These are the homebrew rules/hacks we’ve introduced in the campaign. I do want to just say, I played this game completely as written for a substantial number of sessions before making these changes. These weren’t made without trying the game as-is, and I feel like they’ve had a positive impact on our game! I don’t view these changes as “fixes”, they just move the game more towards my preference.
Hex Based Combat
For combat I use a hex-based map. The ranges break down to:
- Close range is 2 hexes.
- Medium range is 4 hexes.
- Long range is 8 hexes.
- Far range covers the map.
A mech can move 3 hexes on its turn.
Melee and healing systems (e.g. the fabrication arm) can only be used on adjacent hexes, however before you make an attack with a Melee weapon you may move 1 hex toward your target. You can only do this if that move would take you into range of a valid target for your attack. (This effectively puts melee weapons as the same range as other close range weapons, with a slight boost of getting some free movement.)
Why did I do this?
Our whole table was having a hard time keeping track of all the range bands in combat. We initially started full theatre of the mind, with me describing the situation. This quickly tended to get confusing, especially when people wanted to start making use of terrain features in interesting ways. I tried moving to a non-gridded whiteboard map to loosely track where players and NPCs were. Frankly, this wasn’t really better, combat was dragging as everyone constantly needed to know what ranges everything else was from them.
So, enter the hex grid! I have a big whiteboard hex-map I can draw on now, and combat moves much quicker, with much less mental load on me to keep track of everything.
D10 To Push
Ok, this is the big one. Basically, whenever you would re-roll a D20 and take the new result (e.g. pushing, using mottos/backgrounds/keepsakes) instead roll a D10 (a bonus dice) and add that to the original roll. Any system or module that would force someone to re-roll a D20 instead forces them to subtract a D10 (a penalty dice). This pretty heavily inspired by Lancers Accuracy/Difficulty mechanic.
You Nail-It or critically fail on “natural” D20 rolls, which can’t be modified further. (This means there’s no way to avoid a crit fail!)
In addition use a different outcomes table for all rolls:
- 20: Nailed-It
- 16-19: Full Success
- 10-15: Tough Choice
- 2-9: Failure
- 1: Critical Failure
Whenever you have multiple bonus dice, you only benefit from the highest bonus dice rolled from all of them. If you take penalty dice, if for any reason you have multiple, just as with positives only subtract the highest rolled penalty dice.
Bonus and penalty dice don’t “cancel out”, the highest bonus dice is added, and the highest penalty dice is subtracted, from the initial roll.
As NPCs don’t have player abilities, or the ability to push or use m/b/k re-rolls, they instead get assigned a flat bonus to all rolls ranging from +1 (useless grunt) to +4 (elite veteran). Bio-titans get a flat +5.
Why did I do this?
This is probably going to make me sound like the absolute worst kind of GM, but bear with me, I promise I have a point (and I’m hopefully not a horrible GM). Players were succeeding too much! I also misread a crucial rule, but where we’ve ended up I’m happy with the modified core mechanic with my misinterpretation incorporated.
Ok wait, don’t get mad, I know how that sounds. Basically, the way I run games is pretty roll-light. I don’t ask for rolls for a lot of things, and generally let players succeed at stuff unless they’re under real pressure or in danger. However, for that to work, reaching for the dice needs to be impactful, and come with real risk. In my opinion, the stock rules for Salvage Union don’t make the dice risky enough (even if you play the rules correctly, unlike me, who was not).
Oh yeah, that rule I got wrong! I had in my head that the motto/keepsake/background re-rolls were per-session not per-mission! When I was asked about when players got these abilities back in probably our first or second session, I couldn’t find the rule in the book (no ctrl-f for physical copies). So I tried to remember, and my wires crossed. I should really have checked back on that at the end of the session, but I forgot to.
Sort of because of that mistake, re-roll resources players have access to were also effectively “solved” at our table - re-roll fails every time no question. We didn’t have a single session where a player actually ran out of per-session free re-rolls, so it was no question to use them whenever needed.
So, this change to the rules means that:
- The modified outcome table has a full success on a dice roll without using resources being a lot less likely.
- Using resources has an inherent added risk, and can be more or less worthwhile depending on the original dice roll. E.g. Do I spend a resource to add a D10 to a naturally rolled 4?
- You lose the original question of whether to re-roll tough choices and risk changing it to a full failure.
- You lose the ability to prevent critical fails. (I like critical fails, they’re fun, it’s fun for things to go really really wrong.)
I actually only realised my mistake about per-session vs. per-mission re-rolls recently - after we’ve already been using the new core mechanic for a few sessions. I think I’m actually basically happy with the changes I’ve made, but they probably wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d have checked the rules properly. Lesson learnt, make sure you note down anything you had to try and remember and double check if it’s something you need to correct for next time!
I’ve decided to keep the per-session restoring of m/b/k rolls, it means we get to see them quite a bit more, which is fun. We generally only play every couple of weeks, so the actual IRL time between hearing our mottos and about our keepsakes is still quite high.
My final note is, I think the existence of such an ubiquitous and straightforward core rule in a game like Salvage Union makes hacking it into your tastes easy, and is a great piece of design. Even though it was partially created through my mistakes, I really like this rules change, it’s different from the core book’s rules and gives a slightly different weighting to how resources get spent and the success/fail rates. It’s not objectively better or worse, but I prefer it like this.