Another minor change that most people probably won’t notice, but goes some way to cleaning up our terrain rules, is to Obstructions. Guild Ball has always had fairly simple terrain rules, some of it slows you down, some of it speeds you up, some of it you can’t move through at all because it’s a giant boulder! But Obstructions have always straddled the line between simple and complex, because you can move over them while jogging or dodging, but not by sprinting or charging. In addition, in Season 3 it was possible to end your movement on an Obstruction. This may sound like a fairly simple thing, but it often involved balancing miniatures on odd angled terrain pieces, disputes over whether a miniature could even fit on top of a certain Obstruction, and it had weird interactions with pushes.

In Season 4 you will still be able to move over an Obstruction with a jog or a dodge, but a model can never end a move with any part of its base overlapping an Obstruction. Or in plain English, models cannot end their movement on an Obstruction. This functions in much the same way as a model with Flying being able to move over impassable Barrier terrain, but also being unable to end their movement on top of a Barrier.

So, What’s the Difference Between a Trait and a Play?

One of the things we became quite fond of when developing new models in previous years was the idea of cost zero character plays. These allowed us to do some quite interesting things with how players spend influence, and it gave us even more flexibility when deciding whether to make a new ability function as a character play or a character trait. A great example of this is the Mason captain Hammer, who was designed to spend his teammate’s influence to fuel his own abilities.

The more we used cost zero character plays the more we started the blur the line between how a character play is different to an active character trait. Functionally, in Season 3 there really isn’t much mechanical difference between how Furnace’s One At a Time Lads! character play and Ferrite’s Get Over Here! [Iron] character trait work. Both of these abilities have no influence cost, both of them are actions that the model must choose to perform during their activation. This has ended up causing a little confusion from time to time but also it makes it genuinely difficult to determine any mechanical difference.

In Season 4 we have removed cost zero character plays and made adjustments to every player that had one. To return to our above example of Hammer, his Iron Fist character play now has a cost of 1, but Hammer’s maximum influence stat has been increased from 5 to 6 as a result.

But I Want to Play with ALL of Them!