Skills to pay the Bills

I’ve been playing Necromunda 2017 for a while now, and after building and painting 5 gangs and seeing others builds inspired me to ramble about the game and how I play it, starting with skills and working my way through equipment, tactics and terrain later. Necromunda has always been my absolute favourite game, from getting the first box as a teenager as a Christmas present and playing a full campaign with my brother and cousin, (with us all maxing out at least one gang by new year). The new edition gave me jitters at first as I wanted it to be good but you never know, after playing it for the first time I was hugely relieved- if anything the gameplay is smoother and more logical than the first edition, and the models are amazing. (not as keen on the campaign rules at first, but subsequent gang wars are improving my impression) 

So this first post is about skills and how I use them in the game. I’ve always mentally splits skills into groups, based on when they are useful and if they have a downside or cost to using them. You can see my chart below of the current skills and where they fit in my head, and I’ll go into more detail into why after.

Obviously everyone has their own preferences, and people will disagree with some of this but that’s fine, it’s always more fun to play people who see things differently as it means you get more variation on the table and a better campaign overall.

	Passive skills	Costed skills
Reactive skills	Catfall Dodge Spring up Iron Jaw Combat Master Counterattack Parry Step Aside Lie low Escape Artist Nerves of Steel True Grit Unstoppable Inspirational Iron Will Mentor Regroup Medicae Munitioneer	Overwatch
Proactive skills	Clamber Mighty leap Bull Charge Bulging Biceps Crushing Blow Headbutt Combat master Disarm Backstab Evade. Infiltrate Berserker Impetuous Fearsome Commanding presence Gunfighter Marksman Precision shot Trick Shot Ballistics expert Connected Fixer Savvy Trader	Sprint Hurl opponent Rain of Blows Overseer Fast shot Hipshooting

Reactive skills are skills that are only useful when an opponent or game effect gives you the option to use them- in other words you have no control over them yourself. Most reactive Skills are passive, and take effect when a fighter is attacked or injured, though some are simply situational skills that require a fighter to be placed in a certain situation by an opponent. Reactive skills tend to be used to alleviate a player’s bad luck or an opponent’s actions, so can sometimes appear to be of little use if the right situation does not arise.

Proactive Skills are those skills which can be used at the players convenience, or where the player can generate the right in-game situation without requiring his opponent to do anything (other than play the game normally, move into shooting range, charge range etc.) Again most of these abilities are passive.  These skills suit aggressive play more, and are often more visibly useful than reactive skills.

Passive skills have no in-game cost to activate or use, they may be additional actions that a fighter can take without paying AP, or simply enhancements to standard actions. A Passive skill is generally used more than a costed skill as without a penalty to use they are always beneficial. Most skills in the current books are Passive skills.

Costed Skills are skills that require a specific action be taken, or require AP to take an action that could be used elsewhere. Sometimes this is a forced ‘double’ action, other times it could simply be taking the same action twice and losing the flexibility of multiple actions. The upside of costed skills is that they are some of the most powerful skills in the game, and when they are in the right situation they can often swing a confrontation in the users favour.

The acolyte better have some mad skills if he want's to walk away from this one..

Starting skills.

Starting skills are new to this edition of Necromunda, and they are part of the reason I starting musing on skills. Choosing skills rather than randomising them gives players a great level of customisation to their Leaders and Champions right from the first game, you can make sure that not only do your boys and girls have the tools for the job, they have the tactics too.

So how do we choose our starting skills from the array presented to us? All champions have at least 12 to choose from and leaders 18 so finding the one that works for you should be easy, until you start worrying about the ‘best’ skill. When there is a certain skill that seems amazing compared to the others available it can seem tempting to simply splat that across the entire gang (Nerves of Steel Goliath’s and Fast Shot Van Saar I’m looking at you). Or give it to every leader regardless of gang loyalty (Overseers, Overseers are far as the eye can see…) but this doesn’t just miss out on the fun, customisation side of Necromunda, it can also hamper a gangs effectiveness on the board.

Having three Nerves of steel sounds great, escaping pinning for free? Brilliant. But because this is a reactive skill it needs the right situation to come up- you need to be hit by an enemy, not wounded (or just losing a wound for multiple wound models) and you need to pass the Cool test. If your opponent has turned up with proactive skills he will have the upper hand in leading the game right from the word go- Passive Reactive skills rarely change an enemies tactics because frankly they are going to shoot you whether it pins you or not, but knowing that the fighter with the plasma gun has fast shot means you are far less likely to leave anyone in his line of sight if you can help it.

Similarly having a full deck of matching Proactive skills (Three Orlock gunfighters for extra shots every turn is dead shooty but a bit limited) whilst giving you great board control initially, means you are more likely to be punished for errors without the backup of skills to negate bad luck. Necromunda is a game of luck after all, and even Van Saar can miss an easy shot leaving a model vulnerable to counterattack where Step Aside or True grit would come in a lot handier than Trick shot..

My advice for both a fun game and one you’ll have a chance of walking away from with a win is to balance your starting skills out, have at least one Proactive aggression beast, be it melee or shooting, and at least one reactive survivor to keep you in the game when it goes wrong. I’d always advise two champions to start with, so this leaves you with an extra skill to choose which is where you can tilt your gang towards your own playstyle, I often go for a Costed skill in whichever style I go for on the extra guy, whilst sticking with Passive skills on the others. In campaign games you also need to think about where you want that fighter to go in the future- what role are they going to play on the table and what skills would work well with stats increases and specialist equipment to help with that.

Some examples from my gangs-

Goliaths-

• ·         Leader with Combi plasma, Power Hammer and Nerves of Steel.
• ·         Champion with Combat Shotgun, Brute cleaver and Hurl,
• ·         Champion with Renderiser, Stub Gun and Bulging Biceps.

With two wounds, toughness 4 and furnace plates goliaths have already got survivability built in, so I went for an aggressive build initially. The exception is my leader: he needs to be close to get the best from his great stats and weaponry so Nerves of steel will hopefully keep him on his feet under enemy fire. The first champion is designed to stay out of melee and lay down fire into enemies (eventually I’ll get him a heavy weapon when I can afford it) Hurl is an excellent skill in that if an enemy does engage him, he can hopefully suck up any damage, then chuck them out of melee and lay into them with a close range salvo (usually pretty fatal). The second champion is another melee beast, I love the Renderiser but hate losing the extra attack dice, so Bulging Biceps or Berserker is a  must. I went for Bulging Biceps so he can use the pistol in his off-hand and gain the dice even if he doesn’t charge.

Escher-

1. ·         Leader with Shock Whip, Plasma pistol and Inspirational
2. ·         Champion with Combi bolter/needle, stiletto knife and Clamber
3. ·         Champion with Power sword, two Autopistols and Sprint.

Anyone who’s played a few games with Escher knows that once the going gets tough, the girls get the hell out of dodge faster than you can say ‘enforcers!’ The gangs high Cool is a massive Achilles heel in protracted games, so taking Inspirational on the leader is a great way to offset that- the downside is it means the leader needs to stick with the crew quite closely, so needs to be outfitted appropriately.  The first champion is a full on sniper- boltguns are (as always) great weapons for blowing big holes in your opponents hopes and dreams (and gangers) with good range, rapid fire and damage stats.  Clamber is a great skill for a dedicated sniper in that it allows them to get to a vantage point really quickly, and often unexpectedly for your opponent. Finally the last champion is designed for Melee and objective grabbing, she needs to be fast to get there with the Escher’s poor armour and average toughness, so Sprint is a good choice. Remember +1 move is one of the cheapest upgrades for experience in a campaign, and that would give her an 18” move, not too shabby.

You can see both gangs have a decent variance in weaponry and skills, and the mix of proactive/reactive/passive/costed skills is pretty even, though both swerve a little to the proactive as I'm trying to play more aggressively at the moment. 

That’s it for now as I don’t want to write too much, but next time I’ll be going over some of the skills in more detail, who I like them on, how to get the best from them and why naming fighters after their skills and equipment  is  an amazing idea if your memory is as bad as mine.

Mick