Idea for minor rules change (Not for tourneys persay)

[Owlman]

Hey guys, so I've been thinking, while it's true I've never been the guy who ponders percentages in Scape battles, (I personally enjoy the not-knowing vs know the perfect attack to make. Makes things more fun/interesting to me, personal preference) I've seen my friends/family, and of course myself, have lost many a figure to the "passing swipe". (Grrr....)

Now maybe I'm off my meds here, (JK ) but I've been wondering lately how catastrophic it would be to use a simple rules change for most figures during battle:

"When a figure chooses to disengage, and the opposing player's figure takes a "passing swipe" at your figure, your figure may roll 1 defense die."

Obviously figures with Disengage/Phantom Walk are immune to this. I'm gonna use this during our next game with a friend but I'd love to get other folks thoughts on this.

[mtl1998]

I’d still play ‘Scape if that was the rule. I feel like it would be a neat power for some squads/heroes to have. It would be a compromise between not having the disengage power and having it.

[Dysole]

Currently a disengagement is 50% chance of a wound. With this rule, it drops to 33% chance (with knights it's a bit different but it changes for them too). There are only a handful of situations in which you would want to refuse to roll the defense die. The effects are that it makes every figure much more likely to disengage from a fight if it's not worth it to them. Cyberclaw becomes much more valuable. There is much less value in tying down figures since it's much less risk to get out of that. Rats decrease in value but range increases a lot. On the whole, it's not a bad change but I don't think the positives would outweigh the negatives, especially making range stronger.

~Dysole, thinking it's a fine experiment for home games, but it does remove a lot of the strategy from choosing when to disengage

[Owlman]

Originally Posted by Dysole

Currently a disengagement is 50% chance of a wound. With this rule, it drops to 33% chance (with knights it's a bit different but it changes for them too). There are only a handful of situations in which you would want to refuse to roll the defense die. The effects are that it makes every figure much more likely to disengage from a fight if it's not worth it to them. Cyberclaw becomes much more valuable. There is much less value in tying down figures since it's much less risk to get out of that. Rats decrease in value but range increases a lot. On the whole, it's not a bad change but I don't think the positives would outweigh the negatives, especially making range stronger.

~Dysole, thinking it's a fine experiment for home games, but it does remove a lot of the strategy from choosing when to disengage

I hear you. Tho any strategy that makes Rats less effective makes me wanna use it, lol. It also makes sense to me, that most figures summoned to Valhalla can handle themselves in a fight, especially hand to hand combat figures, like knights, einar squads, etc...I hate losing multiple squad figures to a disengage, it just never felt quite right...

[Dysole]

All melee takes a hit. Everything that's built on keeping you in place and can't force you to take a hit. Knights become slightly worse but them and gladiatrons take the least amount of hits. Any kind of defender like dividers, sentinels, samurai, or ashra all take pretty big hits in addition to rats because having a screen isn't all that useful anymore. Conversely pretty much all range gets better especially range attached to a hero. Nilfheim and Q9 probably get the biggest boost. This is why I say it's probably not going to make things better.

I take a disengage when my position could be improved by that disengage. I also am aware it is a risk. The more of an upset I need to win, the riskier I will be with my disengage. I take disengages with a plan for if it fails and I try to minimize the number of attempts.

~Dysole, clarifying

[Knight of Scape]

I actually frequently play with a house rule that's kind of a more extreme version of yours.

When a figure leaves engagement, the figure they left engagement with rolls a number of dice equal to their attack value, while the figure leaving engagement rolls a number of dice equal to their defense value. The figure leaving engagement takes wounds equal to the number of skulls minus the number of shields (to a min of zero).

Intuitively, it's basically just saying that you get to make a free attack against anyone leaving engagement with you, but like a regular LEA, it's not technically an attack to avoid a whole bunch of messy interaction with special powers.

This has the effect of nerfing rats, while still leaving most other melee figures capable of tying stuff down (a 3 defense ranged figure leaving engagement with a 3 attack melee figure is actually slightly more likely to die under this system than under the regular rules). You still have tricky decisions about when to disengage, but they come at different points than in regular Heroscape (some disengages that you'd never consider normally become reasonable when you can roll defense, some disengages you'd easily take normally become iffy if the disengagement has the potential to inflict several wounds).

It also buffs DW8K and DW9K a lot, since they gain functional disengage against a lot of enemies (it always felt silly to me that a deathreaver that could never kill DW9K normally, has a 50% of doing it in leaving engagement).

Of course, this variant also makes Q9 and Nilfheim stronger, but I find strong heroes less annoying to play against than a big rat screen (I also address this by just increasing their costs, see the link in my signature).

~KoS, who will someday get around to making a post of all the house rules he uses for his family games.

[mtl1998]

^I like that version a lot. Especially with the rat v. DW scenario.