thread: 2006-05-18 : Mechaton: done playtesting
On 2006-05-23, Vincent wrote:
Sydney, I expect J has a smarter analysis than I do, but here's mine.
1) Exactly what you said.
1a) Furthermore, even when "wiping out" isn't really what's going on, there's a tradeoff in the dice between attacking and defending. Facing a concentrated attack, you're more likely to use your best dice to protect yourself and to fall back to a better position than to fight back, when possible.
2) I think that the ability to rotate your units up to the front and back to the rear - making your least damaged mechs the biggest threats - is significant. Even if I want to concentrate fire on just one of your mechs, you can pretty actively, if not 100%, distribute it across your whole squad.
3) With J's little swarm in particular, each mech was rolling a yellow die. They were very concretely helping each other out, effectively rolling at I'd estimate 133%.
They were also hand-to-hand only. That means that J was counting on them moving fast; it also means that they were prone to spreading out into a line instead of staying clumped together.
J?
Oh, and I still owe you an answer re: Find Fix Flank, Ralph.
This makes SF go "Transferability of dice"
Ah, I'd forgotten that the white dice (right?) can be used either for attack or defense, so an outnumbered mech is likely to use them defensively...which is a lovely way of simulating a defensive posture (as opposed to, "well, my attack and defense stats are fixed, I might as well fire everything I've got.")
