"What house rules do you guys use?" Topic

Curious what house rules people use at the moment. After a few games, this is what I use. Note.. some of the rules are set because my girlfriend personally likes playing games with a bit more reliability because she started tabletop gaming with Mordheim. I personally don't mind the randomness SOBH can present as it makes you plan for overall vs just a turn by turn phase since your plans can go wrong in a pinch.

1. You can sacrifice your activations for a move no matter what distance. This allows for at least low quality troops to have some sort of reliability. They can focus all their resources on moving. I know this one is potentially a game changer because now all low quality troops have the potential to help pile in on a model, but even from a fluff standpoint it seems like teaming up on a single guy is something even low disciplined combatants are naturally drawn to.

2. You get +1 score for each size category rather than just a flat +1. It just made more sense to me that a gargantuan model would have a greater advantage over a small/normal model compared to a large one. There are already groups/tourneys that use this rule and it doesn't really change much so it does satisfy fluff without compromising balance.

3. The one I've been tossing around is the whole "Fate Tokens" idea. Essentially each side gets designated a set amount and this can be used before any rolls to manipulate the outcome by 1. We've yet to determine whether we should allow more than 1 point spent, but I think the fact that the rolls are done before makes it so its still a gamble when to use it because you're unsure if you would have made a successful roll anyways. It does however allow for dramatic clutch plays.

4. Another iffy one I've been tossing around is the ability to give leaders a free activation similar to Heroes, but it can only be used for leadership roles.

Again, most these are used with the intention to take out some of the randomness. I know its not for everyone.. but I'm curious on what others are doing out there. Feel free to include why you've made house rules and what your games are geared towards.

For solo dungeon crawls, I disregard the warband rules on personalities. I use a 300-point party where every model has the 'Hero' ability. Keeps the amount of models manageable and allows for each one to do at least one thing per turn for the most part.

With smaller parties, I don't have the numbers to lug around treasure chests, so I tossed out those rules as well.

Ooh yea.. thats one I forgot to mention. Since we're coming from Mordheim, we like having heroes/personalities. We limit Personalities to 50% of total score rather than the usual.

My group tends to dislike the Savage rule and avoids it.

We also allow a figure with short move to make a move using 1 action if they would otherwise require 2, but only rolled 1 success.

I don't care for the rules that give extra personality abilities out, I think the game gets boring with too much of that stuff.

In our current campaign, we allowed extra personalities but required a magic user to be in the warband, I do not think the extra personalities helped the game to be more fun.

Some that I would like to try are:
-anything with a combat of 5 or better after bonuses from abilities should be considered a personality.
-I would like to make cleric more useful, perhaps give range to its abilities, or give it an anti-magic bubble, like they have in HotT.

Very interesting theme timli. Seems like you're going the opposite route of our group being more character-centric.

I have used the following rule for ages – and in my case ages is a very long time.

Any natural throw of the dice that comes to 13 is an automatic miss throw or penalty.

It adds to the gaming fun when ever a 13 is thrown and the thrower has not noticed, only to be told by everyone else – Unlucky for some!

Tony

-I would like to make cleric more useful, perhaps give range to its abilities, or give it an anti-magic bubble, like they have in HotT.

Interesting idea. One of the problems with clerics is that the healing ability is not all that useful in a game in which it's rare for the cleric to have anything to heal (since there are no hit-points or wounds or whatnot tracked). Only in the relatively rare instances of a fig losing Q is it useful. I like the anti-magic bubble idea. Perhaps it could be a variation on transfix, but easier to succeed and only applicable to magic users?

Doug

Doug a cleric can make a knocked down fig stand up -- very useful to avoid death and a gruesome kill.

The only change we've used so far is to ignore the "straight move only" rules. But the truth is, we rarely have need to break up moves…most of them are straight shots already.

Doug a cleric can make a knocked down fig stand up -- very useful to avoid death and a gruesome kill.

True. I'd forgotten about that. Still, I like the idea of clerics having some sort of magical ECM ability (similar to HotT).

Doug

One that we've altered, for added reliability, is that you may re-roll the first activation of your turn if it is a failed activation (but you may not switch characters or change the number of dice rolled, so it's not treated as a free shot at three actions for lower Q models). This works well for most of our games, which are by and large "Songs of Our Ancestors", the Quar variant, but might be less balanced when using warbands with more personalities.

We also generally let a Shaken/Knocked Down model crawl (or roll) 1 short distance if it attempts to activate to recover, normally needing 2 actions, but only gets one success.