I plan to chug a recaff can and finish it tonight. Currently doing final touches, text and font templates have been ready for a while, but they were in russian.
I wonder how much I'll change in response; already used much of the CC rules which were excellent (just keeping encumbrance and modifiers for being broken/webbed, and a few other things). Overall such a lovely product!
I hope the community does respond well to it.
I am looking forward to playtesting this as is.
Some potential ideas to consider for variations of defender penalties could be that you reduce the number of dice rather than -1 the WS. Two 3+ dice is better than one 2+ die against a single attack, in the two-attack WS 2+ example of a fighter.
This means that you could lift the defending dice limit and it means a juve (2 attacks) charging a 2 attack champion forces the champion to choose between retaliating with 2 dice or defending with 1 die.
Does AP+1 give a model with no armor a 6+ save?
Some potential ideas to consider for variations of defender penalties could be that you reduce the number of dice rather than -1 the WS. Two 3+ dice is better than one 2+ die against a single attack, in the two-attack WS 2+ example of a fighter.
This means that you could lift the defending dice limit and it means a juve (2 attacks) charging a 2 attack champion forces the champion to choose between retaliating with 2 dice or defending with 1 die.
Does AP+1 give a model with no armor a 6+ save?
I feel that limit is needed, otherwise nothing stops people from turtling all the time and that just prolongs game. I think every time someone fights both sides have to throw at least one attack at each other.
To be honest, I'd much more perfer if everyone involved tried testing as is. If you see that something is clearly not working or could be streamlined, just voice your opinion and it might get changed. The more playtesters and feedback we have the better, and if playtesters change the ruleset as they see fit, then its not going to work.
That is, nothing stops you from cherrypicking rules that you like for your own system, I don't mind. I've even put out a source .doc and fonts I've used, so the project has a chance to continue even if I lose interest.
I also hope that the community responds well to it.
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I was thinking whether or not defender should be able to defend when their attacker is outside the vision arc, or if he should get some penalties. Do note that it is easy for defender to get turned around, because in YCE engaging a pinned fighter makes them stand up, but their facing is determined by the attacker.
Currently I think that there is no need to forbid it or add aditional penalties and leave everything as it is, because pinning a fighter to charge by somebody else is rather easy to do and having a total of -2WS penalty for defender would turn defending into fishing for 6's a lot of the time.
Currently I think that there is no need to forbid it or add aditional penalties and leave everything as it is, because pinning a fighter to charge by somebody else is rather easy to do and having a total of -2WS penalty for defender would turn defending into fishing for 6's a lot of the time.
Don't know if this was considered. Small rule needed for Backstab.
Backstab applies when you come into B2B outside of the fighter vision arc even if the opponent chooses to turn the figure afterward.
Backstab applies when you come into B2B outside of the fighter vision arc even if the opponent chooses to turn the figure afterward.
That's a good point actually; directional armours as well.
If you let the defender pivot before attacks, charging someone in the rear no longer allows you to avoid frontal armour (such as shields or furnace plates)
If you let the defender pivot before attacks, charging someone in the rear no longer allows you to avoid frontal armour (such as shields or furnace plates)
I'm trying to write 'the Main Rulebook' in such a way so that you can plug it with GW publications and run with minimal to none houseruling. Which means that we have to make rules considering how vanilla weapon traits and gear work.
Currently, the main rulebook's melee goes like this:
- attacker initiates Fight outside target's vision arc
- target decides whether to defend or not, defending costs -1WS for this fight
- attacker rolls all to hit rolls while target hasn't pivoted yet (which means that backstab triggers and shields/frontal armour are ignored). defender rolls defence dice even if attacker is oustide their vision arc, also defender's weapon does not matter (so a fighter with WS3+ will always defend on 4+, regardless if his weapon has -1 or +1 to hit at 'E' range).
- target can pivot and make reactionary attacks. defender would do this with a total penalty of -2, (-1 to hit rolls for pivoting and -1WS for defending in the first place)
Can you think of any reason a Juve would charge a high WS/A target in your system?
...
...
It's near-guaranteed suicide. You'd be throwing the Juve away in your own turn, and setting up the opposing fighter to do something dangerous in their own turn.
Okay, sadly its super late for me, but later tomorrow, in about 18-19 hours, I'll post what I think is a better rewording of the close combat chapter. I'm really used to write rules for games and I think I can help to make things clearer, anyway, you'll be the judge in the end
What I'm seeing is that the text mention attacker and defender, but that creates confusion in my opinion. Also, at step 1, I would put a reminder like this (Note that the Defender perform this rotation only after the attacker has performed step 7). (yeah, I know I just used terms "attacker/defender" I just wrote should be avoided)
What I'm seeing is that the text mention attacker and defender, but that creates confusion in my opinion. Also, at step 1, I would put a reminder like this (Note that the Defender perform this rotation only after the attacker has performed step 7). (yeah, I know I just used terms "attacker/defender" I just wrote should be avoided)
That would be appreciated.
If you had enemy pinned, so you backstab them after charge or you charge and not hit to create assistance/interference (2 juves would force someone to defend at -2WS for example, which would allow attacking with ease)
Does anyone think Interference should apply to defense rolls?
After all, verisimilitude.
What about weapon types? Seems hard to parry blows if you're armed with a whip and a pistol, or an industrial saw, or a flail a spiderman gauntlet....
Verisimilitude.
Or maybe we're meant to imagine defense rolls as jukes and wiggles, not parries? Shouldn't they be based on an Initiative test (quickness and alertness), or maybe a Strength test (raw speed and athleticism), then?
[Cawdor voice] Verisimilitude! Verisimilitude! Verisimilitude!
After all, verisimilitude.
What about weapon types? Seems hard to parry blows if you're armed with a whip and a pistol, or an industrial saw, or a flail a spiderman gauntlet....
Verisimilitude.
Or maybe we're meant to imagine defense rolls as jukes and wiggles, not parries? Shouldn't they be based on an Initiative test (quickness and alertness), or maybe a Strength test (raw speed and athleticism), then?
[Cawdor voice] Verisimilitude! Verisimilitude! Verisimilitude!
That's a good catch. I've intended for it to work that way, however RAW it does not currently, I'll change that. If you are fighting 3v1, it should be really hard to defend.
The only restriction I'm putting is that you can't defend without a weapon with a 'melee' trait, which means that only having a pistol won't cut it.
I wouldn't add positive or negative modifiers for weapons, because it'd make defending with anything that gives +1 to hit way too easy perhaps.
Yeah, narratively these are jukes and dodges. I'd still prefer them to be WS checks, first of all, it is easier to remember (all tests in CC for attacks/defence are done with WS checks) and secondly, WS is ironically a very underused stat in a game. Initiative is needed to cross obstacles and retreat from melee, which sems fairly useful.
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It's no less used than BS, really. It's just more difficult to get a charge than it is to get a shot.
I brought up the juking stuff to poke fun at what I think is an unintentional consequence of making rules like this. Namely, that you're now compelled to imagine somebody like a 400 pound Goliath dude bobbing and weaving, because he has good WS and A scores.
I interpret WS as somebody's likelihood of sinking a blow, against a variety of fighting styles. Not their overall ability as a duellist (for the reasons alluded to in the previous post).
All of this discussion has actually served to make me appreciate the current melee paradigm a lot more. Particularly when I read this:
So you broke the game, to make a gambit that was difficult to achieve, but reliably devastating, easy to achieve. And then said, "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, something so easy to achieve should not be this reliably devastating!" (breaking the game even more deeply, imo).
The standard rules make shooting omnipresent, but quite difficult to actually kill somebody with (between the abundance of cover, the 1/6 chance of rolling an OOA, and pinned models almost always breaking LoS for subsequent shots). And the rules make melee rare, and challenging to set up, but reward doing so with a very high chance of removing a target.
The challenge of locking in a charge is one of the great pleasures of this ruleset, for me, and I don't understand people who don't want to rise to that challenge, and would prefer their model to always have its cake and eat it. The positional counterplay of deploying/choosing routes for melee fighters across the board is one of the more tense, demanding aspects of the game. These house rules make it so you might as well just set up your melee beast directly across from the opponent's melee beast, because a charge is just going to come down to a coinflip.
Can I ask the proponents of contested melee rules why they would not be satisfied with something much less ambitious, that still accounts for a gap in WS scores? Like, say:
No Pushover
When a fighter rolls to hit against an enemy with a WS equal to or greater than their own, they subtract one from their results.
Edit: I know I've been very feisty about these rules lately, but I promise it's not personal. If I have time I'm going to try to do an editing pass for you (before returning to my crusade resisting the implementation of these rules
). Your English is excellent, though, and most of the errors are just dropped articles (which don't exist at all in Russian, iirc).
Perhaps GW broke the game when they introduced CGC, and realised a 'close combat gang' didn't work, unless you 'made it far harder to shoot them'. But rather than try to fix either shooting or CC so that it was better for the game, overall, instead we got CGC with their antics, and then a close combat monster arms race (Stimmers, Death Maidens, and Delaque Nacht-Ghul, Thralls and Spekters) that while not assuming the horrible heights of CGC still pile on the issue of Paired especially and its negative impact on CC, so that charging fighters could become ambot killers with their 10 or so attacks hitting at Strength Death and AP butter knife.
But @KA7777, while you may enjoy the tactical glory of pulling off that charge, and we all do when it works out, the base game literally punishes you in terms of credits, XP and injuries for even considering pursuing it. While you mentioned having cover, not everyone has enough cover in their collection, and there is no real guidance on what players should bring to the table. That tacit knowledge isn't easy to express.
While indeed pinning may remove a target (unless you bring infra sights or potent skills to bare), the game gives you a 50& chance of making the target combat ineffective if you wound them (SI and OOA), and rapid fire and blast can offset even the issue of pinning, but either laying on two or three shots with your first hit (especially punishing if the weapon is a boltgun or better), or using the blast template from a nasty weapon to clip a pinned target. If the game started fighters with lower BS and had random advancement, the issues with shooting would be less magnified, but Van Saar and Venators with 2+ starting stats, who can then spend all their XP on toughness, or skills, or whatever else is felt needed have a very negative impact on the game, as does the ease with which 3+ BS leaders and champions can quickly become 2+ master-snipers if you want that. The ease with which you can also obtain shooting-enhancing gear also has a nasty impact on the campaign, versus the lack of value in picking CC-focused gear. It's all problematic, and SG's own solution was 'to break the game' - interesting, yes?
But @KA7777, while you may enjoy the tactical glory of pulling off that charge, and we all do when it works out, the base game literally punishes you in terms of credits, XP and injuries for even considering pursuing it. While you mentioned having cover, not everyone has enough cover in their collection, and there is no real guidance on what players should bring to the table. That tacit knowledge isn't easy to express.
While indeed pinning may remove a target (unless you bring infra sights or potent skills to bare), the game gives you a 50& chance of making the target combat ineffective if you wound them (SI and OOA), and rapid fire and blast can offset even the issue of pinning, but either laying on two or three shots with your first hit (especially punishing if the weapon is a boltgun or better), or using the blast template from a nasty weapon to clip a pinned target. If the game started fighters with lower BS and had random advancement, the issues with shooting would be less magnified, but Van Saar and Venators with 2+ starting stats, who can then spend all their XP on toughness, or skills, or whatever else is felt needed have a very negative impact on the game, as does the ease with which 3+ BS leaders and champions can quickly become 2+ master-snipers if you want that. The ease with which you can also obtain shooting-enhancing gear also has a nasty impact on the campaign, versus the lack of value in picking CC-focused gear. It's all problematic, and SG's own solution was 'to break the game' - interesting, yes?
When I look at the sum total of the YCE offering I come away with the feeling, "well, might as well just make a shooting gang," though.
In the 3-4 campaigns I've played since 2018 I always strove to have at least one GEARED melee fighter, and 1-3 melee-centric gangers. Even when I was using the Gangs of Legend lists, and the scariest thing you could put together was, like, a power weapon and a plasma pistol, and even when playing a gang like Van Saar that has barely any opportunity to lean into CC builds.
But if I were to play with the YCE I think I'd stop doing that. Certainly, the low-level melee fighters would be useless. They stand zero chance of bum-rushing a melee champ, and, once the campaign meta has shaken out, and everyone takes the cheapest available CC weapon in their third slot, even fights against other troopers start getting into coinflip territory.
I wouldn't use a melee specialist, since it becomes so easy to counter one by slamming its mirror into it.
So I might just field a boring shooter's club, the very thing a ruleset like this seems to want to de-power.
I expect the shooting/melee power balance will change again when JawRippa does revised statlines, and nobody has 2+ BS... but that BS restriction alone would rebalance the shooting/melee landscape. No need for a clunky duel system that doesn't even have the nuance to bring to life the kind of scenarios its designed to do justice to (ie. a bruiser versus a fencer)
In the 3-4 campaigns I've played since 2018 I always strove to have at least one GEARED melee fighter, and 1-3 melee-centric gangers. Even when I was using the Gangs of Legend lists, and the scariest thing you could put together was, like, a power weapon and a plasma pistol, and even when playing a gang like Van Saar that has barely any opportunity to lean into CC builds.
But if I were to play with the YCE I think I'd stop doing that. Certainly, the low-level melee fighters would be useless. They stand zero chance of bum-rushing a melee champ, and, once the campaign meta has shaken out, and everyone takes the cheapest available CC weapon in their third slot, even fights against other troopers start getting into coinflip territory.
I wouldn't use a melee specialist, since it becomes so easy to counter one by slamming its mirror into it.
So I might just field a boring shooter's club, the very thing a ruleset like this seems to want to de-power.
I expect the shooting/melee power balance will change again when JawRippa does revised statlines, and nobody has 2+ BS... but that BS restriction alone would rebalance the shooting/melee landscape. No need for a clunky duel system that doesn't even have the nuance to bring to life the kind of scenarios its designed to do justice to (ie. a bruiser versus a fencer)
Okay, first I need to acknowledge a mistake on my part, I reread the real rules and found that fighters already make a free spin when they make a counterattack, thus backstab technically always worked correctly in the game, with the activating fighter spinning first, attacking, then the other fighter made its free spin and made its reaction attack. I thought all of that was part of your custom rules but wasn't. So my bad on that part.
Rereading your text, I find it a bit less confusing.
Question, what does this line mean at step 5
"Defender needs to have at least a single attack die left."
Rereading your text, I find it a bit less confusing.
Question, what does this line mean at step 5
"Defender needs to have at least a single attack die left."
Say, you have a ganger with 1A base. He also has two weapons, which gives him +1A, for a total of 2A. This means, that if he defends, he can put only 1 defence die aside and has to leave 1A to retaliate. If he had 3A, he could choose to put 1 or 2 defence dice to retaliate with 2A or 1A.
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