Zelrig attack

[a midget in a bikini]

I found this on the heroscape web site and this say Zelrig the mighty new dragons Speical attack:



Rob Daviau:
Einar gets his Dragon
Einar is getting his dragon.

Six months ago (give or take) Craig asked me to think of some powers/themes for the next large creature set. This is my favorite part of design, especially for a game like Heroscape. At this point, it’s figuring out what the "feel" of the piece should be and how it should fit into the overall Heroscape universe.

We had four dragons already so this one had to do several things:
1. Be different from the other dragons
2. Address some gaps in the Heroscape universe (so it was a good draft and a good counter-draft)
3. Feel like an Einar unit.

I started thinking about the last part first: Einar. Imperial. Organized. A Valkyrie who liked majesty and a clear show of power. Then I started thinking about dragons and how they worked in D&D (which I played a lot of as a kid and still play as often as I can -- only about 2x a year these days). They had a sense of awe which lower level characters were suspect to but higher level characters were immune to.

That led me thinking to some sort of awe power that affected weaker characters but not more powerful ones. So far this fit the Einar theme and it is something other dragons didn't have. So far, so good. As for fitting gaps in the Heroscpe world, this was working. Squad armies can be powerful so it would be good to have a figure that was a good counter to a mass squad army.

Here was my first take on his power:
Majestic Fires Special Attack affects its target and all figures adjacent to the target. Squad figures whose army card is 110 points or less do not roll defense dice against Majest Fires Special Attack

I was going for points as my cut-off between those that were immune to this power and those that weren't. This presented a number of issues to the playtesters. They didn't like the fact that some unique squads were right on the edge (like the Airborne Elite) and that some common squads weren't affected while unique were. Also, it was a bit too deadly.

So we went to a new version, which was:
Majestic Fires Special Attack affects its target and all figures adjacent to the target. Common Squad figures whose army card is 110 points or less do not roll defense dice against Majestic Fires Special Attack.

This was closer, but still had its issues, mostly that it was still waaaaaay too powerful. So we adjusted it to be a penalty, not a death sentence.

Majestic Fires Special Attack affects its target and all figures adjacent to the target. Squad figures whose army card is 110 points or less roll 2 fewer defense dice against Majestic Fires Special Attack.

Counting points seemed fussy and the dragon was really supposed to intimidate commoners. So here was our final power tweaked to fit with the rest of the heroscape cards.
MAJESTIC FIRES SPECIAL ATTACK
Range 7. Attack 3.
Choose a figure to attack. Any figures adjacent to the targeted figure are also affected by Majestic Fires Special Attack. Common Squad figures roll 2 less defense dice against Majestic Fires Special Attack. Roll attack dice once for all affected figures. Each figure rolls defense dice separately. Zelrig cannot be affected by his own Majestic Fires Special Attack.
There was a long back and forth at this point as to the other stats to this figure, getting the wording right, and balancing the points.

But, at the end, we had a nice, Einar-themed dragon.


Wow that puts Mimring to shame