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Hey all,

Wonder if I can get some opinion on something my opponent and I couldn't 100% get our heads around in the last game we played.

We recently played a game (Blood Angels vs CSM/Daemons) where my Librarian Dreadnought was locked in combat with my opponent's Bloodthirster. One rule (decapitating blow or something it was called) for the Bloodthirster in the current 40k Daemons codex states that if a 6 is rolled, it means instant death if that wound is not saved. My opponent rolled a 6 against my librarian dreadnought after he had rolled to hit and we could not find anything in the rule book about instant death being applied against walkers with the whole roll to hit and then roll to penetrate being different to roll to wound.

In the end, because I had already won the game points/objective wise and it was getting late, we mutually just agreed to treat it as a penetrating hit and do the usual vehicle damage thing. Did we do the right thing here by thinking instant death in combat is only against infantry or did we get it completely wrong? The librarian dreadnought then went on to kill the Bloodthirster and thus remove my opponent's last unit from the table. Killing my HQ librarian dreadnought at the time would have given him some flicker of joy in defeat instead of being completely tabled.


Many thanks in advance

Instant death does not affect walkers or any other vehicles

ID is for wounds which Walkers dont have

No effect.

Walkers, and for that that matter, vehicles, do not have wounds. They have hull points.
Also, you do not roll to wound against them. You make armour penetration rolls instead.
It's got nothing to do with wounding at all. So you can't suffer an unsaved wound on a vehicle. Instant death and similar rules don't apply against vehicles

Thanks guys, much appreciated, that's what we thought but wanted to double check :-)

Yeah, it's actually the case with the majority of psychic powers. Except for the handful with profiles strong enough to hurt a tank, most of them have no effect. Any witchfires that cause wounds like psychic shriek do nothing.

The ones that I'm not certain about are maledictions that reduce WS/BS, not sure if those can be applied to a tank.