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 kirotheavenger wrote:
I like a little randomness as the friction that makes playing the game interesting.

There's definitely a balance.
I quite like Necromunda's randomness. But what I also like about Necromunda's dice is things feel punchy and decisive. It's a few dice and they're almost always going to have some effect.

40k rarely has that. Any dice you roll in 40k feels like an absolute slog. You're rolling, then rolling, then rolling again, and again, full handfuls of dice and at the end of it it's like "damn, two guys died, brutal". Just... wtf am I rolling dice for?
I've really been enjoying my Tau railgun because there's that crunch, that impact, back in there.

What 40k needs is for dice to feel like they matter.

I have the opposite feeling. In Necromunda pretty much every guy fires with swingy results: yes single shots can be powerful but you need to hit, wound, sometimes bypass a save and then roll for the injury. So the vast majority of shots don't do anything.

In 40k results are pretty much guaranteed. The high number of dice means that even with a bad roll something close to average is achieved. In Necromunda most of the times nothing is achieved.

A single guy with a plasma gun for example has a lot of potential. And yet most of the times he won't do anything. Take a min squad of eradicators: unless firing against things with tons of layers of saves no way they won't get absolutely anything against a target. Same with low S weapons, which in 40k typically have a very high rate of fire. A squad of 9 ork bikes fires 108 shots under the speedwaagh, possibly at BS4+ if Freebooterz, and costs 225 points, pretty much like a regular ganger in a 1000 points game of Necromunda. Now compare the results of those bikers and the results of a single guy firing with a lasgun or an autogun. The dakkajet is 36-42 shots at S6 AP-1 or AP-2 for 120 points, which is what 6% of a 2000 points budget?

My Escher firing with 3-4 gals armed with S3 lasguns typically puts one guy out of action in the entire game, at most. But most of the times they just pins enemies rather than damage them.

One of the reasons why I like Necromunda is that lethality is really low compared to 40k. Losing half the gangers is a catastrophic result even at top of turn 4-5, while in 40k it's the average result at top of 2 and sometimes in two turns much more than half the list has already been killed.

That's part of it though - pinning in Necromunda means something.
Injuring fighters means something.
Necromunda has steps of effect other than lethality.

40k really doesn't.

True, although in most cases it just means that the pinned ganger doesn't get +1 to hit by aiming in the next turn. Unless it's a full melee specialist or a guy carrying a heavy weapon with no tools to fire in one action, which are limited cases.

It's just that lots of dice and lots of modyfiers give me the feeling that 40k is selecting a unit and then removing the target, while in Necromunda removing the target is a much rarer event. And that's mostly because the game is way more random and swingy than 40k.

Even rapid fire means random numbers of shots there. And there's always the chance that weapons get "out of ammo" results, sometimes even for the rest of the game. Those are all mechanics that involve a signficant amount of randomness, and contribute to make the game great.

The issue is that many of them do not apply to 40k scale.

Sure pinning can and should came back (although the actual details would vary), but lack of ammo doesn't make sense when you are talking about large squads that can share ammo and belong to well equipped and provisioned professional armies rather than rag tag gangers.

Similarly, injury rules are unwieldy with large model counts and unit based rules.

Oh I agree, I don't advocate 40k moves to precisely copy Necromunda.

But I think a suppression mechanic of some sort would be invaluable to the game if handled well.

There are a lot of rules that I wish they'd bring back for flavor reasons that would help increase variety and skill without needing to adjust probabilities. Having recently looked at the 5th edition vehicle rules, I'd love to see a return of Tank Shock, Death or Glory, and the rule where vehicle movement distance increases on roads (also, give chimeras back amphibious so I can keep looking for a place to use it rofl... seriously, are there no rivers in the 41st millennium? ). Im sure there's a whole slew of other rules that would introduce skillful play decision-making without changing probabilities, but it's been over a decade since I last played a version of 40k that wasn't 9th edition, so nothing is springing to mind.

DeadliestIdiot wrote:
There are a lot of rules that I wish they'd bring back for flavor reasons that would help increase variety and skill without needing to adjust probabilities. Having recently looked at the 5th edition vehicle rules, I'd love to see a return of Tank Shock, Death or Glory, and the rule where vehicle movement distance increases on roads (also, give chimeras back amphibious so I can keep looking for a place to use it rofl... seriously, are there no rivers in the 41st millennium? ). Im sure there's a whole slew of other rules that would introduce skillful play decision-making without changing probabilities, but it's been over a decade since I last played a version of 40k that wasn't 9th edition, so nothing is springing to mind.

Tank Shock was absurdly abusable, Death or Glory was useless 99% of the time and the same applied to roads and amphibious.

Also all of them are tank related rules, which does nothing to "introduce skillful play decision-making" for armies that lack tanks.

 Tyran wrote:

Tank Shock was absurdly abusable, Death or Glory was useless 99% of the time and the same applied to roads and amphibious.

Also all of them are tank related rules, which does nothing to "introduce skillful play decision-making" for armies that lack tanks.

Death or Glory was also fun and flavorful and knowing what constitutes that 1% valid use case is literally an example of skilled play.

As for roads and amphibious,that comes down to terrain choices. If you don't place said terrain it will never be relevant.

As for tank shock being abusable, it's been so long that I don't know what the abuse cases of it were (not saying your wrong, just I don't know what they were). That said, would it still be as abusable given modern vehicle rules (and how vehicles interact with other units)?

As for the limitations of tank rules, I only listed tank rules because that's what I was recently looking at (I mentioned as such in my post). It's no different than skilled play involving psyker rules for Tau (or for someone who doesn't run psykers in their lists). Besides, Death or Glory could come up regardless of whether or not you're fielding tanks.

The abusable part of Tank Shock was simply pushing away scoring troops from objectives.

It is basically the same problem every "I force you to move" rule ever had.

 Tyran wrote:
The abusable part of Tank Shock was simply pushing away scoring troops from objectives.

It is basically the same problem every "I force you to move" rule ever had.

Personally, I wouldn't call that abusing the rule... that's literally what the rule is there to do. The counter play is to skillfully set up supporting units to punish the enemy for attempting to tank shock you off the objective. This sounds like a big bonus for increasing the opportunities for skilled play...

That’s a good example of moving units because it’s interactive and doesn’t remove tactical decisions. Randomly just moving your units out from behind cover to be shot up is more bad.

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
That’s a good example of moving units because it’s interactive and doesn’t remove tactical decisions. Randomly just moving your units out from behind cover to be shot up is more bad.

Idunno, using tank shock to force the enemy out of cover seems exactly as interactive as forcing them off the objective, imho, and would have the same counterplay.

DeadliestIdiot wrote:

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
That’s a good example of moving units because it’s interactive and doesn’t remove tactical decisions. Randomly just moving your units out from behind cover to be shot up is more bad.

Idunno, using tank shock to force the enemy out of cover seems exactly as interactive as forcing them off the objective, imho, and would have the same counterplay.

The vehicle isn’t a hiding psychic character, it’s something that has to slowly rumble across the battlefield, get behind the cover, then force a morale check. If you don’t do somethin to it by then I’d say it’s more on you.

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:

DeadliestIdiot wrote:

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
That’s a good example of moving units because it’s interactive and doesn’t remove tactical decisions. Randomly just moving your units out from behind cover to be shot up is more bad.

Idunno, using tank shock to force the enemy out of cover seems exactly as interactive as forcing them off the objective, imho, and would have the same counterplay.

The vehicle isn’t a hiding psychic character, it’s something that has to slowly rumble across the battlefield, get behind the cover, then force a morale check. If you don’t do somethin to it by then I’d say it’s more on you.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant. I thought you were still talking about doing with a tank rather than with a psyker and was confused heh

At the very least Death or Glory would have to be less punishing. There was no point in using it with expensive models because the chances of failing to stop the tank and losing said expensive model was too damn high.

 Tyran wrote:
At the very least Death or Glory would have to be less punishing. There was no point in using it with expensive models because the chances of failing to stop the tank and losing said expensive model was too damn high.

That goes back to the risk vs reward. If you have an expensive model, chances are they'll be better able to hit when it's your turn. The benefit of death or glory is that the attack autohits, handy (and potentially hilariously glorious but probably just gorey) when the units in question are chaff. With an expensive unit is on the receiving end of the tank shock, it becomes a question of whether stopping that tank from moving it's full distance is worth the possible loss of that expensive (and probably strategically important) unit. Again, a skill-based decision. (And fluff wise, a unit good at killing a tank succeeding at killing a tank coming right at it is nowhere near as glorious as a random chaff unit doing it. The antitank unit might as well step out of the way and fire at their own pace).

Now I'm not trying to imply death or glory is perfect and should be automatically added to the core rules at the next possible opportunity. The big issue that jumps out at me is how it would interact with modern morale rules. If that big expensive (let's say single model) unit fails it's morale check, attrition removes it from the board. Not sure if that's a good thing or not in terms of balancing. I'm leaning towards it not being good for balance though.

Most chaff units literally were unable to threaten the front armor of any tank.

I think only Ork nobs with power claws kinda could do it, and even then it made more sense to move out of the way and charge in your turn instead of every likely losing the nob for nothing.

Also what skill? It would be entirely up to the dice.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Moreover a good unit killing a tank coming at it is just as glorious.

 Tyran wrote:
Most chaff units literally were unable to threaten the front armor of any tank.

I think only Ork nobs with power claws kinda could do it, and even then it made more sense to move out of the way and charge in your turn instead of every likely losing the nob for nothing.

Also what skill? It would be entirely up to the dice.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Moreover a good unit killing a tank coming at it is just as glorious.

The skill is evaluating whether it's worth it or not. Accurately judging risk vs reward is a skill that comes into play a lot in 40k and it's a skill that people in general are not particularly good at, particularly when you start getting into conditional probabilities (which come into play when trying to plan more than one dice roll into the future). Being entirely up to the dice implies that you rolled a die and that tells you whether or not you chose to death or glory when giving the option.

Regardless, were getting rather off topic. My main point with this is that the importance of skill and the level of randomness need not be tied to one another and thinking about it, they aren't tied to one another... higher randomness just means more battles are needed for the signal (skill) to show through the noise (the dice rolls). If there are no dice rolls (ignoring the question of how that would work) and the only difference between the players is skill, every battle will be won by the more skilled player. As the random factor increases, the number of battles it will take to be able to tell which player is the more skilled one purely by who won will increase.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And for the record, I'm not great at judging risk vs reward in 40k... I get the blood lust and make stupid mistakes heh

I think Tank Shock is a great concept - but the execution wasn't great.

Compared to the current implementation of "just charge them, then take your 3 AP-/D1 attacks hitting on 6s" it actually felt like ramming.

But the implementation back then was, imo, pretty bad. 99% of the time it did absolutely nothing but force your opponent to move - which itself was only relevant if you were forcing them off an objective.

In the simplist case you could just add a <tank> keyword or whatever, essentially any vehicle with WS6+ counts as WS3+ and Damage 2 on the charge or similar.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
But the implementation back then was, imo, pretty bad. 99% of the time it did absolutely nothing but force your opponent to move - which itself was only relevant if you were forcing them off an objective.

Tank shock in earlier editions was remarkably powerful - above and beyond being able to reliably roll onto objectives to win games - particularly in 5th.
It was key for vehicle mobility, would break average units even at full strength around 28% of the time and sometimes multiple units, and could be used to push them into blast/template shaped blobs. Vehicles like the old WH immolator were tank-shock machines.

DeadliestIdiot wrote:
There are a lot of rules that I wish they'd bring back for flavor reasons that would help increase variety and skill without needing to adjust probabilities. Having recently looked at the 5th edition vehicle rules, I'd love to see a return of Tank Shock, Death or Glory, and the rule where vehicle movement distance increases on roads (also, give chimeras back amphibious so I can keep looking for a place to use it rofl... seriously, are there no rivers in the 41st millennium? ). Im sure there's a whole slew of other rules that would introduce skillful play decision-making without changing probabilities, but it's been over a decade since I last played a version of 40k that wasn't 9th edition, so nothing is springing to mind.

Tank shock was only ever really used to cheese blast templates. At least in 6th and 7th.

A.T. wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
But the implementation back then was, imo, pretty bad. 99% of the time it did absolutely nothing but force your opponent to move - which itself was only relevant if you were forcing them off an objective.

Tank shock in earlier editions was remarkably powerful - above and beyond being able to reliably roll onto objectives to win games - particularly in 5th.
It was key for vehicle mobility, would break average units even at full strength around 28% of the time and sometimes multiple units, and could be used to push them into blast/template shaped blobs. Vehicles like the old WH immolator were tank-shock machines.

You say "average unit", but genuinely what even was an average unit in 5th ed?
Not Marines, they mostly ignored morale. As did Necrons, and Guard, and Tyranids
I guess Tau? Maybe Eldar?