I got to play some real games for the first time last night, and I think there was one thing that mainly stood out to me as being confusing and hard to remember.
When you attack an opposing gladiator, there are various things you can trigger that give you some kind of bonus. As far as I can tell, there are three such things:
Attacking an exhausted model = free result.
Pushing a model into a friendly model = free extra success.
Pushing a model into a hazard = pushed model gains a fatigue.
Remembering what action triggers what bonus was a challenge and seemed unwieldy to me.
Especially the free push was difficult to work with, I thought, because you don't just trigger it, you also have to make a choice about where in your damage tree results you want to insert that free-floating virtual push.
As of right now, I would prefer it if these bonuses were streamlined somehow. The best idea I can come up with for how is to say that all three triggers just give a free extra success.
However, I really like the fact that pushing into hazards gives the defendant one fatigue. Because it's interesting, and there isn't any other default way to increase the fatigue of enemies that I know of. But it annoyed me that this means that it has no effect to push an enemy into a hazard when they are already exhausted. Cos they can't gain any more fatigue beyond that.
So: I think my prefered suggestion would be to say that both attacking an exhausted enemy and pushing an enemy into a friendly model ("ganging up") should both just give an extra free success. Cumulatively. Then say that pushing an enemy into a hazard gives the enemy one fatigue, but if the enemy is already exhausted, you get an extra free success instead.
I feel like that would be simpler and easier to remember. Then attacking an exhausted model and pushing them into something - whether a hazard or a friendly model - would always give a net bonus of two extra successes on the attack. And it would get rid of the annoying floating push result that slows down the action with too much extra pondering.
Thoughts?