Rulebreaking & Renaming
And speech from a false machine
This Week’s post goes through the process of checking each rule in your game to see if it can be broken in an interesting way by a specific faction or unit.
Especially how you shouldn’t take any rule for granted, and make sure you explore the breakage potential of everything.
Now I subconsciously skipped over the turn sequence, but perhaps there's something here we can break. Messing with the order could be fun. Perhaps something like:
Paradigm Shift: At the start of a Turn you may swap the position of any two phases.
Could have some interesting applications, and of course relies on only one player having this ability to really work. You could tone it down a bit and have it only apply to one side's actions s but I like that this implementation is simple, potentially very powerful, but also requiring careful planning.
I mean, it's probably majorly broken, but let's enjoy this moment. Even if we break it in testing we can find a way for its spirit to live on.
The context here is a miniature wargame but it’s just as relevant to RPGs or boardgames too.
Elsewhere if you’ve enjoyed reading Patrick Stuart’s writings at False Machine, you might be interested in this ridiculous project compiling practically the entire blog into a huge tome.
If that sounds interesting, go and look at Speak, False Machine.
Coming Soon
On Patreon I wrote about the identity of Bastionmechs and teased a potential rename.
But regardless of its name, it’s going through a process familiar to anybody that followed Grimlite into becoming The Doomed.
This is a similar process to The Doomed, where I wanted to keep things broad enough that you could throw together a game using primarily GW (or in this case Battletech) miniatures, while allowing the game to have an identity beyond an alternative ruleset for somebody else's world.
So you can bring your Battlemechs, but they'll need translating into MACs.
I mean, I’m warming the idea of a slightly silly name like MAC ATTACK.
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