Critique these Houserules

I’ve seen these type of gaming tweaks before. Here are some examples of a League rules tried out at a local Game Store by some players:



Shield with Armor is a +2 instead of a +1 Armor Save.

The -1 penalty for 2 weapon fighting.

Heavy Armor: Change the -1M penalty to -1I

Slings: 5gc and Heroes only

(some other goofy rules I can’t remember off hand)



The League was on one night a week and started with 8 members. After 3 weeks (I joined in the 4^th week), there was 3 players and my self. It was my first Game, I was playing Sisters for the First strike with Steel Whips. One player, the Host showed, with his Dwarves against my Sisters. He won. The Dwarves he fielded all had Heavy or Gromil Armor, Shields, Helmets, and pistols. I ducked and weaved in and out of building to get close and avoid the Crossbows and Rifles from high up at table edge. When the Sisters got into HtH with the Dwarf ground troops. I started figuring out why the other players dropped out. The Dwarves had Armor Saves of 2+. Only 6’s to Wound (with Crits) seemed to work. Now I figured out why the other dropped out. The seemingly simple changes, changed the Game Mechanics extremely. Many other warbands became no longer competitive. The Undead player had lots of Zombies, the Dwarf Noble almost took out all them alone in the first game. The Skaven player dropped out soon after that because his Henchmen had no ranged weapons, and were destroyed because if they could hardly wound and, the Dwarf was in Knock Down, they couldn’t finish him for OOA.



The next Band I was going to try these rules with against the Dwarves, was Amazons. The Claws of the Old Ones, Sun Staves, and Sun Gauntlets all ignore Armor. I’m sure the Amazons would no longer be welcome. I figured if the rules were so tweaked then the Amazons should be allowed to play. By the way the League was over before the next game.



The Moral to the story is, if you going to try tweaking the rules, you have to try them in all aspects. For and against for all Warbands. If you want increase armor bounus, play a Warband that can’t have armor. If you want to reduce the Strength or Range of a weapon, play a Warband that relies on it. And one game isn’t enough play the Band for about 10 games, and see if you still want it changed. See if other Warbands are still competitive, or have they been eliminated because they can’t survive.

It's a little unfair to use dwarfs in that example. Dwarf warbands are well known for being overpowered.

I think most players will disagree that dwarfs are overpowered - they can actually be a very tough warband to play successfully and bad luck at the beginning really cripples them.

Conversely, I don't really see that the issue Shadowphx is running into is uniquely a dwarf problem. If the dwarfs are able to get that much armor, everyone else shoult be as well. Granted they can start with Gromril, and if they do they'll have a very tiny starting warband that is easily swarmed and taken down due to their lack of mobility. Lord knows their extra treasure from mining won't help, as they'll need every bit they can get to keep their ranks up in the event that someone ever dies - dwarfs are extremely expensive to replace.

Theoretically, with the set-up he's talking about there, any warband would have had the opportunity to adequately armor themselves and be tanks running around with 2+ armor saves. Frankly, with the amount of money people have to spend on armor a 2+ save shouldn't be as difficult to attain as it is! Then throw in that a str 4 attack will bring that up to a 3+, axe makes it a 4+, critical hits tend to ignore it altogether, a guy with a great weapon or flail is very likely to bring that to a 5 or 6+ save, and on and on. The problem with armor is that it is too easy to get around compared with the investment, so I think it works rather well to have good armor saves, both as an incentive for people to gear up a bit more and as an incentive to mix up your equipment styles a bit.

Yes, this is the first I've heard of Dwarfs being overpowered (often lamented f or being ... well ... crap) and it really sounds like you got an abusive power player running the show ... even in the core rules I don't think they would stop them.

Now, I've heard arguements for these two different save mechanisms.

Shield gets +1 with hand weapon in hth.

Light, Heavy, Ithilmar, Gromril Armour gets bumped up save of +1.

One helps deter the persistance for duel weilding, the other gives body armour a value more reasonable to its cost ... really not sure what to go with ... or say something like, shields 5+ save only applies with a hand weapon and when wearing no armour?

Thank you Myntokk.

+1