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Picture says it all... trying to wrap my head around how wound allocation & resulting cover & armor saves should work here.

The Punisher has inflicted 10 wounds on the Ork Shoota Boy mob.

Four models are equal distance from the Punisher, but have varying cover and/or armor saves:
- The Nob is in Ruins with a 4+ cover save
- The Big Shoota boy is getting a 5+ cover save from the trees in the intervening Woods
- Two Shoota Boyz have 6+ armor saves (the Punisher Cannon is AP - )

What is the proper way to allocate and save wounds in this scenario?



Here's how we played it:

The Nob tanked as many wounds as possible with his 4+ save until he failed two (he has two wounds). Then the Big Shoota Boy with his 5+ cover save until he failed one. Remaining wounds were allocated and saves attempted for the Shoota Boyz.

Was that correct?

From the rules on closest models:

"If two or more models are equidistant from the firing unit, the owning player chooses which model is attacked. That model is treated as being the closest model and remains so until either the firing unit’s attack ends or the model is slain."

Wounds are then allocated to that model and it takes whatever saves it has available.

In the case of your picture however I would say the second from bottom of the front row of Shoota Boyz is fairly clearly the closest - you'd have to measure from the Punisher Cannon to each model to determine exactly which is closest, and it's not that often I find that no model is discernibly closer than any other.

If all of the models were equidistant from the Leman Russ, or sufficiently so for you and your opponent, then the Ork player was right to choose as he wished, and smartly the model with the best save available.

So you'd start with the Big Shoota with 5+ save.

There are 10 wounds, with a 33% chance of saving he's highly unlikely to save them all.

So when he's gone, you'd have measured between the Shoota Boy and the top, and the Nob at the bottom, figured out which was closer, and then let him save some.

And so on until all wounds allocated / saved.

I guess I wasn't sure if we were to consider the barrel as fixed in space or if one would measure from where it could be moved to, i.e. when "pointing" at each model in the mob as it might if it were raking across the unit while firing at it (hell it's a gatling gun after all).

If it were considered in that way, then it would reduce the difference in distance quite a lot, probably to sub 1", which will require some relatively more precise measuring than we typically go in for with 40k.

On the other hand, if the barrel is considered fixed for the purposes of the shot (once the shot is declared) and then measured with it fixed in space, then it would indeed help solve this question as these models are in a line and simple geometry dictates that the ones further off the axis of the barrel are further away from its muzzle.

Thanks for the reply, I guess in the heat of the moment it was too much to think through clearly and of couse the BRB tome with its spread out and often voluminous direction is not always the clearest source of information when you're in a hurry to keep things moving along.

You can swivel the turret to point at the unit before you fire (and in doing so you can attempt to manipulate the closest model measurement) but once dice are being rolled the turret should move.