1: I’m not sure if it was ever considered that we will play Settlement Mode with factions other than Survivors. The other factions are meant to be “the enemy” but it’s just my thought.
2: You can always decide that narratively (or even pointwise) it doesn’t fit that you go into battle with 4 grenades and you can just unequip them. I have an advanced Settlement campaign where my main char (Boone) found a Gauss rifle so I’m usually using that and I don’t bring my basic weapon the hunting rifle into combat. I imagine it like all that units have a private footlocker and they store their basic equipment there when I decide not to bring something into battle.
What I would do with the Psychos is A: roll an armor die before combat to decide how many frag grenades the model starts the scenario with or B: if your Psycho died in the previous scenario I just play it as we “hired” a new guy who came with a few extra grenades.
So if I have a building in my settlement that darws food cards and enough storage / lockers you can have infitine respawnable replenishable food (aka healing items)? That feels like a bug, not a feature.
Other than items a unit starts with on their AI card, all settlement mode items had to be found during a game or / drawn from buildings, not “bought” for caps prior to a game like in other modes. IMO, the vibe of “what do I keep and what do I toss?” is the appeal of settlement mode.
I’ll still be playing all limited use / consumeables as 1-to-1, but I’m a glutton for punishment.
In Settlement Mode if you find a consumable item you may allocate a maintenance shed to that card after each battle. Doing so allows you to retain that card even if used so long as a) the card is not sold and b ) a locker is used for any battle the card is not taken in the force list. The number of consumables taken into battle is limited to however many cards of each type are retained in this way.
That makes sense…and the ‘faction’ thing is a bit nebulous in FWW, I think the ‘faction’ concept is just so ingrained in our contextual understanding of tabletop minis games because we all grew up playing Warhammer and the like.
For our local map-based settlement mode campaign the faction is more of a narrative theme for each of the players…we used the FFG Fallout boardgame hex tiles to build a New California Republic region (roughly) and set the campaign (timeline-wise) during the events of Fallout: New Vegas. I’m mostly just the arbiter, threading a narrative that ties everyone’s games into the setting, giving each of the players narrative choices between games, and modifying scenarios to fit the ‘story’….but I want to play with the Homestead rules as well, so I’m tracking a Raider gang (hence the questions about psychos, etc).
Having said all of that, I didn’t want to restrict anyone’s imagination…even said that groups like Railroad, Gunners, Institute, etc could be used with a good narrative explanation as to why they’d be there on the West Coast.
Currently we have:
2 NCR
2 Survivor
1 Raider (not including my Raiders)
1 Supermutant
1 Brotherhood of Steel
1 Thinking about joining with institute or some other type of all-robot army
I like the armor die roll to randomize the available grenades…still, Ryan is right when he says that—soon enough—The settlement will have multiple structures pumping out an infinite number of various specific types of cards…it will only be starting out where the growing pains are felt the most.
The more I look at the cost of a persistent consumable the more reasonable it becomes.
You can draw a random weapon card for 100 caps and triple your chances of a grenade for a total of 200 caps. Taking it into battle only costs caps in your list. If you do not use that item you can sell it.
If you draw or find a grenade you will have to spend 60 caps just to hold on to it. To not take it into battle will cost another 70 caps. The ability to take an item into battle will cost you 150 caps. Thus making a consumable card a persistently available item will cost 280 caps, because you almost have to dedicate those 3 structures to the card.