Tactical Question: Disengage

[Aman]

Originally Posted by Skarg

It does achieve that, if/when the situation allows, and the winning player manages to capitalize on having won initiative.



No, Disengage does not cancel out losing initiative. If you disengage, you're not accomplishing much to win a fight. It also is only possible if you have an adjDX advantage AND you have someplace good to disengage to AND your enemy doesn't have things they can do with their time while you use your action to disengage.



No. Winning initiative generally does give advantages. It's usually a coin flip to answer the necessary question of who moves first, though, and is not intended to always guarantee an advantage. It's up to the players to move wisely and find ways to gain advantages.

Disengage in no way "contradicts" the advantages of winning initiative. I would say rather that it offers a faster figure a way to avoid a really bad position, which may or may not be the result of losing initiative. But if a figure does use Disengage to escape a bad position, they are also using their action for the turn to accomplish nothing else but moving one hex, which in general is not a productive thing to be doing. Maybe it's better than staying where they were, but if your foes are using their actions to move one hex, that's generally a worthwhile thing to get them to do rather than having them hurting you with weapon attacks instead.

That is, making an enemy take Disengage generally IS a valuable consequence.



Again, no, that's not a fact. That's you under-thinking the situation. Not only is a dozen warriors Disengaging no way to win a fight, but it also generally doesn't work when you actually have a bunch of figures on an actual map, for at least the dozen reason hcobb and I listed in response to your similar post in house rules.

Perhaps the most general reason why even if someone ever did try that (why, I don't know), it wouldn't work, is because Team Disengage can only move 1/2 MA and Disengage, while Team Engage can move full MA to envelop them, and then close in from multiple directions, and/or corner them, or whatever.

Sure, I understand your points in the full context of a game, and of course it is not a concern where both sides have victory conditions to achieve. So no argument from me on those points.

I still submit that it is broken to have a mechanic that allows one side to practice continual denial of action. As a matter of fact, if I have a giant, and you have 1/3 it's size in figs, you can move half, Engage, then disengage and deny it indefinitely, locking it into position with the Engage then denying it a chance to fight, while you shoot it to death.

See what I'm saying? That's a self-defeating design flaw, and it isn't necessary. If you have to roll your DX10 to Disengage from a DX9 Giant, and half your team succeeds, and the other half doesn't, you'll end up with half the team getting beat up. Now you are better off fighting. A design that pushes players to ACT positively is a good design.

The classic error with, say airplane or spaceship battles is to design a scenario where one side just wants to escape. Oops, boring scenario.