Skirmish

[emd1983]

Hey guys!! 

I haven’t been able to pick up a January White Dwarf yet, but I was wondering if anyone has had a chance to look thorough the new skirmish rules yet? 

Anyone have any thoughts/ideas/comments? Worth a look?

Thanks again for all your help!!

[SaJeel]

I've played a couple of games, and really like the balance of it so far. The missions are an absolute blast, and having access to every model is a definite boon and making the points system what you'd expect. Eager to see what happens with next months WD and the further rules that will be in that.

[robinlvalentine]

They're cool enough, but it's a very minor update. It remains a very loose system without really any attempt at balance and with lots of awkward holes and edge cases. I wouldn't really call it a proper game at this stage - it's still basically a very roughly sketched spin-off of the core rules.

I think if you were to stick to the old Skirmish rules you wouldn't be missing that much, but that issue of White Dwarf has enough other cool stuff in it it's worth picking up. 

Very interested to see what the campaign rules in next issue are like - hoping they're a bit more interesting. 

[Kramer]

Also I a stream live and free on twitch right know. On the warhammer channel they’ll be starting a game in a couple of minutes. 

[emd1983]

That’s great, cheers for your thoughts! I think I’ll defo pick up the Jan white dwarf and take a look. 

Cheers!!!

[SaJeel]

The biggest thing for me so far has been how impactive (unit leaders), champions are, the missions grant champions bonus Victory points in interesting ways

[pseudonyme]

 

[Mykah]

It’s great that GW had found a way to calculate renown without needing to publishing updates on new match play points. They added a new keyword “Champion” for the leader of a unit. Which you pay extra for. My only complaint is you still need a hero to lead your warband. I would have like to have seen some writing of allowing your champions to lead. I also like that they reworked the command for skirmish and artifacts to a more general setting.

I’m looking forward to the what they will do for campaign rules in February.

[Kramer]

1 minute ago, Mykah said:

It’s great that GW had found a way to calculate reknow without needing to publishing updates on new match play points. They added a new keyword “Champion” for the leader of a unit. Which you pay extra for. My only complaint is you still need a hero to lead your warbsnd. I would have like to have seen some writing of allowing your champions to lead. I also like that they reworked the command for skirmish and artifacts to a more general setting.

 I’m looking forward to the what they will do for campaign rules in February.

 

Funny thing is the designer suggested doing just that in the twitch stream yesterday. Drop the points and nominate one champion as general and you could give it the hero key he said

[Mykah]

3 minutes ago, Kramer said:

Funny thing is the designer suggested doing just that in the twitch stream yesterday. Drop the points and nominate one champion as general and you could give it the hero key he said

Was this the Warhammer TV twitch stream?

[calcysimon]

I loved too to have the option to give a champion the hero keyword

 

 

[Kramer]

15 minutes ago, Mykah said:

Was this the Warhammer TV twitch stream?

Yes! 

[Kramer]

3 minutes ago, calcysimon said:

I loved too to have the option to give a champion the hero keyword

 

 

To be clear, he said ‘house rule it like that! Sounds cool’

[eekamouse]

1 hour ago, Kramer said:

Funny thing is the designer suggested doing just that in the twitch stream yesterday. Drop the points and nominate one champion as general and you could give it the hero key he said

What is meant by "drop the points"? 

[robinlvalentine]

23 minutes ago, eekamouse said:

What is meant by "drop the points"? 

As in you'd have to lower the starting points value for a warband. As it stands, probably a third to a half of any warband's cost is just its leader, so if you take them out of the game, you might want to set, say, 150 Renown as the new starting level. 

[eekamouse]

10 minutes ago, robinlvalentine said:

As in you'd have to lower the starting points value for a warband. As it stands, probably a third to a half of any warband's cost is just its leader, so if you take them out of the game, you might want to set, say, 150 Renown as the new starting level. 

Gotcha. That makes sense. 

[Future]

Starting a narrative using the new skirmish rules and really excited about it. The first battle will take place before the new white dwarf but any thing interesting in there I will definitely be adding to the skirmish campaign.

 

I intend to heavily house rule it as a path to glory style game until then. Basically combat will be RAW but in between scenarios I want it to take on an almost DND like atmosphere.  In so far as even rolling d20 for the results of skill checks. Lobbying local politics, recruiting 'talent', finding work, the best travel time between locations, can all become d20 skill checks. There wont be much roleplaying per say but instead a list of options to pursue between scenarios that will all require non combat skill checks with outcomes similar to rolling on the rewards table. 

[Mykah]

4 hours ago, Kramer said:

Yes! 

Damn, I miss that. I tired rewatching the stream on my phone but the video didn’t play.

[Kramer]

4 hours ago, eekamouse said:

Gotcha. That makes sense. 

What he said  (indeed play lower starting points, which in my mind really works with campaigns, can't wait for that one  )

2 hours ago, Future said:

Starting a narrative using the new skirmish rules and really excited about it. The first battle will take place before the new white dwarf but any thing interesting in there I will definitely be adding to the skirmish campaign.

 

I intend to heavily house rule it as a path to glory style game until then. Basically combat will be RAW but in between scenarios I want it to take on an almost DND like atmosphere.  In so far as even rolling d20 for the results of skill checks. Lobbying local politics, recruiting 'talent', finding work, the best travel time between locations, can all become d20 skill checks. There wont be much roleplaying per say but instead a list of options to pursue between scenarios that will all require non combat skill checks with outcomes similar to rolling on the rewards table. 

Sounds good! If you end up writing it down, please share! As well as your experiences! 

[Future]

I definitely will!

[Agent of Chaos]

I've had some thoughts about potential house rules for a 6 mission skirmish campaign;

1. Allow command traits and artifacts to be chosen from the warband leader's allegiance (or grand allegiance) although any allegiance abilities wouldnt apply (just the standard grand alliance ones from the skirmish rules). Potentially might make these cost 5 points each with the ability to add them in later missions if the player cant afford them from the start.
2. Likely to be an escalation campaign with additional points added to both warbands after each mission (say 20 points). Setting the starting point level is tricky but I guess starting at 250 and ending up at 350 for the 6th and final mission wouldnt be too much.
3. The reward for the winner of each mission could be a randomly determined artifact from malign sorcery which the winning player could either give to their hero or "sell it at market" for gold (say 10 points) which they can put towards their warband in the next mission.  If one player wins the first 5 missions and sold the artifact each time they would have an extra 50 points for the final mission, meaning at the very worst the final game is 400 vs 350 points- I think thats reasonable as there should be some reward for the earlier wins.
4. Limit total wounds of any hero/monster to ensure no one brings anything too broken- thinking 8 wounds is a reasonable cut off but would need to review some examples to see if this should shift up or down a wound or 2. Definitely wouldnt go lower than 6 or higher than 10. 
5. Would need to do something about overpowered spells etc however there are so many out there I'm not sure if a blanket rule would cover it. Thinking the easiest way is to have players come to me with their list and we house rule how a certain OP spell/ability will work in skirmish so they can decide if they still want to take that hero or not. Perhaps a nerf to a spell/ability would see a hero's cost decrease slightly so they were still playable. 

Thoughts?

[Mykah]

4 hours ago, Future said:

Starting a narrative using the new skirmish rules and really excited about it. The first battle will take place before the new white dwarf but any thing interesting in there I will definitely be adding to the skirmish campaign.

 

I intend to heavily house rule it as a path to glory style game until then. Basically combat will be RAW but in between scenarios I want it to take on an almost DND like atmosphere.  In so far as even rolling d20 for the results of skill checks. Lobbying local politics, recruiting 'talent', finding work, the best travel time between locations, can all become d20 skill checks. There wont be much roleplaying per say but instead a list of options to pursue between scenarios that will all require non combat skill checks with outcomes similar to rolling on the rewards table. 

If you didn’t already know, Cubicle 7 is making an Age of Sigmar RPG and one of their employees made a post on this site.

 

[Kramer]

9 hours ago, Agent of Chaos said:

I've had some thoughts about potential house rules for a 6 mission skirmish campaign;

1. Allow command traits and artifacts to be chosen from the warband leader's allegiance (or grand allegiance) although any allegiance abilities wouldnt apply (just the standard grand alliance ones from the skirmish rules). Potentially might make these cost 5 points each with the ability to add them in later missions if the player cant afford them from the start.
2. Likely to be an escalation campaign with additional points added to both warbands after each mission (say 20 points). Setting the starting point level is tricky but I guess starting at 250 and ending up at 350 for the 6th and final mission wouldnt be too much.
3. The reward for the winner of each mission could be a randomly determined artifact from malign sorcery which the winning player could either give to their hero or "sell it at market" for gold (say 10 points) which they can put towards their warband in the next mission.  If one player wins the first 5 missions and sold the artifact each time they would have an extra 50 points for the final mission, meaning at the very worst the final game is 400 vs 350 points- I think thats reasonable as there should be some reward for the earlier wins.
4. Limit total wounds of any hero/monster to ensure no one brings anything too broken- thinking 8 wounds is a reasonable cut off but would need to review some examples to see if this should shift up or down a wound or 2. Definitely wouldnt go lower than 6 or higher than 10. 
5. Would need to do something about overpowered spells etc however there are so many out there I'm not sure if a blanket rule would cover it. Thinking the easiest way is to have players come to me with their list and we house rule how a certain OP spell/ability will work in skirmish so they can decide if they still want to take that hero or not. Perhaps a nerf to a spell/ability would see a hero's cost decrease slightly so they were still playable. 

Thoughts?

1 & 3. I think the reason probably is weird things might happen. Too many things to overlook. But as a house rules very workable and fun! like the idea of making them worth something. I'm probably going to start small with just champions not heroes and letting them earn something in one of the first missions (relic hunter) makes it also easier for newer players with less rules but layering it on with every game

2. Sounds about right! I'm waiting for the next White Dwarf as I won't have a game before then though

4. I'm going to try it without but I think 8 is a good spot. A  lot of mounted models, the Ogor Tyrant, Nurgle heroes are just below that and I think that's roughly the limit that feels right for Skirmish.

5. Yeah individual rulings are best but I did play couple of games with the rules of three from Hinterlands and that worked pretty well. But yeah everything that hits every unit in a certain range is something to think about. 

Good luck and have fun! 

Also something that might be fun for hero/unit progression might be looking into the Path to Glory upgrades and letting certain models earn one for achieving certain objectives. Could be a fun addition, or too much paperwork. Just a thought.

[Agent of Chaos]

@Kramer great comments mate!

Love the idea of the Path to Glory upgrades and artifacts being a reward for heroes and champions. Thanks for the suggestions!

[Future]

Saw this in the gitz faq but figured it was relevant to all warbands and there fore worth noting in Skirmish -

Q: If I am playing a Skirmish game, how do I work out the renown for Zarbag and Zarbag’s Gitz? A: Divide the points cost of Zarbag and Zarbag’s Gitz (160) by the number of models in the unit (8), to give the renown of each model (20). As you must take them all if you take any of them, this means that although Zarbag’s renown is a bit lower than it should be and the renown of his Gitz is a bit higher than it should be, the combined total for all of the models is still correct.

 

We were definitely curious about this one locally. For any warband taking the hero alone is a steal. We were actually already playing that the hero was the full price if you took them alone.