Today, we’re wrapping up our previews of the initial line-up of playable Autobots.
Before we get too deep into that, early and mid-February were a bit of a rough spot for development of the game, mostly just because sickness, work, and weather kept me much busier than I expected to be. I’ve still been chipping away at getting assets together, but I think we’re looking at a publicly available playtest of the first encounter at some point near the end of March. I need to finalize a few more of the Shockwave behavior deck cards (shouldn’t be too time consuming) and type up an initial version of a How to Play document (this will be the lion’s share of the work that remains). I don’t expect the instructions to be overly long, but it does take a decent amount of refining to make it user-friendly.
Without any further ado, let’s take a look at Bumblebee (and Scouts too).
Bumblebee occupies a weird space in the original G1 cartoon pantheon. If we’re honest, he didn’t really do a whole lot, especially after the first season. Even then, he mostly just hung out with Spike and the other humans.
The Bayverse decided to give Bee a bit more of an action hero role to play, which then began to filter into some of the series that came after the Bay movies.
For this version of Bee, I’m leaning a little bit more into the Bayverse version of the character. In addition to that, as I mentioned in the previous article, I was looking to theme these initial four characters in a similar way to the prototypical Dungeons & Dragons party.
As such, we end up with Bumblebee as the Rogue. He’s meant to be a bit of a high-risk, high-reward character. Like the Rogues of a few D&D editions, he benefits from having an ally near his target to take advantage of his Flank ability. On top of that, even though he has the lowest printed health of any character so far, his Nimble ability can potentially result in him tanking more incoming damage than might be expected of him. You just need to be willing to have some faith in your dice rolls.
This emphasis on being willing to take the risk of being at close range also extends to his assigned weapon. Of all the starting characters, Bumblebee is the only to have a Laser Pistol as his starting weapon. If you can combine having Bumblebee in short range of his target AND having a friendly character near the enemy, his dice will be upgraded from the base of d6s up to d10s. He may only be rolling 2 dice, but his ability to reroll will mean that he’ll more consistently be able to roll successes (and fish for Critical Hits).
It’s also worth noting that Bumblebee has the default Car Speed of 8, and the highest bot mode Speed of 4 (although I’d like to consider playtesting 5 in bot mode). I’m envisioning the various encounters in the game as having more going on than just beating the enemy into submission. Bumblebee’s higher speed should help him zip around to objectives or other points of interest on the board faster than his companions.
As more characters are added to the game, I see that general concept as something that Scouts will focus on. I’ve been toying with the idea of randomized equipment being scattered around the map, which characters can pick up by interacting with it (Energon caches, repair kits, limited-use weaponry, etc.).
That wraps up our look at our final playable character that will be available in the initial version of the playtest. The next article will likely be focused on Shockwave and how the AI behavior deck will work.
Remember, you can keep posted about additional preview articles and information on the Discord server, Facebook group and the website.
Wreck 'N Rule 