Tuesday, July 6, 2010

House Rules: Dismounting

In 40k, there are a number of "steeds", cavalry or machines such as motorbikes that occur in various army lists. In my own armies, seekers of Slaanesh without their mounts of Slaanesh are simply daemonettes. Chaos marine bikers without bikes are just chaos marines.

Every once in a while, I'd very much like to be able to dismount a special character or a squad of miniatures from their assorted steeds. The main reason I find I want to do this is so that a miniature can climb to the upper levels of ruins. Take daemonettes and steeds of Slaanesh for instance. Without their steeds the daemonettes would happily hop up to upper ruins levels to take on any opponents, but their steeds get in their way from doing this (rules wise).

So: as an optional special house rule, I've been mucking around with this idea. At the end of a movement phase, any mounted miniature may discard their mount and replace their miniature by an appropriate un-mounted version (e.g. a chaos marine biker gets replaced by a regular chaos marine, etc.). They lose any applicable bonuses that result from being mounted (extra attacks, toughness and special rules like furious charge if applicable). Moreover, they may not recover their mounts -- they're presumed to have wandered off (frightened by all the noise and clamour of the mordant of battle in the case of horses ... sprayed by accidental bullet fire in the case of bikes). The unit or character is still worth the same points value or kill points (depending on the mission) as before they dismounted. Their unit type changes to infantry (or whatever is appropriate), but they retain any special weapons that were hand-held before they dismounted (e.g. melta guns).

Feedback welcome.

3 comments:

Anton said...

not a bad idea, personally, I'd say at the begining of the movment phase, after all your not going to gallop, dive like a mad mad, then have enough time to get off your mount and grab your toys, I know that in flames of war you have this option so I think it'd work well for 40K

the other "crazy" idea would be that you could carry 1 passanger for each steed/bike now that would be cool!

jabberjabber said...

Hi Anton -- I hadn't considered it at the start of the movement phase. But now that you mention it, I can see strong merit to it! Cheers!

jabberjabber said...

Hi Cyborg Trucker -- I have to agree: for a game like kill team, it could prove invaluable given the low number of models. Cheers!

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