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.

1) Any melee attack hits as long as you don't roll a "miss", meaning by that you CAN hit an enemy on the roll of 0 range with the punch or the chainsaw.

2) I can't see why the Invader shouldn't use Dodge there. Just remember: you just re-roll once the attack (applying the 2nd result to all the monsters), you should never re-roll many times for every monster hit.

3) I'd say yes, he could; but I haven't found anything on the rulebook about that. After all, you can attack at any point of your movement, and you can walk through obstacles, so why not?

4) You can buy them everywhere. Just google that.

1) and 3), I have nothing to add to Freeman's answers - melee attacks don't include a range check (it's in the rulebook somewhere), and I guess that in Doom, attacking from an obstacle space works. By the way, the Acrobat ability in Descent (which is really similar) explicitly doesn't allow attacks from obstacles.

2), I think it makes sense to house rule blasts with dodges. The rules are pretty clear in that they state that you can't reroll any attack more than once, even with multiple dodges - but I think the dodge should just make the monsters avoid the attack that dodge themselves. Thus in my games, blast and dodge work like this:

• Blast attacks can't scatter through a dodge - the first roll counts for where they land.
• The reroll from dodge doesn't count for all the invader monsters, but just those that have dodge themselves. Thus, first all the monsters who can't dodge take regular damage, then the invader player can force the marine to reroll one die, and then all the monsters who can dodge take the rerolled damage.

This is more in line with the way those things work in the shooter, too - as when you shoot with a rocket launcher in any shooter, ever, you don't target the monster but the space underneath it, if you have any experience at all. So if the monster dodges, it won't make the attack go somewhere else, but rather just bring the monster out of the blast area. And, it doesn't make Cherubs some kind of Sacred Protector of Big Monsters. Keep in mind that it's a house rule though - and of course it'll work similarly if a marine dodges a blast attack from a Cacodemon.

4), finally, try sending a mail to parts AT fantasyflightgames DOT com about your faded dice - FFG's customer support is one of the best I've seen in any industry so far, and I just got engraved replacement dice for my fadey ones two or three weeks ago, free of charge.

Thanks to you both for your answers

I must have missed #1 before, I see it in the official errata now (page 3). Regarding #3, I guess it's explicit enough - I just wanted to confirm that the errata was really intended to have the word "figure" instead of "obstacle".

As for #2 - I'm not sure what you mean by "monsters who can't dodge". I don't have the expansion - are there monsters that have a Dodge ability? I was referring to the invader card; if I play that and force the marine to reroll a blast radius weapon, do I have to choose only one monster to be able to dodge, or are all monsters within the blast radius affected by the re-rolled dice?

Ah ... yeah, the expansion has one monster that has permanent dodge (the Cherub). The invader card indeed doesn't say it's just one invader that dodges - but I'd rule it that way anyway. Again though, keep in mind it's a house rule for this case we're talking about, strictly by the rules it is indeed the case that a blast attack that is dodged by one single miniature means the dice has to be rerolled for everybody under the blast.

Which then makes those Cherubs great protectors against blast weapons, a couple of them around your precious oversized invaders, and grenades lose a lot of their threat for everybody else as well. Which really doesn't make sense, I think.

True, and thanks for pointing that out

Also be sure to use the errata on the Dud card from the Invader deck, as the original one is way too broken. You can find it in the FAQ methinks, and the expansion includes the new version of Dud to be used in the old Invader deck.

yes, thanks - I was aware that the Dud card had been changed, but I didn't have the errata with me when we played, so I decided not to use any Duds at that time.

haslo said:

I really like your houserule for dodging blast attacks, though from a thematic point of view, re-rolling a grenade can be seen as the invaders picking it up, then throwing it back at you (or kinda hitting it towards another space, etc). I'll save your houserule for weapons like BFG or rocket launcher, keep the original rule for grenades (after all, it takes few seconds to explode even if you throw it correctly).

After all, the "no more than 1 re-roll per attack rule" is there just for the mechanics' sake (keep the game going fast), it's not very realistic. Houserule for dodging blast attacks makes sense to me.

Any ideas/houserules about aiming grenades? I've allways seen it kinda weird, like aiming the chainsaw. I'm thinking about restricting the aim order just for weapons that in fact shoot bullets/shells.