Block Defense

[Malcadon]

This is not a replacement to normal defense rules, but an addition to it. This should be reserved for monsters made of stone or metal, and supernaturally powerful creatures or magic (spells, potions and artifacts). This rule makes for a better challenge.

Each point of "Block" adsorbs one point of damage; no roll needed, and not subject to multi-attack rules. This requires an attacker to inflict enough damage to bypass the defender's rock-hard skin.

The best use of this rule is the Rock Skin earth spell—an automatic 1-point damage absorption until damage is taken. Wall spells (Wall of Flame, Ice & Stone) could have 1- or 2-point Block instead of 4 Defend Dice.

For stone monsters, such as Gargoyles, given them a point of Block. Metal monsters, like Golems, gets two points. 3-point Block monsters should be super-rare and reserved major bosses, such as the Dragon and the Frozen Horror. If you feel that this makes the monsters too tough, you could lower their Defend Dice by a point or two . . . although, given the chances of rolling defense for monsters is so low, this is not too much of an issue.

On top of that, some types of artifacts and spells may bypass a Block effect on some types of monsters. For example, the Dragon Spear can do a normal 3 AD attack on a Dragon, but ignores it Block effect. This effect is called "Bypass."

What you all think?

[manaknight14]

I have used this “block” idea before, but it’s extremely powerful in a campaign where you don’t have lots of ways to “bypass” it, so I feel it is best reserved for quest-specific challenges like a unique boss. I once created a quest with a boss that was supposed to be resistant to magic, so it had the 1-point block against all spells (plus some improved resistance rolls to non-damage spells), which was a fun challenge. Doing this for every gargoyle and golem might be overkill. The usual approach for these kinds of enemies is just to give them a lot of Defend Dice, but I get that the impact of that can be limited when they need to roll black shields. If you want to give normal monsters an extra degree of toughness, my favorite way to do that is to have them defend on white shields instead of black shields. Walls already do this in the RAW, so adapting that rule for monsters made of stone or metal is a reasonable house rule.

[Vorimir]

I use a special skill for Dread Warriors and Gargoyles called something like Ironclad. If they only roll.one black shield it counts as two. Two are two, three are three and so on...

[Malcadon]

By the way, I had ran over a lot of ideas over what to call this static defense—"Hard Body", "Rock Skin", "Static Defend" and the like—but nothing sounded right in my head. If anyone else have a better name for it, by all means. Although, I can see tags like "Rock Skin" and "Iron Skin" used on a case-by-case basis.

Also, I always love the idea of a hard-to-kill monster that requires a special "bypass" to hurt them, much like silver to werewolves. They can still be harmed by normal attacks, but silver—if you can find it—makes it easier. This can make for good puzzle-solving and tactics.

If you want to give normal monsters an extra degree of toughness, my favorite way to do that is to have them defend on white shields instead of black shields.

In my games, I like to reserve the "defend on white shields" rule for—besides Heroes and Allies—elite monsters and special characters. That is, my Doomguards have normal Chaos/Dread Warriors stats but defends like a Hero, and I lower a number of Defend Dice with special characters if a high armor score makes no sense to them.

[MonsterMotor]

Block defence is indeed a strange label for this. It is simply called „armour value“ in many games. „Fixed defence“ might also be a good label. Fixed defence in HQ can slow down the combat significantly, so I would be cautious with it.

Bear in mind that 1 fixed defence point is worth 6 defence dice (for HQ monsters) on average, but due to the altered fluctuations it is usually even stronger than that. Just do some math on it and you will notice this quickly. I also considered this mechanism when designing my own rework of the HQ rules but found is less suitable than rolling defence dice as normal.

Making boss monsters tougher is more easily achieved by increasing their body points. This also avoids that epic fights against such monsters with low body points but high fixed defence value take forever or, on the opposite, are over after 1 lucky strike, which also ruins the fun for everyone.

Nevertheless, this mechanism is used throughout the D&D board game and it works quite well there, but it likely does so because the orange and purple attack dice grant nonzero minimum damage, and this mitigates what I wrote above.

[Evil Frog Wizard]

I toyed around with a system like this and I just called it 'toughness'. Though, not sure everyone will like that since it's similar to a different system used in both advanced HQ and warhammer. Could simply call it 'ignores' Ie 'Ignores 1 skull'. But I'mma just refer to it as toughness.

Speaking of, I wouldn't go past toughness 1 with just the default weapons in the game available. Maybe have a rule were advanced or magical weapons 'ignore toughness' just to give another tier of weapons to the game. If you added monsters with more 'toughness' you could add corresponding higher grade weapons to match to give players more gear to strive for without the dice rolling getting too out of control. I e-

• longsword: 3 dice+diagonal
• Magic longsword: 3 dice+diagonal ignores 1 toughness
• Legendary Longsword: 3 dice+diagonal ignores 2 toughness

Something like that.

Edit: I just noticed op already has an idea like this is original post. But yeah, same basic idea as 'bypass'.


If the toughness makes things too difficult, you can always make it reset until Zargon's turn. So if a chaos knight has 1 toughness, and some hero hits it with a single skull (which is absorbed by the toughness). It now has a toughness of 0 when the next hero attacks.