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Let's start with weapon skill

ws 3 resembles someone who practiced fighting just few times or he did't concentrate when learning and he is not verced at all.
ws 6 resembles someone who is very good and experienced in fighting.
ws 7 resembles someone who is even better.

The problem is that someone with ws 3 hits someone with ws 6 on 4+. In reality he would hit after many attempts. Or someone with ws7 or more hits someone with ws 3 or less on just 3+. In this case attacker would hit all of his attacks, maybe he would miss one if he would have bad luck.

My solution.
If the ws of the deffender is twice the ws of attacker, he hits on 5+. If it's more than two times bigger than, the attacker hits on 6. If the ws of the defender is more than two times smaller then ws of attacker, he hits on 2+.

The problem with the current system of wounding.

If something has a strenght 3 points or more higher then the toughness of the opponent, he wounds only on 2+. The chance of surviving for a knight hit by cannon ball is closer to 1/36 then to 1/6.

My solution.
If something has strength 3 points higher than toughness of the opponent, then it wounds on 2+ and then on 4+ if 1 was rolled in intial throw.
If something has strength 6 points higher than toughness of the opponent, then it wounds on 2+ and then on 2+ if 1 was rolled in intial throw.

If toughness is 3 points higher than strength, then attacker will wound on 6 and then 4+.
If toughness is 6 points higher than strength, then attacker will wound on 6 and then 6.


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What do you think of it?

Could you post the study that shows chance of survival of being hit with a knight or cannon ball?

The problem with the shift to only being hit on a 6 is fencers blades. 35 points, and you wizard gets an extra attack and anything WS4 or less (most things in the game) only hit you on 6's.
It really takes away the weakness of wizards (poor defense).

Wizzard will not be able to deal damage, with his 2 attacks. He will get wounded sometime and it is enough he will loose a combat and flee.

WS is WS. They knew the charts when they assigned the values to units. I know the FLUFF says that someone is a master super duper swordsman with WS10 and that doesn't matter much against a farmer wielding a broom at WS3 or a master fencer. But it's a D6 game and not meant to be real.

To hit is just a speed bump to to wound rolls, which is where the vast majority of this game's balance takes place.

Every single unit in the game would have to have their WS modified to represent a new value. Because, newsflash, they consider the current dice rolls balanced. I had started a statistical analysis of units based on their price and attributes and a change in WS has a negligible effect on their unit price. I.e., it is not a valuable statistic. To make it a valuable statistic, everything either needs to be repriced or have new values and then you need to balance back to exactly where we are now.

Which is spending a vast amount of time just to try and justify the fluff that an expert swordsman is expert.

An expert swordsmen is measured in more than one stat.
It's both weapon skill and attacks.
Strength and initiative too.
You could even argue toughness to some extent, as when I hit an expert, I'm less likely to get an open swing in on his vitals.

You can't just break out a single part of the process.

Still waiting on that cannon research...

-Matt

If someone has very good technique, skill and avoids oponents attacks then he is often able to make his own attacks and will hit with ease. Ws, S, I are totaly different characteristics. Someone might be very precise when performing his attacks, so they nearly always will hit, but his gentle attacks might not be very strong. He might be not very fast , but extremely precise , skilled able to bring to halt an enemy blow with an ideal positioning of the blade. If Ws is his forte, then why should't he be benefited if models with high strength and toughness are?

I just estimated the probability the knight survives beeing struck with cannon ball. If cannons wound severaly times tougher monsters then a knight on 2+ ,then chances of wounding knight are going to be much higher.
Just beeing mad that super powerfull weapons fail to wound a trooper on 1 without rerolls.

Many units already have a high cost for their high ws.

No units have a high cost FOR their ws. They have a high cost for other attributes. As you've already pointed out it is not a valuable attribute. GW has access to their own to hit tables when making point values.

New HE aren't expensive because of WS, it's because they are ASF, have huge LD, I, WS, equipment and other abilities. Same with WoC troops. WS is just one of many components and is about the least valuable.

devestator 7777777 wrote:
If someone has very good technique, skill and avoids oponents attacks then he is often able to make his own attacks and will hit with ease. Ws, S, I are totaly different characteristics.

If you pretend they're measuring seperate things, then you end up with gibberish. You end up with a game where an Ogre attacks three times for every attack made by a normal human, but does so slower (3 attacks vs 1, but In 2 vs 3). What the hell is that simulating? How do you attack three times as often in the same period of time, while making slower attacks?

And when a human becomes more skilled in combat, as nobles would be compared to conscripted troops, well in the real world it isn't because they're physically capable of making three times as many attacks in the same amount of time as a less skilled soldier. It means they make more precise attacks that are more difficult to countr, and it means they are also more capable of defending attacks from their less skilled opponents. And yet in Warhammer, a hero upgrade for a fighting character almost always means +2 WS (big deal) and +2 attacks (which are what really matters). Is that because these heroes are making more attacks, or does it all vaguely amount to a system where they are inflicting more hits on the enemy through an overall better fighting technique?


Point being, don't pick out one little part of the system in isolation and look to make that a more accurate simulation. The whole thing is a conceptual mess, and has been since at least 3rd ed, and making one part of it 'more accurate' will only serve to slow the whole thing down while doing nothing to make the overall result any more believable. The better answer is actually to go the other way, make it more abstract.

Yah, it's just fluff you're trying to justify.

The whole mess of WS/S/T/W/I/A on top of defenses is just hodgepodge of how they come up with a final result. And I like the idea that something like an ogre works out how he does.

The game just doesn't work otherwise. A master fencer can't fence an ogre. He's 10 feet tall and can lift a horse (and eat it). Your ability with a foil is meaningless.

They gave skaven assassins a ward save to represent their super speed. But a ward save applies to a fuxing comet landing on your head or a god pooping on you. It doesn't apply to every situation but you can't have a 40 page disclaimer of when you can use it. It's a simple game.

If my Idea of changing ws is not good, then what about the wounding?


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If my Idea of changing ws is not good, then what about the wounding?

devestator 7777777 wrote:
If my Idea of changing ws is not good, then what about the wounding?

Same deal really - no point adding more dice rolls to the system just to try and make things more realistic - it'll slow play down and just create some other point where the odds of wounding end up screwy.

Honestly I think there's a lot more scope to go the other way and pull detail out. Think long and hard about what initiative actually means and whether it achieves anything meaningful in this age of step up. Think about whether 3 dice rolls are really needed to sort out combat, or if stats could be combined to make it a 2 roll process.

Agreed.

And for the record, using your combat skill to avoid being hit all together is extremely difficult.
I've done enough fighting in my day to know that, even pitted against someone far more experienced than myself, in which brawl I'm basically guaranteed to leave the conscious world, I can still get in a fair number of hits. Not as many or as solid of ones as my opponent, but easily 30% or more.

They have enough stats to make the units different. And that's fine. And they throw out some items/spells that might buff or test against some weirdo stats.

I remember an old roleplaying game that had like 30 different rolls to see what happened. I took like 2 hours to make a char and the first fight I got in they rolled on table, crit, to crit, to crit, to crit and my spine got severed and I died.

I also tried to write an article about 25(?) years ago for dragon magazine on Marvel superheroes game. And it was kind of like this thread. The editor replied it was a good idea but "too complicated for a simple game."

Warpsolution wrote:
Agreed.

And for the record, using your combat skill to avoid being hit all together is extremely difficult.
I've done enough fighting in my day to know that, even pitted against someone far more experienced than myself, in which brawl I'm basically guaranteed to leave the conscious world, I can still get in a fair number of hits. Not as many or as solid of ones as my opponent, but easily 30% or more.

Fair point. Though personally I'd like the game to embrace the fantasy imagery of dashing bladesmen a lot more. It might not be realistic but the idea of hyper-skilled melee warriors that are almost never touched is, to me, just kind of cool.

But putting that in the current system is hard. Right now we've got the ASF cludge given to High Elves, that basically works as a reroll to make sure almost all their attacks hit, but elsewhere the only real option to improve melee performance is to increase attacks, strength and toughness.

But it would, I think, require a complete re-design to achieve a system where WS was as relevant as I'd like it to be. And given the overall system now is the healthiest its been in years, I am most certainly not arguing for a total re-design.


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DukeRustfield wrote:
They have enough stats to make the units different. And that's fine. And they throw out some items/spells that might buff or test against some weirdo stats.

I remember an old roleplaying game that had like 30 different rolls to see what happened. I took like 2 hours to make a char and the first fight I got in they rolled on table, crit, to crit, to crit, to crit and my spine got severed and I died.

I also tried to write an article about 25(?) years ago for dragon magazine on Marvel superheroes game. And it was kind of like this thread. The editor replied it was a good idea but "too complicated for a simple game."

Yeah, I've played in more than few games that had realism as a main goal, which simultaneously meant hyper-detailed character creation and really brutal combat. The result that should have been obvious to everyone was characters taking a whole session to create and ten minutes to get killed. Not fun


Fortunately roleplaying got a lot smarter, starting in about the late 90s. It started moving away from statting and simulating every little thing the designer can think of, and building hundreds of tiny little simulations and then hunking it all together as one big thing and hoping it plays okay. It started thinking about game design in the context of the overall game, and making sure that as long as, more or less, the overall system produced an okay result then little abstractions here and there were okay.

Not just RPGs but computer games.

When the first, what was it, Tom Clancy shooter game came out, we were all sneaking along. Holding still. And I was like, this is the most boring game on earth. I got up and ran around and died.

The original BF1942 the designers were originally trying to make a realistic simulation. Then they said they realized that was too boring and slow and people like to jump (super mario ruined games!) and drive over people in jeeps and such. So you see most modern shooters have a kind of goofy realism. It's very along the lines of GW stuff. Though 40K was too goofy for me.

 sebster wrote:
Fair point. Though personally I'd like the game to embrace the fantasy imagery of dashing bladesmen a lot more. It might not be realistic but the idea of hyper-skilled melee warriors that are almost never touched is, to me, just kind of cool.

Well, I think the current system does a pretty decent job at that anyway. "Hitting" your opponent, in the strictest of terms, is just making physical contact. But then you have to Wound him, then get past his armour and Ward (including the Parry and "Dodge" saves, which just screams Highly Skilled Warrior).
Most of the attacks I manage to land against better fighters than myself are the ones that they let pass, because it left me open, or because they could roll with it/deflect it and lessen the damage to nothing.
Being able to touch your opponent with your weapon is one thing. Doing so while also hurting them and avoiding injury yourself is another.
Really, I think the Parry save has more potential to represent how talented of a swordsman someone is than anything else.

DukeRustfield wrote:
Not just RPGs but computer games.

When the first, what was it, Tom Clancy shooter game came out, we were all sneaking along. Holding still. And I was like, this is the most boring game on earth. I got up and ran around and died.

The original BF1942 the designers were originally trying to make a realistic simulation. Then they said they realized that was too boring and slow and people like to jump (super mario ruined games!) and drive over people in jeeps and such. So you see most modern shooters have a kind of goofy realism. It's very along the lines of GW stuff. Though 40K was too goofy for me.

Rainbow 6. And yeah, the planning thing in single player was fun for a little while, but outside of that it was basically a really slow shooter where you suffered loads of cheap, sudden deaths (admittedly because real warfare has loads of cheap, sudden deaths, but that doesn't mean its fun).

Computers games, though, have been kind of schizophrenic about the realism in their games. Flight simulators kept going for more and more realism until it was probably easier to fly the real thing (and in chasing the strong fans that really loved that kind of game, they disappeared out of the mainstream game market entirely).


The modern shooter games seem to have settled on a formula that works pretty well, though I admit I don't play them. Add all kinds of detail into the look of the game, but design the actual game about the same old run and gun silliness we've had since Quake deathmatch.


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Warpsolution wrote:
Well, I think the current system does a pretty decent job at that anyway. "Hitting" your opponent, in the strictest of terms, is just making physical contact. But then you have to Wound him, then get past his armour and Ward (including the Parry and "Dodge" saves, which just screams Highly Skilled Warrior).
Most of the attacks I manage to land against better fighters than myself are the ones that they let pass, because it left me open, or because they could roll with it/deflect it and lessen the damage to nothing.
Being able to touch your opponent with your weapon is one thing. Doing so while also hurting them and avoiding injury yourself is another.
Really, I think the Parry save has more potential to represent how talented of a swordsman someone is than anything else.

It works well enough. Certainly well enough that I don't think there's any merit in changing it at this point. But conceptually it's a muddle, and ends up being one dice roll more than a system designed from scratch would have. I mean, consider explaining the process to a new player;

"The guy attacking you is really strong, but your guy is a really skilled swordsman, so you should avoid getting killed. So he has to roll a 4+ to hit, then he'll roll to wound and go past your armour..."
"Hang on, 4+. That seems pretty likely, I thought you said I wasn't that likely to get hit."
"Let me get to that, he rolls to wound and get past your armour, and then if that happens then you roll a parry save to see if you deflected the blow."
"Why am I doing that after he wounded and got through my armour? And why not just have my apparently high skill with weapons just affect his chance to hit me in the first place?"
"Because the bones of this system were invented in the late 80s, as a massive revision of an even older system, and since then we've have 5 more revisions and dozens of army books that have added and removed all kinds of little rules and special circumstances. And the end result is something that kinds of works as a whole, but if you ever look at any individual element it often doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Oh, for sure. It could use some work. My point was just that it doesn't need too much.

...Parry saves should be separated from Ward saves, and be taken after Hits but before Wounds. Or something.

Warpsolution wrote:
Oh, for sure. It could use some work. My point was just that it doesn't need too much.

...Parry saves should be separated from Ward saves, and be taken after Hits but before Wounds. Or something.

That'd be moving to a system that needed potentially 5 rolls. I think it works alright as a kludge to the existing system, but man it starts making that WS table look more and more problematic, and becomes a pretty clear reason that maybe we're closer to needing a total overhaul than I'd otherwise thought.

Agreed, sir. That's the problem with games that pack as much history as Warhammer; there's always the danger that the system (or the mythology) collapses under its own weight.

Poor HackMaster...

Warpsolution wrote:
Agreed, sir. That's the problem with games that pack as much history as Warhammer; there's always the danger that the system (or the mythology) collapses under its own weight.

Poor HackMaster...

Very true.