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I started wondering why vehicles had armour values and hull points rather than toughness and wounds. What does the different mechanism really bring to the game? It sent me down a rabbithole of thought. This is just the seed of an idea and I'd really like some feedback.

How about we get rid of AV and use normal stat lines for vehicles. How about these ones.

Predator: 0 4 9 9/8/7 4 0 0 10 3+
Rhino: 0 4 8 8/7/7 3 0 0 10 3+

The numbers I've used here probably need to be tweaked. You'd have to rebalance the T and W values because the to wound chart makes them a little more vulnerable to small arms fire. Maybe a saving throw or simply higher toughnesses would help mitigate that. However, you can see Toughness has 3 values for front, side and back. Close combat related values are zero. Strength is there for ramming, etc.

While we are at it, we could bring back the Movement characteristic. No more infantry/fast/cavalry/bike, etc. Just a number that tells you how far you can move.

How about another stat for how many weapons you can fire? Most models would have 1. Vehicles would have a higher number. Or maybe just say that all models can fire all their weapons. Most models could be restricted to only having one gun.

It would certainly be possible to look at alternative mechanisms in the game and rewrite them to use the main mechanism. (In this case replacing armour with toughness). Many special rules could be replaced with stats (number of weapons you can fire, how far you can move, etc). Slow and purposeful wouldn't exist -- instead Movement would be D6.

Some rules cannot be easily simplified without detracting from the game. The vehicle damage chart is great and really does add some depth to the game. Immobilising and destroying weapons really captures the feel of tanks in a way that AV does not.

If we homogenise the fiddly rules that don't really add character, that frees up our mental capacity for other things that do add character to the game. What happens to characters when they are badly wounded? Do they carry on as if nothing happened. Do they have reduced WS/BS/A/I? Reduced Ld?

Anyway, this is just food for thought just now. I'd love to gear what you think of the idea.

Hull points are wounds. The current issue with vehicles is that it is easier to strip them of Hull Points than it is to do any other type of damage to them. Glancing shouldn't do more than shake or stun the crew/passengers, maybe knock out a weapon. A penetrating hit is what should be removing Hull Points, immobilizing, wrecking or destroying a vehicle. A Krak Missile should be able to pen a tank with a decent chance of wrecking it, because its an F'ing anti-tank rocket! A Lascannon should punch a whole through a tank, and either explode it or leave it wrecked. A bad roll on a pen should be an immobilize, a mid roll should be Hull Point loss and passenger wounds, a good roll should be a wreck, and great roll should Ka-Blooeeee!

That's what would fix vehicles, not turning them into just another MC.

SJ

Sorry, I wasn't coming from a balance perspective. I was proposing to merge similar mechanics so that there was space for new mechanics for things that are genuinely different.

Don't like vehicles do ya?

Looks like someone is walkin to the waaagh from now on.

If vehicles were more like infantry, they would be worse. Vehicles are vehicles, and should act differently from organic beings or piloted suits.

Making it harder to 1 shot vehicles without a dedicated AT weapon was one improvement, but vehicles are still rather stationary. They really need to allow vehicles to fire all weapons at combat speed, and 1 weapon at cruising speed. Remove Fast Vehicles as a type, and make Fast simply give 2-3" extra to each range band like Red Paint Job does. And let models assault out of stationary vehicles like they can from buildings.

I had a similar idea a while back. I love my vehicles, but having a completely separate set of rules for them is irritating. They need some differences from infantry, just as bikes and MCs and the like do... but they don't really need a completely different system.

My proposal (and some ensuing discussion) is here: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/533529.page

From 6th ed, but should be mostly still valid...

Converting vehicles to more infantry-like units is easy. Just make T = AV - 4. Voila, that S7 weapon still only wounds what was AV13 on a 6, and S6 wounds what was AV11 on a 5+. same as now, same for S9 against AV14. It works really well, and is a super simple rule.

All you'd have to do is give vehicles an armor save, and then slightly adjust things (updating tank shock, for example, and perhaps giving some form of variable ID to Ap1 weapons).

Anyways, vehicles used to be more different than infantry. Stuff on round bases behaved in a (comparatively) smoother, more easily understandable, and more expected fashion. Vehicles, on the other hand, were 40k-is-a-dice-game on crack. Roll well, and your tank was literally indestructible. Your opponent rolls well, and it dies in its first shot. Maybe it gets stunlocked all game, but maybe it doesn't. Maybe it tank shocks your opponent clear off the board and wins you the game single-handedly, and maybe it charges forward and is blown up by a frag grenade.

In a way, they were also a little bit like terminators, where they were more powerful and more expensive and hard to kill, but like how terminators can always still roll 1's, vehicles would keep trundling along until they suddenly didn't.

Personally, I'm kind of glad that they're going in the direction they have been. The only problem that they're facing now is congruity issues with monstrous creatures, which is a rather serious thing they've got to untangle. Personally, I'd like to see vehicles become the new monstrous creatures and the rules for monstrous creatures change, but that's going to be a lot harder, what with needing to rewrite all those codices.

I don't think it would be a good idea since you would have situations like DE warriors poisoning a Land Raider to death which makes no sense. I think the rules for vehicles is pretty good right now just need a bit more fine tuning such as removing the stupid ordnance weapon restriction and perhaps adding a hull point or two to vehicles.

 Archon_Zarbyrn wrote:
I don't think it would be a good idea since you would have situations like DE warriors poisoning a Land Raider to death which makes no sense.

Two ideas here:
1) nothing stops you from making vehicles imune to poison
2) DE can poison necrons, so why not wehicles? Acid rounds or smth...

Generally if you are using "makes no sense" when talking about 40k - you are doing smth wrong.

Dredging the depths of my memory here. I'm sure Jervis Johnson put rules in the Citadel Journal (?) at the tail end of 2nd edition for giving all vehicles a toughness, wounds and armour value. I assume they'd have an armour roll like terminators (3+ on 2d6) Can anyone confirm any of this?

I think it would be better if weapons had 2 profiles. An Anti tank profile and anti infantry profile. This means some weapons will never harm a vehicle and while others can. It will reduce a lot of glancing to death problems (depending how its done).

The main difference behind vehicles is the ability to degrade their performance without destroying them. I think this is still an important and useful thing to represent in the game. I would actually prefer that monstrous creatures could be degraded like vehicles, rather than making vehicles like MCs. Having multi-wound models and creatures able to perform at top condition right to the point where they are supposed to be pretty much gasping their last is a bit iffy in my view.

I think the difference between vehicles and infantry is one of the unique things about the 40k ruleset, and making them a lot like infantry would get rid of that [which 40k needs to stay a competitive ruleset against the others], so how about no on that idea.

Worse.

It's bad enough they gave 'wounds' to vehicles via hull points. They just need to adjust the vehicle damage table to something sensible. Maybe fix the problem instead of compounding it with more add-on exceptions and wonky mechanics. Here's a news flash - vehicles aren't people nor should they behave as such in a war game.

 amanita wrote:
Here's a news flash - vehicles aren't people ...

Nor are robots.

Or Daemons.

Or angry, psychic fungus warriors.



That doesn't mean that they can't all potentially function within the same basic ruleset with just a few special rules to account for the various compositional differences.

 insaniak wrote:

 amanita wrote:
Here's a news flash - vehicles aren't people ...

Nor are robots.

Or Daemons.

Or angry, psychic fungus warriors.



That doesn't mean that they can't all potentially function within the same basic ruleset with just a few special rules to account for the various compositional differences.

Or battlesuits.

Yeah, it's a question of what makes better game mechanics.

Interesting idea to make MCs more like tanks rather than completing the trend of making tanks like MCs. I guess it does kind of bug me a little bit that a riptide can lose 5 wounds and still be fighting at peak effectiveness. At least, if that's not also true for vehicles.

I still think I'd rather change MCs, though. Cap their Sv at 4+ (or for a rare few, maybe 3+... maybe), and decrease their toughness by half (and give them EW to compensate), and then double their number of wounds.

A carnifex would be both more dissimilar to a vehicle, and also a better representation of what a MC should be if it was much more like T4 W20 Sv5+ than relying so much on toughness and armor. Plus, it would give anti-tank weapons a much better defined role, being good against tanks while bad against MCs, which would help fix the problem with vehicles a lot.

 Ailaros wrote:
Yeah, it's a question of what makes better game mechanics.

Interesting idea to make MCs more like tanks rather than completing the trend of making tanks like MCs. I guess it does kind of bug me a little bit that a riptide can lose 5 wounds and still be fighting at peak effectiveness. At least, if that's not also true for vehicles.

I still think I'd rather change MCs, though. Cap their Sv at 4+ (or for a rare few, maybe 3+... maybe), and decrease their toughness by half (and give them EW to compensate), and then double their number of wounds.

A carnifex would be both more dissimilar to a vehicle, and also a better representation of what a MC should be if it was much more like T4 W20 Sv5+ than relying so much on toughness and armor. Plus, it would give anti-tank weapons a much better defined role, being good against tanks while bad against MCs, which would help fix the problem with vehicles a lot.

T3 MC? Would the Daemon Prince be T2? That'd make me cry ha ha ha. Suddenly the Biker Nurgle lord that is T6 just became that much more ridiculous. Another problem is that this would make MC preposterously easy to kill. Most MC are T6, half is T3. Tau firewarrior shots would be wounding them on a 2+ and bolter shots on a 3+. Add to that, doubling their number of wounds would make most things have.... bugger I think 12 wounds? That or 10. Can't remember if they are normally 5 or 6. It'd make ordinance weapons, blasts, etc even less useful against MC as well

If it was a lot of wounds, it wouldn't be a problem. A 20-wound T4 monstrous creature (with EW) would still be pretty difficult to take down. And you could still take it down with mass volume of fire (same as now), except that it would lighten up the number of anti-tank weapons people took (because they wouldn't be good against MCs anymore), which means that vehicles would get a little better via meta shift (and vehicles could definitely use a boost, especially vis. a vis. MCs).

Yeah, flamers would still suck against them, but come on, they should. They're designed to kill hordes of gribblies, not a carnifex or a wraithlord.

Plus, it would make it so that you'd finally start seeing heavy bolters again, and small arms would be more useful now that they'd have another target type, and I can't imagine anyone complaining about that.

The only problem would be just as tanks are currently collateral damage of MCs, the burden would shift to hordes, but that's an easier problem to fix with changes to the core rules.

 Ailaros wrote:
If it was a lot of wounds, it wouldn't be a problem. A 20-wound T4 monstrous creature (with EW) would still be pretty difficult to take down. And you could still take it down with mass volume of fire (same as now), except that it would lighten up the number of anti-tank weapons people took (because they wouldn't be good against MCs anymore), which means that vehicles would get a little better via meta shift (and vehicles could definitely use a boost, especially vis. a vis. MCs).

Yeah, flamers would still suck against them, but come on, they should. They're designed to kill hordes of gribblies, not a carnifex or a wraithlord.

Plus, it would make it so that you'd finally start seeing heavy bolters again, and small arms would be more useful now that they'd have another target type, and I can't imagine anyone complaining about that.

The only problem would be just as tanks are currently collateral damage of MCs, the burden would shift to hordes, but that's an easier problem to fix with changes to the core rules.

I was really more talking about firing a LRBT and the sorts at them. It just feels more fitting for such things to harm them.

Ugh, large blast weapons need their own whole world of fixing.

 Ailaros wrote:
Ugh, large blast weapons need their own whole world of fixing.

Unless it's the Riptide's gun of course

That said, I get what you mean. really blasts as a whole are an odd mess with few exceptions. Admittedly I'm a sucker for delicious pie plates of Imperial Guard justice fired by tanks.

 insaniak wrote:

 amanita wrote:
Here's a news flash - vehicles aren't people ...

Nor are robots.

Or Daemons.

Or angry, psychic fungus warriors.



That doesn't mean that they can't all potentially function within the same basic ruleset with just a few special rules to account for the various compositional differences.

So your argument is that since the game includes fantastical beings it's not meant to be realistic therefore not intuitive?

That is a cop-out.

Vehicles don't have "wounds" - systems break down or the vehicles brew up at once, which is reflected by a good damage table. Having them function perfectly until they suddenly conk out because they'd been repeatedly damaged marginally is really stupid. If you want to over-simplify the game for the mechanics sake, then you need to strip quite a bit more from the system, everything from 'Look out Sir' silliness to challenges and so forth.

If anything a 'critical wound' mechanic should be introduced to possibly make a wound say D3 wounds instead for multi-wound models. If something doesn't quite work right in the game (monstrous creatures) why change other things to function the same way?

 amanita wrote:
Worse.

It's bad enough they gave 'wounds' to vehicles via hull points. They just need to adjust the vehicle damage table to something sensible. Maybe fix the problem instead of compounding it with more add-on exceptions and wonky mechanics. Here's a news flash - vehicles aren't people nor should they behave as such in a war game.

I could understand Hull Points if it actually degraded the vehicle, but the same rules would have to apply to everything with multi wounds in all honesty. Like, losing Hull Points would represent a gun breaking, tires being shot out, engine giving out to the fire, or some other cinematic event, therefore making it either move less, not at all, or not be able to shoot certain weapons if ti has any left.

The same would have to apply for multi wound models, where their performance would decrease depending on how wounded they are. But in the end, this just makes far more book keeping than is needed, having to remember which Sergeant, MC or HQ is at in terms of efficiency, and a whole lot of new tables to deal with to decide whats wrong with them tha'ts making them weak.

In the ends, I don't mind Hull Points so much. But perhaps that's just me.

 amanita wrote:
So your argument is that since the game includes fantastical beings it's not meant to be realistic therefore not intuitive?

No, my argument is that there is no particular need to have a separate system to handle vehicles in a game that doesn't bother with a separate system to handle robots, or daemons, or battlesuits, or any of the other things that aren't functionally identical to human soldiers but follow more or less the same rules.


There are plenty of games out there that use the same damage system for both humanoid and vehicle models that function just fine. The 'realistic' differences between a tank and a soldier can be represented in other ways than rolling damage differently.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 amanita wrote:
Having them function perfectly until they suddenly conk out because they'd been repeatedly damaged marginally is really stupid.

Couldn't you make the same argument for multi-wound infantry models?

On a somewhat related topic, I was thinking the other day about a game mechanic that would allow you to capture enemy vehicles.

You often see in books and films a vehicle's driver and/or crew being killed and the machine is then available to be used by the attackers. In a game this could be resolved by having a troops unit get into base-to-base contact with a vehicle that had had it's crew killed (I see sniper weapons being made able to shoot through vision slits and the like as well as assaulting a vehicle allowing the unit assaulting to try and get into it - more easily done with open topped et cetera) then X amount of the troops are sacrificed to crew the vehicle which then rolls every turn to see if can move and shoot etcetera. Naturally some units would be better at this than others (techmarine say).

Just an idea I had.

 Gogsnik wrote:
On a somewhat related topic, I was thinking the other day about a game mechanic that would allow you to capture enemy vehicles.

You often see in books and films a vehicle's driver and/or crew being killed and the machine is then available to be used by the attackers. In a game this could be resolved by having a troops unit get into base-to-base contact with a vehicle that had had it's crew killed (I see sniper weapons being made able to shoot through vision slits and the like as well as assaulting a vehicle allowing the unit assaulting to try and get into it - more easily done with open topped et cetera) then X amount of the troops are sacrificed to crew the vehicle which then rolls every turn to see if can move and shoot etcetera. Naturally some units would be better at this than others (techmarine say).

Just an idea I had.

In most cases, open topped might be just as difficult to capture due to the crew opening fire on their attackers as well.

Though in the end, I could see this causing more table flipping than anything, but appears to be more an Ork mechanic more than other races. It's not to say other races COULDN'T, but defiantly has the Ork looty vibe. Though I could see such tactics coming at a risk to the vehicle, such as breaking things by accident during the take over. So you could in the end be left with a land raider with no weapons, or even an immobilized land raider.

Just seems not worth it when you could instead blow it up and not allow ANYONE to use it.

 insaniak wrote:

 amanita wrote:
So your argument is that since the game includes fantastical beings it's not meant to be realistic therefore not intuitive?

No, my argument is that there is no particular need to have a separate system to handle vehicles in a game that doesn't bother with a separate system to handle robots, or daemons, or battlesuits, or any of the other things that aren't functionally identical to human soldiers but follow more or less the same rules.

There are plenty of games out there that use the same damage system for both humanoid and vehicle models that function just fine. The 'realistic' differences between a tank and a soldier can be represented in other ways than rolling damage differently.

Fair enough. But I disagree that 'wounds' or 'hull points' is a good answer.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 amanita wrote:
Having them function perfectly until they suddenly conk out because they'd been repeatedly damaged marginally is really stupid.

Couldn't you make the same argument for multi-wound infantry models?

Absolutely. In fact we used to have a table for such things once a multi-wound model lost 1/2 it's wounds - it would lose initiative, WS or BS, movement, etc. We dropped it as it added too much bookkeeping to the game for our purposes.