Reply To: Talking a bit about CLASH of Spears ( well more than a bit )

[seldonParticipant 691xp 1]

Well, I do agree that the rules go into a considerable amount of detail to avoid ambiguity and the book does have nice pictures and illustrations, guilty as charged.

I personally don’t like it when I have to agree with friends how we are going to play this or that, it becomes problematic for club games.This is a question of personal taste, and we wrote the rules for the game we wanted to play.

I think that in recent times the opposite has happened, that many times we get more ambiguity. CLASH is indeed aimed at supporting competitve play, but because we think that this forces us to come up with robust mechanics. I don’t think that this detracts from narrative play. Alvaro likes competitive gaming while I prefer narrative games, as you can see from my AARs, yet I want a set of rules that is comprehensive and well detailed.

I don’t think that good quality books with pictures and illustrations are a problem nor a modern development. I have at least two copies of my warhammer fantasy battle 3ed edition which I love to open every now and then just to read fluff and look at pictures. And I have others, such as War and Conquest , or so many… The difference is that these days it is easier to do such a book than it was time ago, so rules authors take advantage of that. I think CLASH is very well priced for the quality of the book, that is a bit driven by our intention to get the book out there.

All in all I totally respect Chaingun’s view of, “I’ll try before I buy”. I usually don’t do that because I like reading rules, some I play some I shelf but it is always interesting for me to read them.

The instructional videos I mentioned will be aimed at players learning the rules, not as promotional videos and that is why they were not done for the campaign. In fact there was not going to be a “campaign” until the Victix alternative opened up.

It is a lot of work to get the game out there and the “hype” generated, which is critical for a new set of rules to take off, requires a lot of effort when you are an independent outfit. Without that work or “hype” you just get lost in a sea of new releases.

At the end of the day the most important aspect is if the rules are fun or not, and that depends on the quality of the game but also on personal taste and when it comes to that I totally understand. I hope that we will get enough people playing the game so that we can expand it going forward, and so far it looks like it will…

There are so many alternatives out there these days, one can simply go to WargameVault and you will find many sets of rules, lots of them less detailed, maybe oriented as a guide for narrative play.. we just developed the type of rules that we wanted to play and that we had not found in the market… We then put them through extensive playtesting to streamline them and balance them. The rules do have summary boxes over the book so with a quick first read of the book hopefully people will be able to play and then when they find unexpected situations they will go back to the more detailed rules and find the answers there…

But it is all good, there lots of different gamers, I actually feel that there are more games serving the type of games that Chaingun was looking for than the one that we were looking for so hopefully these options can accommodate all players.

I take no offense and respect the opinion…

I’ll confess.. if next year, I can simply go to my club and find players willing to do pick up games of CLASH, like they do these days with SAGA or Bolt Action.. trust me , I’ll be super happy… and that is the real hype we want to generate.. not about selling the book but about getting people playing…

Cheers,

Francisco