Please tell us your thoughts and tell us what it was like playing GOTHIC-PUNK.
I sat down and played a match with a friend tonight, playing as factions from an ongoing Vampire: The Masquerade game we're participating in. The first list, the Vampires, is my squad, composed of characters inspired by my character's Anarch Gang. The second is my opponent's, playing as the Hunter antagonists from the chronicle. I made my units from scratch, my opponent used examples from the book. (Although, Sionnach wound up being identical to the listed 'Asshole Elder' stat line. Also pictured above is the board state when the game finished. For transparency's sake, we played the game with a gridless one-cell-to-one-inch 25x25 board on Roll20, which caused a little bit of weirdness around height but it didn't come up too much. The TL;DR is that I had a great time, but my opponent found it pretty 'swingy', in her words.
The game started out with a few judgment calls -- we only placed two Nodes in addition to the central one because we weren't sure how many we ought to be placing. In retrospect, it would have been a better game if we'd put a couple more down -- would have made the battlefield a bit more dynamic. Our terrain situation also wasn't great, but that's not the fault of the game at all. We began, and out the gate the Hunters seemed to have a bit more of the advantage. Their Boss charged out to the center and the rest advanced cautiously, one staying back to sieze control of the upper-right Node. The vampires, meanwhile, were a bit cautious, shifting slowly into position to pounce. Persephone hung back at one of the points, taking potshots at the hunters from cover, while Alex and the bosses moved in. Vampire Troy had trouble getting much done; he was pretty damn unruly, as a few hunters on the other side wound up consistently being through the whole game. Hunter Troy wound up being a sort of 'sniper' for the opposing side, doing much the same as Persephone.
The game wound up proceeding at kind of a trudge. Once Sionnach and Tiffany got up into melee range near the clustered Hunters, the game started to turn around. I stacked them up toward attack and defense. Todd's Exorcist ability wound up not having much of an effect, while Sionnach's Horrifying was a monster for the opponent's turn economy. In the end, the vampires locked down two points for three rounds pretty handily because the hunters couldn't get a wound in edgewise against my forward troops, and never had the actions to advance on the top point.
The biggest criticism I'd have of the game at this point is that the action economy being at the mercy of the dice makes the game feel... Difficult to plan for and around. It leads to rounds where not much happens and rounds where one side steamrolls the other in terms of action while the other just sort of sits there impotently and that doesn't feel great. In addition, no units wound up getting eliminated at all in this game, which felt strange. All in all, a very promising experience with plenty of holes to be patched, but that's to be expected this early in development. I'm ultimately glad I checked it out and am very excited to see how it develops.
Candyflowers, I'm very happy with your feedback! It's great to hear your impression of the game in practice!
Regarding the number of Nodes, it is a part that really needs to be polished. For two players, the proposal is for there to be 3, as you did. The idea is that few Nodes would encourage players to fight them, while having many of them would spread out the characters and reduce conflict.
Regarding the action economy, it really is something with a certain chaos. It is curious that there were no casualties. No one was injured?
There are some ways to have more control over activation. The Leader's special edge can help nearby characters. Another way is to spend Karma for rerolls. By the way, did you even use Karma in this game?
Candyflowers, thanks for your feedback! I will take into account everything you mentioned for future updates.
There were some wounds, kind of surprisingly few, but then those wounded characters never got Unruly. We used a little bit of Karma. I think my opponent held onto hers a little more stringently, which might have led to some of the frustration on her part. Keeping her Leader in close definitely helped with that but it didn't lead to a whole lot of wounds on her end. Sionnach and Tiffany in particular (Boss and Underboss) were shot at for basically the whole game and never failed a Defense roll.
How it started (TAAG started at the bottom, TAgen at the top):
How it ended:
The TAAG started the starting turns getting nodes, then the TAgen placed the Crossbow model on top of the top cabin so the TAAG retreated from the central node. The TAAG started moving to the left house to get highground while the TAgen took over the central node. After very bad to-hit rolls from both sides, the TAAG surrendered on the last turn cos the TAgen activated some units and had more victory points (so it was imposible to get more VC than them, and also imposible to kill all the units cos it was the last turn).