Friday, January 28, 2011

My Rules Changes for Warhammer v8.1

Okay today is my “Work Experience Day” at Games Workshop Nottingham and Matt Ward and Jeremy Vetock have sat me at a desk and asked me to come up with a list of five things I would change in the 8th Edition rules if I had the chance.

Here in ascending order are my picks:

5. Revise the Monsters & Handlers rules – they are a mess significantly increasing the effectiveness of the units that use them, primarily due to wound allocation. Part of the reason why Salamanders, Hydras and Hellcannons are so good.

4. Stop the “Dirty Reform” Manoeuvre – we all know it is possible to reform into a building that you can’t enter normally due to the building rules. You swift reform then move normally into the building legally moving models up to three times their normal move without marching. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this method wasn’t considered when the rules were written. It has a huge impact on the “Watchtower” scenario. Simple fix – A unit can’t enter a building in the turn it undertakes a Swift Reform.

3. Limit the use of Power Dice to a maximum of 12 per turn – you can generate more than 12 dice but it is only possible to use 12. At the moment the rule is that you can never have more than 12 in the pool at any one time.

2. Limit the effect of “Big Magic” spells – Rather than remove a model, spells that target every model in the unit (e.g. 13th Spell, Dwellers etc) only do a single wound to a multiwound character.

And the biggy……

1. Random Game Length – introduce Random Game Length into all the scenarios. This creates uncertainty in your choices late in the game e.g. do I flee this unit not knowing if there is another turn, the inability to expose characters and units with impunity, should I use or save my item. Personally I think it would greatly improve the game giving another level of uncertainty that you must manage.

So what are your thoughts? Like to see those changes in a future update?

4 comments:

  1. The random game length has some merit, but it would be dependant on what scenarios you applied it to and how.
    Possible changes other then turn length to scenarios and games could also be another method.
    So long as games don't end turn 4, I don't believe in short ones being good ones.

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  2. I agree also on the random game length. Maybe start at turn 5 and up to a max of 7 turns. The monster and handler rules are plain out of wack currently. 12 Dice max would be nice due to slann's free dice(I even play as Lizards and think its OP), DE extra dice, and other magic items to stash dice. Magic is already powerful enough and that would help contain the big game changing phase. My friend and I use the remove the model spells as one game per use. This helps from rolling 6 dice on turn one and wiping a unit off the board turn 1 or 2 and screwing up the rest of the game.

    The thought of creating max number in a unit is entertaining but possibly could be fixed by changing the steadfast rules. Plus my beef with Monsters going into crushing stuff in combat with the bloodied unit staying there with 1 rank for steadfast is dumb. Im not saying make it herohammer/or monsterhammer but maybe give a monster an equalivalent to 1 rank to help them out for the points the monster costs.

    More than other game changes I wish GW would get a FAQ out for Tomb Kings just to help make the army playable for 8th. I got a TK army but they are so so overpriced, point for point, I cant compete against other horde armies. But this isn't any great revelation on TK topic.

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  3. I like your thoughts, the reform is good but I think the 12 power dice max to use is important.... Magic heavy armies still get access to the dice to whittle down the hoard and combat based armies before they can get too close.

    Giving a monster one rank should probably be qualified in that it shouldn't count towards combat res.... only for steadfast purposes maybe?

    the other stuff, I want to wait and see what the O&G book out soon looks like before commenting just in case I have to eat my words...

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  4. With Steadfast, it seems odd that no matter how many casualties you take, you never lose it. It doesn't seem right that you can lose 20-25 models and still be testing on your base leadership.

    Maybe something like if a unit loses more than 50% of its models in the combat phase, a unit can't be Steadfast?

    That would give the Cavalry units a bit of a chance. Apart from Bretonnians, and the occasional Dragon Prince unit, non-Fast Cav mounted units seemed to have disappeared from our club.

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