Juggernaut Trait

[Silverdream]

Unrelated:

This one time, my friend destroyed my APC filled with my best troops with one shot from an anti tank gun. It led to my flank being obliterated, and forced me into an alliance with my other friend. Long story short, we ran out of time but I have no doubt he would've trounced us in 2 more turns.

If you had used Juggernaut, the situation could have ended in two ways. Your opponents AT gun could be size 2 or less, in which case your APC and troops would come out unharmed or it was bigger, he scored a critical or something and nothing could be done. If it would be overpowered as our friend Ham here suggests, you can nerf it down as you wish or use the alternate rules IV came up with.

Why would I want my troops to survive? I want a battle like Verdun or Stalingrad.

[BFenix]

Unrelated:

This one time, my friend destroyed my APC filled with my best troops with one shot from an anti tank gun. It led to my flank being obliterated, and forced me into an alliance with my other friend. Long story short, we ran out of time but I have no doubt he would've trounced us in 2 more turns.

If you had used Juggernaut, the situation could have ended in two ways. Your opponents AT gun could be size 2 or less, in which case your APC and troops would come out unharmed or it was bigger, he scored a critical or something and nothing could be done. If it would be overpowered as our friend Ham here suggests, you can nerf it down as you wish or use the alternate rules IV came up with.

Why would I want my troops to survive? I want a battle like Verdun or Stalingrad.

Destruction is great and all but there is none of it when you don't have your troops. Let them at least deploy and cause maximum pwnage before honorably dying.

[OneEye589]

Can't cause maximum pwnage if they can't cause damage to stuff!

Catch 22.

[IVhorseman]

Destruction is great and all but there is none of it when you don't have your troops.

No. No no no no no no no.

Your troops are destroyed. They have done their job. Your doodz are meant to be killed, even if it's in your base. The biggest problem I have with the juggernaut concept is that it makes damage not happen, which in terms of Brikwars logik, is sakrelige. However, I also really like the idea of units shrugging off attacks, because it makes them totally badass because of that. Part of the Brikwars philosophy is to have your wars be as badass as physically possible - which does not include mourning your losses. Losses on the field are gains for the players, so I have a hard time standing behind something that makes badass deaths happen less often. I still don't think that this is something worth dismissing entirely though. ignoring a single die of damage from every attack is my attempt to relieve that issue, but it still has the unfortunate side effect of crits not happening. If anyone has other ideas, I'd love to hear them

[BFenix]

Agreed.

I think that something like "weak spots" could be done, exploiting the surface elements or more fragile parts. Or, units with Juggernaut could have some sort of extreme weakness against something, being an easy target for a unit that deals a particular sort of damage for example.

[IVhorseman]

You could be required to have a death-star like weak spot on the creation, but that gets hazy when you're dealing with juggernaut minifigs (hats and oxygen tanks are about all that comes off the top of my head). Damage-types are a needless layer of complexity that Brikwars also generally does without, and i think the damage type of "a whole fucking lot of it" is good enough for juggernauts. Having juggernauts be easy to kill seems to go against the entire concept of one. I think their weakness to attacks with multiple dice is plenty exploitable as-is.

[Rev. Sylvanus]

I've been following this conversation and am liking IVHorsman's permutation.  Question about how you would play it out, though.  Lets say the weapon used is a rifle (1d6+1 damage).  Would you consider the net damage to the juggernaut as 0 or 1?  That is, would taking away the d6 leave behind the +1?  This would be a more pressing question when talking about the Assyrian heavy laser rifle (1d6+5 damage).

[mgb519]

Maybe there could be a limit to how much total damage they absorb? Enough to keep them alive against a volley of MG fire, but not enough to survive a 50 way salvo of bullets. Obvious exaggeration, but that's not the point.

[Robot Monkey]

Meh, I still like the juggernaut trait. No more getting your flank disentegrated because of one tank's bad armor roll!

[Gungnir]

I think you should be able to remove a die after damage is rolled, but before it's calculated. That way, if a minifig hits with crit damage, he has a slight chance of leaving a dent.
IMO, this would be less OP, but would make things that much harder to take down.

[OneEye589]

If you want to negate the damage from small arms, just say that a juggernaut traited creation rolls a die when it takes damage. Whatever the juggernaut gets on it's damage reduction roll is subtracted from the damage it would take.

Example:

A creation with a Juggernaut trait is hit and takes 5 (1d6+1) damage. It rolls it's Juggernaut damage reducting d10 and gets a 3.
5damage - 3damagereduction = 2damage
Juggernaut takes 2 damage and rolls for Armor.

Now if you had some sort of weapon that dealt more damage than the Juggernaut could roll, you would most definitely deal some damage. The Juggernaut could also roll horribly on his damage reduction roll and take small arms fire anyway. Depending on how strong you want the juggernaut to be, change the damage reduction dice. It could be anything from a d4 to a d12.

If there is combined fire going on, see how many separate attacks are going to hit. Roll an amount of damage reduction dice equivalent to the amount of attacks that hit and then subtract the sum from the sum of the damage.

Example:

Juggernaut is hit by 5 attacks dealing a total of 30 damage.
Juggernaut rolls 5 damage reduction dice with a total of 25 damage reduction.
Juggernaut takes 5 damage and rolls Armor.

[BFenix]

So the trait would act as some sort of Armor bonus but it would be calculated before Armor rolls?

[mgb519]

Sounds like rolling dice in succession which equals more armor. Then why bother?
Should negate a set number of dice instead.

[IVhorseman]

Lets say the weapon used is a rifle (1d6+1 damage). Would you consider the net damage to the juggernaut as 0 or 1?  That is, would taking away the d6 leave behind the +1?  This would be a more pressing question when talking about the Assyrian heavy laser rifle (1d6+5 damage).

Good question. I'd imagine it would reduce it to zero, since those bonuses apply to the die roll. If there's no die roll, there's no damage roll to apply the bonus to. I could see how you'd argue that the juggernaut should take 5 damage because assyrian rifles are so hardxcore, but I feel like the rule should work best as an extreme, reducing damage from ANYTHING with only one die of damage to zero.

OneEye, you've also just unfortunately made a complicated argument out of "he should have an extra 1d6 armor!" Which definitely works, but it's hardly a super-special-bonus-rule.

[Ross_Varn]

Hey! Damage resistance! I was just thinking about that.