Random turns,you have to love the chaos

Not sure if it belongs in this section, but has anyone ever tried random game turns instead of the normal turn based system, i know it sounds a bit strange but it works really well in scenarios like bar room brawl and adds a bit of real time feel to the gameplay as you never know who's turn will come up next.

Why the heck not? A battle report of this could be interesting.

While random turn order within rounds of play work in a game like Man O' War, units in such games (like squads and independents) still take turns between players. The largest issue with randomizing turn order in a game like Mordheim is that one side takes their entire turn before the other player.

At a minimum, you should change the Recovery phase to happen at the beginning of each round of turns for all players rather than at the beginning of each player's individual turn. That way you'll at least have a chance to recover from all my charging DW clubs stunning you all over the place before I get to wipe the floor with you.

A much more complicated, but involved solution would be to adopt the interworven play order of Man O' War, like this:

1. Beginning of each set of turns, perform Recovery phase for all players.

2. Roll for order of player turns within the set of turns.

3. Each player, in successive rounds of turns, Move and Shoots with one hero or henchman group. Warbands with much higher numbers of heroes+henchman groups should interleave their movement so that there is not a huge overage of moves for one player at the end of the round - for example, if I have 6 heroes and 3 henchmen groups for my Skaven, and you have 4 heroes and 2 henchman groups for your Dwarves, I should move/shoot 1 hero/henchman group the first 3 times, then 2 the last three, for every 1 you move/shoot. You will likely have to mark who has moved/shot so you don't forget. Note that intercepting a charge will count as a model's movement, so he couldn't intercept and then move off again.

4. After all movement/shooting, HtH should be resolved in normal order (First/normal/Last strike, with Initiative/model rolls within each category).

That'll mix it up. Honestely, the turn order of Man O' War is one of the hallmarks that makes it such a great game. I just don't know if this complexity would mesh well with Mordheim's own.

There is also the card system..

each model gets a card assigned to it (just write his name on a card or some solution like that...)
Then you shuffle the whole deck (all labelled cards from every player)
take a card from the top, and the corresponding player moves that model/group of henchmen . they get to move, shoot and do close combat before the next card is drawn.


or as we played it in multiplayer games:

Roll for priority each phase:
Movement - dice off, add your leaders LD and who has highest score gets to move his warband
Shooting - dice off, add your leaders LD and who has highest score gets to do some shooting.
Close Combat - dice off, add your leaders LD and who has highest score gets to bash some skulls in

This worked rather nicely. and added more randomness.

It only really works for tight packed scenarios like bar room brawl, no shooting and very little movement, on large tables it gets very confusing as to who is doing what and when, but if you can keep a good record it can be fun as you have to rethink a lot of strategy on the move. We found it best to use a deck of cards and allocate one to each model, shuffle the deck and away you go, instanr chaos

How about rolling a D6 and adding the initiative or leadership to the role and determine the order of the turn that way?

It would take a fair amount of time to roll on their respective leadership for every hero and henchman group, especially as you would have to do so every turn. it's far easier to use cards and just reshuffle every turn

Ah, yes that would be tiresome, I meant that you in the beginning of a turn each player roll towards it's leaders LD, and the person with the highest score gets to go first – slightly random, though it gives the leader an more interesting role, Say that if a leader is Stunned/knocked down/OOA you have to role against the second highest (as with rout tests).