Thursday, September 5, 2013

Making Officers More Heroic


So here's an interesting idea I had while outlining the Shooting rules today...

So far, officers/heroes are models that can:
1) Take Strike Force Morale Checks (To See If You Retreat From Casualties Sustained)
2) Lend their Ld to units within 6".
Which is all well and good, if a bit dry. But how about this idea?


We Let Them Form Units On The Fly

So you have an officer standing next to a unit during the shooting phase. I'm leaning towards disallowing the targeting of multiple units (for simplicity). But what if we let that officer 'grab' some men from that unit to shoot at HIS target instead?
  • The unit leader + 4 models shoot at target one...
  • While the officer and 5 models he 'ordered' himself shoot at unit two.
We'd have to disallow the officer shooting at the same unit as the unit leader (to prevent suppression-gaming), but it would definitely be a good reason to have the officer in close proximity instead of hiding back in the deployment zone.

The other place we could have an officer grabbing models is in the movement phase, where he could do a "follow me!" and grab men from one or more units around him. Potentially leading the charge towards the enemy lines for a heroic assault.

That would be a good way of getting more models into assault at once. I'd even be tempted to drop the 6" rule (originally created to avoid one-at-a-time unit assaults) for close-combat and go back to pure melee in a more Flames-like vein.

It would also let an officer 'take over' a unit that lost its leader.

Some other rules would have to be adjusted. Perhaps instead of counting up remaining units for the Strike Force Morale Check, we just count up remaining unit leaders instead. So that officers would be free to 'grab' and 'drop' their ad-hoc mini-units without making things too confusing.

We'd also need something simple for dealing with armor-save allocation in mixed units. Though we do have something already that was written for close-combat. Which I'm sure could be adapted.

Thoughts?

Edit: Here's a very short outline of general ideas for this:

6.1.1 With Me Men!
An Officer in coherency with a unit may 'temporarily re-assign' up to half of the squad to himself. Forming a new squad with himself as the leader.

6.1.2 Hold This Position!

An Officer may 'drop' all or part of his unit at a location. They count as leaderless.

6.1.3 On My Target!

If in coherency with an a holding unit in the shooting phase, all models in that unit within 6" of the officer may fire at a separate target from their unit, using the Officer as their leader for all tests.

6.1.4 Whose In Charge Here?! 

The Officer may take over a unit without a leader. Any models following him already also join this new unit.

6.1.5 Want To Live Forever?
Officer may combine two or more units into a single assault action.

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