Rolling for Squads

I’ve seen some discussion/confusion on how squads should normally be handled.

In the book there seem to be examples of someone leading a squad and just rolling their specialist’s ability score and the squad just giving them scale. Other examples seem to indicate rolling a die or two as a fortune roll for the squad.

What’s correct? Is it context-dependent? What kind of context?

I’ve just always been rolling for the squad. If someone is leading a group action and they include the squad I’ll roll for the squad or if someone sends the squad off to do some specific thing.

There’s two major cases:

  1. You have no rookies involved in the roll. In that case you roll the Threat of the group. So if I’m an officer, and I’ve got a squad of rookies with me, and I want to do a group action I’d roll myself, and 1d for the squad (they usually give me stress).

  2. The Corporal rule: Pick a rookie to represent the squad. So if you’ve got the Ghost Owls with you but Alice and Sam are playing two of them, just let one of them roll for the whole squad. But she has two dice (you say)! Don’t they normally get one!? It’s fine, you want the person playing a rookie to be involved and and we want to encourage people playing rookies. And it’s ok to switch between Alice and Sam. Just don’t have Sam and also Alice roll and then add also 1d for the rookies on top of that.

2 Likes

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense.

Amusingly, in my group, more often than not when someone leads a group action involving the rookies they end up being the reason the action succeeds.

Heck yeah :slight_smile: Go rookies! :smiley:

Wouldn’t there be a third major case ? Like somebody rolling Marshal for the Squad to act. It hass to be justified in the fiction but it happens often.

I would say that Marshalling a squad into action would be particularly useful if you want to use the squad not to increase your scale, but to do a setup action to improve your Position (so you minimize severity of Wounds and number of Rookies deaths).