As currently written, the MFØ rules for exotic and hazardous terrain effectively penalizes all players except the defender, who sets up camp where they’re safest and can roll their full complement of dice. The best move for the defender is to set up in such a way that their frames don’t require a specialized system, and set up outside the effect of the hazardous terrain, which then requires the other players to have specialized systems that takes up one of their system slots whether they wind up setting up in hazardous terrain or not.
By the time they get to trying to seize the defender’s stations — a defender who, you’ll recall, has four systems per frame to the attackers’ three, and is only one good/bad roll away from being better off than the second place player — the attackers have been chewed up and are starting to look at each other’s now-underdefended stations where the specialized systems still count for something.
The entire time, the odds that the defender is going to step out into hazardous areas and take the penalty of a white die are very slim. The primary attacker’s best target is the secondary attacker, who has less materiél with which to return fire and is almost certainly closer. And knows that their only legit target is the defender, who they can’t defeat alone.
A Second Edition Kind of Hazard
So let’s try a new way of running hazards. In this test there are three characteristics terrain can have: Rough, Harmful, and Revealing. They can have more than one at a time, and movement systems can allow you to cross over them, though they still have their effects if you start or end your turn there.
Continue reading “Types of Hazardous Terrain in Mobile Frame Zero”