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Originally Posted by weasel fierce
Well, sort of. I guess the bit Im not getting is.. how do I play this in the game?
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I guess one way to look at it is this: the number of aliens you kill is irrelevant to completing the mission. All you need to finish off a planet is to remove all the threat tokens. However each threat token you personally remove entitles you to claim X alien kills, where X is a random number rolled based on the weapon you're using and the range you're fighting at. The number of aliens you've killed by the end of the session is a little cosmetic when it comes to actually succeeding overall, but the guy who kills the most levels up. You're basically competing less against the alien hordes and more against the other guys in the squad to see who gets to improve their character. Everyone who didn't get most kills has to roll dice to see if they get to level up this session, and even then they're rolling against other players.
I am not sure how much I like this mechanic. OK, everyone gets to improve their weapons automatically between missions so there is some degree of improvement for everyone, but it still worries me that levelling up makes you more likely to level up in the future, as compared to most traditional RPGs where it gets harder to level up in order to keep a team of players at roughly the same level of expertise.
Having said all this, 3:16 is a quick play party game where you probably won't want to worry about that stuff anyway. I personally don't see any great tactical play in the combat at all beyond 'pick the best range for you and keep on rolling'. Sadly I wasn't able to convince my local group to play it so I can't say for certain how it would play out in actuallity. I think most of them were put off by the over-simplicity of the skill resolution system and the flashback mechanics, but they've never been big Indie game fans to begin with.
Ash