That, just the posibility of reroll to mitigate badluck maybe at cost of command token, maybe with a -3 modifiers, etc
Honestly, screw rerolls. I am a gamer of miniatures tabletop games since forewer and honestly, no rerolls are much better. I come from different games, I play with rerolls and without them, and games without them are less frustrating. The problem is, once you go rerolls you can not go back, rerolls are extremely powerfull and are doubly so on an oppressive piece of kit. And they will be used on an opressive piece of kit, because most gamers are "probability" gamers. Reroll on bs 10 b2 piece is nothing compared to reroll on bs 16+ b4 piece. Rerolls grant a do-over and they are most agregious on good pieces. They will "guarantee" that anything your main hitter sees, will die. Because while missing on a bs 16 b4 is slim, missing on a bs 16 b4 with rerolls are nearly non-existant. And then it becomes a game of "catch that hitter and eleminate him", it becomes a straight match of chess, where you protect your queen as much as possible, while gunning down for the opponent's queen. Infinity is fun and frustrating in equal measure just because you can walk to the enemy doctor, miss your cc and then get stabbed with a scalpel to death. It inserts a certain kind of thought that there is nothing guaranteed in this game. You can and will fail, and that is okay, because failure is a part of fun as well. My humble take.
I would say NO for rerolls for standard rolls. But deplyment skills like infiltration and combat jump could use at least some bad luck protection. Having your 40+ unit that is designed and priced around starting close to enemy DZ end up in your own DZ sucks. Especially with units like Shinobu or Controlled Jump Liu Xing that pay premium for very good odds, just to end up as order monkey. For anyone concerned with imperonators: just remove the ability to roll for DZ at all.
But we already have a re-roll available, if for Doctor and Engineer skill only (and then, with some limitations). And when going for an objective, you are allowed to re-try in the next Order, at least in most cases, IIRC. I agree with @Darvain - allowing it to be used for general rolls, especially attack rolls, would lead us where we really don't want ot end up... As to what @Amusedbymuse said - I'd agree it wouldn't be a bad idea to have Infiltration and Combat Jump have some kind of bad luck-mitigating mechanism, at least on some models who are supposed to be really good at that. It'd have to be added to their points cost, I guess - but if we can have Booty (ReRoll), we could have a Combet Jump (ReRoll) or Infiltration (ReRoll) on some models: if you didn't like the first result, you are allowed to roll again. Once. It also allows CB to decide which unit gets the re-roll ability and which doesn't, despite both having the same Skill. Caveat: while not a problem with Infiltration mechanics, we could get into hot water if the opponent has Controlled Jump hacking program active. All other instances are basic roll, this brings a re-roll into an opposed roll.
Yeah. The problem is, if it can be used, it will be abused. Allowing certain skills to be rerolled via the Skill (name) (reroll) mechanic is kind of alright. If we have a Paratrooper specialist with a high-altitude glide drop wing and he is a veteran trooper, he can be allowed a reroll on his Combat Jump. With an increase in point cost obviously. But. Allowing normal rolls like a bs attack, a cc attack and pretty much any kind of opposed roll is a big no-no. Because not only it will be stacked in the favour of the attacker, how would you decide the outcome of an ARO reroll? I hit my opponent's Ghulam with my Grunt. I roll 17 and my opponent rolls 11. I want to reroll, but the opponent does not. So, now what do we do? It is a FtF roll. Do we reroll only my side? Only his side? Both? And if both, now we are in a pretty hot water, because we did not just reroll'ed my bad roll, we forced the opponent to reroll his perfectly good roll. As such, if I roll 10 and my opponent roll 11 (a crit, for example) and I do not like that, can I just force my opponent to reroll that crit? Rerolls in an action-reaction game will be extremely tricky to implement and extremely unbalanced and prone to abuse. Henceforth, I think, no rerolls are the best for Infinity. Or... If you absolutely have to have them, then extremely limited rerolls only on certain skills with points increase on the models and this reroll being one-time use per game.
Well, I'd see that as, actually, a balancing solution. The game developer gets another option to make a model better in a given area apart from giving it a staright up bonus (which does exist already). An option they may use or decide it doesn't fit that specific model, and thus shouldn't be available for it. Skills like Combat Jump or Infiltration are one-use-only by their very nature. Though as mentioned, Combat Jump is tricky mechnaically- wise, given it might potentially be opposed. Also, this allows us what one of my buddies used to call a higher resolution / finer grain in the rules, compared to a blanket "allow a re-roll into the game": use it on select models only (and 100% - make it reflected in their cost!).
It would be better to remove the die roll from doctor, engineer and the deployment skills than to add more rerolls to the game. I stand by this opinion while looking squarely at the current mechanics for using command points for rerolls.
I dislike the idea of general rerolls. The possibility of failure is part of the fun and grown-up players should be able to handle it. Rerolls for specific skills on specific models is okay to represent experienced professionals, but it should be the exception.
You used to be able to reroll Hacking Attacks in N3 for Command Tokens, if and only if you had an active EVO device on the board. Almost nobody actually did it, thanks to how N3's meta developed, but I found it excellent for surprising enemy KHDs in reactive.
Bad luck protection sounds nice, but how do you want to prevent yourself from "bad luck" in a game of dice? What you can do is to increase the chances to succeed rolls. And thats what Infiltration (+6) or Combat Jump (+3) does. The later even has the option to activly increase the chances via spending an order and buy an EVO-REM for Controlled jump. The units with (superior) Infiltration have an success chance of Brand do Castro/Kitsune: 80% (PH13 - 3 + 6 = 16) Oniwaban: 75% (PH12 - 3 + 6 = 15) A reroll on infiltration would set the chances to: Bran do/Kitsune: 75% ( PH 13 - 3 = 10 = 50% success, reroll into 75%) Oniwaban: 69,75% ( PH 12 - 3 = 9= 45% success, reroll into 69,75% ) So rerolling by itself is ultimatly worse than the +6. To realy reduce the chance for bad luck the unit needs to have both: Infiltration (+6) (reroll) Bran do/Kitsune: 96% ( PH 13 - 3 + 6 = 16 = 80% success, reroll into 96%) Oniwaban: 90% ( PH 12 - 3 + 6 = 15= 75% success, reroll into 90% ) With such chances of success rolling a dice at all seems like a farce. With Combat jump it is of course smth different, because there are not much units with an increased PH for CJ. The only one that pops into my mind are the Hellcats with Combat Jump (+3), so they reach a success rate of 75% (PH15) or a stunning 90% with an unopposed controlled Jump (PH 12 + 3 + 3 = 18) Controlled Jump is imho they go-to tool if someone wants to take advantage of CJ-Units, for it buffs the chance by 15%. While I´m in, i want to run some numbers; PH - base % - CJ (+3) % - reroll % - reroll+CJ% 11------55% -------70%------79%----------91% 12------60% -------75% ------84%-------93,75% 13------65%--------80%-----94,25%-------96% plz don´t burn me on a pyre if there´s a mathematical error, i did not use the dice calculator but just a basic one. Based on this small summary it shows that rerolls always favor the high-success units, whilest a flat buff like Controlled jump constantly increase the chances. I for myself don´t like the idea of rerolls (or better siad: the inflation of rerolls), because of the high success rate. As said above: with a success rate of >90% it is close to a auto-succeed, so why roll at all? And it makes the "bad luck feeling" even worse, for all the set up still can backfire. And we all know, Lady Luck is a picky whore that rarely sleeps in our bed. A close to safe combat Jump can be amazingly valuable, especially in a later state of the game, when the backrow defence is not as dense as to the beginning of the game. Just placing a modell at a vulnerable spot close to risk-free... I don´t know if that is something we should want to accomplish or if that leads to the non-counterable / non-interactive gameplay we all love so much. I cannot fool anyone: I love rolling dice. I can work with a doctor killing my own units, also the chance to reroll a doctor/engineer skill is what seperates them from a guy with a med-kit / gizmo-kit. On the other hand: I am sometimes a little unhappy about unit better at healing themselfes than by a actual doctor (looking at you, traumadoc that killed my Teuton). I don´t think rolling for doc/eng or auto-success would make a game-changing difference; you still have to spend the orders. Same risk to succeed like rolling for CJ or infiltration. Sometimes i don´t think that "chance", "risk" and "fun" are things that should be considered to be valuable if the discussion about "balance" starts. Not to mock anyone here, but sometimes it sounds like people would be more happy if they just would kill 61,235% of a unit instead of rolling an actuall dice that has 20 sides that can hit every number. I understand that in terms of competetive gaming "(bad) luck" is something not everyone enjoys or wants to happen on a regular basis. I for myself saw too much unlikely shit happen on the table to ignore that, and most of the rolls turn out to happen like intended. But at the end of the day we all roll dice. Chance is a huge part of the game. Calculation is as well. In a best case scenario all rolls would turn out to be statisticly correct. And balance should be build around a statisticly fair game. Chance is what makes the game spicy.
Feels a bit like fate points, but how about a limited dice pool to add/reroll dices instead of a plain reroll? You can even throw in special ammunition dice pool on top of that to modify any roll. Sure it still devalues high risk/high reward aspect of the game, but at least you can kinda balance rerolls with the number of dices available per game.
Epic:Armageddon has a commander reroll mechanic, where you get one single reroll per round, while your commander is in on the table. That single reroll is worth about 3% of your entire army, when estimated in points, it is really very powerful. In Infinity, it would be a nice feature to add to the Lieutenant skill, maybe as a once per game ability, and only while the Lieutenant is in a not-null state. It would be far too valuable to waste on random shooting, but would allow making a clutch critical roll (like an EVO assisted combat drop) a lot more safe.
