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mj12games.com/forum → Defiance → Where are the army ist conversions
Hi,
I've been reading the rules and really like the concepts but find the task of converting from other systems a little daunting.
So I searched the forum and yahoo groups for army lists based on WH40K or AT-43 or warzone but find close to nothing.
Is there a secret cult you need to be a member of to find some of these or what :?:
If you pick up and actually play Defiance you probably won't get to be in the secret new world goverment but you'll most certainly be one of the select few -- very few :mrgreen:
Anyway. There are a bunch of conversions basically from that "popular big name game" + a few others on the official Defiance page. See the "Resources" panel on the right hand side.
http://mj12games.com/defiance/
I've got a few more listed on my (still rather temporary-looking) D:VG resources page:
http://heros.netai.net/html/DVG.html
If you pick up and actually play Defiance you probably won't get to be in the secret new world goverment but you'll most certainly be one of the select few -- very few :mrgreen:
I've got a few more listed on my (still rather temporary-looking) D:VG resources page:
http://heros.netai.net/html/DVG.html
Thanks! Just what I was looking for 
I take it from your comments that Defiance hasn't really caught on. I've read your review and think it sounds great, but is there some fatal flaw in Defiance that drives people away?
I take it from your comments that Defiance hasn't really caught on. I've read your review and think it sounds great, but is there some fatal flaw in Defiance that drives people away?
1.) They don't have their own miniature line.
2.) They don't have thousands upon thousands of dollars of advertising budget.
3.) They don't have a crack team of lawyers to protect their IP.
4.) They don't have distribution to get them into the FLGS.
Wait, looking at it none of those are any flaws with the rules. Huh. Funny that.
Really, the issue is that it just doesn't have that much market penetration. Which is a shame, it looks like a great system.
Indeed D:VG has been hampered by the things as mentioned above, plus also the fact that it's a "complex, but not complicated" game. If you want market penetration for a game without the aforementioned resources you'll have a much better chance going with with "simple, but not simplistic" instead. Many people don't seem to know the difference between complex and complicated. The sheer size of the rulebook alone has garnered snide remarks from the potential audience.
People are dumb. If you take out the army builder and the army lists and the fiction, the rules are small. If you leave out vehicles for your first couple of games, it's 40 pages of actual rules (I skipped the large contents section). If it went down the path of only explaining the common rules, then tacking on all alternative movement and fire options as "special rules" for the appropriate troops, it'd be even more compact. That kind of approach is what makes "Song of Blades and Heroes" work- it masquerades as simple, but really, it isn't.
Defiance tends to play out very fast for games with 20-30 figures and 1-3 vehicles per side, which is pretty big for 28mm skirmish. It's unpredictable though, games can drag out in very heavy or very open terrain, where you can't maneuver or where everyone's too chicken to stick their head out into the long, unobstructed fire-lanes.
Well I've had a chance to read the rules and army builder a few times now and I can see how building an army would seem a daunting task for many.
As an IT-professional I'm always looking for IT shortcuts for doing work and the amy builder obviously should be computerized. I've read that someone was working on a spreadsheet but never brought it to completion. A tool like that would really help bring down the effort required to get started with your own armies. I've started the work and have the weapon builder running.
I know Song of Blades and Heroes and it doesn't compare to defiance at all. It's a simplistic game, very unbalanced and appeals to beer & pretzel players.
One thing that puzzled me most in the Defiance rules was the Exclusive unit rule (p.84).
After going through the trouble of designing units you suddenly have all vehicles marked exclusive along with at least one infantry unit. In addition you only get 1 exclusive choice in a battle regardless of the point value size of it. That seems overly restrictive to me and should have been a % rule instead.
The exclusive rule has been seen as problem by many apparently (it's on the card to be replaced by a different system in the D:VG supplement that's been stuck in the "post production" phase for something like two years now -- not sure if it's in fact been shelved completely or not), tho I don't personally really think it's massively limiting. While vehicle units are exclusive, as are SZ3 infantry units, you can still take additional choices towards your ad hoc units count, which is percentile of the force size.
good point concerning the ad hoc units. Thanks
D:VG army builder is complex enought to allow not-immediately-apparent interplay of different rules... Perhaps this fact is not advertised enough. But if all the possible options were explicitly written down I suppose the book would indeed be "something like 1.000 pages" :mrgreen:
It is usually OK to game the system 
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