Don’t mess wit da bahr
May 29, 2009
It’s a brand new season, a brand new Call To Arms, a brand new batch of maps and terrain and scenarios and stuff. Yay!
At Warmachine night at the FLGS this week, I pulled out my neglecter purple stunties to see who I could muck around with, and sure enough, as fate would have it, I get paired up with the same guy I play with every Sunday night at home. Spud.
It takes effort for me to put together a 750pt list of Searforge, but thanks to the awesomeness of Brun & Lug, it’s doable.
Yes, the bear is white... not it's not cos he's a polar bear... I just haven't gotten around to painting him yet...
So we rolled up map and scenario and got a new one – Here Be Monsters. Each player picks a ‘jack or ‘beast to be their Monster. That model is immune to essentially everything your opponent has – including feats – except for their Monster.
This means you can essentially let your “indestructable” monster run rampant through your opponent’s lines, ignoring free strikes et al, or you can play like you’ve got a monstrous pair and throw the two monsters at each other and see what happens.
After several turns of skirmishing, the Cygnar force taking my list apart piece by piece (as shooty armies are wont to do until you can close with them), Spud’s Monstrous Centurion finally closed with my Monstrous Lug.
Despite being fully loaded with focus, the Centurion only succeeded in removing one aspect from the epitome of beary goodness. I retaliated by moving Brun Cragback into base to enable Lug’s Flank bonus, and proceeded to take the warjack apart, completely wrecking it with one more attack available to me.
NB: Yes, apparently we both completely glossed over the fact that the Monsters are supposed to be non-unique and non-bonded. Lug was not a legal choice for me to make as my Monster. Neither of us caught this at the time (I discovered it the next day when going over the scenarios), and if Spud had rolled a crit on that first attack with the spear, it wouldn’t have made a difference – Lug would have been a shishkabear. Either Monster had a decent shot at destroying the other in one round of attacks, dice willing, so I’m don’t feel *too* bad about it. In this case, he missed the crit he needed to seal the deal, and my damage rolls with Lug were well above average. There was also an apparent misreading re: Lug’s POW, but since I had an unused fury at the point when the Centurion shut down, the end result would have been the same. Still very much my bad, but I’m confident that the same outcome would have been achieved.
Conclusions:
- Bear Hands continues to be an awesome animus
- Stonehold continues to be an awesome spell
- Brun and Lug continue to be bloody awesome
- This scenario is also awesome
I may not have played much Searforge for quite some time, thanks to my focus on my Menites, but damn… Brun and Lug really did give the Searforge Commission a heck of a boost 
Here’s to seeing what they can do in Mk II!
Wow, I need to try this out too; sounds like great fun!
The scenario was really an absurd amount of fun – your Monster can’t be affected by attacks, spells, even feats – only by the opposing Monster. This really added an extra dimension of horror to the game as I’m sitting there playing and recognizing that I couldn’t landslide the Centurion, I couldn’t Molten Metal it, I couldn’t even toss Bokurs against it!
I’m sure we’ll play it again sometime soon, and next time I’ll try to pick a legal option for my Monster
New Study Shows: Cheating Sometimes Results in Victory
That’s a maxim you’ve been living by for how many years now?
For the record, cheating is bad, m’kay? Unintentional mistakes happen, and they do suck, but intentional cheating is to be frowned upon.
“What’s the POW on the bear?”
“18.”
*furrowed brow*
“…really?”
“Yep.”
Oddly enough, I don’t recall publicly calling you out on any of the mistakes you’ve made from misreading or misunderstanding cards. I don’t even make a habit of trying to remember them, so no, I’m not about to give examples.
- We were both rushed by people hovering saying “So you know the store’s closing, right?”.
- I was rushed by you wanting to resolve Lug vs the Centurion, rather than having the opportunity to see if I could take out the Junior and remove the Arcane Shield – you quite literally picked up the involved models and moved them to a seperate part of the table, while I was in the middle of resolving other stuff.
- I had a Fury left on Lug for another attack. Based on the rolls I’d been making, since I never actually saw the damage you were marking down (you were marking off damage either with your back to me or standing at the next table, where your supplies were piled), I fairly sure that one more auto-hitting attack would still have resulted in a disabled Centurion.
In the end, I must have misread the card, since I do not recall the exchange you’re apparently quoting – all I recall is your firmly stating that I needed to roll dice -6 for the damage rolls.
Mistakes were made, they’ve been spelled by my own admission in the above post. Suck it up and let it go.
It just seems a little silly to me to do an entire blog post based around a thoroughly corrupted game result. We make mistakes all the time when we play– the difference is, I don’t then brag about how ROXXORZ my dude was when I used him wrong.
Statements like this also bother me:
“Either Monster had a decent shot at destroying the other in one round of attacks”
…because we both worked through the “average” math on Tuesday morning, and the Bear’s average damage with Flank against an ASed Cent is 13 across six attacks. That’s barely enough for one system.
It just seems a bit disingenuous to me to frame your post as “check out how RAWK the bear is!” when you know you played him wrong, AND rolled insanely hot dice. The moral here wasn’t “don’t mess with the bear”, it was “here’s what happens when luck and compounded error come together”.
I don’t care that you played wrong, or that you won. My standing rule is that any error not caught while at the table is the opponent’s fault for not being perceptive. I had fun despite the play errors, and the hot dice gave me an excuse to do lots and lots of math the next morning.
However, you then going online and misrepresenting the game as a slight error and average results seems like a bit of an odd move to me.
If I believed for a second that your comments were based out of some altruistic concern for the integrity of the blog, then I wouldn’t have felt a need to respond. However, I’ve known you long enough to know that’s not the case; you showed ample evidence on Tuesday night that you felt quite bitter about the whole incident. That you’re dragging it out here is further evidence.
This article was actually written up prior to your working out with your inner statistician, and at the time of writing I did feel that the bear had a fair shot. The insanely hot dice just made it that much better.
As supported by Deacis’ comment, the point of the post was more about how fun and interesting the scenario was. With the exception of the italicized clarification on the errors made, only about 1/4 of the post is even ABOUT Lug.
Oh, and for the record, there’s actually a follow-up article already written up and scheduled to go up on Sunday based on the numbers we ran through, and in the end the four conclusions still stand – Brun & Lug are awesome, and bring a lot to Searforge.
In other words, pull your head in.
>>>If I believed for a second that your comments were based out of some altruistic concern for the integrity of the blog, then I wouldn’t have felt a need to respond.
I don’t give two farts about the integrity of the blog. I mean exactly what I said– it’s just an odd move. Why brag about a result you know to be tainted?
>>>However, I’ve known you long enough to know that’s not the case; you showed ample evidence on Tuesday night that you felt quite bitter about the whole incident. That you’re dragging it out here is further evidence.
And again, it really doesn’t bother me. Tuesday was just me giving you a hard time, as is our way. We’ve probably played twenty to thirty MAJOR rules incorrectly since we started, many of which we’ve only recently corrected. Tainted results don’t matter to me as long as the game is still fun, and the Monster scenario is fun regardless of the outcome. I’m merely calling out the post, which personally I would not have published.
That’s all.
whooooooo, ok guys, you 2 really need to do a rematch and settle this for good!
But seriously, no need to accuse each other about a friendly game on a public blog. Come on, solve this like friends right? Over a beer and some snacks
This is par for the course for us, Deacis – it happens once every couple of months. As is our way, we yell at each other and mutter invectives for a brief period then we shrug and line up the next game.
We’re quite good friends, really, but our personalities occasionally clash.
S’all good.
And to make things fair, I feel I should take responsibility for my part in this whole thing.
“What?” You may say. “Eponymous, you don’t play Warmachine and you weren’t even there!”
Yes, but I may have gotten the ball rolling with my whining about L5R at the last Hobby League. I don’t know what it is about those ninjas; I really love the game but it brings out the worst (and whiniest) aspects of my personality.
Case in point: OK, Spud. “Battle!” No, wait. I also want to do this. “Can I say ‘Battle!’ now?” (This last line is a bit obscure unless you were there).