Rules Review: May 2013 Player's Guide Update

Greetings HeroClix Fans!

With the recent release of Teen Titans and The Man of Steel, the Rules Team has been summoned from our lair in the Negative Zone to publish a new Player’s Guide! This installment of the Player’s Guide will be the last Player’s Guide you will see in this format as we finalize a new series of documents designed to streamline updates and communicate rules changes and clarifications.

This Player’s Guide brings you a number of Additional Team Abilities, two essential rule changes, and, of course, the in-depth game element coverage you’d expect from a Player’s Guide. In addition, you will find a number of clarifications and some slight changes to existing powers so that they communicate more clearly with the new 2013 Rule Book and Powers and Abilities Card. We are sensitive to the idea that the complete Guide is now almost 240 pages long. We are currently retooling how we are making these this crucial data available to you and will soon present a new format for the Player’s Guide that will get you the important information you need, but with the need to (re)print less as we update.

Since those are still in the editing stages, what to fill this article with? Let’s start with some of those new, shiny ATAs.

It’s been a while since new ATA have been offered and in this PG we are releasing ATA’s inspired by characters from four sets! Teams that had a spotlight in Batman, Streets of Gotham, Amazing Spider-Man, and Teen Titans are receiving additional team abilities with this update! We have highlighted a pair of our favorite keywords to review; Batman Family and the Offenders.

Batman allies have been a big part of several of the last HeroClix releases and their new ATA should see a lot of table time. For four points, Batman Family gives your Batman Family keyworded characters Willpower when within 8 squares of a friendly Batman or Bruce Wayne. Additionally, when Batman is elsewhere populating Arkham Asylum with the worst of Gotham City, your Batman Family gets a +1 speed and range. Pretty amazing stuff! BM008 Nightwing with Willpower? Sure. BM010 Blackbat charging 5 squares with a 12 Attack? Indeed. Not a bad investment at 4 points.

The Offenders also get a 4 point ATA in Amazing Spider-man. The Offenders, ever the bane of the Defenders, now have a team ability capable of dealing with those pesky defend chains. This ability takes the Defenders Team Ability and reverses it when any character with the Offenders ATA makes an attack. When the single target of an attack, the character replaces its Defense value with the lowest Defense value of the characters adjacent to him. Terribly inconvenient for those opposing the Offenders…

This Player’s Guide is not all about ATAs. Included is the Rules Team’s take on two popular exploits, both impacting the game in a big way. First, we tackled the conundrum faced when an opposing character becomes the Pilot of a friendly vehicle. Through Mind Control there were cases where, while under the effects of Mind Control, characters could become Pilots of their opponent’s vehicles. This tactic made vehicles a mobile prison and allowed for the indefinite incarceration of an opposing character at the cost of a free action. Clearly, this was never intended to be the role of vehicles. Clearly, this was never intended to be the role of vehicles. To that end, amending the Pilot rules was deemed the best way to close the loophole and bring the abuse to an end. After much deliberation we decided to re-word the Pilot rules, adding the prerequisite that the character began the game on the same force as the vehicle it is to Pilot.

Another change in the May Player’s Guide comes in a tweak to Resources. When DC10 015 Catwoman and MV10 009 Iron Man released they brought a new dynamic to the game; the ability to circumvent Resource Dials. With Iron Man, the interaction between the Resource and character was easy to determine; with Catwoman the interaction was more difficult to nail down. Her Special Power was determined to shut off all aspects of a Resource which included the end-of-turn roll that turned the Resource dial. This ruling, combined with the Utility Belt’s ability to turn the dial to any click on with a double power action on its first click, made the combination quite deadly. If correctly done, the figure wearing the Utility Belt would never have to turn the Resource Dial and have a perpetual +2 with Flurry, (or Outwit, or Poison, or Exploit Weakness). Needless to say, this was not the ruling intended by the original design. In order to correct this, the Rules Team consulted Game Design to determine a fix. That interaction resulted in a ruling that determined the end-of-turn Resource Roll cannot be ignored and is part of the ‘cost’ of the action taken, much like an action token.

Now it’s time for us to slink back to our lair in the Negative Zone. Check back in a couple of weeks for answers to many of your questions concerning the new 2013 Rule Book and PAC. Worry not, heroes, change is on the way, but you’ll need to wait until June to find out what the changes are. Until then, Win if you can, lose if you must, but keep Clixin’.

But before we go, here’s the new Player’s Guide and then enjoy these new ATAs!

Players Guide Golden Age – 2013-06

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