Location, Location, Location

Ever since it came out in 2001, I have been obsessed with Games Workshop's cult classic "narrative skirmish" game Inquisitor.

With that said, I have never actually had the good fortune to actually play a game of it. As a strapped then-15 year-old who could barely afford 28mm miniatures, buying into a new range of 54mm minis was beyond my means. Not to mention those chunky metal models would have been well beyond my ability to build and paint. In the end, Inquisitor received only scant official support before being palmed off onto Fanatic and half a dozen or so issues of Exterminatus magazine, after which it was allowed to slowly die.

Nevertheless, the entire aesthetic of the models, setting, art and the arcane d100 system captivated me and has continued to do so for over 20 years.

Recently, I had the pleasure of watching an interview with John Blanche and Gav Thorpe by FilmDeg Miniatures on Youtube, wherein they spoke of the art and game design respectively. It was fascinating to hear Gav speak about his game design decisions and how they hearkened back to classic Old West Gunfighter games and the like. As such, the game mechanics were made deliberately baroque, as Gav described it, and were intentionally not made to be modern or cutting edge.

This made me wonder however, what if we gave Inquisitor a fresh lick of paint? What if we tarted it up a bit and made it a bit more palatable to modern sensibilities?

Well, let's give it a try.

First of all, I thought to dispense with the d100 for a d20, to reflect most tabletop gamers' familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons. Next, I considered the problem of the Attack Roll. It is something of the zeitgeist that attack rolls are on the way out, at least in the RPG space, with classic OSR fare such as Into The Odd and the soon-to-be released "cinematic, tactical, heroic fantasy" crowdfunded juggernaut MCDM RPG dispensing with them entirely.

In Inquisitor, one rolls to hit by rolling equal to or under one's Ballistic Skill on a d100. On a hit, one then rolls on the hit location chart. However, if the body part hit is behind cover then it is essentially a miss. Therefore, I thought, if we assume that combatants will naturally seek cover during a gunfight, why not skip the attack roll altogether, and go straight to the location roll? If the location rolled is behind cover, it's a miss. If it's not behind cover, it's a hit!

This is fine right up until we start thinking about applying modifiers. If we simply apply traditional +/- modifiers, we risk always getting headshots or always getting our feet blown off or some other slightly hilariously implausible outcome. So, let me propose a solution:

In the first column is the unmodified Hit Location chart. In the second is the Difficult Shot chart, where only even numbered results are hits. In the final column is the Impossible Shot chart, where only results divisible by 4 count as hits. So if you have disadvantage on your shot (target is at great distance, shooting while moving etc.) then your chances of a meaningful hit suddenly halve. If you are attempting an extremely unlikely shot (target is at extreme range or heavily obscured, shooting while sprinting etc.) then your chances are quartered!

This allows us to add penalties to hit without having to resort to +/- modifiers whilst retaining an even spread of hit locations. But what if we want to add a bonus? We can not double or quadruple our chances as easily as doing the opposite. Let us therefore refer back to our initial goal: bring Inquisitor up to date by using design language that the modern gamer is already familiar with. As such, let's loot the Proficiency Bonus from Dungeons & Dragons 5E, apply it to our Ballistic Skill and create a derived stat from it. Let's call it our Shooting Factor.

If our Ballistic Skill is between 1-20, then our Shooting Factor is between 2-6. If we have advantage on a shot (took the aim action before a shot, attacking an unaware or surprised enemy etc.), we can add or subtract a value equal to or up to our Shooting Factor from the Hit Location roll to place our shot. For example, if we have a Shooting Factor of 6, if we roll a 7 or less we can always choose to score a head shot! If you remember my old "Randomly Generating Magic Items in Warhammer Fantasy 5th Edition" post, we discussed how Rogue Trader allowed characters to alter their equipment rolls in much a similar way.

In summary: D20 roll under for ability checks. Attack rolls are made straight to location, locations behind cover are missed. Attacks made at disadvantage have their possible locations halved or quartered. Attacks made at advantage may be placed.

This post was inspired by Prismatic Wasteland's Blog Challenge: New (Year's) Resolution Mechanic! Thanks to them I have been inspired to at least write down some of the ideas that I have been sitting on for a while! So what did you think of this one? It definitely lends itself best to a gunfighter-style game, however melee combat would be a brutal tactic that could pay off if you're brave enough.

It's been a while since I last posted here and I'm not promising I'll be around much in the future but either way, until then!

Making Herohammer Victory Points Better with Final Liberation

Back when Games Workshop released Epic 40K in 1997 I was entranced by the concept of playing out battles on a massive scale, with legions of tanks, infantry and gigantic war machines racing across the table to smash their foes. Unfortunately however Epic 40K was not a huge success and was soon withdrawn by GW so I never actually got the chance to play it. I did however, play a whole lot of the video game spinoff Final Liberation.

That's Commissar Holt!

But what does this have to do with Warhammer Fantasy? Well, Victory Points in Warhammer Fantasy always felt a little bit underdeveloped to me. Unless you had a particularly compelling scenario to play, they were basically just a tally of the enemy units you had destroyed. For every 100 points or so worth of enemies vanquished you got 1 VP. By the end of turn 4 if there wasn't a clear winner then whoever had the most VPs would win. You could award bonus VPs for completing scenario objectives or conditions but there wasn't much more to it than that.

On the other hand Final Liberation had a very interesting Victory Point system, called the Morale Score. An army's Morale Score was its total current points value, meaning that you would start the game with a maximum amount of VPs and destroying enemy units would not gain you VPs but would reduce the enemy's Morale Score. Okay cool but so what? What difference does it make whether VPs are additive or subtractive? Well like I said, using a Morale Score or subtractive VPs establishes a maximum score that an army can achieve, you can't gain VPs indefinitely. Also if an army's Morale Score is reduced to 0, they are defeated. Okay fine, but again, so what? Doesn't that mean that you now have to utterly destroy your opponent to win? That's a great question friend and I'm glad you asked but the answer is no, because:

Objectives.

That's right, objectives. Any good scenario has some sort of objective or condition that one or both sides must achieve. Normally holding an objective will get you 1 VP per turn or something but using subtractive VPs holding an objective now reduces your opponents score. Given that VP scores are now capped, this will create a sense of urgency as armies race across the field or otherwise act as quickly as possible before their score goes to 0. Perhaps the armies are fighting over a hill or a village, whichever side not currently holding the target area taking damage to their Morale Score. Perhaps one army is fighting a rear guard action, and the enemy loses Morale for each unit that escapes off the opposite board edge!

I feel like capping VPs and thus threatening players with defeat via inaction or insufficient/ineffective action will encourage bold actions and create more interesting scenarios, rather than players holding units back until the perfect time or manoeuvring excessively. The time for action is now! Anyway let's crunch a few numbers:

While I am a great fan of 1 point = 1 VP systems such as Final Liberation and WHFB 6E, to avoid excessive arithmeticking we'll stick with 100 points = 1 VP (if you don't mind the maths then feel free to use 1 point = 1 VP or 10 points = 1 VP etc.). In this case your army's Morale Score is its points value divided by 100. So a 1500pt army is worth 15 VPs, a 2000pt army 20 VPs and so on.  The score is then divided amongst your units to the nearest 100 points (i.e. 50-149 points = 1 VP, 150-249 = 2 VPs etc.). It might come to pass that, after dividing up your Morale Score, you have excess VPs left. In this case add them to your general's score, to indicate their importance. If you have VPs left to allocate because you have units that are worth less than 50 points (e.g. a number of unattached Goblin Shamans) then distribute excess VPs amongst them in order of expense before giving any left over to your general. It is possible that some cheaper units could start the battle with 0 VPs. This is fine. Once all VPs are allocated, mark each unit's VPs on your army list.

So how will the scoring work? First of all, an army can lose VPs by having units fleeing, destroyed or reduced to half strength. A unit that is destroyed loses all its VPs. A unit that flees or is reduced to half strength loses half its VPs. This is permanent. In the case of fractions, round down. This means a 1 VP unit that flees or is reduced to half strength loses its only VP. A unit that flees and is reduced to half strength loses all its VPs, even if it rallies later.

Objectives: the exact manner in which VPs are affected by objectives will depend on the scenario so feel free to get creative. Here are some suggestions: 

• Your army must take and hold a hill, building or other such terrain feature. Your enemy loses 1 VP for every turn that you do so.
• You are fighting a rear guard action and your army must escape off the opposite board edge. For each unit that escapes, your opponent loses as many VPs as the unit is worth.
• You catch an unprepared enemy force and must destroy it before reinforcements arrive. For each unit of enemy reinforcements that arrive, you lose as many VPs as the unit is worth.
• You must assassinate the enemy general. You lose 1 VP each turn until they die. However, your opponent loses twice their general's VPs if they do.
• You must stop the demon summoning ritual. You lose as many VPs as the demons are worth when they are summoned. However the enemy does not lose any VPs if the demons flee, are reduced to half strength or destroyed. Act quickly!

Anyway those are just some suggestions! What do you think? As ever feel free to be creative: tweak the VP costs of objectives, have multiple objectives or give each side different missions! Leave your own suggestions in the comments! Personally I think there's huge value to injecting a sense of urgency into Warhammer games, which otherwise can have a tendency to drag on. Also I feel that adding a narrative focus and playing interesting scenarios is a much better advertisement of what Warhammer can be rather than just fighting Pitched Battles all the time! Anyway thanks for reading and I hope to see you next time.

Until then!

Randomly Generating Magic Items in Warhammer Fantasy 5th Edition

I've been getting back into retro Warhammer lately, especially the infamous Herohammer games (4th and 5th editions). These editions are well known for their Fun Is Mandatory, Game Balance Is Optional attitude and that's why we love them. Powerful heroes flying around the battlefield on terrifying monsters, wielding artefacts of obscene power is just the kind of bonkers 90s nonsense that makes us 30-and-40-something gamers misty-eyed.

However sometimes things get a bit excessive and there's only so much Black Gem of Gnar or Heart of Woe spam you can handle before you have to put your foot down. Now, finding inventive ways to limit the power of magic items has always been a thing and pretty much everyone had their own house rules on the subject, and some of them are included in the article Magic Revisited in White Dwarf 222:

A fine article

Of all the potential options listed, what most grabbed my imagination was the Dangerous Free-Thinking Radical Rule, which advocated randomly assigning magic items to players. This put me in mind of character generation processes from Rogue Trader, where instead of outfitting your Sergeants and Captains etc. with bought items from the equipment list, you could instead pay a nominal points cost for a roll on a special equipment table, allowing you to randomly generate your character! Depending how the dice fell, you might come out of it with a stub gun and a knife or a heavy bolter and a vortex grenade!

A small, maddening glimpse into the bananas world of Rogue Trader

So I thought to myself, how can I translate such over the top wackiness into 5th Edition WFB? Well the unfortunate answer is with maths. So let's crunch a few numbers:

In the Warhammer Magic supplement there are 224 magic items listed with a total cost of 11,100 points, giving an average of about 49.5 pts. Now, you could just leave it at that and say that every magic item costs 50 pts and is randomly generated. Boom. Done. Madness ensues, everybody cheers.

However, we can pay at least a little lip service to fairness and game balance. Magic items are divided into seven categories, each with their own average costs. As such paying 50 points for a magic weapon or a bound spell will be a good deal on average (56pts/62pts) while a piece of magic armour will be a bad deal on average (31pts). So I came up with the following costs per category:

• Magic Weapons: 50pt
• Magic Armour: 25pts
• Magic Standards: 50 pts
• Enchanted Items: 35 pts
• Wards: 35 pts
• Wizards Arcana: 50 pts
• Bound Spells: 65 pts

So there you have it, you pay the cost to shuffle the deck and cross your fingers. Obviously you should maybe let players mulligan cards that they can't use (race-specific items, lances for characters on foot etc.) unless you truly enjoy chaos and brutality in which case players could be forced to discard unsuitable items with no refund. Ouch! As for the points costs I came up with, I have generally erred towards generosity and there is generally at least a 50% chance that players will get their money's worth, however if you want to make magic items more expensive then feel free to tweak the numbers to your liking!

Let me know what you think! Whether you're a Dangerous Free-Thinking Radical or a Hard-Nosed Competitive Type I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time!

FIRST

Welcome to the Two Thousand Points blog! I'm your host, Pets, and this is a place for me to indulge my interest in tabletop wargaming and roleplaying games (in general) and Warhammer Fantasy 5th edition and whinging about what I don't like about Dungeons and Dragons (in particular).

Hope to see you next post!