There is a nice little group here that has been playing 'friendly' games of
WotR, just trying to figure out the new rules system. Here follow some of my observations, and I hope you will add any insights you might have, or inform us of any errors you percieve.
Turn sequence:
A variation of I go/You go.
1) Roll for priority. At the start of the game, winner of the roll has priority (or follow scenario rules); in following turns, the winner of the roll decides who gets priority.
2) Movement- player with priority moves all his formations, then player w/o priority makes all his moves.
2a) Magic is cast at any point during the move phase.
3) Shoot phase. Player with priority shoots first.
4) Charge phase. Player with priority charges first. Declare which company in a formation is the spearhead. Declare target of charge. Roll a
d6 and add charge movement (inf = 2 in., monsters = 4 in., cav = 6 in; a roll of 1 is a stalled charge) to see if spearhead makes contact. If so, move the rest of the formation into contact with the spearhead, ending in a legal formation which has maximized companies in contact with the enemy. Note that if the
spearhead is mostly in the enemy's front arc, the charge will be frontal, but if the spearhead is mostly within the enemy's flank arc, the charge will hit the enemy formation's side.
5) Fight phase. Player with priority decides order fights are resolved. Resolve combats. The side which takes more casualties takes a panic test. All formations are moved out of contact.
Repeat for 8 turns, or until one side wins.
As you can see, just because you moved first during the first turn of the game, doesn't mean you will be moving first throughout the entire game. There are in fact many times you might want to move second. But moving first means you will also get to shoot first, and charge first.
Might points can be spent to interrupt a phase. If your opponent has priority, you can have a hero spend a might point and call a heroic move, which will allow his formation to move before any enemy formations. Calling a heroic charge can mean that you get to stop-thrust an enemy charge.
To call special actions like this, you must declare you are doing it at the start of the phase. This gives your opponent the opportunity to call heroic actions of his own. When you have a situation like this, both of you declare how many heroes are calling actions. Then you mark the order your heroes are going in, and you both mark off the might points. (Kind of a bidding war.) Then you roll a
d6. On a low roll, evil wins, and on a high roll, good wins. Then you take turns having your heroes do their actions. So if the roll was a 2, the first Evil hero would make his special action, followed by the first Good hero, then the second Evil, and so on. It is possible for one hero's action to prevent another's, and the might points spent are wasted.
Movement: It's really, really fluid. There are no penalties or restrictions on things like changing facing. If you want to face backwards, you just pick your companies up and spin them around. [Edit: this has been made explicit in the
FAQ.] If a winged Nazgul lands behind you, just turn around- then call a heroic charge and hit the sucker first!
Charging: attack order is important, but bonus dice from charging are usually more important. My winged Nazgul got charged by a formation of Arnor Royal Guard; the Nazgul (monster) got to swing first (5 dice- 4 for attacks, plus one for a higher fight value), but the Royal Guard got in with 2 companies (for 16 dice) plus the charge bonus (2 more) plus one supporting company (1 more). Even had I killed 5 guard, I'd have still been looking at 14 dice coming back at me. Strength 3 to defense 8, he needed 6's then 4's. He got the two hits he needed, and proceeded to make his single roll on the Hard to Kill Chart... 6... bye-bye, Ringwraith.
[Update: we did this wrong. P. 44 says that only 1 company can be placed in contact with a monster.]
Wounding monsters: It took us forever to figure out how this is supposed to work. In general, a model has a Resilience stat, and it when it suffers a number of hits equal to its Resilience, it is removed. So, a single hit will remove most infantry. Two hits are required to remove a cavalry model; if you only do one hit during a combat, the hit is ignored (or as we say, 'soaked'). Most monsters- even the Mumak- have a Resilience of 2. Why then does the Mumak have a 'ridiculously hard to kill' table, on which you can roll numbers of 15+? When the critter gets two wound counters, it's dead!
Except that ain't the way it works.
On anything with a table,
wound counters do not equal wounds. Wound counters are persistent & cumulative pluses to your next roll on the table, but the critter doesn't actually
die until you can get to a 6 on the Hard to Kill table (or indeed, a 15 on the Ridiculously Hard to Kill table).
Say you do 4 hits to a troll (Resilience 2). That becomes two consecutive rolls on the Hard to Kill table. Your first roll is a 2:
one wound counter is placed on the troll's base. Your second roll is a 3, +1 for the wound counter, giving you the result of a 4:
two wound counters are placed on the troll's base, for a total of 3 wound counters. Then you do three more hits to the troll; one is soaked, and the other two become a roll on the table. You roll a 1, +3 for the wound counters for the result of a 4:
two more wound counters! The troll now has 5 wound counters on its base. Hopefully you will soon do two more hits, because any roll plus 5 wound counters will be a result of a 6:
slain. Since a result of 1 on the table is
no effect, a series of bad rolls on the Hard to Kill table can keep the beastie in the fight for a long time.
Magic: The first spell a wizard casts is cast automatically. If you have a Mastery level that will let you cast another spell, in order to do so, you must roll equal to or over the focus value of the
last spell you cast. So Gandalf could cast
Blessing of the Valar (focus 6) automatically, as his first spell; but if he then wanted to cast
Instill Valor (focus 3), he would have to roll a 6. If he rolls less than a 6, he is through casting for the turn.
Just because a spell is cast automatically, doesn't mean it is automatically cast
successfully. Gandalf casts
Blessing of the Valar as his first spell;
Blessing says that on a
d6 roll of 2-5, something good happens, and on the roll of a 6 something awesome happens. On a 1, nothing happens. So Gandalf has to roll better than a 1 for this spell to be cast successfully.
Might: you can never have enough might points. Keeping two characters with
Counselor near each other, so they can replenish each others' might points, is looking to be a nifty idea. Also, adding captains to every unit is looking to be worth it just for the 2 might points they have, never mind the additional point of fight & courage they bring. Spell resistance alone (Will of Iron) is worth the 50 points. When you're just that little inch out of charge range, the ability to have a captain spend a might point to make the charge successful, so the Epic Hero in the same formation can use his might points in the following combat... totally worth it.
Terror: If you want to charge something that causes terror, you must pass a courage test to do so; and if you are successfully charged by a terror-causer, you must pass a courage test or your fight value is reduced to
zero. Terror does not cancel out, the way it does in
WHFB. If a troll wants to charge an Ent, the troll must pass a courage test, and then, if it makes it into contact, the ent must also pass a courage test.
Combat: Another thing we fantasy veterans were doing wrong. We could not, for the life of us, figure out how cavalry could get an
Earth-shaking Charge, or when a disordered formation was ever going to get the chance to fall back. Per p. 50, when a fight is finished,
all the formations are backed up so that they are out of contact.
This is huge. It means that each turn, you get to charge again, and get those bonus dice for charging, again. (And have a chance to suffer a stalled charge- again.
) Even really large units will crumble fast under that kind of punishment. It means if you lose priority, you might find yourself charged by the formation you were punking on last turn. It means that Epic Heroes can leave a formation before the final fight, or join a disordered formation before it makes its courage test to restore order. It means that a formation that was in combat with one formation last turn doesn't have to attack the same formation again- your cavalry can punch into the flank of a big orc formation, then pull out and move away, ready to charge the reinforcements coming up to help those orcs.
Earth-shaking Charge is brutal! If a cavalry formation is on the winning side of a fight, it rolls a
d6, and on a 6, it can immediately charge and fight again in the same fight phase... which means it gets all the bonus dice for charging, and more than likely will be hitting a disordered enemy (since the enemy can't take a courage test to restore order until the start of its movement, and
ESC happens in the fight phase).
Heroic Fight works much the same way, only the second charge is automatic, not
d6'd, but it costs a Might point to call an
Heroic Fight. BUT! If you call an
Heroic Fight and win, not only your formation, but
every other friendly formation in that fight gets to go again.
Attack Order: In any combat, monsters strike before cavalry, cavalry strike before infantry, and like units strike simultaneously. This has led some people to ask, if an infantry company in a deep formation takes three hits from a troll, does it lose those attacks back (a la
WHFB, where the charge is so important)- or does it hit back with its full complement of attacks until models are actually removed from the base? In other words, do the infantry hit back with 5 attacks + support, or 8 attacks + support? The rules are actually vague enough that either interpretation seems valid, and no concrete example is given in the book. The
WHFB mindset naturally assumes that the infantry would lose those attacks, but Fantasy specifically talks about striking first & base-to-base. Nowhere in the
WotR rules does it say that the company in contact with the enemy will lose its return attacks, if the casualties are not removed from the base in contact.
A poster on The Warhammer Forum claims to have called Mr. Ward and gotten the following answer:
a company fights with its full attacks until it actually loses models from the base. So in our example with the troll, if the monster was fighting a fresh formation of four infantry stands, and did three hits, the casualties would be removed from a rear, non-combatant company, and the company in contact with the troll would hit back with its full complement of attacks. (Probably 8 + 3 for support.)
Support: current concensus is that all companies in a formation that are not in contact with the enemy can provide support in the fight phase, and any company that is in range can provide support during the shoot phase.
This makes throwing monsters and cavalry into the front of big, deep infantry formations a bad idea.
[Edit:] We have learned that cavalry charging Monsters usually ends badly for the cavalry.
