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I've always wondered why you roll for toughness before armour. Surely shouldn't you roll to penetrate armour, then if the armour is penetrated you should roll to see if the attack does enough damage to wound the individual. I know it won't affect the game much but it seems back to front.

Thoughts?

It's a matter of game design. It splits things more evenly by having all of one side's rolls happen in sequence followed by the defense rolls.

Because mixed saves are far more often than mixed T values.
And mixed T values getting smearhed into the common is less harmful to characthers than mixed armor values being smeared, especially when you look at things like characters, who often have better armor than the squad the go with, yet identical T value.

It is more logical to follow the flow of actions as they happen.

So for 40k, the most intuitive way to resolve damage is roll to hit . roll to save, then roll to damage,(based on modern warfare.)

However, as 40k rules are based on WHFB rules, where a sword awing, or an arrow could be deflected/dodged at the last minute, rolling saves last makes more sense in this game.(Ancient warfare.)

So if 40k ever had rules written for its game play, rather than converted from WHFB, I am sure 40k would resolve armour before toughness.

There is no statistical difference between rolling toughness or armor first. It really does not matter, and it's faster to have the player roll all his phase at once.

Lanrak wrote:
It is more logical to follow the flow of actions as they happen.

So for 40k, the most intuitive way to resolve damage is roll to hit . roll to save, then roll to damage,(based on modern warfare.)

However, as 40k rules are based on WHFB rules, where a sword awing, or an arrow could be deflected/dodged at the last minute, rolling saves last makes more sense in this game.(Ancient warfare.)

So if 40k ever had rules written for its game play, rather than converted from WHFB, I am sure 40k would resolve armour before toughness.

This has nothing to do with it. The dice aren't representing a sequence of events (one which would be the same in both cases anyway), they're just an awkward way of fine-tuning probability and allowing multiple relevant stats when all you have is a D6. There are two reasons why the sequence happens the way it does:

1) Because it's easier to have one player do all of their rolls and then have the other player roll instead of having to pass the dice back and forth. If you roll to hit and wound before your opponent rolls to save then you can just pick up the hits and immediately re-roll them to get the wounds. If you have to do saves in between you have to count the hits, let your opponent count out that many dice, roll them, and then tell you how many dice to roll to wound. It's just extra rolling time in a game that already wastes too much time on dice.

2) Because there's an ancient gaming tradition that the owner of a unit/character/etc gets to roll to save it. This goes all the way back to the old days of D&D (and maybe even earlier), something bad happens to your character and then you get one last chance to avoid it. So 40k and WHFB follow this tradition, your opponent figures out how much damage they do and then you get the last dice to see if you can save your models.

@Perigrine.
No one is stopping the defending player rolling saves.

And the current order ,
Attacker rolls to hit,
Attacker rolls to damage,
Defender rolls to save.

Requires the attacker to select a number of dice to roll twice..(Number of attacks, then number of successful hits..)
And the defender to select a number of dice the number of failures.

With the proposed change .
Attacker rolls to hit.
Defender rolls saves.
Attacker rolls to damage models that failed their saves.

The attacker still selects a number of dice twice, (the number of attacks then failed saves.)
The defender still selects the number of dice once, (the number of hits.)

it is just down to preference , on rolling dice order, or 'intuitive' resolution.

The fact that ancient warfare , which was the prevelant type of war game until the 1980s, meant that low velocity weapons could be dodged and parried/blocked.
So letting the defender roll saves last could be argued to be intuitive..
That axe swing would take your head of , BUT you blocked it with your shield, to save you from the attack.
This is a intuitive narrative,.
However, this stops being the case with high velocity weapons.