House rules

Hello,
I've been lurking here for a while and decided to make a post about the house rules me and my group use or plan on using, mostly to benefit from the wealth of experience you people probably have. So, please, opinions on the following:

1. Armor
Rules are standard, but the following are added:
Light armour reduces the injury roll (not the serious injury, post-battle, roll, mind you) by 1, for the character wearing it.
Heavy armour reduces the injury roll by 2, for the character wearing it.
AP weapons completely ignore these additional rules, in addition to the -1 to AS.
AS reduction from strength spills into this added protection if the strength bonus completely negates the AS and could lower it still. Example: a greatweapon warrior (S3) hits another guy wearing light armour. It completely negates his AS of 6+ and would reduce it by an additional 1 which is subtracted from the injury protection.

This way armour seems a lot more dependable and characters wearing heavy armour feel like tin cans, where you have to knock them down or stun them to kill them, basically like how low quality troops would kill fully armoured knights. Knocked down characters are autohit and, if wounded, are OOA automatically, while stunned characters may be taken directly OOA, or, at least, that's my interpretation of the rules.
Heavily armoured characters could also be taken out of action with a crit if an AP or +2 injury result comes up.
This also boosts the popularity of axes over clubs, 2-handers over dual wielding and gunpowder weapons over whatever, because of the increased presence of armor.
We also started playing with the reverse idea. If a character isn't wearing any armour and is hit with str 4 or higher, the injury roll will get a bonus equal to the spill from the str AS reduction. This encourages people to wear armour, which, in turn, boosts the popularity of some of the more neglected weapons.

Problems:
I'm not sure it would be ok to give a 3 pt injury protection for gromril armour.
Should the character also be allowed a serious injury roll, as well as the above rules?
Blunt weapons: we play by applying the protection to the roll and then seeing if it's 2, 3 or 4 to see if we apply the stun effect.


2. Parry
Resolved as a hit versus the attacker. If successful, the attack is parried. The hit roll suffers a penalty equal to the str difference between the combatants. Thus, if 2 equal combatants fight, the defender with a sword and the attacker with a greatweapon, the defender would parry on a 6 (4+ to hit, with a 2 pt penalty from the attacker's greatweapon +2 str).

3. Crits
When a 6 to wound is rolled, the hit must be confirmed with another successful roll to wound.

4. Dual wielding
-1 to hit for the off-hand, hoping it works well when coupled with the incentives above to use other kinds of weapons.

Comments and ideas, please? I'd like opinions on the armour ideas, especially, since most of the other stuff is mainly scavenged from other people's house rules.

In my opinion, I not trying to be a pratt or shoot down your ideas but...

1. Making armour more effictive i.e increase the save for light armour to 5+, heavy and ithilmar 4+, Gromril 3+ or reducing the price (not both) would be better.

2. I like the way parry is currently in the rule book i don't think the current rules are broken at all. many warriors have paid the extra for a sword for the parry rather than getting the cheaper armour slicing axe.

3. Don't make critical's too hard they can often be our only saving grace against 90xp heroes

4. I like this one, i was actually considering implementing this one in my campaign, but i considering there being no penalty, if both hands are equipped with the same weapon due to the balance and rhythm you have.

Welcome to the forum!

1.  I usually don't like armor fixes, but this one sounds fun.    I don't mind the -3 mod to the injury roll for Gromril as long as all results less than 1 result in a knock down rather than being negated.

Quote :

Should the character also be allowed a serious injury roll, as well as the above rules?

Not sure what you mean.
2. +1 to the Fiend's comment.
3. Too much dice rolling in a game that already has too much dice rolling.
4. Not something I worry about.

1. Von Kurst, that's actually exactly how we play it, the injury protection never completely negates the injury, after all modifiers are applied, the result can't be lower than 1, which means heavily armoured characters tend to get knocked down a lot, where others would be stunned or OOA.
I've also read the idea somewhere of armour adding +1/+2/+3 wounds, besides the normal roll. What do you people think of that?

I think armour is the main issue for me with Mordheim, I want it to be good and characters to have reasons for taking it, because going there all the way from Marienburg in just a shirt seems wrong.

The way it is now, I can get heavy armour for 50 crowns and have a 5+ or 4+ save, like Fiend suggested (his solution makes it somewhat more tempting), or I can have a swordsman with 2 swords for 55 crowns. And I can have him stand in front of me... and help me back up... and hit my enemies... and carry my loot.

1.1 About the serious injury roll, I was referring to a house rule suggestion I came across often, where if a character wearing armour is taken out during a scenario, he's allowed an unmodified armour save to ignore any serious injury rolls and treat it as a full recovery. The save takes into account only body armour, no shields or other effects.

2. About the changes to parry, we just changed the special rule, keeping it unique to swords. The reasoning behind the change was that it felt off when low skill opponents had an easier time parrying and yes, one could argue that higher skilled characters would just be hit less often and that could be interpreted as parrying, but it felt off.

3. If we don't confirm crits, half the wounds on tougher creatures would be crits (creatures you wound on a 5 or 6).

I think the ruling is that if you require a 6 to wound you cannot critical it, and if you require a 5 to wound there is only one point of difference between you, and remember that you can only get one critical at a time so if a Strength 4 human is fighting a toughness 5 Orc, the human wounds 3 times with a 6, 6 and 5 there is only one critical in there, yet a Strength 3 human is fighting the same Orc with the same wound roll there is only two wounds and none are critical's and Mr Orc has a good chance of saving those rolls.

My big problem with the armour suggestion of dampening the injury roll for KD, Stunned , OOA is that it makes Dwarves, helmets, Undead and the skill "jump up" extremely powerful.

Phantasmal_fiend wrote:

My big problem with the armour suggestion of dampening the injury roll for KD, Stunned , OOA is that it makes Dwarves, helmets, Undead and the skill "jump up" extremely powerful.

I'm not really following with the first paragraph but the second is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.

About the undead, I think only zombies ignore stunned results and they can't wear armour anyway. In the case where a dead enemy character wearing armour comes back as a zombie, I guess it could either be left at that, since it doesn't happen that often and it's supposed to be special or the injury protection could just be ignored on account of the armour being damaged from what caused his death.

Jump up: The warrior may ignore knocked down results when rolling for injuries, unless he is knocked down because of a successful save from wearing a helmet or because he has the No Pain special rule.
The same reasoning could be applied to the injury protection. If the injury roll is a natural knockdown, the warrior ignores it, but if he gets knocked down instead of stunned or ooa because of his armour, he's still down.

Helmets: When all's said and done and the character's injury type is determined, if he's stunned, he can roll his helmet save (although I've been considering the idea of helmets just increasing AS by 1).

Dwarfs: I really don't know what to make of them, because they're not really played in my group and the few times I've played against them they seemed weak for several reasons (slow, few, not being able to see over waist high walls and crates). Are they good? Could they use the boost? Because the change really does benefit them most, I believe.
The only reason I can think of why it wouldn't be unbalanced is that armoured dwarfs would be few in numbers and they still get knocked down like the other races and then someone else finishes them off. Or shoot them and bypass the injury protection alltogether.

Question... Does armour offer the injury role protection as a passive ability without any need to roll for armour save? This is my interpretation but I want to confirm.

RationalLemming wrote:

Question... Does armour offer the injury role protection as a passive ability without any need to roll for armour save? This is my interpretation but I want to confirm.

The idea was that armour saves are taken as normal, but armour also has the passivy ability to protect against injuries. So a character in heavy armour, for example, would roll his 5+ and, if he fails, would roll for injury with -2, down to a minimum of 1.
So, in that sense, it doesn't need an armour roll.
We also play it that anything that ignores armour, ignores the injury protection, as well.
Armour piercing also completely negates the injury protection.
Ex.: If someone were to shoot a pistol at a guy in heavy armour, he'd get no armour save (str 4 + AP) and no injury protection because of the AP.

Franz Volker wrote:

I'm not really following with the first paragraph but the second is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.

It was in regards to criticals and you comment

Franz Volker wrote:

3. If we don't confirm crits, half the wounds on tougher creatures would be crits (creatures you wound on a 5 or 6).

Franz Volker wrote:

About the undead, I think only zombies ignore stunned results and they can't wear armour anyway. In the case where a dead enemy character wearing armour comes back as a zombie, I guess it could either be left at that, since it doesn't happen that often and it's supposed to be special or the injury protection could just be ignored on account of the armour being damaged from what caused his death.

All undead treat stunned as Knocked Down so this includes mr vampire, and when you start re-animating the hero zombies after they have been taken out they will be quite powerful if they have any sort of armour.

Franz Volker wrote:

Jump up: The warrior may ignore knocked down results when rolling for injuries, unless he is knocked down because of a successful save from wearing a helmet or because he has the No Pain special rule.
The same reasoning could be applied to the injury protection. If the injury roll is a natural knockdown, the warrior ignores it, but if he gets knocked down instead of stunned or ooa because of his armour, he's still down.

Ok this sounds like it would solve that problem.

Franz Volker wrote:

Helmets: When all's said and done and the character's injury type is determined, if he's stunned, he can roll his helmet save (although I've been considering the idea of helmets just increasing AS by 1).

Yeah you may have to do this if you are wanting those changes, as a warrior in heavy armour will have a -2 to the injury roll, meaning most warriors cannot take him OOA without knocking them down or stunning them first. If they have a helmet that's a 4+ save against being stunned and just being KD instead.

Franz Volker wrote:

Dwarfs: I really don't know what to make of them, because they're not really played in my group and the few times I've played against them they seemed weak for several reasons (slow, few, not being able to see over waist high walls and crates). Are they good? Could they use the boost? Because the change really does benefit them most, I believe.
The only reason I can think of why it wouldn't be unbalanced is that armoured dwarfs would be few in numbers and they still get knocked down like the other races and then someone else finishes them off. Or shoot them and bypass the injury protection alltogether.

With the rule changes Dwarves go from good to insanely good, they can only be taken OOA on a 6 which will be even harder with a -2 or -3 to the injury roll, they ignore the hammer and maces concussion rule, and can get a skill to make helmets more effective.

Franz Volker wrote:

Or shoot them and bypass the injury protection alltogether.

If the rule only applys to close combat for armour reducing the injury roll, it will give shooting warbands quite an edge and making the whole point of making a house rule to balance things unbalanced.

Franz Volker wrote:

RationalLemming wrote:

Question... Does armour offer the injury role protection as a passive ability without any need to roll for armour save? This is my interpretation but I want to confirm.

The idea was that armour saves are taken as normal, but armour also has the passivy ability to protect against injuries. So a character in heavy armour, for example, would roll his 5+ and, if he fails, would roll for injury with -2, down to a minimum of 1.
So, in that sense, it doesn't need an armour roll.
We also play it that anything that ignores armour, ignores the injury protection, as well.
Armour piercing also completely negates the injury protection.
Ex.: If someone were to shoot a pistol at a guy in heavy armour, he'd get no armour save (str 4 + AP) and no injury protection because of the AP.

So if the guy in heavy armour has a shield thou. he would get the armour protection ???

No, it is my understanding that AP negates the Injury Protection entirely even if an armour roll is still available.

If the guy also has a shield, he gets the armour save as normal (what's left of it).

Quote :

If the rule only applys to close combat for armour reducing the injury roll, it will give shooting warbands quite an edge

Yeah, sorry, I meant shoot him with a blackpowder weapon or something else with AP.
I'm not sure how to solve the vampire & dwarf issue, besides people bringing more AP weapons.
What I'm hoping this does is cause a chain reaction in our group, which it did to some effect. Armour became so good, people started using it and then their enemies started using often neglected weapons like axes and blackpowder weapons to counter it. Before, they'd just go for maces and bows.

As for the armor issue my house rule is that you take away strength bounse for AP aganist armor.

The S:4 -1 to armor save, S:5 -2 to armor save etc. That rule can be overpowering and makes most armor useless. "Ha! I spent 50 gc on heavy armor." "Ha! Spent 15 gc on a double hand weapon and it by passes your armor because of my increased strength! I don't even need any fancy expenive dwarf made weapons either!"

Once the strength bonuse rule is taken away, the only thing that reduces amor saves become less common. Usually axes, black powder weapons and the dwarf weapons. Players will want to start buy those kinds of weapons and buy armor as well. Inforce the WYSIWyG rules to help cut down on players trying to power game by buying axes for all their guys without having an axe on the model.

This way, uber strong warbands like Beastmen and Orks doesn't unblance the game a bit.

Also, its a more simple and easy to remmeber house rule that makes armor more useful.