Gaming | Indiana Jones and the Template of Doom

We find ourselves back in the ruined wastelands of Hive Secundus as the Necromunda campaign continues. Some of my misgivings about the game have been slightly addressed this go around. Some. Because in this game, we were playing a high octane game driving about on motorcycles ala Mad Max. 

Witness Me! 

The neat thing I like about tabletop wargaming is the environment If I wanted to play uber crunchy games all about min-maxing, I would play video games. If I wanted a 2d map where abilities are only dependent on cards and stats and not models, I would play board games. No, I want to play on a cool table where the models matter. I want LOS damn it! And let me tell you, the zone mortalis or whatever stupid name the Necromunda tiles have do not scratch that itch. They may as well be a board game played with tokens. Buuuut, I do really like the Sector Mechanicus (again, stupid names) style of gaming. 

One thing I find that Necromunda does really well when it wants to is environments. In this particular game, to simulate the high speeds that everyone was driving at, the whole map would move back 8" at the end of every turn, with new terrain appearing at one end of the table and disappearing at the other. If one of your models fell off this end, that was it, they were out of action. This little bit of extra rules really added to how the game played, and it felt like a real tabletop game. And of course Necromunda still has to be Necromunda, so enter the shotgun template. 

The third movie reference in this post and it still doesn't match the rest

You see, in Necromunda, if you're hit with a weapon, that means you get pinned. If you're pinned you can't do any action other than crawl at half speed or get up. And seeing as each model gets 2 actions per turn, a pin is a severe limitation to their action economy. But you have to hit, which requires dice rolls. Unless you have a shotgun. If a model is within template range of your shotgun (or really any other weapon with this type of range), they are automatically hit, which means that you don't even have to roll and the enemy model is pinned, cutting their options in half (and completely eliminating the ability to charge and get into melee combat). So it's a rather powerful thing in my mind.

Buuut, if you combine that with our motorcycle game, you get a nasty little combo. If you're pinned while driving a motorcycle, and you fail an initiative check, you take damage depending on the distance you moved, which could be up to 16''. And normally you'd have to roll to get that hit, which is an element of chance. But I had a shotgun. Automatic hits everywhere, which meant there were a lot of meat crayons as gangers went skidding on the floor. And my lone little juve ganger with a shotgun essentially mopped the floor with my opponent's warband. Which feels good in some ways and bad in others. I'm sure there are ways to mitigate this (play better hur dur), but I'm not a fan of mechanics that take away players' ability to do things. Debuffs are cool, but if it prevents me from doing stuff with my guys while I watch them wriggle on the floor and eat more bullet shots, it's not fun to me. 

That's two wins for me in this campaign now, and I'm slowly liking the game a little more, but I still have issues with it. 

-The Space Dinosaur