Painting and Ranting about Game Design

Transcript

Still just painting Maximus tonight, but I’ve been thinking about this game that’s been kicking around my brain for years. It’s taken a bunch of different iterations. Playing Crown and Skull last year really kicked off the urge to pick it back up.

What Makes Mordheim Special?

I’ve been thinking about what makes Mordheim the skirmish game. How much is nostalgia? How much was the dream team that came together to build it? How much was the game just being genuinely good? The art, the vibes, how we were all kids—it has that mystic level. When I was a kid, you actually played Mordheim because nobody had full Warhammer armies. I think that era kicked off the grim darkness that Games Workshop ran with.

The HP Problem

I hate HP. I hate mana points. I hate D&D’s spell-per-day system. I hate how Age of Sigmar and 40K do it—rolling to hit, then damage, then save. If you have three hit points, it’s just a die next to the model that eventually hits zero.

Crown and Skull uses an attrition system where your skills and gear get checked off as you take damage—no actual HP. It works great for RPGs, but in both groups I DM’d, players tried to game it by buying cheap gear to tank with instead of building out their characters. In a wargame, that’d be even easier to exploit.

The Knockdown Idea

I came up with a knockdown system: instead of HP, models go from standing to knocked down to removed. You could have effects that ignore the first knockdown, get models back up, or ignore removal. Kingdom Death does something similar but not the same way. I don’t like physically knocking models down—maybe turn the character card sideways instead. But then there’s the token question.

The Token Spectrum

I either like no tokens or so many it’s a token management game in itself—like War Machine. But in tournaments, messing with tokens can clock you out. And with War Machine’s elemental effects: if the goal is eliminating models and it’s always easier to just kill something than apply a status effect, why bother with all these systems?

What I Actually Want to Make

A Mordheim-style skirmish game that’s soloable, super lightweight, super immersive, with meaningful campaign progression that isn’t just random dice tables after the game. Maybe non-lethal—supernatural entities doing mischief to each other. Grim whimsical miniatures.

I want the tightness of Magic’s ruleset. War Machine’s rules are pretty tight. But too many narrative games use “it’s narrative” as an excuse for loose rules. I want something cool, different, and tight—not different for different’s sake.

Today’s Painting Tip

Use a bigger brush than you think you need for tiny spaces. A size 1 with a sharp point holds so much paint you don’t have to keep hitting the same spot. We’re three or four rounds of glazing and layering into the purple now, plus a lot of work on the whites.