House Rules


The Austin group play with a few house rules, here they are:

1: Most level 3 rules are not used. If they are not listed in these exceptions, then they must be agreed to (prefereably before the game starts) or they are not in effect.

2: The published level 3 rules that are used as a standard practice, are:
 

  1.     1. The "floating critical" rule: If you roll 2 on your location roll, you then re-roll to find the actual location of your crit. We have found that this tends to liven up play, but it cuts both ways. Most often, what would have been a engine or gyro hit, goes instead to an actuator, or ECM, or something (in comparison) worthless.
  2.     2. The "powering down the Gauss Rifle" rule. Under standard level 2 rules, if you run out of ammo, or the armor over your gauss rifle gets breached, tough. Just sit there and watch it explode. Under this level 3 rule, at the end of your turn, you can power down the gauss rifle, and it will no longer explode when hit.
3: The custom rule that is in effect, is what we call the "Shotgun Choke" rule: When rolling for the number of pellets that hit from an LB-X cluster munition hit, at short range, you add 2 to your dice roll. At Long range you subtract 2, and there is no midifier at medium range. The rationale to this, is that at short range, you are more likely to hit with a full pattern of shot, and at long range, the likelihood of hitting with a full pattern (realistically) is nil. This rule is easy to implement, and adds a bit of realism to the game.

In practicality, this also added another element I liked: it seemed like the usual M.O. for the LB-X Autocannons, was that at long range, the cluster ammo was almost always used, because of the reduced to hit number (dropping your to-hit by one means more, when you're going from a 10 to a 9, than from a 5 to a 4). At short range, the number was low enough, there was no point in wasting almost half your damage. Now, it seems that people are using the cluster and the solid more or less interchangeably at any range, which I like.

4: When the majority of the units involved are vehicles, we tend to use the level 3 rules for vehicles. This greatly increases their durability, Such an inclusion is not in place by default, but is usually agreed upon