Frostgrave and friends
Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 6:24 pm
I apologize if I’m breaking any rules by bringing it up, but I figured there’s been some other Warhammmer/skirmish wargame threads in the IMHO subforum, so it’s not too out of line here. As I’m in the middle of winding down my 5e Spelljammer campaign, I’ve decided to pick up some new nerdery, and since I’ve had fun using minis for 5e combat, a skirmish game might appeal. I've picked up Frostgrave and have Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago on order.
My fiancé and I played our first game of Frostgrave last night, and what struck me is just how swingy the combat is. Everything’s a d20+modifiers roll, generally opposed, though spell casting is vs a target number. What’s interesting to me is that magnitude of success in opposed rolls is meaningless - if you roll a 19 and win a combat, it makes no difference if the opponent rolled an 18 or a 2 in terms of the damage you inflict. Suffering to the conquered, I guess.
The other odd aspect is that even the lowest level units have about 10 points of armor, so that winning with a 10 or less feels pretty meaningless - their armor just eats the damage. Maybe with access to beefier units with higher modifiers this becomes less prevalent, but with our starting war bands of infantry and thugs, who only have 2-3 points in Fight, everything feels very controlled by the RNG rather than the stats of our units.
My fiancé and I played our first game of Frostgrave last night, and what struck me is just how swingy the combat is. Everything’s a d20+modifiers roll, generally opposed, though spell casting is vs a target number. What’s interesting to me is that magnitude of success in opposed rolls is meaningless - if you roll a 19 and win a combat, it makes no difference if the opponent rolled an 18 or a 2 in terms of the damage you inflict. Suffering to the conquered, I guess.
The other odd aspect is that even the lowest level units have about 10 points of armor, so that winning with a 10 or less feels pretty meaningless - their armor just eats the damage. Maybe with access to beefier units with higher modifiers this becomes less prevalent, but with our starting war bands of infantry and thugs, who only have 2-3 points in Fight, everything feels very controlled by the RNG rather than the stats of our units.