Iamfanboy's Studio

  I enjoy D&D. It was my first RPG over thirty years ago, and upon death I will hopefully be cremated and compressed into a d20 so my mortal remains can terrorize players and DMs for decades more.   But D&D is a tool for storytelling, and like any tool it has good uses and bad uses. Sure, one could use a screwdriver as a crowbar to pry open a door, but one breaks and bends a lot of screwdrivers that way - conversely, you COULD use a crowbar to open up a toy's battery compartment, but good luck getting it back together!   D&D's forte is anime-esque high fantasy without a lot of focus on reality. Magic derived from various sources (gods, nature, the self); sentient beings with racially distinct physical abilities and characteristics living in harmony or conflict with each other; a world either in decline from a previous golden age or on the rise to a new one: these are all stories that D&D excels at telling and it needs at least two of those in order to thrive. It

 New California Republic (NCR) Tactics & Overview, v5.2   What makes the NCR SPECIAL? Well, it's their Faction rule, of course. Being able to swap a Reaction marker - which is normally only offensive - for a free piece of cover against one shot is quite solid. They also have a wide variety of excellent shooting models, with even your basic NCR Troopers being decent with the right guns. Their Uniques are also uniquely supportive - acting as excellent force multipliers. Lastly, all their models have at least two Expertise skills, and some have all three - though only a few have them at any high number - so you can in theory get by without dedicated objective runners. What makes them not SPECIAL? A complete lack of close combat. Only three models in the whole faction break 6 in the Melee skill, and only one model (which isn't any of the above) can beat STR 7 for the bonus Black. This also makes their vaunted Reaction Markers worth less against Melee-centric factions, as there&