Kabalites Battle Trait

It's already up with the rest of the battletomes, but I thought I'd talk a little about the Kabalites Battle Traits.  Some armies (like the Dark Eldar) have army-wide abilities that pretty much already resemble battle traits.  Other armies (like Imperial Guard) do not.  The Dark Eldar's Combat Drugs and Power from Pain abilities lent themselves to this task, so I rolled with it.

I may have mentioned before, but in general my goal with Battle Traits is to have one that is straightforward and easy to use (kind of life the ones in the GHB) and then a second that is a little more involved.  So while Combat Drugs in 40k are an involved table with a lot of different results, I simplified Combat Drugs to a risk/reward mechanic when attacking.  It's basically Damned terrain, but all the time, and you don't suffer the consequences until after you've attacked.

The second ability is Power from Pain.  I considered going with the old pain tokens mechanic, but ultimately decided against it.  However, I'm not impressed by the newer version where they simply ratchet up over the course of the battle.  To me, that does not seem to encourage strategic play, which is something I generally try to facilitate when coming up with rules.  So I adapted something similar to Epidemius' kill counting rule, but used units instead of models so that it will scale better with game size (not a whole lot better, but bigger games tend to have bigger units in addition to more units).

Next up, I'll talk about the Tau  Greater Good Battle Trait!