I’ve been playing a bit of KT with some friends and the fundamentals are great. I really like the IGYG mechanic, the shooting mechanics, the hand to hand, and the movement. The keywords for weapons work fairly well too.
What doesn’t work for us, at all, is the wildly overcomplicated faction rules that have been mashed over the top. If you’re playing Mordheim there’s a learning curve as you don’t start with a hundred skills, special rules, and other optional crap on top.
I can mostly manage the DKK rules, for example. They’ve got four “orders” that can be applied to them which buff them in various ways. There’s a load more “ploys” that can be applied too, which are a bit much to keep track of but are just about doable.
The same cannot be said for a friend’s Vespid Stingwings, or Hernkyn Yaegirs. They’ve got a multiple resources they have to keep track of and work with (and therefore as their opponent I need to understand too!).
I don’t know if cutting this complexity out would debuff a load of factions, otherwise I’d just be calling for all of it to be scrapped. I more wanted to create a topic to have a bit of a whinge about it and see if anyone else feels the same way.
With GW’s skirmish games from the '90s, most factions start from a fairly similar point and then diverge over time as they slowly gain access to their special rules. It’s a learning curve. KT seems to be more of a learning wall. Way too much to keep track of all at once.
Not once have we made it beyond turn 2 of a given game before we run out of time and headspace. It feels like there’s a great game buried under all the cruft but I’m not sure how much work it is to excavate that game.
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Our group has basically dropped GW’s rulesets for OnePageRules variants, specifically Grimdark Firefight as a Killteam replacement. There’s a built-in army builder and faction equivalents for just about every GW faction.
While not killteam, we used their base Grimdark to play a full 2v2 500pt game in less than 3 hours.
The best part of all of this is that there’s no tracking of individual armies unique tactical options, everyone is using the same ruleset that uses a combined set of tactical options available to everyone. You can evem do- interfactional armies!
I considered this but ultimately that boils down to “play a different game”, which is fine, but if I’m going to do that then there’s any number of other rulesets.
I was more wondering about people’s experiences with Kill Team.
Everything you said is why I created Ruinstars. We had the exact same headaches and gripes with KT. Games are under 45 min, PvP or PvE and coop play, campaign system, squad builder + game tracker, and 100% free + open-source.
Very cool, but this wasn’t really about which game system to play instead.
I see. But I think you’ll run into the issue that the team rules are also how they put variety in the game. The core rules themselves are pretty simple, or at least approachable. The operatives’ stats and their weapon stats are actually fairly standard across teams (there’s really only 5-6 archetypes of operatives and weapons), so faction rules and abilities are how they differentiate the teams and make an aeldar feel like and aeldar on the table.
You could choose to play with one of the more streamlined teams (e.g. Angels of Death) and just proxy your minis in but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for either.
I think you’re stuck with trying to house-rule the team rules which could remove or reduce that complexity, and keep the flavor/variety. But doing that well would be difficult, especially finding the equilibrium between simple rules and “strength” of those rules.
