Defend the find and hidden treasure

Defend the find:
Victory terms for defend the find state"if at the end of defender turn the attacker has more standing models within 6" of the objective than the defender, the attacker wins". So attacker wins when hee gets in the vicinity of target building, should not be much of a task since attacker choses table edge for purposes of deployment and gets first turn. We will be playing orcs vs. skaven vs. witch hunters and by those terms witch hunters will always lose battle right after, lets say, third round of orc/skaven movement phase simply because of their superior numbers (unless WH will get some real good shooting). Orcs/skaven need just to run into vicinity of the target and avoid missle fire. On the other hand WH player after such defeat will gain 3 pieces of wyrdstone just because his heroes were sitting in the building playing cards/shooting crossbows. To avoid certain defeat WH could rush out from the building, but what for? Minimal casualties + 3 wyrdstone + 5 heroes standing - personally I would not move an inch away from the building if I were them.

All these factors make scenario kind of... lame, and I think it needs some changes. For now, I consider changing victory conditions to simple "we play till someone routs", this way the scenario will see some actual fighting. Of course we can alwas just not play this scenario, but I prefer rather to fix it, than to avoid it. Has anyone have other Ideas? We played it only once, but maybe some one has a different view on the matter?

Hidden treasure:
This one is in my opinion not so much broken as... peculiar. You find the treasure if you roll 12 when entering the building. Should both warbands fail to find the treasure via dice rolls (and double 6 doesn't happen too often), it will be fond in the last building automatically. This means that I can leave one building unchecked near my own deployment with one henchman standing by the door and rush with the rest of my warband to ransack other buidings or face the enemy. Chances are that no one will get double 6 while searching the buildings, and then my lucky hero/henchman gets in, retrieves treasure and gets away easily wile rest of my warband covers his escape. Naturally both players can do that, but I see no reason in enemy getting the spoils, when I did all the searching.

To avoid such turn of events I guess each warband should get +1 to their finding rolls for each building searched (and this bonus would be counted separately for both warbands - each is rewarded for its hard work). This way after searching two buildings I would need only roll a score of 10 in the third building. That change is not too great, but now you can actually find the treasure on you own with a lucky roll instead of waiting someone to loot all buildings. Lets say this bonus reflect warband's growing determination to find the treasure before competition, making their ransacking more throughout:) )

Again, I would be thankful for any Ideas/ different points of view.

Well, for the "Hidden Treasure", I suppose the other warband will be just as smart, thus, there will be two buildings at the end left unsearched... still, then you need to "protect" the building, binding up some of your warband and giving your opponent a better chance at manoeuvering, etc...

As to "Defend the Find". Obviously, if you're playing two vs. one and then it's two warbands with lots of models vs. one with very few, things get unbalanced. For changes, you could increase the amount fighters that have to be within radius, reduce the radius (perhaps limit it to within a building), add some secundary objectives/random happenings to the scenario, or have the winning condition start after a certain turn only (like 6 turns or whatever - if the warbands want to just sit this period out in hiding, I think they lack some spirit of the game )

Eliazar wrote:

Well, for the "Hidden Treasure", I suppose the other warband will be just as smart, thus, there will be two buildings at the end left unsearched... still, then you need to "protect" the building, binding up some of your warband and giving your opponent a better chance at manoeuvering, etc...

Well, that kind of spoils the game for me - with both warbands guarding their buildings outcome of scenario would depend rather on who rout first than searching. Both warbands would just clash somewhere in the middle fighting till they drop. Well, you could try to run with one of your henchmen past enemy to search "their" building. Hmm, maybe its not that bad, still doesn't feel right to me though.

Eliazar wrote:

As to "Defend the Find". Obviously, if you're playing two vs. one and then it's two warbands with lots of models vs. one with very few, things get unbalanced. For changes, you could increase the amount fighters that have to be within radius, reduce the radius (perhaps limit it to within a building), add some secundary objectives/random happenings to the scenario, or have the winning condition start after a certain turn only (like 6 turns or whatever - if the warbands want to just sit this period out in hiding, I think they lack some spirit of the game )

Having victory condition start after a certain turn is a neat idea, thanks. Maybe a D3 + 3 turns, or D6+1 - I like a certain level of randomness in my games

if you are playing Defend the Find with 3 players, you are not playing it as it was intended to be played. I suggest the Chaos on the Streets article from the Best of TC and the 2002 Annual for actual multi-player scenarios.

I like Defend the Find as the Defender because you can assure yourself the maximum treasure from the scenario. An attacker who does not 'enter' the find is out of luck for the extra wyrdstone awarded for occupying he find.


Hidden Treasure gets discussed regularly there are several easy fixes to the last building problem. mweaver and styrofoamking have both proposed excellent variations.

I agree about the peculiarity of 'Hidden Treasure' - and it is kind of counterintuitive, too, to decide the location of the treasure (that is the reason for the warbands' being in the area in the first place) ad hoc and after searching already has commenced.

An alternative would be adding the step of locating the treasure to the pre-game phase - after all buildings and terrain have been placed and after everyone has set up his warband, take a number of two-sided counters equal to the number of buildings on the table, with one that has a 'Jackpot / Treasure' marking and the rest empty, shuffle them and place one in every building / possible location (face down, of course, so that no player knows where the Jackpot actually is). When searching a building in the game, the player gets to flip the counter over, and if it has the X, the treasure has been found.
That way, everyone really has to search and the building with the treasure is predetermined by chance, not by lame waiting tactics.

If you want even more, MWeaver has one scenario on his blog (A Stake in Time Saves Ryan) that uses this method, and adds rules for actually looking for the treasure in the building itself, too (instead of the old 'As soon as I step through the doorway, I know if the treasure is in this building or not', the searching process can last several turns, because the counters are only flipped over if a certain number is reached on a D6, with modifiers for different circumstances); they work very well.

/Edit: I should really write less. Or faster. Then everything I say would not already have been said.

I normally rule that searching is done at the end of the Movement phase- that way, you can't be sure which building it is until everyone has moved (also prevents a sprinter from searching 2 buildings in one turn!)

Although, as a possible variation that just hit me-

Searching results aren't presented at the end of the turn, but at the end of the round. If the last building has been searched, the treasure is found in one of the buildings searched during that round. (ex. If Player A searches 2 buildings, then player b searchs the last one, the treasure is in one of those 3 buildings.)

Thus, if you have the "two buildings left" situaiton, if one player steps into a place, the other player may step into his building. Also, you have to be out of combat / not knocked down /stunned to search, meaning you can interupt a searcher.

One thing i've thought about for the hidden treasure mission is to increase the chances of finding the treasure in other buildings. Usually we run into the same thing as described above where each side leaves one unsearched building on their side. Next time I'm going to propose that we have a decreassing difficulty. First building searched needs a 12 to find the treasure. Second building needs an 11+, Third a 10+, etc. This would encourage people to actually search buildings and increase the chances of it actually coming out from a dice roll.

edit-
Just noticed this is basically what you proposed in the first post but I guess I missed that I think I like the idea of increasing the counter for the side that actually searches buildings. Put a counter on all the buildings that are valid, when you search the building you take that token off and it adds +1 to your rolls. As for the searching thing, we always rule that searching a building ends your movement phase so you can't search two buildings with one person.

It's my brudder Jim's blog, actually. Here is a link to some of our scenarios. "The Lost Chest" is our replacement for the Hidden Treasure scenario. It has produced some seriously fun games.

http://hobbyblog.wargameweaver.com/mordheim

We use a method similar to what Drayven suggests to try for Hidden Treasure. The warbands accumulate bonuses to search separately so one warband cannot sit back and guard a final building and receive a bonus to search. It seems to work well.

Defend the Find is a favorite of mine, especially when I am outnumbered. The appeal of Mordheim to me is not just winning but the play. So when my dwarves are swarmed by rats its a mad dash to kill as many as you can, as fast as you can.

Other scenarios pose some terrrible starting situations: Surprise Attack can be a quick rout but thats the dice!

Thanks everyone, now I have some new Ideas to think about

Mephysto wrote:

An alternative would be adding the step of locating the treasure to the pre-game phase - after all buildings and terrain have been placed and after everyone has set up his warband, take a number of two-sided counters equal to the number of buildings on the table, with one that has a 'Jackpot / Treasure' marking and the rest empty, shuffle them and place one in every building / possible location (face down, of course, so that no player knows where the Jackpot actually is). When searching a building in the game, the player gets to flip the counter over, and if it has the X, the treasure has been found.
That way, everyone really has to search and the building with the treasure is predetermined by chance, not by lame waiting tactics.

If you want even more, MWeaver has one scenario on his blog (A Stake in Time Saves Ryan) that uses this method, and adds rules for actually looking for the treasure in the building itself, too (instead of the old 'As soon as I step through the doorway, I know if the treasure is in this building or not', the searching process can last several turns, because the counters are only flipped over if a certain number is reached on a D6, with modifiers for different circumstances); they work very well.

Adding two sided counters before battle sounds interesting, I like the Idea of treasure being in that particular location from the start. And the additional rules for searching within the building are great. Come to think of it, finding treasure cannot be as easy as walking through the doors I'll try out those rules next time we play

In my group RAW hidden treasure is one of our favourite scenarios to play because of the strategy involved. How do you split up your warband? Too much on defence and you cannot punch through and 'search' your opponent's guarded building. Too much on offence and you cannot defend your own building. Too few scouts and you leave yourself vulnerable to a lucky find of the treasure when your opponent finds it on a double 6. Too many scouts and your offence and/or defence will suffer.

In practice it seems to be somewhere between a quarter of the games we play and half of them where the treasure is rolled up (we have never studied it - it seemed fun enough as it was). Perhaps this is another case where using not enough terrain makes the game poorer? 20-25 rolls seems like it will find the treasure a non-trivial amount of time.

To be honest, I tend to enjoy the games *more* where the treasure is auto-found, but the risk of it being found somewhere else is needed to make the balancing of forces and roles challenging.