Let's talk about SBH 5.0

[hackbarth]

I had the pleasant surprise of getting the revised version of SBH 5.0 on my RPGNow account. So I promptly downloaded and printed the book to review.

My impressions so far:

First impression: the font seems somewhat harder to read and printed it doesn't improve much. Somehow the text seems lighter and harder to read.

Once trough this first obstacle, the rules seem more well explained, some doubts that cropped up during reading and playing the 4.3 version (Can I use diferent sized bases? Downed minis count as enemies in contact? etc) now are explained explicitly in the text. It seems to incorporate all the FAQs that appeared in the freehack zines. Good.

I was delighted to see more Special Rules. Some I really wanted to my miniatures, now I can have a heavily armored dwarf, or a really good shooting Legolas, or a high kicking, fast punching martial artist! But as I was reading more, I saw that a lot of kludge was introduced through them, including in some old special rules!

For example, in Mounted, SBH had a minimalistic approach that worked really well with the ruleset: +1 combat and free disengage against non-mounted figures. Now it has a carrying feature that seems very unrealistic, and seems to me that can generate weird tactics.

Undead is kludgier yet, in their morale rules. Undead had simple morale rules, they didn't routed, in the case that they failed morale (rarely with a +2 bonus that undead get), they turned to dust in the spot. Now there are complicated rules for the number of failed rolls and the presence of a standard on the table, and this standard piece isn't even explained on the book! Something simple (any failed roll is a kill) turned egregiously kludged (two or three failed rolls are a kill, but if you have only one failed roll they stay where they are, unless there is a standard on the table, then they run to the standard, but only if you want them to).

That's it for now. I'll continue reading.

[andrea sfiligoi]

Hi

Font: the new font used has the same readability class of the old Georgia that was used in the old book. I just wanted to differentiate from the old version so that one could tell at a glance it's a new edition. Most comments so far seem to like the new layout better.

The mounted additional rules come almost verbatim from SGD. They have been part of the SBH canon since SGD was published. Most people have asked us to collect the various rules from the supplements so it is inevitable that these are added. People would protest if they were scattered in two books. You can of course limit the use of carrying in specific scenarios. They didn't seem to generate specific tactics, I have seen them used only a few times in games, and mostly in specific scenarios.

The old Undead morale rule generated a lot of talk on the yahoo group and is the result of many people thinking that undead were underpowered in the old version of the rules. It was too easy for them to crumble to dust, basically any all undead band lost the game at the first morale test. The Standard rules are needed for Undead only and they are explained in the Undead heading.