Before we get to Melee Weapons proper, I should probably spare a few words on the expansions' only new Weapon keyword: Remote. Originally I had planned for things like the funnels from gundam or other attack drone-esque weapons to be represented by Support Upgrades, but players reported back that it wasn't scratching their Remote Weapons itch. The game needed to have Remote Weapons that used your Might stat and could be shot down to disable them. So I did just that. There's not much else of a story to them, really, I gave them fairly low defensive stats to compensate for the fact that disabling them requires one enemy to spend a turn not actually shooting you. Like I said back when I wrote about "Go, Funnels!", these don't have a passive Upgrade for balance reasons... But in hindsight I suppose I could've given them an Advantage to attacks and some other bonus, it didn't have to be an extra attack each turn.
So, Melee Weapons! I said a long while ago that what the Melee Weapons in BCG lacked wasn't attack power but versatility and utility value. My goal with BCZ's Melee armory was to add a few options for raw damage while trying to make viable options for attacking at range, crowd control or niche options for specialized builds.
Assassin Blade
Assassin Blade is one of the straightforward damage options, though it is best suited to groups with multiple meleeists rather than a single dedicated duelist. It's also quite effective in the hands of Grunt swarms focus firing a single PC. It draws inspiration from the flanking and sneak attack mechanics found in D&D and other RPGs that encourage having multiple PCs ganging up on the same target.
Countersword
This is a Technique for tanks. With a Pulling Field build, it is somewhat tricky to use but is very rewarding when you do pull it off. It can lead to wasted turns the rest of the time, however, and that's what makes this a very conditional and meta-dependent Weapon... Unless you take I Am Your Opponent, in which case you can force an Enemy to trigger your Countersword, swinging with a fairly strong attack that can potentially Maim or even destroy the offending Enemy before they get to finish their own attack. It's not a straightforward Weapon, but I think it fulfills its purpose.
Great Crusher
This is our first new area of effect Melee Weapon, it either murders tightly packed Grunt squads or debuffs them to the point where they pose much less of a threat. The Range isn't particularly amazing, though. Great Crusher draws an obvious inspiration from the Goldion Crusher of GaoGaiGar, though less on the whole "reducing things to light with a planet-sized weapon" part and more on the way it usually appears in videogames.
Hook Launcher
Positioning-based strategies, particularly those using Guardian of Steel, can be very hard to defeat. That's why BCZ includes more forced movement to disrupt those strategies and add an element of counterplay. It is not a hard counter, because it is a One Shot, so you have to focus fire the hooked target or you'll barely get any value out of it. The forced Dueling can buy you some time to help with this, assuming the target doesn't have Slippery Chassis.
Kamaitachi
Another area of effect Melee Weapon. This one needs a sizable Systems investment to reliably hit more than one Enemy, but it doesn't suffer from in-built drawbacks like Slow or One Shot. You could even use it without any Systems as a counter against enemies with an Active Defense like ECS. One of the best of this bunch.
Magnet Rod
Remember when I mentioned Weapons for niche builds? This one is for PCs with low Energy. You can get by at low PLs without an Energy of 1 or 2, making it a solid pick. And at high PLs, nearly everybody has 5+ Energy so this will always trigger if you choose to stay at 3-4 Energy. It's not amazing, because Energy is kind of a really important stat, but if it's a low priority for you then this is worth taking.
Pressure Point Attack
It's a Resonance Cannon but even more flavorful. It trades Range and repeatability for Crippling and, um, non-Unreliability. It's a solid pick for Duelist builds that need a finisher but don't want to use Techniques.
Rocket Sword
A secondary Weapon for the Boosted Lance builds that are, otherwise, really bad at dealing with mobs and have little reason to do anything but spam Boosted Lance every single bloody Turn (and maybe use Lightspeed Assault once). It's basically Bombardment for Melee PCs, otherwise. Good stuff.
Shocking Swordwhip
This used to be a ranged tanking Weapon, penalizing attacks that didn't target you. After the change, it simply has Crippling (which is a much more effective and straightforward debuff) but is Unreliable so you need to stack Advantages or get lucky to make it hit. It is handy for the right build, if not spectacular.
Stumbling Fists Style
Very flavorful. The combination of keywords makes perfect sense given the name and what the Weapon does. It's very good for Support PCs with 0 in Might, assuming they don't have Unarmed. If you want to make a battlemage build with Tacticool Approach, this is a great primary Weapon to use while building up to Electro-Sapper Pods.
And that's it. I have very little negative to say about most of these, which shows how much of a better handle I've got on the power level of Melee Weapons as a whole. If I absolutely had to tear them down, I'd say that Shocking Swordwhip, Great Crusher and Hook Launcher could take more trouble setting up than they're worth, and that you need to be PL2 or 3 at least for them to be viable, but that's it really.
Next: New Shooting Weapons.
Gimmick Out.
May 27, 2018
May 20, 2018
BCZ Retrospective XIX: Features
We're almost to the end of the PC section, with the last set of Upgrades in this update. Most of the Features in BCZ were the result of months of me playing BCG, watching giant robot anime or playing videogames and going "You know, that's something that BCG doesn't have. I wonder if I can adapt it..."Sadly, my notes are lost to time, but I believe one or two of them were actually commissioned by Kickstarter backers.
Oldtype
Oldtype
Oldtype was designed as a sort of balance patch for Bosses and Rivals that were having trouble staying alive against PCs optimized for offense. It was so effective that I ended up taking the defensive ability and making it a General Upgrade. That's right, first came Oldtype then Internal Fortification, not the other way around! BCZ goes at length about the utility value of Oldtype and how it is a very powerful buff 90% of the time with a negligible drawback, so I don't have much else to say about it mechanically. I'll just note that I really like how it basically turns your Bosses and Rivals into the tabletop equivalent of videogame damage sponges with tons more HP than the PCs who have only a tiny fraction of their skillset. Easily one of my favorite additions to the rules in this entire book.
Omnienvironmental
This is a commission, and it was originally going to be a Mobility Upgrade, but giving it an activation cost made it basically "Like most Mobility Upgrades except better" so it ended up becoming a Feature. I'm not 100% happy with it, because if you use it for its intended purpose it is a very harsh penalty to Energy just so you can ignore a handful of Terrain penalties that may or may not ever happen in your game (when was the last time you fought underwater? RIP Getter-3.) but if you attach it to one of your Transformations then it is a very efficient way to give most Terrain in the game a middle finger while you don't have to suffer the penalties the rest of the time. Still, it is worth taking, and that's a victory.
Remora Frame
Oh boy, this one is kind of busted. Docking makes you very hard to kill, and you can optimize towards aggression then latch on to the party tank. Throw Dispersion Aura on top and it becomes kind of gross. Oh, and remember how I said Miniature Model was messed up by the rules-as-written because of the order of operations from the core book? That also applies to Remora Frame. Overall Rating: Yuck.
Sibling Model
Sibling Model is what happens when I sit down and try to boil down the gimmick of units that specialize in team attacks to a simple mechanic. Do you want a party of coordinated units with great teamwork? Everyone gets Sibling Model and when it happens it's a guaranteed 30+ Damage attack once per Operation. Do you want two or three units with a specific team attack that only they can pull off? Give them Sibling Model. Finding a buff to it that wasn't overwhelmingly powerful was the toughest part, and I think it was tweaked a handful of times until I went with the smallest possible numerical increase. It's okay, but not all that exciting. I wonder if I should've instead gone with something flashier, like "It turns your Synchro Attack into a Technique" or something along those lines.
Unstable Reactor
I genuinely can't remember if Unstable Reactor was a commission or my own idea, and that sucks, because I really want to take credit for it but I can't do so with a honest conscience. Unstable Reactor is probably the most flavorful Feature in the expansion, if not the whole game, and it is extremely powerful to boot. Originally all it did was turn your mech into a bomb. That is to say, it didn't give an Energy bonus, it simply made you explode when defeated. The Energy bonus was added later for flavor reasons. Yes, dear readers, I actually made this extremely powerful Feature even stronger just for flavor! Originally, the explosion was supposed to be both the good and the bad thing about the Feature. The idea is that, to most optimizers, the explosion isn't even a negative, because they either don't care about what happens after they've already lost or plan to never actually let that happen. No, the real negative isn't for them, but for their teammates and the GM that now has to deal with a potential teamwipe where everyone dies horribly. All Features are subject to GM approval, but Unstable Reactor gets its own sidebar explaining when and when not to allow it. Even then, I still sometimes get questions about how to deal with PCs that picked it from GMs that weren't ready to deal with the walking nuclear bomb PC. C'est la vie. My official stance is that Unstable Reactor is so much fun and causes so much drama when it goes off that it is worth all of the unintentional headaches it can invite.
And that's all for Upgrades... At least for PCs. We still have a bunch of NPC Upgrades to do after we do PC Weapons. This thing isn't ending yet!
Next: Melee Weapons.
Gimmick Out.
May 13, 2018
BCZ Retrospective XVIII: Design Flaws
Flaws, Drawbacks, Negative Traits, whatever you want to call them, point-buy systems usually include negative abilities to go with the positive ones, which give extra XP instead of having a XP cost. There are two reasons that I didn't do them until BCZ:
1) Most of the time, the builds that take these builds are the ones that don't care about the penalty. This is the equivalent of putting all your points in Might and dumping Systems to 0, except you're doing it multiple times per PC instead of just once. While I think that BCG is a game that encourages a degree of system mastery, I didn't want to give people 60+ points of free stuff by handing out half a dozen easily ignorable drawbacks.
2) The other type of character that takes negative traits are the ones who want to use them for roleplaying, usually for plot or social drawbacks like being hunted down by ninjas or having to take care of a little brother. I do not like this approach, because getting your own subplot about having to deal with assassins or your baby brother isn't a drawback, it is a reward. Every character is supposed to have personal subplots, one or two of them shouldn't be getting free XP for them. For these characters we already have Genre Themes. This way, everybody gets GP from actually roleplaying those so-called flaws, instead of free XP that is only as much of a problem as the GM is willing to make it.
For those reasons, I decided not to have any negative abilities until BCZ, where I could add a sidebar explaining when and where to allow them. By hiding Design Flaws behind these two layers (putting it in an expansion + the aforementioned sidebar), instead of putting them in the core book, it minimizes the odds of them ruining games having one or two characters that are leaps and bounds more powerful than all the others.
Even then, there are only six of them. Turns out that writing Design Flaws that aren't 100% free points is pretty hard! Let' see how well they turned out:
Unarmed
...Okay, this isn't the best start. Unarmed is almost free points for one kind of PC: Full Support builds that don't care about Weapons and Might Tests. For everyone else, it is a serious building challenge. The only problem that the Full Support builds suffer is they can't contribute to Synchro Attacks, which is probably worth 5 MP, not 10, but it's better than nothing. Still, it is only fair that Full Support builds get one Design Flaw they can work with when Meleeists get their own.
Berserker
I quite like Berserker, as it presents difficult tactical circumstances on you, which you can play around by carefully choosing your Weapons and mobility options. This is easier for a GM to exploit by deliberately placing annoying damage sponges in front of the Berserker, which I consider a good thing as otherwise it is basically free 10 MP when you're a Duelist build. Arguably, this could be worth +100 MP because it lets the GM place the closest enemy unit behind fifty instances of Extreme Terrain, but then the Berserker's problem isn't the Flaw, but the dickishly murderous GM.
Miniature Model
There are two issues with Miniature Model. The first ist that, like with Berserker, if you carefully balance your mobility and range options, this is a free +20 MP. I think 10 MP is a small enough amount that I can afford to give it to people willing to jump through some hoops. But 20? That's a little too much. In hindsight, this shouldn't round up the Weapon Ranges. The second issue is that Page 8 of BCG says that, when you have to do multiple operations on the same statistic, you should always first halve then add or substract further modifiers. This means that Miniature Model doesn't affect the extra movement from Overbooster or the extra range from Long Range. Note to self: In the future, always halve at the end instead of at the beginning.
Limited Battery Time
This is a common mecha genre convention, which is good for it because it went through like 5-6 different versions and I would have scrapped it if the trope wasn't so ubiquitous. Some of the versions include: Rolling Systems or taking Damage equal to Tension, spending Energy equal to Tension or taking that much Damage and deactivating after a fixed Tension number. They were all very wordy, super unfun to play with, and some of them could be easily built around to give free 20 MP. This version is much harder to exploit, as Tension is a very significant bonus after Turns 1-2 and losing a fixed Level of Threshold each Turn is simply brutal. It makes you want to try really hard to use those 20 MP to end battles ASAP, but it is hard to blitz enemies without using Tension buffs, so it provides a decent buildaround challenge.
Precious Snowflake
According to some, this is 30 Free MP, because you don't need Antimaims to play the game. Others would say that this is a trap because there's no way 30 MP can compensate for the inherent randomness in losing all your important stuff by Turn 2. Perhaps the truth lies... Somewhere in the middle. *Jumps down a chasm*
Walking Coffin
Would you believe me if I said this used to grant 60 MP? The reasoning was that, even if you you could spend all of it on Defense/Threshold, you would only be a very strong unit at low PLs but you'd still be very vulnerable at high PLs. To be fair, it didn't have the Active Defenses clause at the time, so not even Absolute Barrier could save you. At some point one of my playtesters made me see reason and this was a terrible enabler for glass cannons with a billion ways to kill everything and everyone in Turn 1. The final version of Walking Coffin is a lot better at representing the type of unit that it is named after (ATs from Votoms), because you have to bust your butt to avoid taking Damage basically ever.
I started writing this thinking I'd be a lot more down on these, but I actually rather like them. There's only one real dud (Miniature Model) and arguably Unarmed could be a little bit harsher, but I think all the others are in a pretty good place where you have to get creative to play around the drawbacks and even if you do success is not guaranteed.
Next: New Features
Gimmick Out.
1) Most of the time, the builds that take these builds are the ones that don't care about the penalty. This is the equivalent of putting all your points in Might and dumping Systems to 0, except you're doing it multiple times per PC instead of just once. While I think that BCG is a game that encourages a degree of system mastery, I didn't want to give people 60+ points of free stuff by handing out half a dozen easily ignorable drawbacks.
2) The other type of character that takes negative traits are the ones who want to use them for roleplaying, usually for plot or social drawbacks like being hunted down by ninjas or having to take care of a little brother. I do not like this approach, because getting your own subplot about having to deal with assassins or your baby brother isn't a drawback, it is a reward. Every character is supposed to have personal subplots, one or two of them shouldn't be getting free XP for them. For these characters we already have Genre Themes. This way, everybody gets GP from actually roleplaying those so-called flaws, instead of free XP that is only as much of a problem as the GM is willing to make it.
For those reasons, I decided not to have any negative abilities until BCZ, where I could add a sidebar explaining when and where to allow them. By hiding Design Flaws behind these two layers (putting it in an expansion + the aforementioned sidebar), instead of putting them in the core book, it minimizes the odds of them ruining games having one or two characters that are leaps and bounds more powerful than all the others.
Even then, there are only six of them. Turns out that writing Design Flaws that aren't 100% free points is pretty hard! Let' see how well they turned out:
Unarmed
...Okay, this isn't the best start. Unarmed is almost free points for one kind of PC: Full Support builds that don't care about Weapons and Might Tests. For everyone else, it is a serious building challenge. The only problem that the Full Support builds suffer is they can't contribute to Synchro Attacks, which is probably worth 5 MP, not 10, but it's better than nothing. Still, it is only fair that Full Support builds get one Design Flaw they can work with when Meleeists get their own.
Berserker
I quite like Berserker, as it presents difficult tactical circumstances on you, which you can play around by carefully choosing your Weapons and mobility options. This is easier for a GM to exploit by deliberately placing annoying damage sponges in front of the Berserker, which I consider a good thing as otherwise it is basically free 10 MP when you're a Duelist build. Arguably, this could be worth +100 MP because it lets the GM place the closest enemy unit behind fifty instances of Extreme Terrain, but then the Berserker's problem isn't the Flaw, but the dickishly murderous GM.
Miniature Model
There are two issues with Miniature Model. The first ist that, like with Berserker, if you carefully balance your mobility and range options, this is a free +20 MP. I think 10 MP is a small enough amount that I can afford to give it to people willing to jump through some hoops. But 20? That's a little too much. In hindsight, this shouldn't round up the Weapon Ranges. The second issue is that Page 8 of BCG says that, when you have to do multiple operations on the same statistic, you should always first halve then add or substract further modifiers. This means that Miniature Model doesn't affect the extra movement from Overbooster or the extra range from Long Range. Note to self: In the future, always halve at the end instead of at the beginning.
Limited Battery Time
This is a common mecha genre convention, which is good for it because it went through like 5-6 different versions and I would have scrapped it if the trope wasn't so ubiquitous. Some of the versions include: Rolling Systems or taking Damage equal to Tension, spending Energy equal to Tension or taking that much Damage and deactivating after a fixed Tension number. They were all very wordy, super unfun to play with, and some of them could be easily built around to give free 20 MP. This version is much harder to exploit, as Tension is a very significant bonus after Turns 1-2 and losing a fixed Level of Threshold each Turn is simply brutal. It makes you want to try really hard to use those 20 MP to end battles ASAP, but it is hard to blitz enemies without using Tension buffs, so it provides a decent buildaround challenge.
Precious Snowflake
According to some, this is 30 Free MP, because you don't need Antimaims to play the game. Others would say that this is a trap because there's no way 30 MP can compensate for the inherent randomness in losing all your important stuff by Turn 2. Perhaps the truth lies... Somewhere in the middle. *Jumps down a chasm*
Walking Coffin
Would you believe me if I said this used to grant 60 MP? The reasoning was that, even if you you could spend all of it on Defense/Threshold, you would only be a very strong unit at low PLs but you'd still be very vulnerable at high PLs. To be fair, it didn't have the Active Defenses clause at the time, so not even Absolute Barrier could save you. At some point one of my playtesters made me see reason and this was a terrible enabler for glass cannons with a billion ways to kill everything and everyone in Turn 1. The final version of Walking Coffin is a lot better at representing the type of unit that it is named after (ATs from Votoms), because you have to bust your butt to avoid taking Damage basically ever.
I started writing this thinking I'd be a lot more down on these, but I actually rather like them. There's only one real dud (Miniature Model) and arguably Unarmed could be a little bit harsher, but I think all the others are in a pretty good place where you have to get creative to play around the drawbacks and even if you do success is not guaranteed.
Next: New Features
Gimmick Out.
May 6, 2018
BCZ Retrospective XVII: New Combination Upgrades
BCZ didn't introduce any new Extra Areas or Alternate Forms, so we're skipping straight to Combinations. I I tried to make new Extra Areas and new Transformation Upgrades, by the way, but they were kind of... Broken. That's a topic for another day, though.
So,Combiner Mecha. One of the many thorns in my side when trying to write a game that is both fun and also simple. I mentioned last time that the BCG version of the Combiner rules is very powerful and very flavorful, it was only missing mid-battle Combinations as a genre convention. This is where we pick up today.
Invincible Super Combination
Very, very late into the BCG development process (late enough that I knew we were going to be late in delivering the Kickstarter rewards), Super Combination was still the subject of much discussion. We kept going back and forth on whether it was worth it to sacrifice multiple HP pools and multiple attacks per round to make one super unit. The argument boiled down to two things: Whether your super robot army could replenish their resources by combining and the final Attributes of the Combined Unit.
This first issue was the trickiest one. Replenishing your Threshold, Oneshots, etc. is extremely powerful. If I balanced Super Combiners around, then I was stealth nerfing anyone who deployed precombined. I figured that many groups would rather simply do that, jumping straight to the payoff of their combined super robot than have to do the whole song and dance of battle in their weaker mechs while risking that one of them might explode. I didn't want to force that playstyle on them.
The second issue was simply a matter of numbers. Every time something about Super Combination changed, it was either too cheap at high Levels for the massive Attribute boost it granted or too expensive for the tiny Attribute bonus it granted at low Levels. This was just a matter of numbers though, so while it was certainly difficult, it wasn't a playstyle problem. Eventually one playtester suggested adding a "Tax" to Super Combination that scaled according to the Level of the PCs to fix this problem, and I decided to make said "Tax" an Upgrade in itself... For the expansion.
There was a nonzero chance that baking this Tax into the core Super Combination rules would have unintended consequences and could break something. With only a few days until the final pdf files had to be sent to the printer to check for printing errors, I made the call to leave Combiners relatively underpowered (Yes, they were considered underpowered back then) and made a mental note to properly playtest Super Combiners with these additions in the expansion.
The story does not end here yet, however. ISC went through a few different versions, the stupidest being the one in which every Subpilot choose one of Might, Guard, Systems or Speed then gave that Attribute from their mech to the lead, resulting in a very flavorful insanely overpowered mess. The idea was that you could make the legs grant a Speed boost, the Torso a Guard boost, etc. But even when limiting this to 1 Area/Attribute per Subpilot and 4 Subpilots total, it still gave us Mechs with 20+ in every Attribute. We settled on a flat +1 to those four stats per Subpilot not long after the first few builds and never looked back.
And that is the story of ISC.
Universal Component
Universal Component (UC) had similar issues to ISC. We knew it was going to give Upgrades and Weapons, but we had to figure out if it healed both partners and if it granted any Attribute bonuses. The answer, by the way, was yes - sorta. The UC restores anything they've spent, but the lead doesn't. This encourages the UC to take risks and do combat on their own if they want to maximize the value they can get from their mech, but since they can combine with any PC (and if they go down the squad only lost 1 PC, not the whole Combiner) the risk of things going catastrophically wrong is much lower. You can still make a UC build that is pure support and deploys precombined, of course. It is probably weaker, but much safer as well as more generally useful.
That's it for both Combinations in BCZ. I'm okay with how they turned out, overall. There are some issues with Combiners where obviously the lead has the most fun out of everyone, but I don't think you can really fix that without giving each Subpilot loads of options and probably an element of chance, which would overly complicate a series of Upgrades that are already the most complex in the game. Ultimately, playing a Subpilot is for people who actually want to be a Subpilot, much like playing Healers is for people who enjoy playing them, not a role that people should be forced into.
As an anecdotical observation, I think that by now I've seen more NPC Combiners as Superbosses instead of actual parties with Combiner PCs. I'd be interested in hearing any experiences you may have with them!
Next: Design Flaws. Hooo boy.
Gimmick Out.
So,Combiner Mecha. One of the many thorns in my side when trying to write a game that is both fun and also simple. I mentioned last time that the BCG version of the Combiner rules is very powerful and very flavorful, it was only missing mid-battle Combinations as a genre convention. This is where we pick up today.
Invincible Super Combination
Very, very late into the BCG development process (late enough that I knew we were going to be late in delivering the Kickstarter rewards), Super Combination was still the subject of much discussion. We kept going back and forth on whether it was worth it to sacrifice multiple HP pools and multiple attacks per round to make one super unit. The argument boiled down to two things: Whether your super robot army could replenish their resources by combining and the final Attributes of the Combined Unit.
This first issue was the trickiest one. Replenishing your Threshold, Oneshots, etc. is extremely powerful. If I balanced Super Combiners around, then I was stealth nerfing anyone who deployed precombined. I figured that many groups would rather simply do that, jumping straight to the payoff of their combined super robot than have to do the whole song and dance of battle in their weaker mechs while risking that one of them might explode. I didn't want to force that playstyle on them.
The second issue was simply a matter of numbers. Every time something about Super Combination changed, it was either too cheap at high Levels for the massive Attribute boost it granted or too expensive for the tiny Attribute bonus it granted at low Levels. This was just a matter of numbers though, so while it was certainly difficult, it wasn't a playstyle problem. Eventually one playtester suggested adding a "Tax" to Super Combination that scaled according to the Level of the PCs to fix this problem, and I decided to make said "Tax" an Upgrade in itself... For the expansion.
There was a nonzero chance that baking this Tax into the core Super Combination rules would have unintended consequences and could break something. With only a few days until the final pdf files had to be sent to the printer to check for printing errors, I made the call to leave Combiners relatively underpowered (Yes, they were considered underpowered back then) and made a mental note to properly playtest Super Combiners with these additions in the expansion.
The story does not end here yet, however. ISC went through a few different versions, the stupidest being the one in which every Subpilot choose one of Might, Guard, Systems or Speed then gave that Attribute from their mech to the lead, resulting in a very flavorful insanely overpowered mess. The idea was that you could make the legs grant a Speed boost, the Torso a Guard boost, etc. But even when limiting this to 1 Area/Attribute per Subpilot and 4 Subpilots total, it still gave us Mechs with 20+ in every Attribute. We settled on a flat +1 to those four stats per Subpilot not long after the first few builds and never looked back.
And that is the story of ISC.
Universal Component
Universal Component (UC) had similar issues to ISC. We knew it was going to give Upgrades and Weapons, but we had to figure out if it healed both partners and if it granted any Attribute bonuses. The answer, by the way, was yes - sorta. The UC restores anything they've spent, but the lead doesn't. This encourages the UC to take risks and do combat on their own if they want to maximize the value they can get from their mech, but since they can combine with any PC (and if they go down the squad only lost 1 PC, not the whole Combiner) the risk of things going catastrophically wrong is much lower. You can still make a UC build that is pure support and deploys precombined, of course. It is probably weaker, but much safer as well as more generally useful.
That's it for both Combinations in BCZ. I'm okay with how they turned out, overall. There are some issues with Combiners where obviously the lead has the most fun out of everyone, but I don't think you can really fix that without giving each Subpilot loads of options and probably an element of chance, which would overly complicate a series of Upgrades that are already the most complex in the game. Ultimately, playing a Subpilot is for people who actually want to be a Subpilot, much like playing Healers is for people who enjoy playing them, not a role that people should be forced into.
As an anecdotical observation, I think that by now I've seen more NPC Combiners as Superbosses instead of actual parties with Combiner PCs. I'd be interested in hearing any experiences you may have with them!
Next: Design Flaws. Hooo boy.
Gimmick Out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)