Hi everyone,
I got my own copy of Doom some months ago and tested it briefly with two people from work. It seemed to go well but due to time constraints we had to stop playing about halfway through Knee Deep in the Dead. The game sat on my shelf until a couple of days ago when I ran a game for 3 other friends. I'd say these guys are relatively experienced gamers - one of them owns the World of Warcraft game and taught it to us, and we picked it up pretty quickly. They have also gone through a few years' worth of pen and paper RPGs. Because of this, I was fairly confident that they would be able to deal with the game, so I didn't bother setting any "mods" (like infinite pistol ammo, etc).
Doom actually bombed pretty badly with them. I had been telling them to run for their lives and that I was not a benevolent GM but another player also trying to win, but they still had it pretty rough. I did make some mistakes at first, but after they asked me to check the rules a few times, I made sure I was playing correctly.
A number of questions came up during the game:
1) Red die and melee attack - when rolling the red die while using a fist or chainsaw, if the player rolls the face with 4 damage and 0 range, does that still count as a hit? At melee range, I said it should miss because they should have to roll at least a 1. However they were having a hard enough time with the game, so we counted it as a hit.
2) When throwing a grenade or using the rocket launcher, or even the BFG - if the players target an empty space in the middle of a group of monsters, does the invader card Dodge force a reroll of the attack dice for all opponents in the blast radius? I had explained blow-through against large creatures by using the corrected rules, i.e. you attack spaces instead of figures.
3) Does the Recon ability allow a marine to attack an adjacent opponent while standing on top of an obstacle? I refer to the rubble adjacent to the demons in Area 2 of the first map. The errata says you can't attack while occupying the same space as another figure - it doesn't say obstacle .
4) Is there a way to buy extra sets of dice? Some of the die faces are starting to fade already.
They were pretty upset with the game, but they persisted and made it to the end, and by that time I had pulled more than a few punches already. They won the game with a lucky die roll when the imps I had spawned around a corner missed its fireball attack against the weakest marine (2 armor, 1 wound left) right before they exited the red door.
One of the last comments I heard from them was, "You could lose friends with this game." But we're still on speaking terms, so....
I don't want to speculate on why they disliked the game - I'll just run different games with them and save Doom for other friends. Still, I thought I'd better clear these questions up.