On shields and armour

Nice idea!

Our little group actually made some drastic changes to the parry and armour rules. For a basic start, armour is half the cost and +1 to the save, Heavy armour therefore costs 25gc and has a 4+ save.
As for shields they confer their armour save (of 5+) only when being shot at UNLESS they are shot from a different angle (making positioning very important) in CC a shield grants an extra parry, not an armour save, we did this for 2 reasons.
1. Parrying is a much cooler, action film way of stopping a blow than saying 'it could get through the armour'
2. It in courages a model to either be aggressive or defensive, either wielding a sword an a shield (1 attack and 2 parries) or two swords (2 attacks and 1 parry) - we agreed that swords should not confer 2 parries and that a shield should not confer and extra attack.

UNLESS they have the folioing home brew skill
SHIELD BASH - allows an extra attack with the shield, cannot be parried, does not cause critical hits, and can only stun or knock down, not take Out of Action. Its a cool image i think that a warrior with a sword and shield will smash his opponent to the ground with his shield and then deliver a killing blow while he's on the ground.

There are some really nice ideas here
However I fear that too "drastic" changes might slow the gameplay down some. And confuse veteran players
We did some changes in our group, found here: on my blog
So far it has worked really well. People actually buy the different armour types, witch means there's a point to use armour piercing weapons and the fact that the shield is useful has brought forth quite a few morning stars and spears
Bucklers however might still need some attention, as we still don't see any in use :/

bucklers are stupid anyway, no one else has ever bothered to make a distinction between a shield or a buckler historically or otherwise.

I don't think this is the case. Admittedly, I have only used a shield for a year or so and a buckler for a few months, but I have watched it being used quite a bit and, even with my small exposure to it, it is pretty obvious that shields and bucklers are used with different techniques.

Granted, they are both used to block and parry but axes and maces are both used to strike and parry and we give them different rules too.

Historically, bucklers were *more* popular on the battlefield than shields both with knights and foot-soldiers for a variety of reasons. Personally, I suspect one of the main ones was cost. Shields needed to be replaced after pretty much any battle in which they saw conflict whereas the buckler (being made of metal) did not.

This is the first easy-to-read essay I found on Google, but there are others if you can be bothered looking.

In Mordheim their lack of use in general seems to come from the fact that all they do is grant a parry if you don't have one or a re-roll if you do, and parry is frankly weak.

In my group we are still looking at ways of making bucklers more interesting, but have not yet finalised on what we are going to do.

Things we are experimenting with:
Bucklers allow an additional parry if you have a weapon with parry.
Bucklers allow parrys on equal rolls
Bucklers allow an offhand that has one or more of the following:
The attack has concussion
The attack is -1 to hit
The attack is -1 S
The attack is +1AS
The attack is -1I
The attack is Always Strikes Last

We are also looking at adding shields skills and buckler skills that will do some of the above e.g. a skill that grants the offhand attack or extra parry or +1 to parry or something. Buckler skills will be in the Combat section and shield skills will be in the Strength section. Or maybe some will be in one or the other?

We are also looking at changing the base parry mechanic, both to increase the value of parry and the value of WS. Mechanics we are looking at so far are:
Parry on a flat 5+
Parry on a successful WS 'hit' against opponent (rolled separately and normal modifiers)
Parry on a successful 'wound', but with WS substituted for S and T.
Parry on a successful 'wound', but with WS+S substituted for S and T.
Parry on a successful 'wound', but with WS substituted for S and T, enemy S-mods apply.

As you can see that is a *lot* of combinations and permutations to test, but so far we are looking at giving the buckler an off-hand attack at -1S and granting parry or a parry re-roll if you already have a parry. We already have a house-rule that shields and bucklers add +1 AS in melee. The WS+S 'wound' gives the best numbers so far, but sacrifices simplicity more than we like so we are still looking.

I found if you allow people to choose one hit to parry per round of combat, parry ends up being worth it, and it minimises the amount of rule changing.

I have home-ruled shield skills in my home campaigns, but unless we changed the shields to always have minimum armour save of 6+, shields were still hardly used.

I only mentioned bucklers being stupid because few, if any, other games bother with bucklers and they are, as you said, too weak to be very useful.

the only use i ever had for bucklers was for low WS models in the early stages of the game. ie: WS2 models.
these ones get hit on 3 a lot, and that re roll can keep em alive quite a bit longer.
however, once they get to WS3, they usually dumped the bucklers and went for shields

brokenv wrote:

I found if you allow people to choose one hit to parry per round of combat, parry ends up being worth it, and it minimises the amount of rule changing.

Duh. So simple and obvious. No wonder none of us thought of it .

brokenv wrote:

...few, if any, other games bother with bucklers and they are, as you said, too weak to be very useful.

Yeah - too many games think of them as just shields, but smaller and therefore less effective. D&D is one of the bigger propagators of this, but so it goes. Ah well, just a few nudges and they can be actually good, and different from shields .

Changing the parry to block the lowest hit roll rather than the highest... I LIKE IT!!! It would definitely make them more appealing than dual-wielding... I may try a sample game with this in mind to see how my players like it.

Spectre76 wrote:

Changing the parry to block the lowest hit roll rather than the highest... I LIKE IT!!! It would definitely make them more appealing than dual-wielding... I may try a sample game with this in mind to see how my players like it.

I played one campaign trying to make shields and parry worthwhile, and started with super strong rules and marked them down until it felt balanced. Shields with unmitigated 6+ saves and choice of parry were the easiest and fairest. We also ended with armour at light 6/ heavy 5/ ithmilar 4/ gromril 3 and no move modifiers.

We did away with -1 modifiers to off hands (too much math), giving shields 5+ save and bucklers 6+, as well as allowing parry on ties.

I've almost gotten to the imbalance in shooting weapons but I haven't play tested enough.