House Rule: Hiding Revision

If you've ever played Necromunda, you might know that there are two types of cover: soft cover at -1 to hit (for a partially obscured model), and hard cover at -2 to hit (if 50% or more of the model is behind cover.) This, of course, dones not carry over perfectly to Mordheim, as the Necro weapons /shooting are set up differently.

But how's this for a house rule:

Cover: Any model that has any part of his body (not including weapons or clothing) obscured counts as being behind cover, and suffers -1 to hit.
Hiding: Any model that has at least 50% of his body obscured behind an obstacle may declare himself as hidden.

Thus, the rules for cover don't change, the rules for hiding themselves don't change- the only switch is that the model has to be covered by 50% to hide.

I haven't played in a few months, but I remember a game wherein an ogre hid behind a crate the height of his shin. Made no sense. Thoughts?

We occasionally have discussions about what's in cover, but it's easier to go with the 'not everything can be represented on the tabletop' than it is to go with a more 'actual line of sight rule' (like the hated current version of warhammer).

We have used the hard cover/soft cover rules from Warhammer for a house rule since Mordhiem came out. It causes some difficulty for new players on occasion, but it plays fairly smoothly.

My house rule makes it so that the object the warrior is trying to hide behind must be the size of the warrior. They would be able to crouch, kneel, squeeze, cower, pick up a shiny etc. The point of my house rules is to make it more cinematic, even if not quite as gamey. More fun for the younger players especially I have noticed. Especially the image of a guy hiding behind a low wall, reloading and popping up for shots with his handgun or bow.

In my group we added an additional -1 for 'intervening obstacle' for things that were in the way, but were not 'cover' per se, for example when you have to shoot through a window you are not standing next to and then further on to the target itself. Intervening obstacle would stack with -1 for cover, of course. For now we have left trick shot as it is negating cover, but not intervening obstacles, but we might reverse that, or possibly make it ignore both.

In any case, what we did for cover was to steal a rule from Infinity and make it so that to claim cover you have to be in base-base contact with it. If you are not in base-base you are considered to be just running around, if you are and declare yourself in cover then you are considered to be squooshing yourself and minimising your profile etc. If a model can see all of a model taking cover then they cannot claim cover against that model.

Also considering stealing from Infinity the fact that being in cover not only gives you -1 to be hit, it also gives you +1 to your armour save.

One thing I liked about Mordheim cover rules (coming from Necro) is their lack of ambiguity. If you are obscured you get minus one; if not you get nothing. No having to decide if you get -1 or -2.

I think if you adopt the b-b to declare cover to get -1 and have that stack with -1 for an obscuring obstacle you could get the granularity you want (0, -1, -2) for cover without having to mess around with the whole is-that-50% issue. Personally, I think if an ogre were to take cover behind a barrel by going prone and aligning himself properly, then yes, he should be able to claim -2 cover. Being only a barrel though, it wouldn't take a lot of moving from one side or the other to uncover the ogre.

An Ogre ducking behind a small barrel would grant him cover, I grant that. But put an ogre that's 8 foot tall and 5 foot wide behind a 3 foot tall skinny barrel and suddenly "you can't see him" takes a little bit more imagination.

I agree, can't see at all is a bit of a stretch. I don't know how thin your barrel was or how big your ogre was, but if it was the standard GW barrel and the standard GW Mordheim ogre (which I *do* have and can therefore imagine) I think an ogre going prone behind a barrel and sqwooshing himself up *could* reasonably claim -2 cover from people in front of him.

It wouldn't take a lot of movement to either side to lessen that though, so perhaps something along the lines of "If both sides of a model are visible while behind cover, a maximum of -1 can be claimed. That would stop people from getting -2 from dead shrubs, small rocks, fence posts, and thin barrels. I would imagine large targets would run into this more than normal sized warriors.

Also bare in mind that the hiding rules say that you can only hide behind something that could reasonably conceal the model. An ogre hiding behind a barrel that could barely hide a human is just silly.

There you go then. Rules for reduced cover provided *and* the rules to stop silly hiding already exist .