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I haven't seen anything about it in the BRB, still looking. I was wondering if poisoned attacks work against Chariots and War Machines. If you have a poisoned attack then you wound on your hit rolls of 6. Now if that unit with poisoned attacks is attacking a chariot or war machine, they are hitting against the construction itself. Imagine skinks shooting poisoned darts at the side of a chariot. The hit would realistically be there but the poison is not realistically going to effect the wood or metal of the chariot, right?

Or is this just one of those things where that's just the way it works?

There's living parts of these models like animals and crew.

I suppose. I read into it as you're taking the toughness of the chariot or the war machine. So it is that construction being hit / damaged. I don't think of my boards pulling the chariot being hit or my crew operating my stone thrower being hit because the rules say to use the toughness of the machines themselves. So it is those machines themselves I'm imagining are being hit by those poison attacks. Not the animals and crew who's toughness are being ignored, thus no hits are being made upon them.

But for arguments sake I'll go with poisoned attacks against Chariots and War machine work the same way with 6's rolled on To hit as they would any living organism. heh....living organism.......now I'm thinking about poison effects on the Dead! LoL I should just quit now before I get lost in it. lol

If you find it hard to wrap your brain around a skink with a blow pipe wounding your stone thrower which has living crew - consider the same skink can wound and kill a Khmerian Warsphinx which is a construct made of stone and animated by magic... with T8... So ya :/ not all rules make sense. The way I look at it is Games Workshop wanted a mechanic that wounded on 6's to hit - that mechanic gained some fluff and that fluff is known as poison. But in the end it's still just a mechanic allowing models to wound on a to hit roll of 6.

Incidentally in the old rules the construct couldn't be wounded... Now it's justified by saying the skinks are shooting holy water out their blow pipes. Maybe Slaan hocked a loogie on the needles before they were loaded?

Poison doesn't always mean its "Poison"

It could be a caustic acid extracted from some creature in Lustria that can dissolve stone or the Slann/some powerful wizard had blessed the poison to interfer with magic. Not really poison, but has a similer effect.

The 6 to hit=auto wound is supposed to signify the "even a scratch can turn lethal" idea. If the hit's good enough, it counts as "almost wounding" as it is, so we don't need to roll to see if it actually does, because of Poison.

With war machines and stuff, the crew are ignored as you say, but that also doesn't make any sense. Why would I shoot at the steel barrel of a cannon when I could aim for the crew? The 6's represent hitting the crew. A 6 to wound with an arrow hits one of the crew (hence, why you remove him), while a 6 to hit with a poisoned rock grazes the crew member like Poison normally does, negating the need to roll to wound.

You should have seen Dark Elf assassins in 7th. Rending Stars + Manbane = S7 versus chariots, for an auto-kill. Poison working on the crew/steeds? Makes sense. A single attack so powerful it breaks the chariot apart? I suppose. Both instances working together to achieve both? Not so much.

SoCxWarChief wrote:I haven't seen anything about it in the BRB, still looking. I was wondering if poisoned attacks work against Chariots and War Machines. If you have a poisoned attack then you wound on your hit rolls of 6. Now if that unit with poisoned attacks is attacking a chariot or war machine, they are hitting against the construction itself. Imagine skinks shooting poisoned darts at the side of a chariot. The hit would realistically be there but the poison is not realistically going to effect the wood or metal of the chariot, right?

Or is this just one of those things where that's just the way it works?

Also you could ask why poison affects undead. They don't even have a working bloodstream (or similar).

In the 5th (and maybe even in the 6th, can't remember) those things were immune to poisons. Not anymore, since no where reads that they would be -> poison works against chariots, warmachines and undead just as it works against anything else.

If something isn't written in the rules, it isn't. If something isn't allowed, it isn't.

They should simply rename it 'keen strikes' or something if they really wanted to avoid this discussion.

I don't think it's that hard to understand, though.

1. Chariots/war machines have fleshy parts. The Poison hits those parts.

2. This is Warhammer, where the war-torn world is grim and gritty and full of blood and horror beyond imagining. There are some wicked poisons out there. Corrosive acids that melt metal as easily as flesh, sanctified oils that burn the otherworldly flesh of daemons and their mortal followers. Etc.

#2 may be a bit of a stretch in some cases (not all, though, I assure you), but I think #1, the real issue here, is easily understandable.

There's actually a little-known Chaos God called WoundOnSix who is responsible only for poison. That's all he cares about. Not diseases. Not taking over the world. Not even making people dance. All he does is make poison hurt anything. He's been around so long, that everyone knows this to be a fact. If you take enough snake venom and rub it against a brick wall, that brick wall will eventally crumble away to nothing.

It's only our weirdo Earth instincts that think poison needs...something to work. Like blood or organs or nonsense. Just like we're not afraid to go to the north pole and come back with 4 tentacle arms. That's totally normal and logical in WHFB. Just like WoundOnSix going about his merry way.

DukeRustfield wrote:There's actually a little-known Chaos God called WoundOnSix who is responsible only for poison. That's all he cares about. Not diseases. Not taking over the world. Not even making people dance. All he does is make poison hurt anything. He's been around so long, that everyone knows this to be a fact. If you take enough snake venom and rub it against a brick wall, that brick wall will eventally crumble away to nothing.

It's only our weirdo Earth instincts that think poison needs...something to work. Like blood or organs or nonsense. Just like we're not afraid to go to the north pole and come back with 4 tentacle arms. That's totally normal and logical in WHFB. Just like WoundOnSix going about his merry way.

Best explanation I have ever seen.

WoundOnSix also gives out minor blessings. He lets choir boys (S1) wound Steamtanks, Anvils of Doom, and Cauldrons of Blood (All T10), be wounded on a roll of 6.
With enough Choir boys, any foe can fall.

-Matt

At my FLGS I tried to make the argument that VC/Undead did not need to make starvation rolls during our Badlands Campaign seige battle but was shot down unamiously because no rules state that they are immune to it. I then used this reasoning to my advantage later when my ghouls managed to put some pretty heavy damage on a steam tank. My opponent argued that it was metal and that poison shouldnt affect it but I kindly asked for a rule stating that it was immune to poison. None was found.

So chalk it up as to one of the discrepencies between RAW and logical thinking that will always be found in table top gaming.

Creating a workable gameplay mechanic will often fail to overlap with common sense.

HawaiiMatt wrote:WoundOnSix also gives out minor blessings. He lets choir boys (S1) wound Steamtanks, Anvils of Doom, and Cauldrons of Blood (All T10), be wounded on a roll of 6.
With enough Choir boys, any foe can fall.

Well, yeah. Who do you think those evil choir boys are actually praying to?
I mean which Chaos God symbol scares you most?

<--Slaanesh?
<--Tzeentch
<--Khorne
<--Nurgle

OR

Yeah little lizard men being able to poison a chariot pulled by giant lizards,lions or mutant pigs is so unrealistic... WHFB is not a simulation remember that and your games will be far more enjoyable.

Turn to page 163 and 164 in the BRB. Look how large those Daemon Lords are. On 164 if that dude stopped sticking his tongue out and simple fell flat on that little elf, he would die. Period. I don't care if he can benchpress 450 pounds, that daemon is the size of a truck. On the previous page, he's the size of a temple.

Yet a really really really lucky Skaven Slave could kill either one. That's WHFB.

Warhammer is indeed a simulation. Of a fantasy-reality. We need to accept that there are dragons and magic and simple Evil, but not that the laws of physics work differently than they do in our "true" reality. There are different levels of fiction.

As for the Greater Daemons...yeah, if one fell on an Elf prince, it'd kill him. Assuming that super-fast elf didn't, ya' know, jump out of the way. And that said Skaven Slave does indeed have a chance. Just like in reality. I could take out an Air Craft Carrier by throwing rocks if I snuck up on it and all of it's guns jammed and everyone on board had a bad hangover and I somehow managed to brain two guys/rock. The odds are against me, of course. Just like the Slave's. I won't bother with the math right now, but the odds of said Slave hitting and wounding a Bloodthirster, who then fails all saves, enough times to kill him, is easily more than 1:1,000,000. And the odds of that Bloodthirster not killing said Slave in those five combat phases is equally unlikely. So is that Warhammer? No. That's for real.

I refer you to the story of David vs. Goliath, in this case Goliath is the daemon and david is a skaven slave toting a chunk of warpstone in its sling that happens to rip a hole through the daemon with a lucky shot. . . and BAM WoundonSix gains another loyal worshipper.

Warpsolution wrote:Warhammer is indeed a simulation. Of a fantasy-reality. We need to accept that there are dragons and magic and simple Evil, but not that the laws of physics work differently than they do in our "true" reality. There are different levels of fiction.

As for the Greater Daemons...yeah, if one fell on an Elf prince, it'd kill him. Assuming that super-fast elf didn't, ya' know, jump out of the way. And that said Skaven Slave does indeed have a chance. Just like in reality. I could take out an Air Craft Carrier by throwing rocks if I snuck up on it and all of it's guns jammed and everyone on board had a bad hangover and I somehow managed to brain two guys/rock. The odds are against me, of course. Just like the Slave's. I won't bother with the math right now, but the odds of said Slave hitting and wounding a Bloodthirster, who then fails all saves, enough times to kill him, is easily more than 1:1,000,000. And the odds of that Bloodthirster not killing said Slave in those five combat phases is equally unlikely. So is that Warhammer? No. That's for real.

Are you a politician by any chance?

No way. I side with the Forces of Order.

Your aircraft carrier analogy is faulty.

The chance of you throwing a rock AT an aircraft carrier and sinking it is zero. You would have to get every computer on the entire internet working together to shift the decimal places far enough to see a non-zero digit. We would all die of old age before we got the answer. Even the most quantum mechanics-thermodynamic-sucking philosopher-mathematician would say it's zero.

But Skaven Slaves are like perpetual lottery winners by comparison when it comes to their ability to take out equivalent aircraft carriers. They can't walk down the street without a gold bar falling out of the sky and conking them on the head they're so lucky. That's why Skaven trade in warpstone, because gold is so common to them. They had to literally find something from another planet. And even THAT they have tons of. I mean, imagine if our entire economy and energy sources functioned off of nothing except Mars asteroids. We'd have one calculator on the entire planet. But Skaven got tricked-out cars, and knives, hell, they got so much they use it in BULLETS and just fire them away.

WHFB is very very much fast and loose with it's probability and logic.

As a kid, when GW first really made it's push into the US, I couldn't understand it at all. Why the hell would someone use a chainsaw when they got these mega laser cannons and tanks? And why aren't they wearing helmets??? It just made no sense to me. GW.

The aircraft carrier thing is a fine analogy. I don't need to sink the ship; just kill enough guys on board that it becomes useless. And that, I assure you, I could do with a big ol' pile a rocks. And a lengthy make-out session with Lady Luck.

I doubt anyone can convince me that, mathematically, a Skavenslave has anything resembling a chance at taking down a big monster. Granted, more dice = more outliers, and while the low ones hurt no worse than the average, lots of little guys will (seem to) get luckier than the elites.

I'll agree on the Skaven economy, though.

Why chainsaws? Why do we use knives and the like? Also, they have force fields.

Grey Templar wrote:Poison doesn't always mean its "Poison"

It could be a caustic acid extracted from some creature in Lustria that can dissolve stone or the Slann/some powerful wizard had blessed the poison to interfer with magic. Not really poison, but has a similer effect.

Exaclty right!

I agree!

DukeRustfield wrote:But Skaven Slaves are like perpetual lottery winners by comparison when it comes to their ability to take out equivalent aircraft carriers. They can't walk down the street without a gold bar falling out of the sky and conking them on the head they're so lucky. That's why Skaven trade in warpstone, because gold is so common to them. They had to literally find something from another planet. And even THAT they have tons of. I mean, imagine if our entire economy and energy sources functioned off of nothing except Mars asteroids. We'd have one calculator on the entire planet. But Skaven got tricked-out cars, and knives, hell, they got so much they use it in BULLETS and just fire them away.

Except, of course, the roll to see if a lone Skaven slave can take out a greater demon isn't just based on the roll to wound. First off the daemon gets to attack, and we'd need to see all his attacks miss before the slave even got to have a swing. You're looking at about 4% odds of that demon failing to kill the slave. Then the slave has to hit, wound, beat armour and the ward save. There's about a one and a half percent chance of that happening. So the odds of the slave drawing blood at all sit at 0.05%, or about one in two thousand.

And, of course, that demon has wounds. So to actually win the fight the slave has to repeat the above about six times. Which moves the odds to about one in 40,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is a very unlikely thing.

Why all this talk about one slave against a bloodthirster? An equal number of points of skinks will kill a bloodthirster from shooting before the thirster gets to make a charge, unless the thirster gets lucky on its charge roll. Assuming a stock bloodthirster with no armor, it only takes two units of ten skinks in double tap range to kill it in one turn. And that's just with poison attacks and assuming none of the other hits wound.

If it has armor, it'll take another unit of skinks.

{edit} Sorry, after the first sentence, I kept writing "slave" when I meant skink. Had to go back and correct it to avoid confusion.

Bloodthirster's dont have armor. "Just" a 5+ ward. It's

1,1,1,1,1,1,1 (1/6^7) BT wiffing
6,6 (1/36) Slave pwning
1-4 (66%) BT unsaving
tstomp # D6 1's (variable, but 1/6^3.5 average) BT stepping on his own feet

Repeat the above 5 times. They aren't good by any means.

Blood thristers do have armor. Heavy armor. They can buy better armor if they wish.

Dukes math is off, as the BT hits on 3's, not 2's, and most likely will have re-rolls.
Slave/skink/choir boy (or anything WS4 or less) hits on 5's (not 6's).

@Saldiven
If you're going to account for stand and shoot, you might as well account for those terror tests as well. Mostly likely result is charge into a unit (might fail terror) then redirect into another, which also might fail terror.

-Matt

I think Sebster and Matt got this down pretty well. The point is: Skinks/Skavenslaves/whatever do indeed have a chance in taking down a Bloodthirster. But those odds are probably about as good as me assassinating a battleship's crew members with pebbles and a wrist rocket.

I really don't think the "wound anything on a 6" idea is that bad. Sphinxes get it the worst, of course, but if S4 and less couldn't wound them, we'd have never seen them created in the first place. What in 7th edition could muscle its way up to T7? War machines. A few weird character + item + spell combos. Not much. Because things being impossible to wound was incredibly awesome.
Now, though, everything can be wounded on a 6, so there's a diminishing return, which makes it okay to have super-tough models. And yet, against an average Bloodthirster, Abomination, or Hydra, that Sphinx is being wounded on 6's only, which I think is pretty awesome.
Does it make sense that a giant has the same chance of wounding a sphinx as a goblin? We could argue that, since the sphinx is so tough, they're both reduced to aiming for the eyes/joints/what-have-you, but let's not. Let's say it doesn't make sense. And to that I say, this isn't the only time in Warhammer that your price premium for a better stat doesn't come into play. As I've said, WS4-7 is all the same to WS8. Skaven Warlords think Chaos Warriors with halberds are just as slow as Dwarfs with great weapons. So that's part of the game, part of the strategy. Do you try to save points and field stuff that's "just good enough" to take down the foe, or do you spend lots of points to ensure you're always the best? We're only working with numbers 1-10 and 1-6. There's limited variability here.

To conclude:

- poison versus chariots/war machines makes perfect sense.
- wounding on 6's isn't that big of a deal.
- Warhammer did a pretty good job simulating reality on such a broad scale.

HawaiiMatt wrote:Blood thristers do have armor. Heavy armor. They can buy better armor if they wish.

Dukes math is off, as the BT hits on 3's, not 2's, and most likely will have re-rolls.

Wow, i never noticed they had HA. And I never looked at that extreme of the to-hit charts. Even a 1 vs. 10 is a 5+. and 10 vs. 1 is 3+. Knowing is half the battle. So they're even luckier, by far, then I made them out. They're so lucky they don't even have to buy lottery tickets to win.

I LOVE wounds on 6. Because horde army vs. elite army. Without that rule it is like a Skaven trying to build a machine powered by coal or gasoline--IMPOSSIBLE.

Have the tables turned too much the other way? I think so. You'll see a lot more massed troops than shambling mega-stat monsters. As they rewrite the books, taking those monsters down on cost will help tremendously without causing the whole 40K anti-armor nonsense, which would translate in WHFB to must have high Str units. I just ordered my forgeworld book (don't spoiler it for me) and heard there's that thing that ignores < some str (4?) and I simply don't know if that's a good idea no matter how realistic.

Warpsolution wrote:Does it make sense that a giant has the same chance of wounding a sphinx as a goblin? We could argue that, since the sphinx is so tough, they're both reduced to aiming for the eyes/joints/what-have-you, but let's not.

Sure, and the other issue is that it's a mistake to look at a single element in a series of dice rolls and think the game fails to account for everything. I mean, we might say “WS is broken because having a massive WS only makes you twice as effective as a guy with woeful WS – 3+ compared to 5+” but WS isn’t the only thing representing how lethal a character is in combat. I mean, someone might have a point that for guys who train their whole lives with swords and move with inhuman grace, WS 5 isn’t that impressive for Swordmasters. But they’ve also got ASF and two attacks.

What matters is, overall, how many wounds a unit is likely to inflict on another unit. All the individual stats to get to that figure are meaningless, and poorly defined. I mean, how is it I can be faster than you because I have higher initiative, but you make two attacks to my one? Who is faster?

Do you try to save points and field stuff that's "just good enough" to take down the foe, or do you spend lots of points to ensure you're always the best? We're only working with numbers 1-10 and 1-6. There's limited variability here.

And to emphasise a point you touched on, that limited variety is a good thing. It creates meaningful differences in expected results, and that leads to interesting strategic choices (like going for 'good enough' vs spending enough to ensure you're always the best).

I've played countless hex and chit games where consideration was given to every possible detail, with an end result that the optimum choice was, say 41% likely to be effective, compared to the mediocre option at 38%. Having 16% jumps in effectiveness is a good level of difference. Especially when, like I was saying above, that one stat isn’t the only measure in use.