Finally, we held the ultimate playtest - eight people each designed their own armies, using the recently developed "Creating Armies" rules. The TSR designers are a sneaky, underhanded bunch, and they all pored through the manuals trying to create the nastiest, most powerful, most outrageous armies they could find. The final battle took place on three planes (Ethereal, Astral, and Prime Material) with about 40% of the total forces invisible when the game began. There were devas, planetars, mezzodaemons, galeb duhr, and 10,000 gibberlings - each with a sword and a girdle of storm giant strength. There were catapults firing mirrors of life trapping that contained powerful monsters. There was a force of 220 invisible shadow dragons. There were three hundred-handed giants (see the Legends and Lore volume for details). There were drow cavalry on nightmares (they didn't last long). It took 8 hours of playing time (and 4 large deep-dish pizzas) to get through two turns . . . but it was an incredible amount of fun, and a lot was learned.
That led to the sixth draft . . . and eventually to the seventh.
Michael Dobson, Dragon #100
It's just a very evocative quote. And the loot from 10,000 gibberlings wearing girdles of storm giant strength is pretty impressive. Fun stuff. Also, how many drafts a game can go through.
The one time I got to play BattleSystem with a created army, I realized the Tarrasque would fit in my budget, and just went with that. The absurd fear aura routed my opponent completely. I did also make another army, and we played that out, so the day wasn't wasted.
ReplyDeleteHaha, that's great. Sometimes you have to put limitations on.
DeleteWe once ran a GURPS arena combat session. Then one player asked how much magic items are per energy point. Turns out he was spending most of his points on Wealth with Multimillionaire and was going to just equip his fight team with piles of magic items. So we ended up having to stop right there and re-write the rules of engagement. It was clever but wasn't the point of the exercise and would have basically derailed the whole session while we all did the same thing for a few hours instead of fighting out a battle.