Adapting 2ed. narrative play

[Ozzac]

With my group of friends we decided to try to adapt the narrative play manual from 2ed. to 3ed.

After changing the wording of some things and removing mentions to things that don't exists anymore (like peons) it seems feasible.

We will beign in september with a short 4 games campaign. 

Would you be interested in battle reports, opinions etc?

[Math Mathonwy]

I would certainly be interested in hearing how it goes!

It wasn't very balanced in M2e so I don't think that it being a bit wonky is a problem in M3e, either since that's simply not the mindset one should have when playing it. So sounds good to me!

[Adran]

You mean a shifting loyalty campaign ( rather than just story encounters)? I'd read the reports. 

My suggestion would be if the ability/action exists in 3rd, to use its wording ( things like leap and flurry would be examples of things which basically do the same thing in both editions but the wording of the 2nd edition doesn't quite work with 3rd rules).

Have fun. 

[LordZombie]

I am always interested in a more fun side of malifaux. 

[Ozzac]

Thank you for the interest.

At the moment the biggest changes were the banning of summoners and Ulix A since the advantage would be too great and the fact that everybody starts already with a master and totem.

I didn't create content specific for the explorers since in my group nobody has still bought any of them.

[KID55]

Interesting, whould be there some official compaign rules for 3ed in future? I've played company in 2ed and that was fun (not balanced, but company play is not about balance, for this we have tournaments)

[clockworkspide]

On 8/10/2022 at 1:09 AM, Ozzac said:

With my group of friends we decided to try to adapt the narrative play manual from 2ed. to 3ed.

After changing the wording of some things and removing mentions to things that don't exists anymore (like peons) it seems feasible.

We will beign in september with a short 4 games campaign. 

Would you be interested in battle reports, opinions etc?

I'm working on a similar project myself, actually.  Would be interesting to see how your group is finding it (and also maybe to compare notes on how we adapted certain features from 2E to 3E).

[Ozzac]

On 8/16/2022 at 1:19 AM, KID55 said:

Interesting, whould be there some official compaign rules for 3ed in future? I've played company in 2ed and that was fun (not balanced, but company play is not about balance, for this we have tournaments)

Not that I know of. 

[LordZombie]

On 8/15/2022 at 6:19 PM, KID55 said:

Interesting, whould be there some official compaign rules for 3ed in future? I've played company in 2ed and that was fun (not balanced, but company play is not about balance, for this we have tournaments)

With M3e, I just don't see it. This edition just seems to get more tournament style. 

[Ozzac]

We begun, mostly, since one player still needs to make their band.

Anyway this are the lists: 

Youko A,Chiyo, Hinamatsu, Bill, Kunoichi, Geisha, Wanyudo

Hoffman A, Attendant, Joss, MElissa,, Guardian, Hunter

Zoraida A, Hinamatsu, Rider, Silurid x2, wicked doll

Colette A, doves x3, Coryphee x2, Angelica, Carlos, Dorian.

Ulix B, Penelope, Old major, Gracie, Squealer x2, Wild boar.

First match was between me (youko), and hoffman. 

The match was corner deployment,

carve a path

deliver a message, secret meetup, bait and switch, dig their graves, in your face

and ended with a 3-3 on 3 turns.

Youko managed well, since it has some decent defences against shooters melissa was rendered almost useless, and she basically worked to move the stragegy markers.

We both made a point for the strategy, 1 point each for secret meetup (hinamatsu and Joss for me, Hinamatsu and the guardian for Hoffman) and a point for deliver a message for me and bait and switch for hoffman.

We both had a casualty (wanyudo and the guardian) and all in all it felt evenly matched.

Edit: the last list: Marcus A, Jackalope, Initiate x2, Crockett, Sabertooth, Myranda

 

[Ozzac]

Ulix vs Marcus 3-4

Strategy: carve a path

Deployment: flank

Schemes: vendetta, search the ruins, claim jump, set the trap, power ritual

Both did 2 points for the strategy, Ulix did 1 point for claim jump, Marcus 1 point for power ritual and 1 for search the ruins.

Basically once the tiger got flight it was a massacre, with both the squealers and the cursed getting killed with serious malus going on, and the Ulix player trying to kill the wrong tiger (myranda transformed) for vendetta.

[Ozzac]

Last battle, unfortunately I wasn't present and it was an hassle just to get the victory points, so no report.

Colette - Zoraida 4-4 on 4th turn.

Strategy: turf war

Deployment: flank

Schemes: power ritual, search the ruins, set the trap, catch and release, bait and switch.

Colette did 3 points for the strategy and 1 point for power ritual. Zoraida did 2 points for the strategy, 1 for power ritual and 1 for search the ruins.

There were 2 interesting points made in the aftermatch, that I'm going to explain: the first one was that one of the silurids died, and with a black joker result it was going to be eliminated from the zoraida crew and added to the colette crew. The Zoraida player chose to cheat and change the result, but the interesting part is: I think in this situation the best solution is to proxy the silurid for the rest of the campaign, but somebody else (in my group) said that the model should be lent to the other player.

The other point is Colette doves. based on the play style the doves keep exploding, so all 3 of them "won" some kind of injury. Now I'm torn between 2 options: the first one is that the injured ones are the initial ones, and thos summoned after are fresh and injury free, this would give a slight advantage to the Colette player, but still a minimal one since, as minions, the doves could sustain 2 injuries max before needing to be retired. 

The second options is that the doves summoned are always the same, so they keep getting summoned with the preexisting injuries. Plus the 2 injuries max rule.

What do you thinK?

[Adran]

On the first point, I would say the choice is really up to the owner of the silurud. If they are happy to let another player use one if their models then fine, but I would fully understand someone not wanting to give part of their collection away for an event so they couldn't use it for anything they wanted during that time. They might also give a different answer depending on who the player that would be getting the model is, and that's fine. I'm totally happy for friends I see regularly to borrow my things, I'm much less happy for aquatances who I never know when I'm going to see next to borrow them, and there are some people I wouldn't trust to look after my stuff. 

 

On the second part, I don't think doves that you summon should be the same as your starting doves. That does mean that you will slowly injure your initial doves as they get " finished off" and get some annilated due to injuries.  The colette player may then want to buy new doves to add to the roster.  It may lead to in game choices about which dove to sacrifice each time based on the campaign circumstances,  but I personally like that.  

There are advantages and disadvantages to this, you will probably start racking up injuries on the doves, but when you summon a dove, it won't have those injury downsides, and so be more useful. Uts probably going to get to the case that the colette crew will not start all games with a maximum allowed number of doves,  but they can still summon to reach the maximum  

[Ozzac]

First game of the second round: Ulix - Hoffman 

1-2 on the third turn

Deployment: wedge

Strategy: guard the stash

Schemes: load em up, assassinate, sabotage, set the trap, public demonstration.

Ulix managed to make 1 point for assasinate, while hoffman got 2 points from the strategy.

The Ulix player managed to do a lot of damage, but ignoring the strategy and letting hoffman do what he wanted. Gracie is a juggernaut, expecially with 2 squelers healing her.

The Hoffman player gave me an interesting feedback: usually in a normal or tournament game you first see schemes and strategy and then you build your crew. But with narrative play you first build your crew, and then you have to adapt to the schemes and strategies that are extracted. As an example among these schemes he couldn't chose public demonstration, because he didn't respect the points requirement.

I'm thinking next edition either to make the players to chose schemes and/or strategies, or to give them a pool of 10 schemes to chose instead of only five, hoping that this will make things better.

What do you think?

P.s: @Adran yes, those are my ideas too, but it's nice to get a confirmation.

 

[Adran]

19 minutes ago, Ozzac said:

 

The Hoffman player gave me an interesting feedback: usually in a normal or tournament game you first see schemes and strategy and then you build your crew. But with narrative play you first build your crew, and then you have to adapt to the schemes and strategies that are extracted. As an example among these schemes he couldn't chose public demonstration, because he didn't respect the points requirement.

I'm thinking next edition either to make the players to chose schemes and/or strategies, or to give them a pool of 10 schemes to chose instead of only five, hoping that this will make things better.

What do you think?

 

Part of the reason you choose 2 from 5 is because you often can't do all 5. This will be especially true in this, but you do get to choose your roster, and do have to hire new models for the roster each " week" so after a few weeks you probably have plenty to choosevfrom to build your list.

whilst when you start you might not be able to do all schemes,  you probably need to make sure you can do a majority just in case. 

Even in the campaign you should generate strategy and schemes before picking a crew,  its just you have a restricted pool to hire from . The size of the game should be picked to not force one side to play everything they own. 

[Ozzac]

Yes, but expecially for the first games you are forced to play with your entire crew, that is not optimized for all kind of plays.

And regardin the forced hire, while true it's not always a possibility. If your first games have been bad, and you have 2/3 scripts total it's simply not possible to hire somebody with most crews, and with the keyword mechanic it can be worse than it was in 2ed.

Anyway, here is my battle report for youko vs zoraida.

5-6 on 4 turns.

Strategy: plant explosives

Deployment: flank (I don't know if it's a bug or what else, but it seems that I get flank way more than the other deployments)

Schemes: detonate charges, hold up their forces, bait and switch, leave your mark, catch and release.

Beautiful and difficult game, if not for a couple of mistakes on my side it could have ended with my victory, unfortunately on the last turn I was forced to chose between the strategy and doing hold up their forces.

anyway youko managed to do 2 points from the strategy, 1 from hutf and 2 from catch and release, with the kunoichi running to zoraida, slapping her and then running away planting explosives. Honorable mention to chiyo, who danced with a silurid for 3 turns getting killed only at the end of the 4th turn.

zoraida got 3 points from the strategy, 1 from leave your mark and 2 from catch and release. The combo of triple obey (usually rider, hinamatsu and my poor wanyudo) and the rider bringing hina to me on the first turn is really annoying. But I managed to use "we own you" on the rider, killing both hina and the wicked doll with a single attack, so I got my revenge.

My worst mistake was ignoring the silurids, that thanks to leap managed to plant their explosives on the 2 corners of the central line on my side, ensuring 2 points for zoraida.

Youko crew is confirmed to be annoying, expecially when my opponents don't read my cards and declare charges on the geisha. (since these are friendly games I usually just point the error and let them redo the action)

 

 

[Adran]

1 hour ago, Ozzac said:

Yes, but expecially for the first games you are forced to play with your entire crew, that is not optimized for all kind of plays.

And regardin the forced hire, while true it's not always a possibility. If your first games have been bad, and you have 2/3 scripts total it's simply not possible to hire somebody with most crews, and with the keyword mechanic it can be worse than it was in 2ed.

 

Firstly, you will want to make sure what you play is right for you and your players. So whilst I might offer suggestions they are based on my experience and what worked for my group. I haven't tried playing it in 3rd edition, and the group I played it with in second edition were all very experienced players, so were pretty good at making the best out of what ever they had. So feel free to change the rules to what work for you. These are suggestions that eitehr worked for me, of I think would work under the rules you are trying to impliment.

My first experience of the campaign was when I was in the process of trying to play every model I owned in the course of a year, and so I hired a very bizarre mix of models to try and use as many of the models I owned that I hadn't played yet that year, including mercenaries, so my personally added hiring requirements were much more restrictive than M3 keyword hiring. ( I selected Myranda as a leader and hired Ronin, which meant I was easily giving up points for assassinate when ever it cropped up, which was about 50% of the games at the time, and I couldn't use the ronin bonus action to self sacrifice without the risk that they would get injured doing so). 

Your initial crew almost certainly isn't going to be optimized. You probably should try and make it a generalized crew that can do at least 10 of the schemes, just to make sure that you aren't in a situation that you can't score. It is certainly possible to build a starting roster that can't do any schemes, but that is player choice, and its quite hard to stop players making a bad choice of they want to.

According to the rules, the first hire you make each week after the first comes with a 5 script discount, so every crew should be able to hire someone even if they have failed to earn any script in the games (although collection size may prevent this, that was something I didn't have to worry about, but its got to be a pretty strange collection /set of games to not be able to buy anything after the first week, and I would suggest most players ought to consider at least the first weeks buy when they are making their starting roster so they don't just hire all the cheap minions that they own straight away ).

I can't remember the exact rules for working out a game size, but I'm fairly sure that it was intended that no side was forced to hire everything they owned. (although there is no natural cache in M3, there is also a much lower number of upgrades to hire so it probably should balance out). 

If you do struggle with schemes, an alternative way to work it out is give everyone the list of 13 schemes, and they can choose any 2 from that list but can't repeat a scheme until they have done 8-10 of the list ( If you make the number too low you can find some players may try and build a very efficient list at doing set schemes, since they can garentee they will show up. Might not be a problem with all play groups, but my group had players  that would have built a list that could easily do a selected 6 schemes and just used those 6 over and over if they were allowed to). 

 

P

[Ozzac]

I think I missed the 5 points discounts, this changes a lot.

Regarding the game size is lower amount of points between the 2 players +5

[Ozzac]

Herding cats is easier than getting informations on the matches.

Last match of the second week. Marcus vs Colette 4-1

The only thing I know about the points is that Colette did 1 point for sabotage.

Regarding the game itself Marcus scared Colette thanks to crockett in an elevated position and the jackalope with a rifle (bought the previous match). The Colette player had play on the defensive the entire time, since at a distance there were 2 rifles, getting closer there was the sabretooth.

[Ozzac]

Hoffman vs Zoraida. 

2-4

Wedge

Strategy: guard the stash.

Schemes: public demonstration, assasinate, hidden martyrs, breakthrough, spread them out

A bloodbath, thanks to the hooded rider that dealt at least 5 damages each round, before being stopped by Joss on the last turn, who killed him and zoraida.

hoffman did 1 point for the strategy and one point for assassinate. Zoraida managed 3 points from the strategy and 1 for hidden martyrs.

Great surprise from the hoffman player who found out about the 5 free soulstones. Every other player in the campaign knew it, and since his first game was against me I'm sure I told him.

[Ozzac]

I'm sorry for disappearing, had some problem.

We are almost at the end of this experiment, and I got many positive comments, so I think I'll try to make a long campaign, and see how it goes, thanks everybody for the comments and ideas.