Be Excellent To Each Other

Don't be soft. The SH corridor system is infinitely variable, and is basically a 2D version of tabletop terrain - I've seen people make up quite excellent 3D versions of it, too.

HQ and SC were just one board each. And had really stupidly simple rules.

Still (very nearly) infinitely variable, though. Hero Quest rules were on par with Space Hulk, IMO (more complicated, in fact, as there were more monsters, treasure, traps, etc.).

It's a printed floorplan on one board - no variation at all in "terrain".

A few years ago I got essentially tricked into playing tabletop D&D with one of my uber-nerd friends and can honestly say it was the most tedious night of my life. And yet the swine has the gall to call me a geek for loving my shooty shooty video games!

What about AHQ? (I'd say roleplaying over wargaming for HQ anyway, regardless)

Not so - you could use rock falls and door positions to modify the map, and make it all twisty turny. And a quick peek online shows that the HeroQuest rules are far more complicated than Space Hulk rules.

Look - the main difference between SH on the one hand and SC/HQ on the other is that HQ/SC were wank, okay? Shush.

Advanced HeroQuest had room and corridor tiles that could be arranged in yer average infinitely-variable fashion.

So did Advanced Space Crusade actually, but that's largely academic because it took so long to play a game of Advanced Space Crusade that by the time you'd finished the sun had burned out making it too dark to see who'd won.

Nah, HQ was better than SH. Even the acronym is better. I wasn't that familiar with SC (but it's still the more complicated game).

Also: I can't believe we're arguing about it

LALALALALALALALLALALALALALALA


EDIT - heh, indeed.

So what is your stance on Blood bowl then (the bestest of all GW's games for minis)? Answer me that!

I never really liked Blood Bowl, but then I only played it once, against a cock that I'm sure changed the rules.

I lurve the Chaos chapters. Big pointy fuck daemons rot and bile for the FUCKING win. My local book emporium is selling the Warhammer novels for 2spond fiddy each, bostin.

I had a great Blood Bowl ogre, that was possibly the finest piece that I painted. Couldn't stand the game though.

Tabletop rather than board game, mind.

You're not wrong. We binned the official rules after the 3rd (4th?) revision and stick to the 'Net Epic' rules which are very much in the spirit of the original.

They went far too kiddy friendly for my tastes.

Ooh! Since I last looked at the GW site (6 years ago!) they now do include Slaaaaaanesh and Carrot.

Which version of Blood Bowl are we talking about? The Warhammer-with-a-ball first edition, the second edition with the polystyrene pitch that always ended up in just one massive ruck in the middle, or the much-closer-to-American-Football third edition?

NERDS.

I had a mate who played, though. The whole thing baffled me. I think he actually used to play against himself and award himself experience points, or something. I did play Hero Quest the board game, but it's not quite the same.

Didn't it have some kind of rival called Necromunda or something? Who knows, you nerdy, nerd nerds.

We (as in, my wife and I) have still got both of the Realm Of Chaos sourcebooks. They're excellently grundy, especially the Nurgle-Carrot one.

I'm sure that if I went back to my mothers, I could find an epic collection of Squats and Skaven.

Mostly looked appaling due to being painted by 6-8 year olds.

I've got the Khorne - Slaaaaaaaaaaaaanesh one. Got it a carboot for an quid about 20 years ago

All of them...It's a much better game now with the Living Rulebook and can be played online with the java version of the game.

Also - PC / XBox / PS3 version of Blood Bowl out soonish from the Chaos League chaps.

Not sure how excited to be about it - Chaos League left me seriously ambivilent.

Was it good-humoured or said with malice? Everyone has something which A N Other could consider 'nerdy'. Even Max Mosley. Part of being an adult is to accept that fact, laugh about it, and shrug it off. I used to be a pompous arse about many things* - these days I'm happy to accept that not everyone likes what I do, and vice-versa.

I like to play board games, but never got into wargaming. Lack the patient to paint the models, for starters.

* Ok, I probably still am. But in a better, more excellent kind of way

Warhammer online is coming out soon, and I was genuinely disappointed to find out that they had left out the Skaven.

Also, there's a Blood Bowl flash game and stuff which has been mentioned on the internet spaceships forum, so go looky, or I might post a link later.
EDIT: Warhammer fantasy and dark elves all the way.

I used to play Warhammer40k.

We had big battles on many weekends (we being my brother, his mate, and I). I'm not sure if we ever finished one, as we both played far too cagey, and he used very sneaky tactics.

In the end I found it was often useful to equip half of my army with slingshots, since you could lob very powerful grenades for miles quite easily. Retro FTW!

The biggest nerds in the world are sports fans.

*Stupid costume: check.
*Obsessive knowledge of all things related to their team. check
*Ability to participate in fucking pointless arguments till the cows come home, die and rot to the bone: check.

Anyway, used to play 40k, a little fantasy battle, Epic, Necromunda, a bit of Bloodbowl dabbled in Man'O'War...

I popped into a GW shop for the first time in 10 years the other day, and on seeing how much the models have improved since then... I am tempted to start painting again. as it was something I really used to enjoy, but gave up because I had no money. I have a bit more disposable income now, so why not give it a go again? see if I've still got it! I don't think I'll bother to collect an army, just get models that appeal to me (but who knows?)

Anyone remember Dark Future? All the thrills and excitement of post-apocalypse road warrior combat condensed into a tedious boardgame.

Well, I say "tedious"; I never found anyone else willing to play it. I still tried learning the rules though and failed miserably; this can only be because the rulebook was crap, and is nothing at all to do with my pathetic memory.

I never managed to get anyone to play Paranoia either, but at least that rulebook was entertaining.

Paranoia was awesome. A cross-between a sci-fi and a slapstick comedy RPG.

I played a few missions of that, both as a gamesmaster and a player. It was terribly fun to trick players into revealing more information than they should have known, and thusly getting them summarily executed.

And I still can't hear 'that' song without thinking, "Glory, glory, hail computer!"

Used to dabble a bit but then got into videogames more. At school there was a wargames club which I went along to a few times but usually ended up watching, not understanding half the rules. Battlecars looked the most interesting of the stuff that was played - more my kinda thing compared to the likes of Diplomacy.

Hero Quest and Space Crusade had their place though as I think they were good intros to tabletop games without blitzing players with overcomplicated rules. Speaking of which, I remember buying a couple of duffers in that sense - Battle of the Halji and some game involving dragons flying at various heights to attack each other.. never finished a game of either.

I used to love the look of that game - I had some of the expansion rules in copies of White Dwarf and it sounded ace. Also - you could use matchbox cars and stick guns on them. How cool is that?

The only problem was that the action was stuck to the road and moving a set number of squares - a mate and I designed a game that was the same basic concept of cars having a barney but played out on a tabletop and used inches rather than boxes for movement. And went into damage right down to having fucked suspension. It was great.

@SinisterMinister - YES! NetEpic is the fossilisation of the last decent set of rules. It went inexplicably wank after that version.

You're rapidly becoming my favourite BETEOer.

The most recent set is thoroughly dreadful, although free, seeing as GW have killed off all the "niche" games.

I was never really into wargaming, although I did have a smallish Ultramarine army. RPGs where my thing. I ran Shadowrun campaigns for nearly ten years -- I think I have every single sourcebook between the release of second edition and the release of third edition (roughly 50 books), all still stashed away in my attic.

I played tons of different RPGs: AD&D (Planescape, Spelljammer (I had loads of this), Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms), whatever the GURPS fantasy one was called, Earthdawn, Chronicles of Amber, etc etc. I'd consider reffing some Shadowrun now if I thought I could get a group together. Every so often one my mates brings it up. Did anyone ever play Feng Shui? That game kicks ass.

I think I was scarred for life after reading / playing those DIY 'choose your own adventure' books as a child. They put you right off Role Playing.

You know the drill; "all you need is a coin, a pencil and paper"*

"You approach a door. From beyond it you hear a monstrous howl. If you leg it, please turn to page 87. If you barrel through the door for a bout of decimal coinage based slaughter, please turn to page 145"**

Really, really put me off RPGs in all their guises.


*Make your stats up, naturally.
** Go to both pages to see what the more favourable outcome was.

Trufax - My wife and I got together over Shadowrun. I'll never forgive it It'll always have a special place in my heart for that.

We're mainly playing World Of Darkness systems at the moment - Elaine's running a Dark Ages Vampire campaign then when she fancies a break we'll probably be on to my Werewolf game, but Shamblerun always calls us back eventually.

We played some Feng Shui and Paranoia from time to time as change-of-pace one-shot comedy games (top Paranoia tip for maximum entertainment with minimum effort - get your characters together. Make sure they've all had their secret society and service group missions. Have them all get on the same large elevator to the briefing room. Have all the lights go out. Hang a sign over the edge of your GM's screen saying "NOW ACCEPTING NOTES". Smile and wait. God, I love Paranoia).

Took ages to get the board set up just right.

I never played anything much more complicated than Hero Quest, and Risk. I tried to play Star Wars Risk with some friends a few years back and our brains melted at the rule complexity, so we gave up.

Tabletop games proper though, are cool purely because of those little figurines/models. I have a mate who obsesses over them, painting them just right, mixing colours, and they do indeed look aces.

There's a World of Darkness MMO in the works, apparently.

It'll be "new" (ie, "rubbish") World Of Darkness, though.

You are in fact me, that's exactly what I did. I must have had 15 or 20 Fighting Fantasy books, and a good odd few CYOA ones too. Strangely I always won every fight, mostly because I recognised that rolling a dice for 5 minutes at a time in between reading wasn't what I wanted to do.

Sold the lot of 'em on eBay about a year ago. No regrets though, they hold no interest for me now

RPGing now made even easier! An excellent tool for playing proper pen and paper RPGs over the internet with your mates. I mention this just by way of information.

Craster and I are going to start playing D20 Modern again using this. When we finally get our shizzle together. I absolutely love writing and DMing games.

Oh - Planescape was, without question, the best D&D setting. Closely followed by Forgotten Realms (Elminster FTW!).

Quick question for all those who have played WWII / Napoleonic wargames - do "real life" methods work in them? In virtually all of the PC games I've played, doing things like outflanking or surrounding you enemy hardly helps at all, let alone stuff like skirmishing or using terrain. The best strategy is always to either just slam everything into attack at a single point, or suss out the rules the computer plays too and just exploit them.

Very much depends on the ruleset, that. Is the boring and unhelpful answer.

Dark Sun, man.

The story that defined the setting for me - for reasons too convoluted to go into, our party found ourselves making an unplanned trip into the desert half a step ahead of a bunch of very hacked off evil clerics/secret policemen. A few days into the journey we were getting desperately short of provisions but, spotting a caravan making its way down a trade route a few miles away two of our characters left the group to see if we could nick anything useful from them. On approaching, a guy appeared on the caravan's upper deck and hailed us. We explained that we were lost and needed water, and the bloke shouted down that we were welcome to join the caravan if we wanted.

I looked at the other player. He looked at me. And almost as one, we turned to the DM and said "I'm legging it".

The way we saw it, anyone in Dark Sun who offered to help you for no reason was obviously a wrong 'un.

Any hands on experience with that? I'd have my doubts I think -- I'm a hop-around-the-room kinda guy. But I could see how something like that could work very well. Perhaps I should try and assemble a few of my mates for a few rounds of Shadowrun.

I always rated Dark Sun (cannibal halflings!) and Spelljammer (sheer weirdness!) above either of those.

Rodafowa's story is great.

Cras and I have had a fiddle individually, and it seems pretty handy, but we've not tried running a game on it yet as we're waiting for the third member of our little group to get his internet sorted out.

The lack of proper voice interaction may cause it to suffer a bit, but given how crap my accents are it may actually be a blessing...

I used to play epic about - ooh, Jebus! - 14 years ago. What did they do to it? How did they mess it up?

Yeah, makes sense. I've always wondered how someone like Alexander the Great or Genghis Kahn would do in some of these games. Would their natural talent shine through, or would they lose because they keep forgetting to align their units at the end of the movement phase, or whatever.

Voice comms will be easy enough to sort out.