Hazardous terrain and you(r tables)

[Math Mathonwy]

Do you use Hazardous terrain on your tables?

I don't think I have ever seen any in my games unless I have personally asked for some. When used, it's usually a small puddle (or something similar) and there's only one piece of it.

It drastically affects things, though and makes certain abilities a lot more powerful. Especially Pushes in any direction. But has the testing been done mostly without it? Is the game balanced around having no Hazardous terrain?

So yeah - do you use it and why/why not? How much do you use it? Does it affect your games? Would you like to use it more? Do tournaments use it?

Edit: Severe terrain habits are also interesting. Do you use severe terrain, how big patches of it and what're your feelings about it?

[Dogmantra]

I've gone off severe terrain mostly, especially given the FAQ that you can climb during charges. Before then (playing under my interpretation) there was kind of a difference between little walls and severe patches because one blocked charges the other just slowed them down. Now it just seems to bog the game down, and it often leads to dead zones in the table because there's severe terrain there and no point slowing yourself down so much. Half movement is a pretty nasty penalty. I much prefer implementations like Guild Ball, where you just lose 2" off your total movement. Obviously since you can't double walk it's a bit different but I think Malifaux already occasionally runs into being kind of a static game where most of the repositioning happens on turn 1.

So what I tend to do and I've been getting local people to do (and I think they like it) it to is to define things that would normally be severe such as water, undergrowth etc to be 0/1/2 hazardous terrain (or sometimes the default 1/2/4 if we're feeling nasty). This way there's still a penalty to moving through "severe" terrain, but one that doesn't feel so oppressive imo. And with the 0/1/2 damage flip it adds a kinda neat risk analysis. It doesn't do a huge amount for the game, but it does tend to feel a bit more empowering. I actually think in Malifaux 2.5e or 3e or whatever it would be a good chance to implement this or something similar as standard - perhaps severe becomes you can either take half movement or risk a damage flip?

 

I also like to try to include it every so often as more traditional hazardous terrain, but I think one of the issues is that it's really hard to find appropriate terrain pieces. VASSAL has cactuses and lava and I've had some fun with those (I've seen models die from being thrown into cactuses twice), but if you don't do my severe = hazardous tactic, none of my local game stores really have anything that works as hazardous terrain. I've seen some neat pieces online like gator infested water but they look like they take quite a bit of effort and they're pretty rare.

[Math Mathonwy]

Very interesting stuff!

We have these somewhat big (something like 8" x 6") field patches at my FLGS that we use for Severe terrain. This, I feel, is somewhat important because there's quite a few models that ignore severe terrain (e.g., Unimpeded, and one of Mah's chores - as well as Flight and Incorporeal but they ignore all other terrain as well) and Pushes do as well so having none sorta affects how much these models are worth. They also don't offer cover but do affect movement so shooters get some love (our tables are usually pretty packed with terrain so getting a cover-free shot is a bit of a luxury).

That said, I can see your point as well and Severe terrain really sucks if you don't have ways of ignoring it and get stuck in a big patch.

I'll add a note to the original post about Severe terrain being also an interesting topic and encouraing people to comment on that as well!

[Dogmantra]

9 minutes ago, Math Mathonwy said:

 This, I feel, is somewhat important because there's quite a few models that ignore severe terrain (e.g., Unimpeded, and one of Mah's chores - as well as Flight and Incorporeal but they ignore all other terrain as well) and Pushes do as well so having none sorta affects how much these models are worth.

Yeah this is imo the downside of playing severe-as-hazardous. For what it's worth, forests tend to stay severe when I do this but it's a bit of a compromise.