“Til Death” option for Hero characters.
Heroes are the only characters that can die in Battle, and on very few occasions they get to recruit locals and raise region morale. They can’t do police work or civil work if I understand it correctly, and get only marginal unit advantages. (Does their Swordskill even add to the unit CS anymore?). This is why I propose they get an additional option. A “No retreat, no surrender” option in their Unit settings.
Let’s say this raises the chance of the Hero dying to something nearer 90%-95% (since in BM you apparently can never have certainty over anything, though I would also be in favour of a total 100%), with the very slight chance that instead of dying they are just Critically Wounded.
There are plenty of times in actual Medieval History when Knights fought without retreat and died doing so, which seems like the very epitome of what a hero should be.
(See Sir Geoffroi de Charny at Poitiers, Sir Simon de Montfort at Evesham. etc).
Sure, you’d have to calculate what their unit would do, perhaps almost every man retreats when the unit reaches the values for when they would usually retreat, and only the Hero and a few other men as a close personal bodyguard stay the field and ultimately die alongside them. (When a Hero dies the unit disappears anyway, so if 5 men staying the field for that little bit longer swings a battle then .. well .. all the more fame to the dead Hero, epic roleplay etc.) I can’t imagine that would be too hard to implement.
So as well as making Heroes that little bit more interesting and desirable it also allows players to .. dispose, of a character they otherwise have no other use for. I had Sextus do a one-man-cavalry-charge against the besiegers in Valkyrja before Averoth fell, and then roleplayed he simply “disappeared”. Had I had the option to actually have him die in that battle it would have been much more appropriate. (but then .. maybe he did ;p) The fact Heroes are otherwise useless is the reason I’ve never played one. Their abilities are seemingly so rare to enact they’re the only character class that has almost no reward for a binding-subclass, save for the slight chance the character might die. And then it’s just a termination of the character, a one-off and often not very consequential end.
It’s better than simply having to “Retire” a character, or suddenly having them spontaneously die. This doesn’t make the game any “easier” like so many other suggestions, doesn’t over-power or give any real advantage to a character, save for letting a player enact a powerful roleplay before sending their character to what would hopefully be their glorious demise in battle.
Thoughts, comments, criticisms, the usual -
