Midnight Dark #005 - Heroes

I'd welcome my patrons' thoughts on the place of heroes in the conceptual space of Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark. As it stands, the rules are very much a bolt-on so can be extracted almost entirely without impacting the rest of the rules and I'm a little on the fence about them.

If you've been following Precinct Omega since before Zero Dark, you'll be aware that the original Horizon Wars had no heroes, very much by design. My position at that point was that, at the scale of warfare being waged, individual soldiers count for very little compared to the coordination of the whole.

In Zero Dark, meanwhile, the situation was reversed. Heroes - that is, the characters most competent and with the specialized skills required to complete missions - were essential. Part of the philosophical message of Zero Dark was "every soldier counts". If you haven't noticed, it was intended to encourage players into a space in which a "Rambo" attack was tempting but extremely risky.

When I wrote Infinite Dark, then, I wanted to make the game stand apart from similar spaceship games by placing more emphasis on the contribution of the people at the controls or helms of spaceships (which, to be fair, Fantasy Flight - and now Atomic Mass - did quite well with X-Wing and Star Wars Armada, albeit through the usual FFG tactic of throwing money at the problem until it went away).

Inevitably, therefore, I am looking at building the contributions of people back into the Midnight Dark mass battle concept and the broad mechanism is very similar to the one I adopted in Infinite Dark: heroes have a statline that acts as a modifier on the statline of the element to which they are attached. So an element with MFAD of 3/3/2/1, say, might have a hero with a statline of 0/+1/+1/0, giving the element a total modified statline of 3/4/3/1.

Heroes also have their own special abilities, although using them may come at a cost. For example, all heroes come with the ability "heroic sacrifice". I'm still working on the exact mechanics of how this works because they will evolve with the rules of the game, but essentially it works by removing the hero from the element in return for a one-time boost - for example, to remove the "exhausted" state or to avoid imminent damage. I hope the symbolism is obvious. However, my hope is to avoid it feeling like an obvious choice - much like in Zero Dark, the sacrifice of any individual should come at a significant cost.

Naturally, heroes will come into their own in a campaign setting, as they will be the element of an army can can change and develop - as well as be damaged or killed!

Now, I like heroes as a concept and I feel like there's a desire for battlefield heroics in speculative miniatures wargames that should make them a commercially intelligent addition. But the question in my mind is whether they should be a core feature of the game or reserved to a subsequent "campaign" supplement. So I'm looking for my patrons' thoughts.

Is the addition of heroes to your Horizon Wars games something you yearn for? Or even just an addition you think you'd find fun, perhaps helping you get closer to the feeling of your IP setting of choice? Or do you think it will detract from the hard-ish edge of the Horizon Wars concept that's better held back?

Let me know what you think.