Good rules. I agree with your points at the beginning about not changing the game too much. I think tweaking the difficulty a little bit as you have suggested adds more 'peril' and certainly makes the game more exciting. I have also nerfed crits, and make enemy attacks always against the most vulnerable explorer (I think I read these ideas on BGG - your post?). I have tried playing with the defence rolls you suggested but two groups of guardsmen suddenly became superhuman. I now have large characters defend with D6 but Chaos Marines and OM with D8. I have not played with retinue characters, but having to pay them makes good sense thematically. A house rule I have added is that all explorers (including those in stasis) only heal one grievous wound at precipice after each expedition. This makes me swap out the explorers a lot more instead of always relying on Locarno and UR-025. Look forward to your next vid.👍
Yeah. I really enjoy the game out of the box, so this isn't about reinventing the whole system. It's just salting to taste really. Minor nudges this way or that. Not something I would even bother doing if I didn't already love the game so much. I also prefer leaving armour rolls off the smallest enemies. I don't think they should be able to withstand withering firepower from the heroes, and it just makes the game flow a little faster. I like the idea about grievous wounds. It does get very easy to stick to your favourite characters, so finding ways to encourage you to mix up the team is never a bad thing. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts.
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring Update: Just started my final expedition for the hidden vault with the house rules we discussed and my best team kitted out. First card was a combat, and the group finished with five wounds and two grievous wounds. 7 more exploration cards before the vault. Ain't looking good. But the peril adds excitement, right? Normally these additional rules aren't that harsh but had some crippling reinforcement roles, and letting traitor gaurd sergeants role a d6 defence.
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring Managed to finish the expedition... Entered the vault with three grievous wounds and two explorers were taken out of action. I had the Raiment of the Technomancer but rolled a 3 on its first use. 😣 What a game! I hope you get to do Solitaire playthrough.
@@adamryder8377 Sounds like a close call. I love when missions create those movie-like moments where the heroes have their backs to the wall. The weeks running up to Christmas are bedlam, with lots of family events, parties, and some pressing deadlines for my day job, but hopefully I will find some time to squeeze in playthroughs.
Thanks for sharing your ideas for house rules, to increase difficulty I'm going to use 3 house rules, which are: 1) When rolling for reinforcements, use a D6 instead of the D20 2) Give all hostiles a D6 defence action dice, apart from power armoured hostiles, which I'll give a D8 3) If an explorer is taken out of action during combat then make a vitality roll for that guy in each event phase of that combat and if they fail the roll change a wound marker to a grievous wound marker, if all of the action spaces are grievous wounds and the explorer fails another vitality roll in the event phase then the explorer bleeds out and dies. I've also bought extra sets of the hostiles to reduce limits on the number of miniatures. I thought I'd share them in case you want to try them out.
Perhaps using a D6 for reinforcements is a bit much? Instead I'll use the the D20 but treat a 1 or 2 as the game's 1 result, a 3,4,5 as a 2 result, and a 6,7,8 as a 3 result
@@David-mx1os Interesting ideas. I do agree that a D6 for reinforcements is probably a bit much. Giving enemies a defence dice is really good, and makes a big difference. Thanks for watching the video and sharing your own ideas.
I don't like to change the rules much either. What I do involves more dice rolling, so some people might hate it, but I've never found the game too easy when playing with my house rules. 1st, when placing enemies on a discovery point, I role a dice (die?) to see which enemy from that group gets placed. I do this until the hex is filled to capacity (obviously, this step can be skipped if the group is all the same unit, like beastmen or ur-ghuls, etc). Then, instead of rolling to choose which enemy from the group is placed next, I roll for which adjacent hex they get placed in. This way, for example, with 6 traitor guardsmen, you're only guaranteed to have 1 full hex (where the discovery point is) and I can't game the game by making the 3 most powerful guardsman be in that hex. This makes Pious Vorne's flamer way less powerful because the units are spread out. And usually for her to reach the hex with the most enemies in it, she has to get closer to the other enemies surrounding it. 2nd, if there's a choice of targets, I roll a dice for the enemy. I think lots of people do this. 3rd, I do your idea of making criticals only do 2 damage instead of 3. Just those tiny changes and I'm never complaining about it being too easy.
Cool. Thanks for watching the video and sharing your ideas. It's an interesting idea to randomise the enemy spawn placement. I'm not keen on adding a lot of extra dice rolling, but for most enemies you wouldn't need to do it, so I might give that a little whirl at some point and see how it goes. I do think the crit nerf is a solid call. I don't really know why they decided to make it triple damage in the first place.
You've got some really great and interesting ideas here, thank you! I really like the idea of the critical rolling for variable additional damage, makes it feel more like a measured movement game in addition with the armor saves per enemy size. I don't know if I will USE them, but I like the way you are thinking. (I am still trying to wrap my first play through before I tweak anything.) Whenever I have two even choices I just call "odds/evens" and roll a D6 and take the corresponding result, ie; when reinforcements arrive through a portal they have two choices of hex to arrive on, (assuming they are bursting through the door) so I roll odds/evens for that. I am looking forward to increasing the difficulty slightly as none of my characters have died in my first play through and now they each have ~9 upgrades/items which is a bit unmanageable.
Thanks for watching. There is something quite pleasing about a 50/50 dice off sometimes. It's quick, and it's a neutral outcome - sometimes things will go your way and sometimes they don't. Also, it quite nicely reflects the fog of war. A bad guy in a gunfight isn't always going to make the best decision in the heat of the moment.
Nice video, I will add some of those to my compilation (some I already had there :) ). But I would advise against randomized crit - I think, that there are hostiles, which can heal themselves separately from wounds and grievous wounds (Ambull?). It will be hard to keep track.
Thanks for watching. Randomised damage is just an idea I have toyed with. I think with a bit of refining it could be made to work, but I'm not quite there yet. I realised I probably wasn't very clear in the video when I said that if you rolled the second crit then that would be three "which is the standard critical damage." In other words, you would either cause double damage or a crit. But at the moment I'm very happy with crits just being nerfed to double damage, but I'll probably keep poking at other ideas.
Interesting stuff, I'm only 2 expeditions through so far (turns out I've been doing one or two things incorrectly) but I shall definitely be trying these rules in the future. 👍🏻
I also think one of the best and simple ways to increase difficulty is to use intelligent adversary play instead of randomly rolled AI. That is to say you have a person controlling just adversaries who plays them in the same way as you would your heroes instead of using random roll generation tables. They decide when they advance, when they hold or retreat, how and who they attack. When in range to attack the Blackstone dice can still be rolled to see if the attack becomes an onslaught or just standard single attack (any roll lower than onslaught results in a standard single attack). This is harder to implement in solo play as you might tend to give your team an advantage wether conscious or not, so in that instance i tend to revert to the AI table and resolve targeting issues ect via dice rolls. For eg two heroes are equal distance from adversary a roll of 1-10 attacks one hero a roll of 11-20 attacks the other. Multiple attacks on all heroes in range are resolved in the same way.
I cant figure it out yet..but having a way to make spindle drones(the anti bodies of the Blackstone) and the Ur-ghul attack everything and making it balanced. Those 2 factions wouldn't ignore chaos(you could say the ur-ghuls would as an argument by the fact they don't like chaos flesh but I doubt it holds water)
I haven't yet. I was going to do my first run of it on camera, but it might be a little while, as I'm completely swamped at the moment. From looking at the rules, I think it will be a fun one-off experience, just to see how much stuff you can kill, but I don't think it's going to be something people use a lot (not least because you can't use the Solitaire in campaign play).
I used the first two as well... They seemed a natural thing to do. Not sure about the d&d one, as it would result in a very uneven difficulty based on the draw.
It’s worked really well for me. It’s a nice quick solution for if you start to feel like you’re having an easy time of it. Thanks for watching the video!
Occasionally you can run out of miniatures, so having extras will prevent that, but an extra set of villains is really most useful if you have the card pack expansion that increases the number of miniatures in each spawn group.
A common complaint of Blackstone Fortress is that it’s too easy. Even Games Workshop released an expansion solely intended to up the difficulty. A lot of the ideas in this video are for those people who do want the game to be more challenging.
Certainly. Changing to a D6 would really ramp up the number of reinforcements, which I am not a huge fan of. I would rather enemies were a little more robust rather than simply appearing in greater numbers.
Have you ever tried doing one activation roll per group rather than per enemy? I've never done it, but I was going to try it at some point to see how it pans out.
@@mikolajwitkowski8093 Cool. Yeah, I would expect fewer rolls to cause spikes in the luck, while rolling across the board helps to level things out. It's an interesting idea though.
@@jorjthemorj Thanks for sharing. It's an interesting variant. I think it's probably better to roll per model, just to get all the different interactions.
Good rules. I agree with your points at the beginning about not changing the game too much. I think tweaking the difficulty a little bit as you have suggested adds more 'peril' and certainly makes the game more exciting. I have also nerfed crits, and make enemy attacks always against the most vulnerable explorer (I think I read these ideas on BGG - your post?). I have tried playing with the defence rolls you suggested but two groups of guardsmen suddenly became superhuman. I now have large characters defend with D6 but Chaos Marines and OM with D8. I have not played with retinue characters, but having to pay them makes good sense thematically. A house rule I have added is that all explorers (including those in stasis) only heal one grievous wound at precipice after each expedition. This makes me swap out the explorers a lot more instead of always relying on Locarno and UR-025. Look forward to your next vid.👍
Yeah. I really enjoy the game out of the box, so this isn't about reinventing the whole system. It's just salting to taste really. Minor nudges this way or that. Not something I would even bother doing if I didn't already love the game so much. I also prefer leaving armour rolls off the smallest enemies. I don't think they should be able to withstand withering firepower from the heroes, and it just makes the game flow a little faster. I like the idea about grievous wounds. It does get very easy to stick to your favourite characters, so finding ways to encourage you to mix up the team is never a bad thing. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts.
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring Update: Just started my final expedition for the hidden vault with the house rules we discussed and my best team kitted out. First card was a combat, and the group finished with five wounds and two grievous wounds. 7 more exploration cards before the vault. Ain't looking good. But the peril adds excitement, right? Normally these additional rules aren't that harsh but had some crippling reinforcement roles, and letting traitor gaurd sergeants role a d6 defence.
@@adamryder8377 Sounds tense. Let me know how it turns out!
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring Managed to finish the expedition... Entered the vault with three grievous wounds and two explorers were taken out of action. I had the Raiment of the Technomancer but rolled a 3 on its first use. 😣 What a game! I hope you get to do Solitaire playthrough.
@@adamryder8377 Sounds like a close call. I love when missions create those movie-like moments where the heroes have their backs to the wall. The weeks running up to Christmas are bedlam, with lots of family events, parties, and some pressing deadlines for my day job, but hopefully I will find some time to squeeze in playthroughs.
Thanks for sharing your ideas for house rules, to increase difficulty I'm going to use 3 house rules, which are:
1) When rolling for reinforcements, use a D6 instead of the D20
2) Give all hostiles a D6 defence action dice, apart from power armoured hostiles, which I'll give a D8
3) If an explorer is taken out of action during combat then make a vitality roll for that guy in each event phase of that combat and if they fail the roll change a wound marker to a grievous wound marker, if all of the action spaces are grievous wounds and the explorer fails another vitality roll in the event phase then the explorer bleeds out and dies.
I've also bought extra sets of the hostiles to reduce limits on the number of miniatures. I thought I'd share them in case you want to try them out.
Perhaps using a D6 for reinforcements is a bit much? Instead I'll use the the D20 but treat a 1 or 2 as the game's 1 result, a 3,4,5 as a 2 result, and a 6,7,8 as a 3 result
@@David-mx1os Interesting ideas. I do agree that a D6 for reinforcements is probably a bit much. Giving enemies a defence dice is really good, and makes a big difference. Thanks for watching the video and sharing your own ideas.
I don't like to change the rules much either. What I do involves more dice rolling, so some people might hate it, but I've never found the game too easy when playing with my house rules.
1st, when placing enemies on a discovery point, I role a dice (die?) to see which enemy from that group gets placed. I do this until the hex is filled to capacity (obviously, this step can be skipped if the group is all the same unit, like beastmen or ur-ghuls, etc). Then, instead of rolling to choose which enemy from the group is placed next, I roll for which adjacent hex they get placed in. This way, for example, with 6 traitor guardsmen, you're only guaranteed to have 1 full hex (where the discovery point is) and I can't game the game by making the 3 most powerful guardsman be in that hex. This makes Pious Vorne's flamer way less powerful because the units are spread out. And usually for her to reach the hex with the most enemies in it, she has to get closer to the other enemies surrounding it.
2nd, if there's a choice of targets, I roll a dice for the enemy. I think lots of people do this.
3rd, I do your idea of making criticals only do 2 damage instead of 3.
Just those tiny changes and I'm never complaining about it being too easy.
Cool. Thanks for watching the video and sharing your ideas. It's an interesting idea to randomise the enemy spawn placement. I'm not keen on adding a lot of extra dice rolling, but for most enemies you wouldn't need to do it, so I might give that a little whirl at some point and see how it goes. I do think the crit nerf is a solid call. I don't really know why they decided to make it triple damage in the first place.
You've got some really great and interesting ideas here, thank you! I really like the idea of the critical rolling for variable additional damage, makes it feel more like a measured movement game in addition with the armor saves per enemy size. I don't know if I will USE them, but I like the way you are thinking. (I am still trying to wrap my first play through before I tweak anything.)
Whenever I have two even choices I just call "odds/evens" and roll a D6 and take the corresponding result, ie; when reinforcements arrive through a portal they have two choices of hex to arrive on, (assuming they are bursting through the door) so I roll odds/evens for that. I am looking forward to increasing the difficulty slightly as none of my characters have died in my first play through and now they each have ~9 upgrades/items which is a bit unmanageable.
Thanks for watching. There is something quite pleasing about a 50/50 dice off sometimes. It's quick, and it's a neutral outcome - sometimes things will go your way and sometimes they don't. Also, it quite nicely reflects the fog of war. A bad guy in a gunfight isn't always going to make the best decision in the heat of the moment.
Nice video, I will add some of those to my compilation (some I already had there :) ). But I would advise against randomized crit - I think, that there are hostiles, which can heal themselves separately from wounds and grievous wounds (Ambull?). It will be hard to keep track.
Thanks for watching. Randomised damage is just an idea I have toyed with. I think with a bit of refining it could be made to work, but I'm not quite there yet. I realised I probably wasn't very clear in the video when I said that if you rolled the second crit then that would be three "which is the standard critical damage." In other words, you would either cause double damage or a crit. But at the moment I'm very happy with crits just being nerfed to double damage, but I'll probably keep poking at other ideas.
Interesting stuff, I'm only 2 expeditions through so far (turns out I've been doing one or two things incorrectly) but I shall definitely be trying these rules in the future. 👍🏻
Thanks for watching. I hope you find one or two of the ideas interesting! I would love to hear what you think.
I also think one of the best and simple ways to increase difficulty is to use intelligent adversary play instead of randomly rolled AI. That is to say you have a person controlling just adversaries who plays them in the same way as you would your heroes instead of using random roll generation tables. They decide when they advance, when they hold or retreat, how and who they attack. When in range to attack the Blackstone dice can still be rolled to see if the attack becomes an onslaught or just standard single attack (any roll lower than onslaught results in a standard single attack). This is harder to implement in solo play as you might tend to give your team an advantage wether conscious or not, so in that instance i tend to revert to the AI table and resolve targeting issues ect via dice rolls. For eg two heroes are equal distance from adversary a roll of 1-10 attacks one hero a roll of 11-20 attacks the other. Multiple attacks on all heroes in range are resolved in the same way.
Thank you for sharing some interesting ideas👍
Thanks for watching. It's such a fun game to tinker with.
I cant figure it out yet..but having a way to make spindle drones(the anti bodies of the Blackstone) and the Ur-ghul attack everything and making it balanced.
Those 2 factions wouldn't ignore chaos(you could say the ur-ghuls would as an argument by the fact they don't like chaos flesh but I doubt it holds water)
Seth Dunavant it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt the ambull rules. The problem would be making the game easier for the good guys.
Have you tried the White Dwarf solo variation yet - and if so, did you enjoy it?
I haven't yet. I was going to do my first run of it on camera, but it might be a little while, as I'm completely swamped at the moment. From looking at the rules, I think it will be a fun one-off experience, just to see how much stuff you can kill, but I don't think it's going to be something people use a lot (not least because you can't use the Solitaire in campaign play).
Always Board Never Boring thank you!
@@Ben_Mdws You're welcome. Thanks for watching!
I used the first two as well... They seemed a natural thing to do. Not sure about the d&d one, as it would result in a very uneven difficulty based on the draw.
I need to experiment with that one more.
I think that's a great idea, that grievous wounds do double damage and not triple damage.
It’s worked really well for me. It’s a nice quick solution for if you start to feel like you’re having an easy time of it. Thanks for watching the video!
Is having to box sets worth of bad guys going to make it harder? I have two sets but only use the dice out of the other set, lol
Occasionally you can run out of miniatures, so having extras will prevent that, but an extra set of villains is really most useful if you have the card pack expansion that increases the number of miniatures in each spawn group.
This game is so difficult already, why did you add all those hrules that add difficulty to it?
A common complaint of Blackstone Fortress is that it’s too easy. Even Games Workshop released an expansion solely intended to up the difficulty. A lot of the ideas in this video are for those people who do want the game to be more challenging.
its 4 too late. but use a d6 for reinforcment make the game more difficuilt.
Certainly. Changing to a D6 would really ramp up the number of reinforcements, which I am not a huge fan of. I would rather enemies were a little more robust rather than simply appearing in greater numbers.
I think the game has too many rolls as it is, so the house rules that add them are a no go for me.
Have you ever tried doing one activation roll per group rather than per enemy? I've never done it, but I was going to try it at some point to see how it pans out.
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring I have tried it, it works ok with average result, but if you get an extreme roll for the whole group... not so great :)
@@mikolajwitkowski8093 Cool. Yeah, I would expect fewer rolls to cause spikes in the luck, while rolling across the board helps to level things out. It's an interesting idea though.
@@AlwaysBoardNeverBoring always done this as I clearly misread the rules. Certainly makes the game harder and more tense at times!
@@jorjthemorj Thanks for sharing. It's an interesting variant. I think it's probably better to roll per model, just to get all the different interactions.