New Campaign.

Me and my friends are planning on starting up a new Mordheim Campaign now in the next few days or so. Before we've only been playing a minor amount, with the rules straight out of the rulebook found on GWs website. What I was wondering is what we should do to balance the game slightly, considering some things are broken. I know most can be found by searching the forums, but there is such a massive amount of ideas that I've seen just from looking for half an hour and I've got no idea which ideas work well with others and so on.

So simply, I would love to if anyone can help me with a list of minor changes that helps balance the most broken things in the game, for example DW and the weakness of Armour.

Thanks,
vonCruxz.

From all my experience it appears that the most common alterations are as follows...

Common
1: Attacking with two weapons imposes a -1hit modifier (this can be removed by taking a new "combat" skill)

2: Shields give a +1 to armour save normally but give +2 in close combat if being used in conjunction with a one handed weapon

3: Reduce the cost of basic armours (some reduce it by half, others less than)

Other less common but still suggested/used by some people are as follows...

Experimental/Controversial
1: Shields give a 6+ save against HITS rather than adding to armour saves, essentially an additional but weak "Step Aside" or "Dodge"

2: Body armour gives heroes a chance to make a save against rolling on the serious injuries chart, (so for example if a heavy armour wielding char is taken OOA in a game they don't need to roll on the serious injuries chart if they can roll a 5+ on a single D6 etc) Note, this is highly controversial as it penalises warbands/heroes that cannot wear armour.

3: Some people straight up buff the armour saves of the body armour, so light = 5+, heavy = 4+, etc etc, rather than reducing the cost. (Bear in mind this will also buff the defences of any dual wielding characters, which is very dangerous if not combined with a DW nerf)

4: when dual wielding, allocate one weapon to your "main hand" and one to your"off-hand". Attacks made with a weapon in your "off-hand" incur a -1 hit modifier (a slightly weaker dual wield nerf).

5: When using a shield in one hand you gain an additional "Shield bash" attack, treat this as a dagger attack, (this essentially falls into the mindset of "Lets even out dual wielding by letting almost everybody get two attacks!") Note: I have seen some people add this as a combat skill rather than a baseline rules change.

I've possibly missed some, but those are the ones that keep cropping up over and over. I can personally recommend the top three "Common" ones as I have used them with various success when organising campaigns in the past. The others have their merits and downsides, I think their use or non use will really come down to what warbands are taking part in the campaign and what your players would like to see.

I would recommend compiling a list of possible rules changes and sitting down with your players to see how everybody feels about, then pick some from the list and have a few pit fights or small battles to see how they all work together. You never know, you may find that they are actually not bothered with the changes and are perfectly happy with vanilla rules, in which case there is no need to worry ^^

Hope you find a solution that fits.

It would help to know what is 'unbalanced' in your opinion.

I have only been flitting around the internet for the past 3 yrs or so, so I was quite unaware of balance issues until I discovered them in cyberspace. That said there were several rules that we had adopted from Warhammer that show up as 'balancers'. At the time we just thought they were cool rules...

Mordheim isn't the prefect game system, but I don't know one that is. What I do like is its flexibility.

Well, one thing I think is sad is that some weapon setups are simply just better in every way than others in the basic rules. For example most DW options are greatly superior to Swords-Shield in my opinion.
Other than that, Armour has almost never been used in our games since it is to little gain for to much gcs.

My friends, me being a skaven player, often complain greatly on how overpowered slings are too. But I believe that can easily be balanced by making armour more cost-efficient.

I was a little bit wondering what others think is unbalanced and what they've done to balance it. We have never really have had any longer campaigns, just short ones so we haven't really noticed late game play much which we were hoping this round to have.

we use the main 3 listed above.
we also gave all armour a slight boost/rework
Light 6+ for 5 gold
med 5+ 15 gold
Heavy 4+ for 25 gold
Shield 6/5+ as listed above for 5 gold
Buckler 6+ and parry for 5 gold
thats off the top of my head on those

we also implemented a changed Crit hit chart

1-2: 1 wound equals 2
3-4: 1 wound equals 2. +1 to the injury roll
5-6: 1 wound equals 2; +2 to the injury roll, no armour

the end result of all of this is to get armour on models and make duel wielding less valuable. Result is more diverse game play.

We are also going to experiment with letting healing herbs be put on any model to be used as a re-roll on the Serious Injury chart (post game) to see if they die. Reason being is mainly due to the large models giving them a better chance to survive, but also other heavy investments as well.

Pervavita wrote:

We are also going to experiment with letting healing herbs be put on any model to be used as a re-roll on the Serious Injury chart (post game) to see if they die. Reason being is mainly due to the large models giving them a better chance to survive, but also other heavy investments as well.

I've been testing some new rules I made for encampments in our upcoming campaign that you may be interested in. You basically start with some tents then reinforce/upgrade it and you can hire people to form an "entourage" of followers/workers to help your warband indirectly.

One of the followers I'm testing is as an alteration of the Doctor rules from the "Sawbones" Town Cryer mags.

He works as per normal but after each battle you can pay him to allow you to re-roll the serious injuries chart of ONE hero. It costs 15+D6 gc per wound on the characters statline and the second result stands (even if it is worse).

Not had a chance to try this out in a long running campaign yet, but I'm hoping it will work out nicely and encourage people to use more big guys (other than the bloody trolls -.-') you might want to give it a try? You could adapt it outside of the camps by simply saying that one hero can give up their exploration phase to take an injured member to the doctor?

@Pervavita

Does that mean the Gromril armour would give a 3+ save? Or do they get something else positive.

yes, but the cost of it and Ithmil armour is unchanged.
You have to remember a few things.
on a roll of 1 an AS is always a fail. So Gromril vs heavy armour and shield is no diffrent.
also you still run a 33% chance to ignore armour on a crit
and last, strength 4+ is something that happens a lot in Mordheim; it also makes great swords a lot more usefull (S6 will negate 3 levels of armour).
So armour is still viable, but at the same time you also encourage 2 handed weapons to break through the armour.
We have seen a lot of diffrent weapon choices in our games.
It also odd enough helps nerf elves! those pesky shooters have a much harder time with armour then most (due to no black powder, strength skills, or x-bows) so all those great hits they make don't break through nearly as much.


The doc rules seam interesting. may try something out like this.

@Pervavita: I meant to ask, I like the idea of adding a Medium armour option, but I have two questions about it,

1: How do you decide what heroes/henchmen can/can't wear it?
2: How do you different armours interact when combined with shields , reduced movement etc?

med armour we made it so if they could use heavy they can use medium armour.
Medium acts the same as with a shield as heavy armour.
So in effect we just added a heavier version of armour to the mix and lowered all cost.