Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Heroic action? It had better be!


So when we decided to so this campaign I was all for it. I was also all for keeping it nice and simple. From my time in the hobby and working at GW I have seen far too many campaigns become overly complicated. And almost 100% of the time it has lead to the downfall of the campaign (I am looking at you 40K campaign involving Battle Fleet Gothic). I have found that when running campaigns KISS.....keep it simple stupid.

Needless to say when my buddy Mike brought up his desire to give models a bonus for heroic actions I was a bit reluctant. I was really worried about it affecting how the games are played. Mike and I had multiple discussions and debates on what would work.

My first concern was over the fact of what would be a heroic action. A sergeant with a power fist killing four marines? Not very heroic in my mind. A chaplain ripping apart a squad of Khorn Berzerkers? Now that is heroic! I really like the idea of both combatants agreeing upon what is heroic.

My second concern was over the table being too powerful. You have to be very careful when using abilities from the universal special rules section. A perfect example is that someone wanted one of the abilities to give "relentless" to a squad. My counter point was asking him if he would be ok with A Blood Angel devastator squad in a rhino having relentless. Needless to say his answer was no. So we sat down and continued to bounce ideas back and forth.

My last concern was making unnamed characters or sergeants more powerful than the special characters in the game. I envision the special characters of 40k to be the bravest, best and most bad ass in all the galaxy. And in my opinion having a sergeant keep getting his stats bumped and eventually being able to take on a Captain Sicarius or a Ragnar Blackmane was not the way to go. We brainstormed and decided that you could not stack abilities.

In the end I am very happy with the way that the Heroic Action Table turned out. Mike did a great job and put a lot of hard work into finding a good balance. I think his background of playing lots of RPGs really helped. I am really excited to see how this works out in our games. I hope that some of my Blood Angels are found worthy and can etch their names in the history (our at least our groups history) of 40K.

-Rik

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