A Suggestion to Make Officers More Useful

[AZKAMAT]

I call them Standing Orders, for Ociffers (anybody with leadership).

Works like this: every leadership character is assigned a small command that he can give out a general order to give a small bonus to. I came up with these after seeing Stubby and the other big names talk about what to do with officers. These are my thoughts.

Go pull the crap outta their ass!: General +1 damage rolls for everybody under that leadership character's command (or just +1 to damage dice size).

If THEY don't kill your ass, I WILL!: +1 to armor rolls (or +1 to dice size of armor rolls). You can change this to whatever you see fit if you do the "minifig armor is fixed at 4" business.

Get your asses in gear!: +2" to move (or whatever significant move bonus seems appropriate to you).

Effectively, at the start of each turn, the leadership character must choose one of these to confer the bonus to everybody under his command. Also, the player MUST say the words (if your mom is around or whatever, make up some other manly sounding phrase).

Notice I keep saying things like, "Under his command," instead of "In his squad."
Why? How could we keep track of who bosses who around in-game? It's easy in my army; each officer is assigned a squad of guys, and the appearance of both officer and men are distinct across my different squads. So even if they're not on a squad plate, it's easy for me to keep track of who belongs in what squad, and who that squad's commander is. But I guess that for everyone else,I guess you could do whatever in setting up "officer jurisdictions." Such as imposing range limits in inches to who the officer can order, or saying it can only be done to people on his squad plate (which I dislike doing, because in squad plates everyone has to shoot at one target, unless of course it's just to move around a large number of guys quickly). My personal, preferred approach is to just assign each officer a "command" during setup, and let him and those troops be tied together for the entire game.

This is my idea to make the officer (and anything with Leadership) more valuable than just a choreography specialist/squad champion.

EDIT: I just realized that I need to stipulate that you CANNOT (or at least, ought not to be able to because it would be stupid and unsportsmanlike) get multiple bonuses. I.e. no drawing bonuses, ever, from more than 1 Leadership characters.

[Nimja]

Um.. IfI remmeber correctly, officers arent in BW2010. Are you using BW2001?

[Gungnir]

Um.. IfI remmeber correctly, officers arent in BW2010. Are you using BW2001?

They will be. Whenever Stubby gets around to finishing that chapter.

[Nimja]

SO obviously, AZKMAT is using BW 2001.

[AZKAMAT]

SO obviously, AZKMAT is using BW 2001.

Nope.

I never even touched that shit. I got into playing this game using the 2005 rules, and started incorporating parts of the 2010 rules as I learned about them (notably the automatic weapon rules). It always just bugged me in 2005 that officers never really were much more than "Herp derp I'm a little bit better than the rest of you and I could do choreography." I got really agitated one day when my opponent abused a house rule stating that all characters in his army who wore capes were officers. Guess what all his basic infantry got that game.

But that's not my point.

My point is; I know there's some kind of debate and head scratching over what to do with the 2010 army rules chapter. This is my small attempt to contribute to that. Come to think of it, it's probably already been thought of before, because it's pretty simple and straightforward; i.e. not hard to dream up by somebody like Stubby. But in the event that it at least helps someone else think up something awesome to put into the rules, or even leads to somebody having some great games with house rules inspired by these, then mission accomplished.

I admit to not having playtested these, but I look forward to doing so.