Thursday, March 24, 2011

F--king hydra.

These are my hydras. They are crawling on some homemade terrain during a game of anarchist Warhammer 40k. Yes the spraypaint is terrain.
Here is the thing you maybe can't see very well about my hydras in the pictures: they suck.

Why? Because every round they regenerate on a 5 or 6. Or allegedly they do. Though Viv had one and I had one and they were the last foes to die in this game, they did not roll a 5 or 6 on a d6 once in the whole goddamn game.
Fuck you hydras. Fuck your 5-headed scenery-climbing asses. You are losers.

Ever have a nemesis? I have a nemesis. His name is Cameraman Darren. To kill time while we wait around Hollywood for Hollywood people with Hollywood problems we play games.

Sometimes he wins, sometimes I win, and this is all tolerable and all in good fun when it is a battle of wits--as it often is. It is good to have a Karpov. But sometimes he just wins by fucking raw luck. And when this happens it's infuriating.
It's infuriating because just because he won by pure luck and knows he won by pure luck it doesn't stop him from saying smug things like "Well part of my strategy was to win by sheer good luck."
I suck at rolling dice, pretty much. When I'm DMing this is a pretty decent talent on accounta it allows me to set up seemingly unwinnable tension-crank situations and then say like "Ok, you all die if I roll better than a 2" and then I don't. Which is fun. It spreads a feeling of warmth and peace to know god hates you but is powerless to do anything about it. But when I'm playing? fuck that.
So in this like 3way Warhammer game versus me and Viv I'm thinking "Well my dice suck, but Viv's dice don't suck, so Cameraman Darren's natural favored-by-Jesus status means nothing..."
But no. Round One: I lose a Marine to Viv on account of the random scenery distribution puts my guy at a natural 2-to-1 disadvantage and initiative puts him last on account of I'm a gentleman and am like "Viv's never played before, she can go before me". Round 2: I lose a Terminator (who cannot shoot straight) to Darren, leaving me with just a hydra. Meanwhile Darren takes out Viv's witch and tyranid in one (followfire) shot, leaving her with one hydra.

This leaves Dr Smug with all his guys and me and Viv with one hydra each. And then they just wallow in the gunsights, taking a ridiculously long time to chew up the cannon fodder and not regenerating for like an hour and a half. Fuck you hydras. Fucking hydras.

Now Cameraman Darren alleges his catastrophe-spike goes both ways. He claims he accidentally blew up a city in R0lemaster rolling a negative 300+ anticrit. But whatever. I haven't seen it.

And I wish I could bask in the comfort of all your comments about such holes as you think there are in the 40k system, but, no, this is homemade version and I pretty much rebuilt the whole thing form the chassis up. It was not Games Workshop's fault: it was all down to the dice, and the dice were determined to dispense ignominious death. Fate, I despitheth thee...

Fucking guy...someday...