[Cortez]

I like the WS roll to see if the maneuver is successful, not sure about the dodge/parry to oppose it idea though. The character performing the circle needs to have enough of an incentive to carry it out otherwise it'll never get used (like in the current rules). If it can be countered then it may not be worth giving up an attack for it.

Perhaps the maneuver can be combined with an attack? But you also don't want the circle/attack action to become the standard attack either.

[MarcoSkoll]

I like the WS roll to see if the maneuver is successful, not sure about the dodge/parry to oppose it idea though.

Manoeuvres may have been rare in 1stE, but when it did happen, I always found it really daft when a defender couldn't respond to another character just walking right around them. As much as IRE wants to encourage more movement in close combat, in making position more fundamental, it's also going to be important to let characters respond to that.

So I feel it's both necessary and valid - after all, a more experienced fighter is more likely to be able to avoid being flanked. Still, balancing it may well be a concern, but then, all of IRE's close combat modifiers are going to need  playtesting and refinement to make sure they work as intended; the system is different enough to 1stE that the same values of modifiers no longer really mean the same thing.

I'm doing some of that through statistics, doing some old fashioned mathhammer to work out how the numbers play out, but it's definitely going to need to hit the table too.

Perhaps the maneuver can be combined with an attack? But you also don't want the circle/attack action to become the standard attack either.

I do plan on allowing circle/attack as a possibility, although again the modifiers will need refinement.

As far as encouraging variety, while I won't be too surprised to see individual fights quickly settle on strategies as opponents get a measure on each other and their environment, hopefully the opposed mechanics and the changed reach system will make this a different strategy in different combats.

Fighting an opponent with a Reach 2+ axe will need you to choose your distances differently to if they have a Reach 3 sword, and fighting a high-WS swordsmaster who's good at parrying will call for stacking modifiers in your favour more than if you're trying to handle some wizened scribe.

[TheNephew]

Dates allowing, I'd like to help playtest the IRE if it's happening at Dark Sphere.

Couple of notes from a first proper read-through:

Reactions read like they'll play a lot more smoothly than I'd originally thought - nice simple yet comprehensive rules.
Edit: Especially impressive as every question I have is answered in the next paragraph or section, so far.

I assume, since I didn't see it stated explicitly, that Prepared/Reserved Reactions hold over the end of the turn?
If I use all of my actions/dice last activation/turn, I will have no Reactions available until my next turn (besides close combat)?


Location Injury & BIV - I vaguely recall chatting about your plans to solve the "slap a marine to death" problem on the canal walk back to the station after the Lachesis Affair (maybe...), but it looks like the rules are the same.
I bit of forum searching has turned up some discussion, but the conclusion seems to be "it doesn't come up often enough to be a problem".
Have you given any thought to making the damage track for Injuries cumulative?
BIV 6 means one hit of 7 damage to  the chest will cause a (7 of 12) Heavy Injury, but 4 more points is still a (11 of 12) Heavy Injury, another 4 damage puts it into (13 of 18) Acute Injury.



Typo:
p17 Action/Reaction Order - First example - "However, after half og his 6 yards running..."

[MarcoSkoll]

Dates allowing, I'd like to help playtest the IRE if it's happening at Dark Sphere.

A formal playtest day probably will be at Dark Sphere, although I'm hoping I can lure a couple of players for a game at Golden Aegis in order to spot any glaring errors.

Reactions read like they'll play a lot more smoothly than I'd originally thought - nice simple yet comprehensive rules.
Edit: Especially impressive as every question I have is answered in the next paragraph or section, so far.

It's almost like I spent three and half years writing it.

I assume, since I didn't see it stated explicitly, that Prepared/Reserved Reactions hold over the end of the turn?
If I use all of my actions/dice last activation/turn, I will have no Reactions available until my next turn (besides close combat)?

Although I may need to make it more apparent, top of page 19:

At the start of a character's turn, any unspent reactions they have previously reserved or prepared are automatically lost. If a character chooses to delay his own turn until later through the game turn, he will retain his actions until that point.

Location Injury & BIV - I vaguely recall chatting about your plans to solve the "slap a marine to death" problem on the canal walk back to the station after the Lachesis Affair (maybe...), but it looks like the rules are the same.

I think that was Ancient Rites. Lachesis was at Dark Sphere, so not much meandering back along canals.

Anyway, I've found that one hard to resolve without nasty amounts of bookkeeping, rules clutter and/or a complete re-write.
Where possible, IRE does try to keep things as a logical progression from 1stE; for example, the reaction system, while inspired by Infinity, draws from Inquisitor's rules for things like close combat, overwatch and the dodge/deflect shot skills.

Tracking injury total by location means a lot more paperwork and would interfere with the healing system.

Inquisitor's injury system is actually pretty robust when I try to attack it. All I've been able to do is some minor tinkering (a few injury chart changes, capping stunned results and levelling the system shock threshold). And the thing is, I honestly cannot remember the last time the slapping problem actually was a problem.

The best I've been able to come up with is the idea of a toned down version of the Ossmodula rule from the Dark Magenta Astartes article - a hit of less than half BIV (or possibly a fixed value like 3 or 4) before armour can't increase the injury level above Heavy, and will instead just do immediate damage for the current level.
However, I think I'd have to make it an optional rule, as I think that penalising low damage weapons might actually be more of an issue than the slapping problem.

[Cortez]

Yeah, don't remember the 4 paper cuts and you're dead/crippled being a problem at any Conclave event. It's more of a problem with heavily armoured characters anyway, which are fairly rare these days (unlike when the game first released and everyone went a bit crazy at the lack of restrictions).

As for a testing day at Dark Sphere, maybe we should hold that earlier (May/June) and push the IGT back until August/September?

[MarcoSkoll]

It's more of a problem with heavily armoured characters anyway, which are fairly rare these days.

Well, I think I'd have to make any minimum damage limit before armour anyway (although perhaps not before cover and forcefields, which are less of a constant).

If I made it so that some minimum damage had to be done after 10 points of power armour, then attackers would have to score a minimum of about 13 or 14 points of damage to have a chance at doing those characters any serious hurt at all, which is impossible/near impossible with some weapons.

Yes, power armour should be tough against low powered weapons, but making it completely invulnerable would make it even less reasonable to take in game. And that's kind of a problem. I did have a discussion with someone a while back - it rather missed the point of IRE*, but one of the points it did bring up was that if you do want to create a completely-over-the-top Tyrus-type who thinks they need to put the fear of the God-Emperor into everyone, you're quite heavily restricted.
* It basically started "You're fixing Inquisitor? Good, I've never played it, because I always thought it was terrible. Here's a list of games I want you to turn it into", and I had to explain that the IRE project was for people who actually like Inquisitor.

I did feel that was a valid point. While I do think that Inquisitor should largely remain about covert and semi-covert wars, loud bombastic and arrogant types are an established archetype of the Inquisition - and it is also sometimes entirely valid to call in a Space Marine.

As such, I actually want to make high armour less effective - or, perhaps better worded, less absolute.
The broad plan at the moment is to put some options in so that characters can try to attack weak spots in their opponent's armour, trading hit chance for some armour piercing ability. (Broadly, adapting the "Sure Strike" and "Crack Shot" skills into actions any character can attempt)
Armour would therefore still be very useful against low damage weapons (as hitting the weak spots would be hard), but not completely invulnerable.

As for a testing day at Dark Sphere, maybe we should hold that earlier (May/June) and push the IGT back until August/September?

Possibly. Ideally I'd like to (hopefully) run the test game at Golden Aegis to get a broad idea of if anything big needs fixing before I commit to a full event, but I'd also like to know when people are available. (I have to check my availability over those weekends one way or another). If we've got a day which would have really good attendance, it'd be better to use that for the IGT; the playtests would still be informative even if we could only scrape together one table's worth of players (particularly as I could then really focus on that one table), but that'd be a pretty miserable IGT.

[Cortez]

The armour thing is a tricky one. I agree that there needs to be a place for Tyrus and Space Marines, but I also feel they shouldn't be allowed to completely overpower everything else. At the moment I feel the rules achieve this by making it so that any basic weapon can penetrate power armour with a bit (ok a lot) of luck. The problem is of course is that this makes power armour a bit too vulnerable (from a fluff perspective) to weapons such as boltguns and chainswords.

I like the concept of having to attack the joints etc. on power armour. Would you be upping the AV at the same time though? Otherwise I feel it would make power armour too vulnerable to the more powerful weapons. It would also allow the rules to reflect different grades of armour i.e. Space Marine Armour > Tyrus Armour > Sororitas Armour or something like that.

[TheNephew]

Point thoroughly addressed and rebutted - I'm satisfied.

The only alternative that occurred to me was some sort of criticals ignoring armour system, but that might be hard to mix with the current crit system.

[MarcoSkoll]

Would you be upping the AV at the same time though? Otherwise I feel it would make power armour too vulnerable to the more powerful weapons

Precision attacks are unlikely to affect the effectiveness of the more powerful weapons. There'll be a to-hit penalty for precision attacks, so for weapons which already have a fair chance of breaching power armour anyway, trying to aim for weak spots will actually worsen their damage output.

For a rough example, let's say a precision attack is a -20 to-hit and gains Penetration(D6). If we have a BS 60 character (no other modifiers).

With a 2D6 autopistol:
Standard shot: 60% (hit chance) x 8.33% (rolling 11+ on 2D6) = 5% chance of causing at least one point of damage through AV10
Precision shot: 40% x 50% (rolling 11+ on 3D6) = 20% chance

With a 2D10+4 bolter:
Standard Shot: 60% x 85% (rolling 11+ on 2D10+4) = 51% chance
Precision Shot: 40% x 96.66% (rolling 11+ on 2D10+4+D6) = 38.66% chance

Those numbers may need balancing, but show that it's entirely possible to make precision shots so that they benefit low damage weapons, but not those weapons that already threaten power armour.

~~~~~

That said, yes, introducing these options could possibly be used to justify toughening up some armours in IRE.

With precision attacks, power armour could actually be put up to something like AV12, yet still remain more feasible for low damage weapons to pierce (continuing the above example, a 2D6 autopistol would have about a 10.4% chance*).

* That's ignoring the chance of the target evading (they're more likely to evade a lower to-hit value). However, I've not yet looked at encumbrance in IRE. It'd be entirely possible to balance an increased AV for things like carapace or power armour with an evasion penalty** - wearing a quarter tonne of armour might be very good at stopping bullets, but you're not going to be dodging them.
The advantage to Astartes armour might then be not that it's thicker, but that the Black Carapace makes it much less encumbering.

** Also, I have currently included power armour with a mention in the target size modifier rules (wearing power armour does make you a bigger target). But I'll make it more specific when I get to that part of the Armoury.

[MarcoSkoll]

Possibly in time for a playtest on Saturday, I bring you V0.2.0.3:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/pgup1aw4o2vkh2m/Inquisitor+Revised+Edition+Alpha+V0-2-0-3.pdf

Changes are marked in red, with tentative changes in orange. Where entire sections are new, I've only marked the section header.

It now includes:
- a few more designer's notes.
- preliminary close combat manoeuvring rules
- a slight expansion to the psychic rules
- the start of the abilities section (thus far it only covers rulebook abilities that need changes in IRE)
- updated versions of most of the psychic powers from the rulebook
- And an early draft of the close combat weapons section of the armoury

[MarcoSkoll]

In the hope of a playtest at the weekend (although it's looking doubtful, due to lack of victims willing volunteers), I've put together a print copy. (I'm not expecting to either need, or be able, to make any massive changes before Saturday).

[Cortez]

I think the lack of tables may be a bigger problem 

We'll need to plan a specific event I think. Doesn't need to be that big, 3-4 players would be sufficient.

[MarcoSkoll]

Oh, it'll definitely need a specific event, but I was hoping to get a test in before then to spot any major "What the hell was I thinking" mess-ups before they had a risk of derailing an entire test day.

[MarcoSkoll]

I've put together a crib sheet for the current version of IRE, listing/summarising most of the rules changes from the LRB, which will hopefully make a useful reference for anyone wishing to playtest the rules.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/0oo6czattlu269p/Inquisitor+Revised+Edition+V_0_2_0_3+Crib+Sheet+V1.pdf

I expect to release a slightly updated version of IRE in the coming weeks (prior to the Dark Sphere day), as I've been playing around with example combats and such to get an idea of how the modifiers need to be fine tuned. (I expect to keep most of the underlying mechanics, just adjusting the exact numbers).

Hopefully, this will also include more of the missing chunks of the rules/skills/armoury.

[MarcoSkoll]

Sooooo, IRE news...

I've found time over the last while to run some more tests. Mostly just example cases of different characters trying to kill each other, but tests nonetheless.

Given that some of the rules have thus far been more statistics, theory, instinct, experience and what makes sense on paper* theory than actual playtesting (particularly given the rush I had trying to get them ready in hope of a playtest at Golden Aegis last month), even I'm still getting a grip on how some things actually feel on the table.
* An early revelation in this project was that what worked in my head could easily sound like the ravings of a madman when actually put into words. Which probably means I'm a madman.

The feel of the revised close combat in particular isn't what I expected, although it's exactly what I should have expected - given it's ... um, more or less how I said I wanted close combat to work. Stupid as it sounds, I was surprised when the rules did what I wrote them to do.

So yes, much more movement, with different close combats being unalike in their style. Changes in terrain, weapons or skill can heavily affect how characters can approach combat. Some of the test combats I ran came out all Princess Bride, others were chaotic brawls with characters trying to blast each other point blank with shotguns.

Unsurprisingly, I've found a few points I might need to clean up before New Dawn, but I'm pretty happy so far.

~~~~~

The other part of this post is that I was at Salute on Saturday, and had the chance to discuss some of Inquisitor's rules design with something of an authority...



More than just the discussion we had on the day, he's made the generous offer of coming onto the Conclave and answering some questions about the philosophy and decisions that drove Inquisitor's design, as time and his recollection* permits.
*And, indeed, mine. While he'd read something I said earlier in this thread about having questions about aspects of the game design, I only mentioned having questions - not what those questions actually were. So I now need to remember what I actually wanted to ask.

That's a big thing for IRE - any additional insight into the original design process will be very helpful in keeping the updated edition faithful to its predecessor.