit" but tie the masters to new keywords like "zombie" so that you could make a new undead model and not need to consider that Nico will easily spam it through summons. That would allow ressers to get new better models cheaper without summoning messing with the pricing.

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6 hours ago, hydranixx said:

Keyword wise I agree with OP some work could be done but I can't see any easy fixes that don't drastically impact Shikome and Hanged, especially as far as summoning is concerned- do you make them exclusively one keyword or another? Shikome are already juggling 3 keywords...

I agree that summoning will not go away, it's a great mechanic.

Not sure why the keywords would need to be such an issue, the whole point would be dropping shikome a stone or two so that you wanted to start them on the table with more masters but not make them summonable for as many masters so no need to add keywords. They are beasts and spirits already, I'm not sure how you got it to them juggling three keywords or needing more. Being one of living, undead and construct should be considered the norm. On top of that I don't find two thematic keywords excessive in any way. In neverborn most things are living and constructs and on top of that the norm is probably to be two of their thematic keywords, some models even have three keywords like woe, darkened, mimic, nightmare etc. I don't see neverborn players having any difficulty handling this.

As I understood it part of the problem is that hanged are summonable at all but not considered good hires so a drop in cost but few keywords if any so that you could start with one or two on the table but never summon them.

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34 minutes ago, Ludvig said:

The suggestion was to cost them so they were reasonable hires so basically every minion in the entire faction would get cheaper and then change the summoning actions to make them relatively harder. Part of the suggestion was also to make the summoners not summon "undead" or "spirit" but tie the masters to new keywords like "zombie" so that you could make a new undead model and not need to consider that Nico will easily spam it through summons. That would allow ressers to get new better models cheaper without summoning messing with the pricing.

This seems like you are looking for the entire faction to be rewritten and that seems rather unreasonable for something that isn't broken. So there is no need to fix it. Maybe in a new edition this could happen. Although wyrd has been resistant to changing models stats unless absolutely necessary otherwise the books become invalid, cards need to be reordered. It's a huge logistical mess honestly.

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@Merchant

This thread literally starts with the words:

On 2017-09-22 at 4:35 PM, Da Git said:

So this is probably something for the next Edition, but I'd love to see the key words get cleaned up.  This goes across all factions, but I think it's particularly relevant in Ressers with their summoning. 

 Yes these are major changes inteded as the next edition overhaul of ressers to take the game in the right direction a couple of years down the line. No one has ever suggested otherwise, the premise of the thread is that we will see a new edition where this could be possible so I kind of assumed anyone posting here has that kind of scope in mind. :) They changed plenty of things between 1.5 and 2.0, all model stats and even adding factions so I don't find it an unreasonable change. 

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12 hours ago, Ludvig said:

Not sure why the keywords would need to be such an issue, the whole point would be dropping shikome a stone or two so that you wanted to start them on the table with more masters but not make them summonable for as many masters so no need to add keywords. They are beasts and spirits already, I'm not sure how you got it to them juggling three keywords or needing more. Being one of living, undead and construct should be considered the norm. On top of that I don't find two thematic keywords excessive in any way. In neverborn most things are living and constructs and on top of that the norm is probably to be two of their thematic keywords, some models even have three keywords like woe, darkened, mimic, nightmare etc. I don't see neverborn players having any difficulty handling this.

I looked at their Spirit, Undead and Beast tags, and their reliance on both Poison and Adversary, and made the leap that they wear a lot of hats at the moment. If we *were* to reorganise keywords, which is not to say I agree or disagree with reorganising them, I'm just wondering where they'd fit. 

In the OP's proposed keyword change, where Zombies are a unique Nicodem thing, do they become an Undead Zombie+Yurei hybrid similar to their Undead+Spirit of today, exclusively Undead Zombie or exclusively Undead Yurei?

Perhaps I misinterpreted the OP's idea around keywords.

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Honestly I'm just glad I'm not a Gremlins player lol. There your two supremely binding keywords Pig and Gremlin pretty much inhibit anything else from seeing play, and only half your actual Pig and Gremlin models appear to be viable if these forums are anything to go by.

I don't envy the job of whoever is tasked with trying to redesign or revamp their faction. 

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21 minutes ago, Paddywhack said:

But Nicodem specializes in summoning Punk Zombies in the fluff. He prefers undead that were skillful in life.

Specializing doesn't necessarily exclude everything else? The fluff is also torn to shreds since m2e opened up the factions with liberal hiring so I'm not sure what you are saying. There werea ton of models in the same faction that couldn't be taken together for thematic reasons, all of that is gone except Lazarus for some odd reason. There is no way in hell the Judge would hang out with McMourning when the latter had brought a rogue necromancy. That would instantly blow his cover. McMourning getting to bring the chihuahua into guild crews is also ridiculous from a story perspective.

Nico could have a lower Tn for punk zombies than other summons. I think making him summon only punk zombies would be going way to far if that was what you were suggesting.

I think the fact that he has auras providing pretty great buffs to undead like + to all df flips, slow immunity and + to all damage flips is a pretty neat way of showing that his minions are obviously made of tougher stuff than the next resser's.

More masters doing like Molly and having limited upgrades providing different summoning options would also be a good sollution to create more diversity in playstyles. Nico could have different mood upgrades providing different summoning keywords.

I think Seamus opening up faction crossover by making other models undead is also a really interesting new direction. Lots of fun conversion opportunities as well as options for building interesting synergies.

Nico could have an asian fascination upgrade that opened up Yurei to his summoning but gave undead instead of spirit or something similar.

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No, you were saying that Shikome, having an Asian aesthetic, didn't seem to mesh with Nicodem. I was pointing out that, fluff wise, he prefers the Punk Zombies who are also an Asian aesthetic (more so in the fluff of the early stories rather than the models so much). Since Nicodem prefers the warriors from that background I could easily see him using Shikome as well. 

I was not implying or speaking about actual game rules. I actually don't think the problem with Summons and mis-costed models has a lot to do with Key Words. I'm not sure that new key words would really solve anything. I believe, in the next edition, which may be some time from now, a full re-imagining of the summon mechanic across all factions should be explored. 

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I'm not really keen on a new edition at all to be honest. The Gaining Grounds rotational system makes balance change over time appropriately. The enormous quantity of models and upgrades would make a new edition a huge undertaking when it's probably not necessary. 

The simplest fix appears to be the "2.5" revision, a rule book update with adjustments to some selected rules and better explanations of timings/trigger sequences and perhaps modifications to the dreaded vantage point rules, (and removing Gremlins as a faction ;)).

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3 minutes ago, hydranixx said:

I'm not really keen on a new edition at all to be honest. The Gaining Grounds rotational system makes balance change over time appropriately. The enormous quantity of models and upgrades would make a new edition a huge undertaking when it's probably not necessary. 

The simplest fix appears to be the "2.5" revision, a rule book update with adjustments to some selected rules and better explanations of timings/trigger sequences and perhaps modifications to the dreaded vantage point rules, (and removing Gremlins as a faction ;)).

True. I'm not expecting anything in the near future. Even in a .5 update they could make some changes to the overall Summoning rules (maybe make it Paralyzed instead of Slow when it comes in, or all Summons gain Shambling, or any other number of things). 

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What are you talking about? The Judge 100% knows mcmourning is innocent so nothing he can do is suspicious. That Rogue Amalgamation just happened to show up and help at around the same time. I mean hoffman might be upset dougie is making constructs by sewing together flesh instead of metal but dougie would never raise the dead, its clearly powered by soulstones and internal motors!

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6 hours ago, Nukemouse said:

What are you talking about? The Judge 100% knows mcmourning is innocent so nothing he can do is suspicious. That Rogue Amalgamation just happened to show up and help at around the same time. I mean hoffman might be upset dougie is making constructs by sewing together flesh instead of metal but dougie would never raise the dead, its clearly powered by soulstones and internal motors!

Using soulstones and machinery to power constructs made of flesh is known as amalgamation and the purpose of Hoffman's station is to eradicate any such practice so he would crucify McMourning if he knew.

@Paddywhack

I wasn't being clear, it's not that they're of asian descent or anything, it's the whole concept. Nico summoning asians who could wield swords is still him ressurecting a corpse which is 100% in line with his fluff persona. Shikome aren't zombies. When you read their flavour text they seem more reminiscent of norse valkyries than the original story of Shikome but either way they're not random people ressurected but a manifestation of some spirit essence which seems to have a role in the afterlife without being ressurected. Kirai beckoning vengeful spirits to her would explain why they'd hang around her but Nico can't go to a graveyard and find a winged corpse because their corpses didn't have wings, that's part of their spirit manifestation from what I understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikome

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