Mordheim house rules that work well?

[Hobgoblin]

I'm finally getting together a Mordheim campaign after at least a year of interest in the project. My son and I have played a few games, and we've got some more participants who're keen, so we should be kicking off soon.

One thing that seems near universal among Mordheim players is a spot of house-ruling. I thought it might be worth canvassing the good denizens of this forum for what works, what is widely thought to work but causes problems and what is just best left alone.

My initial thoughts are to play strictly 'rules as written' - with one exception: allowing a 'fighting retreat' (in the  movement phase, a melee participant can move backwards or sideways at half-movement unless entirely surrounded; the other participants in the melee can choose whether to pursue up to full movement or let the retreater go). This is something I'd add to all man-to-man skirmish games that don't already have it, just to keep combat dynamic and to give more tactical options (e.g. retreating onto a bridge or narrow ledge where foes can only come at you one at a time and clumsy antagonists - like I2 orcs - are more vulnerable to falls). From the discussion of that rule, I don't think there are any significant unintended consequences of that.

The second thing that occurs to me is that there probably ought to be a 'full plate' armour option with a 4+ save - really just for reasons of pseudo-historical accuracy. I'd like a mercenary captain in fifteenth- or sixteenth-century-style plate to have the same degree of protection as a Bretonian knight in full mail and a shield (thus allowing the former some confidence in tooling up with a double-handed weapon like a poleaxe). But I won't add that from the start; I'd have to figure out an appropriate cost, for one thing: 100 or 150 crowns, maybe.

A common thing I see online is imposing a penalty for two-weapon use. Realism and Warhammer precedent seem to demand this, but I'm inclined to leave it - at first, at least. It does allow the weakest heroes like night runners and young bloods a little more oomph and thus more of a sporting chance in combat (yes, they may have WS 2, but give them a club and a dagger, and at least they get a couple of goes). Also, the +2 S/going last for two-handed weapons (compared with +1 in classic Warhammer) seems to balance reasonably well with two-weapon use - or going first with a spear or +1 S with a halberd.

But what about balancing with shields? I see a lot of 5+ saves for shields in melee, which does seem to balance better with the dreaded dual wielding. But shield and spear seems to be fairly well balanced against two attacks (going first and a chance of saving), even if shield and sword (club, axe, etc.) isn't. And if we do introduce full plate at 4+, a 5+ shield would throw the balance out again, so we'd have to go with 3+ for full plate (which might be nice from a simulation point of view, but would have to be priced astronomically).

Also, in our games so far, orcs with light armour and shield seem to have made an awful lot of armour saves. It might just be that having a lot of T4 troops is fairly unusual, so the back-up of the 5+ save just amplifies their resilience. But the 25c investment seemed worth it.

Skaven slings are often criticised as overpowered; we had a single slinger in our first couple of games, and he didn't seem any better than the orcish bowmen ranged against him; by the time he got close enough for his 2x -1 shots, the orcs were upon him. Again, I'm inclined to wait and see how they play out in greater numbers; I've also seen people arguing that they work just fine.

Anyway, those are just initial thoughts from a position of inexperience. I'd love to see what those who have played much more of the game think. I've been scouring the forum for such things, including Koyote's house rules (another excuse to gawp at his glorious miniatures!).

[Citizen Sade]

First up, a couple of comments:

• Gromril armour gives a 4+ save. I’d use the cost and rarity of that for for your full plate, if I were you.
• Spears allow you to strike first. As does charging. In such cases, strike order is based on initiative. If you want to tilt the odds back towards the spearman, consider giving them +1 initiative in the first round of hand-to-hand.

Moving on, a couple of house rules that I favour for our games:

• Only heroes, hired swords & dramatis personae dual wield.
• Toughened leathers are available to starting warbands with light armour on their equipment list.

As we often play WYSIWYG using Oldhammer figures, we generally reduce the cost of armour by 50% to allow people to field enough of the tooled up little buggers. Helmets, shields & bucklers don’t get this benefit as they’re cheap enough and useful already.

[Hobgoblin]

First up, a couple of comments:

• Gromril armour gives a 4+ save. I’d use the cost and rarity of that for for your full plate, if I were you.
• Spears allow you to strike first. As does charging. In such cases, strike order is based on initiative. If you want to tilt the odds back towards the spearman, consider giving them +1 initiative in the first round of hand-to-hand.

Ah - good ideas, both! Yes, the Gromril works perfectly: hard to come by and suitably costly. And as a Mordheim campaign inevitably tests the limits of WYSIWYG, the acquisition can be assumed to be the mercenary captain or whoever getting his starting armour completed rather than replaced.

Moving on, a couple of house rules that I favour for our games:

• Only heroes, hired swords & dramatis personae dual wield.

That's a neat idea! It's more elegant than adding modifiers to melee (which is generally 'clean' of them), and it preserves the swashbuckling aspects and the chance for junior heroes to at least stand out a bit in close combat.

• Toughened leathers are available to starting warbands with light armour on their equipment list.

Toughened leathers can't be used with a shield, right? That's essentially the only difference from normal light armour? It does seem to me that there would be scope to do something like toughened leathers 6+, light armour 5 +, heavy armour 4+, full armour (or Gombril mail) 3+ with a shield adding 1. But that would be quite a major shift!

As we often play WYSIWYG using Oldhammer figures, we generally reduce the cost of armour by 50% to allow people to field enough of the tooled up little buggers. Helmets, shields & bucklers don’t get this benefit as they’re cheap enough and useful already.

That's broadly what we'll be doing figures-wise; one of our players is contemplating making a mercenary warband entirely from Perry foot knights, which would allow him just five figures in total. Cheaper armour would certainly make a difference.

[Citizen Sade]

Toughened leathers can't be used with a shield, right? That's essentially the only difference from normal light armour?

Yes, plus they’re much cheaper and can’t be sold on. These restrictions don’t sit very well with me but otherwise why would anyone ever pay for light armour?

[boneio]

The consensus on the problem with armour is that it's too expensive and too easy to overcome. It's largely better to simply have more warband members than it is to pay for armour.

Slings on skaven are the other way around - slings are OK, it's the warband of many-many skaven things all with sling-slings that's problematic.

I'm not sure either is worth house ruling over unless you have some power-players in your group! My view on house rules is to only introduce them to balance out your local 'meta' i.e. if someone is steamrolling the rest of you or someone is really lagging behind 

This site might be useful if you're not aware of it: https://broheim.net/

[Hobgoblin]

Yes, plus they’re much cheaper and can’t be sold on. These restrictions don’t sit very well with me but otherwise why would anyone ever pay for light armour?

Yes, they're very 'gamey'. What compels you to take off your toughened leathers if you buy or find a shield?!?

One feature of our games so far has been fairly small warbands - precisely because we've been using old-school miniatures: Nick Lund orcs and - mainly - metal Jez Goodwin Skaven. So light armour has been a kind of equaliser. Our starting Skaven warband used only nine miniatures, and the orcs had seven. So the five Perry knights wouldn't be too out of place!

At the start of our campaign, I think that might be a good thing. I'm planning by kicking off the initial session with a big four-player game (or bigger: we might have another couple of participants) and then breaking into smaller games to be played side by side. Small warbands should lead to quicker games - especially the multiplayer ones. But once we get going, we might well revisit armour costs along with other rules.

The consensus on the problem with armour is that it's too expensive and too easy to overcome. It's largely better to simply have more warband members than it is to pay for armour.

Yes - I suppose what's countering that for now is that we all have a preponderance of armoured figures. But that may change (I'm already kitbashing some unarmoured Skaven slingers ...).

Slings on skaven are the other way around - slings are OK, it's the warband of many-many skaven things all with sling-slings that's problematic.

I'm not sure either is worth house ruling over unless you have some power-players in your group! My view on house rules is to only introduce them to balance out your local 'meta' i.e. if someone is steamrolling the rest of you or someone is really lagging behind 

Good point! I think everyone we play with will be driven primarily by the inclusion of cool or characterful miniatures rather than anything else.

This site might be useful if you're not aware of it: https://broheim.net/

I'm all over it but thanks! It's such a great site!

[Citizen Sade]

Another house rule that might work for your group is that warband hero casters pick their spell rather than roll for it. Most have stat lines that are not that impressive to start with and it’s quite a downer to be lumbered with a duff or difficult to cast spell as well.

[Hobgoblin]

Another house rule that might work for your group is that warband hero casters pick their spell rather than roll for it. Most have stat lines that are not that impressive to start with and it’s quite a downer to be lumbered with a duff or difficult to cast spell as well.

Yes, that's a good one, potentially. I think we'll start out with random spells to see how they go, but that's a great suggestion to have up my sleeve if there's disquiet.

So far, our Eshin sorcerer summoned a single giant rat in the first game. In the second (we 'rebooted', so he got a new spell), he had a powerful transformation spell but failed to hit the required 8 in five attempts!

[boneio]

Can't do much to houserule for bad dice rolling 

[Hobgoblin]

Can't do much to houserule for bad dice rolling 

Indeed! As I have a longstanding distrust of Warhammer magic (as kids, we banned it at one point as we found that it wrecked games), I wasn't too unhappy about the underwhelming results! And at least there was (short-lived) excitement about the transformation spell.

[Citizen Sade]

Magic in Mordheim is pretty low key. I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times it’s had a major impact on any of our games. And I’ve been playing, pretty solidly, since it was first released.

[Hobgoblin]

We got a few more games in over the weekend, including a mini-campaign with advances, and yes, magic did seem suitably underwhelming. I quite like the random roll, though, just to enforce creativity.

With more campaign games in the offing, I'm thinking that the way to go with armour is probably to make it more effective rather than more affordable. I was wondering about essentially doubling all saves apart from toughened leathers to get a spectrum like this:

Toughened leathers (no prohibition on shields, though) 6+
Light armour (e.g. byrnie or breastplate or buff coat, etc) or shield 5+
Heavy armour (e.g. mail hauberk + extensive limb protection or similar) 4 +
Light armour and shield 3+
Heavy armour and shield 2+
Full plate (the toughened-leathers prohibition on shields could be applied here on 'historical' grounds) 2+
Gromril armour +1

Saves below 2+ would just negate modifiers. So a mercenary in Gromril full plate would still fail his save on a roll of 1, but he would still save on a 2+ if attacked by an S4 Black Skaven. Ditto for a mounted man in full plate.

That would obviously be quite a change; it might be too much. But it would balance dual wielding and two-handed weapons with shields quite nicely. And it would also balance the 'heavy armour and shield' Bretonian knight with the 'full plate' mercenary captain for a bit of verisimilitude. I also think it might make small, heavily armoured warbands more viable without unbalancing things; there are an awful lot of ways to reduce saves in Mordheim, and there's falling (no save) too.

It would also mean that it's better to have a shield than not against the average human halberdier or Black Skaven swordsman, which seems only reasonable.

Another rule tweak I'm seriously considering is a 'WYSIWYG over lists' principle when it comes to buying equipment. So, if you're fielding a classic Kev Adams goblin with a crossbow, you just buy him a crossbow from the orc list. And if you want to field Grom's Goblin Guard, you simply pay your 20gc for light armour.

I'd even extend that to mutations - so if you want to field Throt the Unclean, you can shell out 40gc for an extra arm as per Possessed.

All in all, I think that's much less disruptive than the armour tweak - though I'm very keen to get a game in with the latter to see how it goes.
This seems pretty minor

[Elbows]

I always lean away from anything having a 2+ (particularly one which can't be reduced, etc.).  While it would still be a rarity, that's "feel bad" territory for gaming.  If you left it at 2+ maximum and all normal modifiers applied, it's slightly less "feel bad" in my opinion.

You could always do simple re-writes for how armour/shields function in the game, or certain ones, at least.  Shields could apply a parry, or incur a -1 when attacked by missiles, rather than actual armour.  Certain armours could reduce incoming enemy strength instead of providing a save (makes the most sense for stuff like light jerkins, leather, padded armour, etc.).  Some armour could reduce your to-hit roll, etc.  All this stuff would remove the armour save roll, which would be a nice streamlining effect.

[Hobgoblin]

I always lean away from anything having a 2+ (particularly one which can't be reduced, etc.).  While it would still be a rarity, that's "feel bad" territory for gaming.  If you left it at 2+ maximum and all normal modifiers applied, it's slightly less "feel bad" in my opinion.

Yes, that's a good point. And it would avoid having to count negatives, etc. And even a guy with a 2+ save is still on just a 5+ save if he's whacked by an orc boss with a two-handed sword.

You could always do simple re-writes for how armour/shields function in the game, or certain ones, at least.  Shields could apply a parry, or incur a -1 when attacked by missiles, rather than actual armour.  Certain armours could reduce incoming enemy strength instead of providing a save (makes the most sense for stuff like light jerkins, leather, padded armour, etc.).  Some armour could reduce your to-hit roll, etc.  All this stuff would remove the armour save roll, which would be a nice streamlining effect.

Those are great ideas!

One thing I thought of earlier was that shields could parry on a 'match' as well as a 'beat' - so a shield, unlike a buckler, could parry a 6. And shields as cover against missiles rather than saves is nice and clean.

I really like your idea about armour reducing 'to hit' or strength. I suppose the tricky bit would be combining it with the save-modifying effect of high S.

[Citizen Sade]

One thing I thought of earlier was that shields could parry on a 'match' as well as a 'beat' - so a shield, unlike a buckler, could parry a 6.

Like the Dwarf Master of Blades skill? Would you up the cost of shields for the additional benefits opening up the costed for in-game effect rather than cost to produce in reality can of worms?

Parry is an interesting one. There’s an argument that it should not just be limited to swords, bucklers & Dwarf axes. I think it’s makes more sense to have it as a skill useable with any weapon. Perhaps even one that’s automatically available to anyone who’s sufficiently skilled/trained. WS4?

I really like your idea about armour reducing 'to hit' or strength. I suppose the tricky bit would be combining it with the save-modifying effect of high S.

I quite like the concept of armour increasing toughness. The trouble is that such an approach could lead to some very tough models and would probably require a pretty major overhaul of Mordheim rules. Criticals based on to hit rolls rather than to wound, for example, to allow skilled or lucky strikes to weak spots.

TBH, there are plenty of things that could be changed to make Mordheim more balanced and/or realistic. I haven’t found the system to be sufficiently broken to prompt me to do so and deal with all the knock-on effects yet.