Yet another house rules/feedback thread

Hi Guys

I just opened this account today in order to get some feedback outside the inner circle of our Mordheim group. Sometimes, when making house rules I fell like I might get tunnel vison and loose sight of the bigger picture. I already tested the waters on the the Mordheim subreddit, but I figured it might be even more helpfull to cut away the middle man and dive straight for the Mordheim Geek epicenter of excellence   

but onwards to the presentation:

We are a group of danish Mordheim afficionados, who have been playing a lot of Mordheim for the last year and a half. During this time we have developed quite a few house rules and additions to balance the game to our taste. This has included both revisons of weapons and rules in general. The following is a list of our most significant changes. I would love to get som feedback from you guys to what we could improve or what should be changed.


General Rules:

Off-hand weapons are at -2 to hit. There is a combat skill called ambidextrous, which cancels that.

parry: We use the somewhat common house rule favoring weapon skill. the defender sucessfully parry if he passes a to hit test. it is however, only allowed to make one parry each combat round (extra sword or buckler gives +1 to the parry roll). Furthermore it is not possible to parry any attacks that are more than +1 St over the defenders Strength (after weapon modifiers!).

Heroic effort: This is a post-game discussion between the players after each game, where we nominate any characters who  might have made reckless, and occationally borderline suicidal moves (a Skink making a diving charge on a Troll, or a skaven singlehandedly taking on three Beastmen). The unit is rewarded with one or two additional experince points. This rule is mainly for reflektion of the ended scenario and to encourage people to take some outrageous chances once in a while


Equipment.
Spear - 7 gc, strike first, unwieldy

Halberd - 10 gc, strike first, +1 ST two handed

light armor - 10 gc

Hvy armor - 25 gc, -1 int if using shield.

Shield - 5 gc, 6+ ward save. New special rule "shield wall" - If in base contact with another friendly model using shield, they get an additional +1 save, though this can be modified.

Helmet - 5 gc, treat 1-3 as knocked down (the old rule seemed to be an unnecessary extra dice roll)

hammer/mace - 5 gc, concussion

slings - 10 gc

apart from slings, all other ranged weapons have been largely unchanged.
Results from current rules.

Report of the experience so far:
All in all the games seem more balanced. Swords, halberds and great weapons, seems to be the favored weapons for most, whereas dualwielding is used mainly by youngbloods and weaker henchmen.
The reduced cost of armor means that it is used more frequently, though it is stille rarely seen before mid-game scenarios. The reduced costs of helmets however, means that they are quite common, so maybe 5 gc is a bit too cheap.

in terms of missile weapons there is a fairly even split between bands favoring bows and those swearing to the crossbow, which is nice! Handguns still seem terribly imbalanced however so any ideas on how to modify these, without them loosing the feeling of exotic new warfarwe, will be much appreciated!

As mentioned any constructive feedback is appreciated!
Thanks for your time and sorry for the rant

For handguns in my group we made a house-rule that handguns and hunting rifles have the special rule Penetrating Wounds: When rolling for injury, roll two dice and use the highest result. This meant the rifles were noticeably deadlier without either increasing their strength, or giving plusses to their injury or wounds.

We took away Quick Shot from Crossbows to improve Handguns. Not sure how that would work for your group as it may push people towards Bows more while you currently feel like you have a nice balance there.

Another option is not to change anything for Handguns and they remain rarer. Blackpowder weapons were still rare during the time of Mordheim.

@ Lord 0: That seems ike a pretty ingenious house rule!
I never even considered that approach, but this would certainly make the handguns more worth their price.

@RationalLemming: True!, we would not want to destroy the current balance between bows and xbows, and frankly I think it would cause a riot to even propose the removal of quick shot   As for the last option, I completely agree that handguns should not be a common sight, but I think this needs to be adressed by the rarety roll and general availablity, not by keeping them in the current condition where people don't buy them because they are like a bad version of the crossbow, only more expensive.

J0shua85 wrote:

We are a group of danish Mordheim afficionados, who have been playing a lot of Mordheim for the last year and a half. During this time we have developed quite a few house rules and additions to balance the game to our taste. This has included both revisons of weapons and rules in general. The following is a list of our most significant changes. I would love to get som feedback from you guys to what we could improve or what should be changed.

Where are you playing?  

J0shua85 wrote:

Off-hand weapons are at -2 to hit. There is a combat skill called ambidextrous, which cancels that.

We play with excactly that rule and find it to be quite fair - I've also made quite a lot of calculations supporting this rule.

J0shua85 wrote:

parry: We use the somewhat common house rule favoring weapon skill. the defender sucessfully parry if he passes a to hit test. it is however, only allowed to make one parry each combat round (extra sword or buckler gives +1 to the parry roll). Furthermore it is not possible to parry any attacks that are more than +1 St over the defenders Strength (after weapon modifiers!).

Can't say much about it, except how are you using this with the Dwarf Master of Blades skill?

J0shua85 wrote:

Heroic effort: This is a post-game discussion between the players after each game, where we nominate any characters who  might have made reckless, and occationally borderline suicidal moves (a Skink making a diving charge on a Troll, or a skaven singlehandedly taking on three Beastmen). The unit is rewarded with one or two additional experince points. This rule is mainly for reflektion of the ended scenario and to encourage people to take some outrageous chances once in a while

Sounds quite fun!

J0shua85 wrote:

Spear - 7 gc, strike first, unwieldy

Might be in order with a price reduction. Haven't calculated that yet, but I'll get back to that soon

J0shua85 wrote:

light armor - 10 gc

Same price for ours, except Lizardmen who gets Light Armour for 25gc as pr. normal rules.

J0shua85 wrote:

Hvy armor - 25 gc, -1 int if using shield.

Doesn't this undermine the Ithilmar Armour? We've kept it as it is at least

J0shua85 wrote:

Shield - 5 gc, 6+ ward save. New special rule "shield wall" - If in base contact with another friendly model using shield, they get an additional +1 save, though this can be modified.

Ward save means it cannot be modified in any way and that it's taken after Armour saves?'
And the additional save, is that a Ward save or Armour save?

J0shua85 wrote:

Helmet - 5 gc, treat 1-3 as knocked down (the old rule seemed to be an unnecessary extra dice roll)

Must disagree here. Helmets are, first of all, worth the price! Second, what about the skills for Orcs and Dwarves that improve their save to 2+ with a Helmet? Also Dwarves has this Injury table, and Saurus can get the same with the skill Toughened Hide: 1-2 KD, 3-5 Stun, 6 OOA. Lastly, Maces/Hammers changes the normal injury table to 1 KD, 2-4 Stun, 5-6 OOA, so this will also prove to be a problem.

J0shua85 wrote:

hammer/mace - 5 gc, concussion

Agree, hammer/mace is underpriced - IF you're going for a stun.

J0shua85 wrote:

slings - 10 gc

Might be a bit too much, we have them for 5gc and find that pretty fair. They're better than Short Bows, but not on par with Bows, so a place in between might be more in order. Then again, it's a special weapon accessible to few, so that might also be included in the calculation made by the original creators.

J0shua85 wrote:

Handguns still seem terribly imbalanced however so any ideas on how to modify these, without them loosing the feeling of exotic new warfarwe, will be much appreciated!

Handguns are quite awesome for a Dwarf with Quick Shot, Hunter, Nimble, Trick Shooter, etc. - then you can change to a Handgun when forced to move and Quick Shot the rest of the time. But yeah, other than that it's not too good.

Aipha wrote:

Where are you playing?  

For the moment we are just doing casual games in our respective apartments, but I think most of us would be up for getting our mettle tested at any semi-official tournaments as well. I just don't know of any in and around Copenhagen.

Aipha wrote:

We play with excactly that rule and find it to be quite fair - I've also made quite a lot of calculations supporting this rule.

So you're the numbers crunching guy eh? Knowing one of these is always nice when you dabble in the development of house rules   

Aipha wrote:

Can't say much about it, except how are you using this with the Dwarf Master of Blades skill?

To be honest this has not yet come up, but we do have a dwarf player so we definitely have to adress this! I guess the most logical rule would be either giving +1 to parry or maybe that the character can ignore our other house rule of not being able to block attacks that are at least 2 St higher than the defenders.

Aipha wrote:

Might be in order with a price reduction. Haven't calculated that yet, but I'll get back to that soon

I'm inclined to agree. with halberds having the +1 st as well as strike first it seems to be much favored over the spear. So it might be necessary to lower the cost of spears and/or raise the price of halberds, or alternatively give the spear another special rule to buff it a bit.

Aipha wrote:

Doesn't this undermine the Ithilmar Armour? We've kept it as it is at least

I see your point. I guess we could decide to say either that the Ithilmar armor does not have the -1 int or that in fact it gives +1 int even though it is technically heavy armor. Either way it is not often seen in combat, so I imagine it won't be a big issue, but we'll see.

Aipha wrote:

Ward save means it cannot be modified in any way and that it's taken after Armour saves?' And the additional save, is that a Ward save or Armour save?

hmm.. As we have used it so far, it has just been when rolling for armor save, meaning that a person with shield always saved on a 6. the additional save would mean that unarmored soldiers with shields, who were in base contact, had a 5+ armor save, but that strength and other modifiers would be able to modify it all the way to the 6+ ward save. This meant that warbands using shields would have to make a decision to either stay close together in order to recieve the armor bonus, but at the cost of mobility and increased risk of being flanked. Or that they could split up, but then they would only recieve the ward save.

Aipha wrote:

Must disagree here. Helmets are, first of all, worth the price! Second, what about the skills for Orcs and Dwarves that improve their save to 2+ with a Helmet? Also Dwarves has this Injury table, and Saurus can get the same with the skill Toughened Hide: 1-2 KD, 3-5 Stun, 6 OOA. Lastly, Maces/Hammers changes the normal injury table to 1 KD, 2-4 Stun, 5-6 OOA, so this will also prove to be a problem.

Yeah I think you're right about helmets being worth 10 gc. I think our price reduction on armor made us think it would be silly that a helmet cost the same as light armor, but for gameplay purposes it is at least as good if not better!
I can see the problem with the dwarf and orc special rule, but with the others, it can be circumvented by saying that regardless of race, one number on the dice, which would normally result in stun, now counts as a knocked down in stead. Humans would only be stunned on a 4 whereas Dwarves and Saurus with toughened hide would be stunned on a 4 or 5. of course it could be argued that humans have their risk of being stunned reduced by half, whereas for. example dwarves now only have a third, but I see it as both races recive an additional  one-in-six chance reduction of stun. The earlier model can also be argued to favor the hard-headed dwarves as they would benefit from a 50% chance of avoiding stun, on three of their dice rolls in stead of the normal two. To get back to the orc and dwarf special rule, maybe they could just get an additional modifier of 5+ when rolling the 4 or 5? I'm not exactly sure, but it will certainly have to be adressed.

Aipha wrote:

Might be a bit too much, we have them for 5gc and find that pretty fair. They're better than Short Bows, but not on par with Bows, so a place in between might be more in order. Then again, it's a special weapon accessible to few, so that might also be included in the calculation made by the original creators.

Yeah slings seem to be an eternal point of discussion. It was actually our skaven player who suggested keeping the rules as is and raising the price to 10, as this would both lower the incentive to sling spamming and also encourage him to think more out of the box when using skaven.

Aipha wrote:

Handguns are quite awesome for a Dwarf with Quick Shot, Hunter, Nimble, Trick Shooter, etc. - then you can change to a Handgun when forced to move and Quick Shot the rest of the time. But yeah, other than that it's not too good.

Can you use quickshot with gunpowder weapons?! I thought they were restricted to one shot because of them being gunpowder, and that it is only usable by bows and xbows. I think just the fact that you need this amount of skills to make handguns viable, goes to show that they are not balanced enough.

Overall, I think everything seems decently balanced. I'd agree that helmets are underpriced at 5gc, and slings are overpriced - 7gc might be more appropriate, if you're having an issue with sling spam.

Quick Shot cannot be used with Handguns without a house rule, as the skill specifies 'bow or crossbow' only. It's entirely logical to house-rule allowing it to be combined with Hunter, though. For my group, we just removed Prepare Shot entirely, allowed Quick Shot, and introduced the gunpowder optional rule - it's still an inferior choice to crossbows (less range, more expensive, rare, and can jam/explode, with only an extra -1 save modifier), but at least it's not utterly inferior.

The "Heroic Effort" rule is a nice little flavor house rule. It's a great idea to reward some more gutsy play, since a lot of Mordheim players play very conservatively which ends up making some pretty boring games. I wouldn't implement it where there are ultra-competitive players, since they might bitterly argue over who deserves the bonus experience, but amongst a group of friends (which is all I play with) it'd be great. I'm about to start a new campaign so I may suggest this as a new house rule in fact!

J0shua85 wrote:

parry: We use the somewhat common house rule favoring weapon skill. the defender sucessfully parry if he passes a to hit test. it is however, only allowed to make one parry each combat round (extra sword or buckler gives +1 to the parry roll). Furthermore it is not possible to parry any attacks that are more than +1 St over the defenders Strength (after weapon modifiers!).

For low WS models against high WS models it is thus harder to pass the parry test (hard to hit anyways, and they can't bet on getting a lucky low attack roll from the high WS model), and they get fewer chances to do so (because the STR req to negate a parry is lower). That seems like it'll push people to buy clubs over swords.

J0shua85 wrote:

For the moment we are just doing casual games in our respective apartments, but I think most of us would be up for getting our mettle tested at any semi-official tournaments as well. I just don't know of any in and around Copenhagen.

Cool, so around Copenhagen? That was basically the question

J0shua85 wrote:

So you're the numbers crunching guy eh? Knowing one of these is always nice when you dabble in the development of house rules

Well, it's known to settle an argument when you bring the numbers on the table! But yeah, some days I go crazy with calculations, but atm. I'm reading for an exam ^_^

J0shua85 wrote:

To be honest this has not yet come up, but we do have a dwarf player so we definitely have to adress this! I guess the most logical rule would be either giving +1 to parry or maybe that the character can ignore our other house rule of not being able to block attacks that are at least 2 St higher than the defenders.

I guess you'll find out. We've changed parry as well and has some problems with that skill. We've just decided to keep it as it is for now though.

J0shua85 wrote:

I'm inclined to agree. with halberds having the +1 st as well as strike first it seems to be much favored over the spear. So it might be necessary to lower the cost of spears and/or raise the price of halberds, or alternatively give the spear another special rule to buff it a bit.

I missed the strike first on Halberds! Wondered why it was on the house ruling list -.- but yeah, some recalculation should probably be done.

J0shua85 wrote:

I see your point. I guess we could decide to say either that the Ithilmar armor does not have the -1 int or that in fact it gives +1 int even though it is technically heavy armor. Either way it is not often seen in combat, so I imagine it won't be a big issue, but we'll see.

Guess not, if you don't play with it as Light Armour as we do. Gromril is much more attractive then!

J0shua85 wrote:

hmm.. As we have used it so far, it has just been when rolling for armor save, meaning that a person with shield always saved on a 6. the additional save would mean that unarmored soldiers with shields, who were in base contact, had a 5+ armor save, but that strength and other modifiers would be able to modify it all the way to the 6+ ward save. This meant that warbands using shields would have to make a decision to either stay close together in order to recieve the armor bonus, but at the cost of mobility and increased risk of being flanked. Or that they could split up, but then they would only recieve the ward save.

Okay, I misread that rule then, thought it was when facing an opponent with a Shield  
So like Scaly Skin, except that Axes and Guns won't remove it either.

J0shua85 wrote:

Yeah I think you're right about helmets being worth 10 gc. I think our price reduction on armor made us think it would be silly that a helmet cost the same as light armor, but for gameplay purposes it is at least as good if not better!

I know the feeling, but it is that good imo., especially with high Toughness!

J0shua85 wrote:

I can see the problem with the dwarf and orc special rule, but with the others, it can be circumvented by saying that regardless of race, one number on the dice, which would normally result in stun, now counts as a knocked down in stead. Humans would only be stunned on a 4 whereas Dwarves and Saurus with toughened hide would be stunned on a 4 or 5. of course it could be argued that humans have their risk of being stunned reduced by half, whereas for. example dwarves now only have a third, but I see it as both races recive an additional  one-in-six chance reduction of stun. The earlier model can also be argued to favor the hard-headed dwarves as they would benefit from a 50% chance of avoiding stun, on three of their dice rolls in stead of the normal two. To get back to the orc and dwarf special rule, maybe they could just get an additional modifier of 5+ when rolling the 4 or 5? I'm not exactly sure, but it will certainly have to be adressed.

Then it would make the skills worse. I like the extra roll too, since you can re-roll a roll like that - if you opponent makes the roll, you won't have that option.

J0shua85 wrote:

Yeah slings seem to be an eternal point of discussion. It was actually our skaven player who suggested keeping the rules as is and raising the price to 10, as this would both lower the incentive to sling spamming and also encourage him to think more out of the box when using skaven.

Well, I'd say 7gc would be more fair. Will put it on the calculation list. We've made it 5gc and haven't had any problems with it.

J0shua85 wrote:

Can you use quickshot with gunpowder weapons?! I thought they were restricted to one shot because of them being gunpowder, and that it is only usable by bows and xbows. I think just the fact that you need this amount of skills to make handguns viable, goes to show that they are not balanced enough.

No, you cannot if you notice, I've written that "you can change to a Handgun". Changing usually means going from something to something else and in this case it was changing from a Crossbow to a Handgun when moving, since you won't be able to use your Quick Shot with the Crossbow when moving. A Handgun only has 1 shot anyway, so you won't lose anything on that account! Sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough, I just figured it was obvious, which it of course never is

@Caledore: Thanks for the Feedback! I can really recommend the "Heroic effort" rule. Not so much for the actual reward as much as a way of digesting each scenario and increase the overall appreciation of the game. But yeah, certainly only applicable in groups of friends, and not people who are overly competitive.

@Reg06: well so far this has not been the case, and the sword is generally still one of the favored weapons, at its only real weakness is against heavy weapons.

@Aipha I think for now we might increase the cost of halberds to 15 gold and reverse helmets back to 10 gc. ATM nobody is playing skaven, so we'll probably leave slings as is for now.

In terms of the Crossbows, I now see the error of my ways, and apologize for the confusion
But for dwarves to be able to do this, they have to first get one of their Thunderes to become a hero, or give a hero the weapons expert skill. Next they would have to accumulate enough levels to get all the other mentioned shooting skills, and finally you would have to invest 60 gc og shooty equipment in order to use this option. So it seems like quite an elaborate scheme for them to become useful (as you ofc also mentioned in your original comment). At the same time i think its a darn same that handguns are hardly ever seen in my campaign. I'm not an advocate for it becomming a common sight, but it would be nice to the the odd handgun in a scenario, much like blunderbusses are now (in our games at least.) I think I might suggest to my team that we implement Lord 0's house rule with penetrating wounds.

Thanks for all the great feedback, and I look forward to hearing about your calculations on the spear and sling!

P.S. Do you also live in Denmark?

J0shua85 wrote:

@Aipha I think for now we might increase the cost of halberds to 15 gold and reverse helmets back to 10 gc. ATM nobody is playing skaven, so we'll probably leave slings as is for now.

Cool, glad I've made some impact with my comments

J0shua85 wrote:

In terms of the Crossbows, I now see the error of my ways, and apologize for the confusion

Np, could've made myself clearer!

J0shua85 wrote:

But for dwarves to be able to do this, they have to first get one of their Thunderes to become a hero, or give a hero the weapons expert skill. Next they would have to accumulate enough levels to get all the other mentioned shooting skills, and finally you would have to invest 60 gc og shooty equipment in order to use this option. So it seems like quite an elaborate scheme for them to become useful (as you ofc also mentioned in your original comment). At the same time i think its a darn same that handguns are hardly ever seen in my campaign. I'm not an advocate for it becomming a common sight, but it would be nice to the the odd handgun in a scenario, much like blunderbusses are now (in our games at least.) I think I might suggest to my team that we implement Lord 0's house rule with penetrating wounds.

Aye, it's a long way, and the only thing that really gets better compared to a Crossbow is the extra -1 to AS. For that, you have to sacrifice 6" range, a skill and 35gc plus a Rare roll. Not much worth it. Have to mention though, that it's optimal for the Engineer. I make my Thunderers melee (thanks to Lord 0) and Clansmen ranged and then go Weapons Expert with them and get a Rifle instead.

J0shua85 wrote:

Thanks for all the great feedback, and I look forward to hearing about your calculations on the spear and sling!

I'll do some calculations now and see where it goes ^_^ I actually think I have some old calculations that could do it for the Spear!

EDIT: Made the Spear/Halberd calculations.
If you want to keep your Halberd at 15gc, the Spear should be 8,85gc (9gc). The Halberd is 1,7 times better than the Spear according to my calculations based on 19 different fighting situations. I'd say that's pretty fair. If you want the Spear at 7gc, the Halberd should be 12gc.
EDIT: Made the Sling/Short Bow calculations.
The Sling is 1,27 times better than the Short Bow - for Henchmen. On short range of course. This is based on numbers from 12 (actually 36, but the rest gave the same result) calculations. Didn't make the Hero calculation, because as I usually hear it, that's not the problem.
This leaves us with a Sling price of just below 6,5gc.
For me, these arguments should be taken into consideration:
It's a 'special weapon', meaning that only few have access to it.
It has longer range than the Short Bow.
On long range, it's not better than a Short Bow (except of course the 2" extra)
Our group will probably keep it on 5gc, but 2gc is indeed too cheap. 6gc or 7gc could be another price, but I'd use the 'special weapon' argument here, to lower it to 5gc

J0shua85 wrote:

P.S. Do you also live in Denmark?

Aye, I do indeed basically in CPH.

In my group we made shields and bucklers give an additional +1AS in melee. This, combined with a -1 to the off-hand attack, made shields a lot more common on the battlefield. Because of *that* (and changing toughened leathers to armour) higher armour saves are more common. That has led to more common axes and, interestingly, handguns.

Against a heavily armoured target a single shot at -2 to the armour save with two dice deciding injury is better than two shots at -1; especially against a 1+ armour save.

In addition to this, typically a black-powder specialist will not bother taking quickshot at all and instead take Pistoleer or some other skill. Moar variation means moar fun.

For what it is worth, my group is quite competitive and we have not had any problems with slings once the tactics against them were worked out. The one strength of the sling is that it is cheap enough to give to your henchmen and only Skaven can really take advantage of it. If they do that then a) their henchmen are taking all the experience and b) their henchmen are taking away their income by making their warband so large (optimum warband size being 9 or 12, depending on player preference). In the hands of a hero, pretty much any other ranged weapon is better. Even shortbows are better because you can use both Quickshot and Hunting Arrows with them.

That being said, it did take 3-4 campaigns before it became common knowledge to everyone how slings/Skaven could be defeated so I am not sure how that compares to your group. These days Skaven tend to be strong at the start, but then lose momentum due to limited access to armour, limited access to hirelings, and *very* limited use of Tarot cards. They retain their top-tier status, but only just, and are closer to mid-tier late campaign.