A New Type of Hero...?

[MaJic_Rat]

Originally Posted by RickyDMMontoya

No confusion, no need for the frankly silly "take X wounds then remove Y figures" stuff going on here.

To each his own but calling it "silly" is a bit harsh for a friendly conversation on creating mechanics without having to eyeball every's cards and figures.

The power of the common units is that the player doesn't need to sort that stuff out. There are enough things to keep track of during a game and the honor system only goes so far.

I still think it's an interesting idea for special power on a squad to not have to remove figures until a threshold of wounds is met.

[RickyDMMontoya]

That's such an artificial and "gamey" gimmick though. It totally shatters the suspension of disbelief (limited though it may be in this instance anyways). It changes the perspective of the player from playing the game to playing the rules. I can suspend disbelief just enough with the regular rules. I'm attacking to kill things. When I'm attacking to accumulate wounds on a functionally indestructible unit to pass an artificial threshold which will then render that unit and all others of its type destructible, it kills the fun. It's so obviously a blatant "game rule" and has no air of reality to it. It's the shred of reality which makes the game fun. Rules like the one proposed above take away from that.

It really doesn't make any sense in a realistic way how wounds accumulated on unit X somehow make unit Y more vulnerable later to totally unrelated attacks.

It especially doesn't make sense for the unit frequently brought up as an example in this thread, the Sentinels, because they are frequently depicted as having near Borg-like adaptive capabilities, rendering later Sentinels less vulnerable to attacks which would destroyed an earlier model. http://en.marveldatabase.com/Sentinel_Mk_II

That said, I still think the Sentinels are a pretty good candidate for Deathwalker style 1 Wound, high defense anyways. They typically have a bunch of attacks that do nothing, and then one (often little attack) that destroys them outright. Rarely are they depicted as taking battle damage that isn't either immediately repaired or immediately fatal. Even Doombots are often shown the same way. Yes, they're supposed to be "perfect duplicates of Doctor Doom," but they rarely actually act like that in comics. See Marvel Ultimate Alliance for how Doombots are treated. 3 hit enemies you beat on in the first level, so there's a pretty good precedent for not making them as difficult and intelligent as Doctor Doom...

In a 400-600 point game, you're going to have damn few of these things in your list anyways. So it really won't be a problem to just use them as common heroes with multiple wounds. Maybe the 12 year olds who have never played before might get them confused, but even they would be able to get it straight after a game or two.

If you're playing a 4000+ point game, then keeping these guys straight is a minor problem compared to some of the other issues that can arise, so again it shouldn't be a major issue. This is especially the case because presumably a player capable of playing such a game would be experienced and well equipped to deal with such a minor difficulty.

[MaJic_Rat]

My Doombot idea was envisioned for 1000+ point Marvel games ... say Dr. Doom and 4 Doombots = 1245 points vs. 5 of your favorite Marvel figures.

Also, this idea came from trying to use Deathwalkers as Dr. Doom's robots. They just don't stack up to the other Marvel characters.
- no matter how many you have. The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough 1) order markers to go around or 2) enough hero units to fill up the points.

In a mixed game this is less of a problem.

As for the other idea: it was off the cuff idea that maybe I should have left out of the discussion. Creating custom rules and units is in part a function of ones gaming philosophy and style of play.

[dablue2]

Originally Posted by GreyOwl

The problem we've seen from that approach is that it doesn't always fit thematically. With that approach you either kill them or you do nothing, whereas we're trying to find a way that allows you to wear it down over time through wounds. Plus we want to remove the possibility of killing the figure with a single strike, regardless of how probable or improbable it may be.

Grungebob, what GreyOwl means is give the figures more lives.

[IAmBatman]

Necromancy!

[kurisenshi]

What about Doombots or Sentinels in the video games? Does anyone remember playing that X-Men arcade game from the 90's where you had 2 screens & could play up to 4 characters? The "common" enemies were man-sized sentinels, weren't they?

For Heroscape purposes, is it really so bad to not be 100% accurate on themes? I know it's tough with customs of established characters, wanting to make them as true to their comic book forms as possible, but remember that the game we're playing is Heroscape here, & so it's OK to format them to fit Heroscape.

It happens all the time in video games like I said earlier anyway. I mean, didn't a Justice League game come out last year that let you play as Superman? Special abilities were limited, weren't they. really, couldn't Superman just beat down almost every "common" enemy in that game if they were translated into the comics?

I say either make a Unique Squad (1 life), Common Squad (1 life), or set of Unique Heroes (more than 1 life). That's what I would do, anyway.

But still, that's just my opinion & I look forward to seeing what you all come up with anyway.

[PlaneswalkerXan]

I'm not sure if anyone has thought about this (I didn't have time to read the entire thread, will soon and will edit this post accordingly).
Why not have a mechanic:
Armored Transport (Ability name)
Rules text: If AT-ST would receive a wound counter, decrease the defense die by 1. If AT-ST would have a defense die count of zero, it dies.

1 Life
Move 3
Range 6 (I kinda want it to have "Range >2" for the flavor that it cannot attack something underneath it)
Attack 4
Defense 7

I'm totally open to suggestions.

[UranusPChicago]

Why not just use a simple mechanic like the following...

Sentinel Bonding - Instead of taking a turn with this Sentinel, you may take a turn with any Sentinel you control. If the Sentinel from this card is destroyed, you may transfer any unused Order Markers to another Sentinel's Army Card that you control.

[GreyOwl]

Because without the new type, you couldn't draft more than one Sentinel in the first place. If it was unique, you could only draft one. If it was common, it would only have 1 Life.

[UranusPChicago]

Use "Sentinel" as the Class for the card.

Then add the following verbage to Sentinel Bonding...

"Your army may contain more than one Sentinel at a time."

In the same way that Cyberclaw negates the game mechanic of Disengagement, I think it would be alright if an ability negated the restriction of having more than one unique "unique" in one's army.

However, unless each Sentinel has a separate card, it will become near impossible to track wounds.

[GreyOwl]

That's essentially the purpose of the symbol. It just a more condensed form than writing out the power like that, similar to the superstrength or flying symbol. And yes, you still need a separate card for each Sentinel in order to track wounds, but at least each card can be identical (just print multiple copies).