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Having played BFG for quite a while and seen lots of player made material pop up online over the years, I wanted to start a discussion about what are and aren't good practices for creating ships, fleets, races, and rules.
COPYING RULES IN OTHER SYSTEMS: BAD
I'm going to try to avoid ranting here, but this needs to be said: Just because an army has something in 40K, doesn't mean it should have it in BFG.
I keep seeing lists pop up where someone will say something like they have a great Blood Angels list and they have some rule where the strike cruisers turn into Death Company strike cruisers on a 6+ at the beginning of the game and gain a 4+ save against each hit scored on them, completely ignoring the fact that the rule makes no sense in the context of spaceships.
Space marine variant lists are the biggest culprits of this (No, Battle Barges cannot be Intractible, Stubborn, Red Thirsty, True Gritty, etc.) It is important to capture the army's flavor, but it must be correctly applied in the scope of the game system.
SIMPLICITY: GOOD
BFG is an incredibly simple and elegant game system. The key to this is that every fleet uses the same core, but the tweaks it just a little. Think for a second about any two fleets and consider how they are the same.
All fleets have some forms of weapons batteries, lances, torpedoes, fighters, bombers, engines, shields etc. True, their batteries might hit on a 4+, or cause a fire when they crit, or ignore shields on a 6, but it's still a weapons battery.
A weapon that "causes a point of damage on a 5+, or on a 6+ if the ship is moving away, but with a +1 modifier if facing the sunward edge and rerolling misses if it the third Tuesday after the vernal equinox" might be a perfect rendition of how you see your alien race's weapons working, but it does no good if your opponent's head explodes as you try to explain it to him. (or maybe that was your plan...)
Always ask yourself, "Can I make this simpler?"
NOT UNDERSTANDING THE FLEET/SPECIES/ARMY: BAD
Here's the key example: Seddito Oppremere. One of the aspects of the Space Marine list it that lances are limited in numbers and fielded only on escorts, another is that space marine ships carry shorter range weapons, but the SO broke both these rules by having 4 60 cm lances on each side.
If you want to occasionally break a rule, that's fine, but do it in a way that is minor and don't break more than one rule at a time. For instance: If you want to design a chaos cruiser with torpedoes, give it a str 4 salvo instead of 6, don't also give it a enhanced engine, and make sure to cost it correctly.
If you want to do something wierd, make up a new race and don't try to jam the square peg in the round hole.
I look forward to your replies and opinions.
Peace
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The Construction Worker Space Marines like to paint Yellow and Black Stripes on Everything. This is for Safety. They also like to Blow Up Stuff. This is for Unsafety. They are very complicated people. This is why they are very (x2) popular. ? Sneak Preview of Construction Worker Space Marines
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) make sure it is to scale, and if there ends up being no impact on the game, there is no special rule! E.g. BT's 'possibly' only giving the enemy a +1 boarding mod when crippled instead of a 2+, this represents the way they are fired up by the lose of comrades and the fact there are more SM's on your typical SC (but many of them won't be full brothers).
