Hey, everyone. After yet another long break I want to start using more interactible objects on our tables. Weapon panoplies, destructible walls etc But most importantly - neutral turrets and mines, reacting to both players. Turrets can be hacked, being neutral objects, they shouldn't have great stats, with BS score of 10 or so, armed with Combi-Rifle and Total Reaction.. What do you guys think?
There's always the risk of them critting shit off the table with rolling B3 for AROs. Might want to settle for a Contender, not giving them Total Reaction until actively controlled by a player etc. Mines are easy to add, both players know what those neutral Markers are, main question here is if you want them to be Camoed or revealed.
Some of the paradiso campaign missions have Combi rifle, Total Reaction turrets that shoot both players. I remember in one of them I lost more troops to one of those turrets than I did to my opponent...
What's so bad about defensive turrets critting things off the table? Makes them a credible threat which will need to be dealt with or avoided entirely, not just an annoyance. As for neutral camo tokens, Toadchild's marker creator includes some weird camo colors I think. Easier to keep track of which ones are the neutral ones. For a bit of extra fun, you could also randomize what type of deployable it ends up being when it triggers: antipersonnel, cybermine, e/mauler...
I might be wrong, but I think every Operation:Weather System box has featured a mission where the Guest NPC stands in the middle of the table with 360 and shoots at everybody. Adding Total Reaction to that probably wouldn't be out of line. The problem with mixed deployables (cyber mines, mines, etc.) is that you have to have a something rigged up that you can ask "Deployable X approached by Y. Does it detonate?" and cover all of the cases. You could probably even do it in a spreadsheet if you didn't have a spare computer programmer nearby, you just need a bunch of columns for "Hackable in LoS", "Non-hackable in LoS", "Hackable out of LoS", "Non-hackable out of LoS", create a bunch of rows for each of the deployables with "--" or "Explodes", hide the cell contents, randomize the row order, and reveal the cells one at a time. Otherwise, because cyber mines and exploding mines have different detonation criteria, you end up spoiling what's hidden as soon as someone gets within ZoC, whether or not the deployable could have detonated.
I think the neutral mines and deployables shouldn't be camoed. They were there before the skirmish, likely left behind after another battle and probably were detected beforehand, just not defused because of the time it would take and possible tactical uses.
One notion too is simply utilizing Dangerous Terrain elements. The rules for them already exist, and they have an impact on both strategy and tactics.
This is cool. It also makes Minesweeper a useful skill. I've liked TR Combi Turrets in every game I've played with them. You get extremely creative strategies for dealing with them. The best plans I've seen are based around neutralising them for just your turn so that they're a problem for your opponent as well. I'd always prefer making them REMs though, as that gives a bonus to AHDs for dealing with them.
