Coup-De-Grace: Arena Design

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The following categories provide discussion and examples of different aspects of arena layout. Its intended as a design workshop, to give GMs and players ideas as to cool ways to vary their arenas. Nothing here is set in stone, but players should be made aware of which different rules are in play.

Objectives and scenarios

The default set-up of coup-de-grace is two teams fighting to the death. Once you've taken the other team out of action, you win. This section chanegs that idea with the concept of scenario goals and objectives.

Consider trying out the following example scenarios.

Variant Rules relating to scenarios

Themed Warbands

Works best for GM-designed scenarios and warbands. Theme the warbands to create more narrative cohesion: e.g. orcs versus dwarves.

Variants:

• "Alignment" - For team-pick, divide minis into good, evil and neutral. A player who has picked at least one good mini cannot pick any evil ones, and vice versa.
• "Preferred Allies" - For blind bidding, each mini you have adds +1 to the bid value of minis of its own race, and -1 to the bids of one opposed race. These modifiers affect who wins the auction, but not the cost to be paid if you win.

Respawn

In games where annihilating the opposition is not the objective, there may be the ability to "respawn". At the start of each round, as that warband's first activation, the warband may restore one out-of-action mini and place it in his starting area.

Reinforcements

This is the same as respawning, but rather than use out of action minis, the player may pick a mini from a shared "reserve pool" and bring this one into play in his starting area. This means that there'll be a new mini each turn!

Heroes

Sometimes you want one or two models in a warband to stand out. A mini can be treated as being "heroic" if the scenario directs this. This gives it +3 Hit Points, and it can use each of its held weapons twice each turn instead of once. Also, it halves the MA cost of any actions from these weapons.

Mooks

Equally, sometimes you want models to be represent faceless minions who are there for more competent warriors to cut down, and who are only dangerous en masse. A mini can be treated as being a "mook" if the scenario directs this. This gives it -2 Hit Points, and any attack roll made by a mook that rolls an odd number automatically misses.

Variant Objectives

Checkmate

Each player nominates a single model as his "King". This model gains +3 Hit Points and has its status revealed to all players.

When a warband's King is taken out of action, it loses the game. Depending on the scenario other minis in the warband may be instantly taken out of action as well, or may remain in play for the player of that warband to have a chance to affect the ongoing outcome.

At any point that only one player has a King in play, that player wins the game.

Try this objective with the reinforcements rule as above.

Capture the Flag

Each player has a "flag" placed on the board which their team must guard. Any model may spend 1 movement point to pick up a flag in an adjacent square. Doing so takes the place of whatever is in that mini's left hand. If the mini is downed or taken out of action, the flag drops in an adjacent square (dropping mini decides which one). A mini can voluntarily drop a flag in an adjacent square for 1 movement point.

When a warband brings an opposing team's flag back to a target area (maybe that team's starting area, or maybe a separate area to any players starting zone), that flag is removed from the game, and the warband wins the game. For 3+ multiplayer games, instead remove the warband whose flag is captured from the game, and continue till only one warband remains.

As variants consider the following:

• "Murderball": One flag only, which is "neutral" and in the centre of the board. First team to bring it home wins.
• "Defence and Attack": One flag per team, and the team's own flag starts in their starting zone.
• "Bomb run": Teams start with a neutral flag each, but the target is their opponent's starting zone.

Capture the flag works well with the respawn rule, and can be made more chaotic with the mook rules.

Zone Capture

The arena has three or more designated zones which count as target zones. At the start of each round, a zone which only contains minis of one warband is considered to be controlled by that warband. If at the start of any round, a warband is controlling a certain number of zones (say 2 out of 3) they win.

Zone Capture works well with respawn rules, though to stop things dragging out its often a good idea to have respawns be mooks.

Variants:

• "King of the Castle" - Instead of zones, have a single square be the target area. Grant a small buff to any model on this square. A player wins if a mini he controls occupies the target area for 5 turns in a row.
• "Endzone Attack" - Each player's starting area is a target zone. Leave off the respawn rule for this variant!

Wave Defence

The arena is set up so that one player, or the GM sends in successive waves of enemies. These turn up at regular intervals (e.g. every D6 turns).

The goal could be to survive a fixed number of waves with at least one model intact, or perhaps to survive as many turns as possible to beat a "survival high score".

Variants:

• "Tower Defence": Defending players play by points buy, and must spend half their points on buying traps, turrets, obstacles and the like from a GM provided list.
• "Us vs Them vs Us vs Them:" Two players play simultaneously on two boards, attacking on one, defending on the other. Winner is the one who survives with his defending team the longest.

Killstreak

The goal here is to make a certain number of kills to win the game. Use respawn rules and state how many kills are needed to win.

Variants:

• "Escalation": Have starting forces be mooks, but respawn as standard forces, and then to respawn again as heroes.
• "Master of Mayhem": Each mini tracks its own number of kills. To win, an individual mini needs five kills without dying itself.
• "Chosen One's Rampage": As per Master of Mayhem, but each player gets one uber-hero, that can never be killed! If reduced to 0 or less hit points, the mini is downed, but can never be reduced below 0 HP or taken out of action.
• "Style Bonus": With any variant, gain a bonus kill point for a kill made using various marked environmental effects (e.g. a spiked pit trap, a bonfire, etc.).

Arena shape, rooms, corridors and open spaces

You can use any game boards, dungeon tiles or even graph paper that has a grid of squares on it, but its worth putting some thought into the following:

General Principles

Encourage Movement

Nothing makes for a duller game than two teams refusing to move from their start areas. Some scenarios actively encourage a more aggressive approach, but in a default kill-battle the temptation will often be to just set up a defensive line and let the enemy come to you.
As an arena designer, you want to use tricks to discourage this. Perhaps set up the areas nearest the entrance points so that they aren't very safe. A wide open kill zone, with multiple accesses from different directions is a good starting zone, especially if its easy to set up flanking moves from protected positions at the side.
Desirable features should be placed furher in, and persistent hazards should be kept near the starting areas. Make the most beneficial environments be the ones at the centre of the board, and the most detrimental ones over the starting areas.
Early cramped space can encourage movement so that minis can be brought to bear. a 1 square wide corridor leading into an open chamber forces players either to move up into the open chamber, or to present his minis one by one.
If all else fails, consider having the board move! This can be literal, with the scenario having board sections rearrange themselves (perhaps sliding towards a more dangerous zone), or can be achieved with advancing hazards: if both teams are being pushed into the centre room by a closing ring of fire, then they'll soon start moving!

Offer Choices

The game becomes most tactically intersting if you give a choice of routes, which are equally (un)desirable. Maybe there's a shortcut between target control zones, but its across an exposed narrow bridge over lava. Maybe the corridors form a circle or figure of eight, encouraging outflanking moves for faster models.

Keep it Tight

Vast sprawling dungeon arenas may look cool, but if it takes ten turns before contact is made, there's going to be a lot of dullness before the teams end up fighting within much smaller areas.
Better by far to keep it tight from the outset. As a rule of thumb, for every mini in the battle, have the arena be 2 squares wide. So for twelve minis, the game board shouldn't be wider or longer than 24 squares. That doesn't just mean a big open space of 24 x 24 squares, of course. You can limit the number of squares further by breaking that area into rooms, corridors, hazards, obstacles and the like.