Surviving Combat

For gaining experience, what is "survives the battle"? If the Hero/entire Henchmen group gets taken OOA, do they lose out on that xp, or do they get it as long as the Hero/entire Henchmen group doesn't get killed via the serious injury chart?

And two more questions;
1) Can you shoot through allies?
2) Does melee combat block los for shooting, or provide cover?

Reg06 wrote:

For gaining experience, what is "survives the battle"? If the Hero/entire Henchmen group gets taken OOA, do they lose out on that xp, or do they get it as long as the Hero/entire Henchmen group doesn't get killed via the serious injury chart?

As long as not killed they get xp. They can't be used for searching for stuff though.

Reg06 wrote:

And two more questions;
1) Can you shoot through allies?
2) Does melee combat block los for shooting, or provide cover?

These two my gang plays this way:
1) Yes. As long as they're not in melee...
2) It provides cover, but if you miss by one when rolling to hit, you hit the melee instead, randomized.

Nothing to add to folketsfiende's answer to the first one.

Shooting through allies: in our group, no if they are directly in the way, or yes but with "cover" for the target if the friendly model is partly in the way but the shooter can see a reasonable portion of the target model.

Shooting past melee combat: basically the same answer as above - no or yes with cover for the target, depending.

Our gaming group plays it differently with surviving combat. We play that the model literally has to walk off the field to count as surviving, with henchmen groups only one of the group needs to walk off for the whole group to have counted as surviving. While it may not be the rules as intended we play it so people don't put all of their henchmen in groups of one for the off-chance of better experience upgrades.

For surviving combat, there are two separate ways to read it (and they are very different). If you've played the other way, how do you feel it changed the game?
I can see surviving meaning "not killed" gets members to advance much quicker than if it meant "not taken OOA", which makes getting max heroes and many xp gathering henchmen right at the start even more of a top priority. But everyone is happy because they actually get their members to advance. But this has the side effect of reducing the value of things that don't gain xp.

Living Rulebook page 81 writes

Code:

If you look through the scenarios you will notice that
warriors always earn +1 Experience point for
surviving a battle. They earn this even if they are
injured – so long as they live to fight again!

So it's pointed out even models taken out of action will recive the exp. U could also say, just taking part in tha senario grants the exp point as dying makes the exp redudant anyway.

Surviving: We play it, as Keylan states, the way the living rulebook spells it out.

Your other questions: we play that combats block line-of-sight, Friendly models don't but they will give the target cover.

Cool. Thanks for the answers.

We play that melee blocks line of sight in the same way you can not see through an enemy model.

Shooting into a melee is okay, as long as you dont have any models involved, randomly hitting a target.

Surviving the battle is just that, if the model took place, and didn't get killed as a result, they get the exp. Henchmen groups being the same.

We have never really had a problem with groups of 1 henchmen, as trying to hire additional henchmen later with exp costs $$ as you have to then pay for the exp, and you are only able to get so much exp to purchase new henchmen between each battle. SO potentially if you roll bad for your exp, or shards it could take a while to build that group up to 5 members etc.

"Shooting into a melee is okay, as long as you dont have any models
involved, randomly hitting a target."

That is the official rule found in the "Chaos in the Streets" article. It isn't in the original rulebook because those rules assume two-player games.

The danger I have seen with playing the 'only xp for not ooa' method is that in a medium to long campaign, whoever starts winning will get harder and harder to catch because they will be taking their opponents OOA more so getting more xp. They get enough of an advantage for generally *earning* more xp than the people they are fighting - they don't really need the advantage of them earning xp *and* denying their enemy xp too.

If an ally makes out the cover however and you miss by one! (i.e you need 4+ and roll a 3) the cover, that is your ally, is hit instead!

mweaver wrote:

"Shooting into a melee is okay, as long as you dont have any models
involved, randomly hitting a target."

That is the official rule found in the "Chaos in the Streets" article. It isn't in the original rulebook because those rules assume two-player games.

I knew we played that way for a reason