BEACH Overlays/Hexes/Tiles

[TheAmishStig]

Originally Posted by Broadway Phil

I knew not having the rules in front of me was a mistake. Of course "if not disabled by terrain" should be added. But I would be confused by the references to beach hexes, and avoided them as much as possible. I thought the whole idea of marsh was to provide a transition from clear terrain (etc.) to swamp in the same manner as beaches do from clear terrain (etc.) to water.

Phil

No worries, the bullet points were all to make sure I understood what you were going for, map out how some permutations would play, and serve as a 'Hey, this might be an unintended consequence of the phrasing'.

What I wasn't sure about was if "The 'stop no matter what' rule still applies it comes from anything other than Swamp / Marsh" was your intent or not, and saw a potential loophole in the "from swamp/marsh to swamp/marsh" phrasing.

The rest was trying to make it sound like it belonged in a rulebook, but GranitePenguin's point about not requiring a 'go to this other bit for the rest of the rules' lookup is a point well taken...it's something that annoys the crap out of me in the Shadowrun 4E/5E books, and I'm ashamed I fell for it. Can't say I'm not learning a lot about the finer points of writing rules for others to read, beyond simply writing rules for play purposes, though!

Nth verse, same as the first? "Marsh is a form of Swamp. A GEV entering a Marsh is required to make a 'disabled by terrain' roll, but is not required to stop due to terrain if it succeeds on that roll. A GEV is not required to stop before transitioning between a Water hax and a Marsh hex, or vice-versa. If a road or railroad passes through the Marsh hex, a GEV may gain the road bonus in the same manner as a road/RR in a Beach hex. For all other purposes, treat Marsh as Swamp."

I admit to being tempted to go as far as "A GEV entering a marsh is not required to make a 'disabled by terrain' roll"...which would get rid of the "Has to stop when you make that roll, except in this one edge case" problem, but I'm afraid is going to end up too powerful, and too easily abused to create a new Fuzzy Wuzzy situation. The risk of being disabled by the terrain ameliorates that at least somewhat.