RidiQles wrote:
Thematically I like the idea of unique characters... but that whole thing starts to hit some dissonance when you face a cohort that has the same model as yours... we've even thrown around the idea of having a bit of a draft when we play so that the same gladiator doesn't appear in two different cohorts.
That's a great idea, actually. It requires people to be comfortable with someone else touching their models, which not everyone is, but I like the idea that two players get all their AR models together before a game, remove any duplicates, and then take turns picking "players" for their "team". Seems very thematically appropriate for the game. And it means you won't necessarily get your ludus benefits, if you end up competing with your opponent for the same ludus...
RidiQles wrote:
For some reason though, the idea of multiples of the same beast doesn't really bother me much, even though they are clearly characters in their descriptions.
I think it's like that for everyone, and it's just like Walker says - it's because the beasts are still presented like base animals, and so despite technically being characters, they don't have distinct personalities in their profiles in the way the humans do. If I take a Proximo or Leo and chain it to a pole as a living hazard for my game, we will most likely just think of it as "a beast", not *the* Proximo or *the* Leo.
I think presenting the beasts as characters is an inspired move, but it's not going to make its full impact until we get a selection of lions and proximos that each have individual personalities. And we don't really want that, probably, because we kinda like that the beasts are slightly generic at the same time as being sorta characters. They're in a greyish area between the two. Just like Noxius.