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Sorry if this has already been suggested, but a quick glance over the first page didn't reveal any posts quite like this... Unless I just missed them. >_>

So the old WS chart was not ideal. It wasn't the easiest thing to explain to new players, and the limited range of to-hit rolls made it feel unsatisfying in those situations where it mattered. The new system is, at least around here, largely considered an improvement. But a handful of characters do feel like they've slipped through the cracks. Previously, my Solitaire could take on a swarm of gaunts or a horde of ork boyz and feel like a BAMF as they struggled to roll the 5+ they needed to hit him. Now, he'd better make sure he clears most of the enemy unit if he wants to live. Most of us have at least one unit in our army that is feeling the pain of getting slapped around by sheer volume of low-quality attacks even though they're meant to be quite good at *not* getting stabbed in the face.

So what would everyone think of introducing an "Untouchable" or "Can't Touch This" or "Hard to Stab" or whatever you'd like to call it rule that essentially imposes a penalty to melee to-hit rolls against a small number of highly skilled melee characters. It would be reserved for characters of especially great melee skill.

So as a rule of thumb, you might say, "Any unit with the character rule that previously had a WS of 9 or 10 now imposes a -2 penalty to to-hit rolls directed at it in the fight phase. Characters that previously had a WS of 7 or 8 instead impose a -1 penalty."

You could stretch the -1 penalty to include WS6, but that almost feels like it would apply to too many characters (autarchs, space marine captains). This penalty would be somewhat offset by units that excel at hitting targets. An autarch, for instance, would still hit an enemy keeper of secrest more easily than a run-of-the-mill guardian, but the greater daemon would also have its martial prowess recognized by reducing the autarch's to-hit rolls to a 4+ instead of a 2+.

So orks hitting chaos marines on 3+? Great. But going after Lucius the Eternal might be just a bit harder. Thoughts?

Agree totally. Avatar has the same problem now. Maybe simply say that you suffer a -2 penalty to hit named characters in close combat. Or force commanders. Unless using a name character or force commander to sttsck.

don't like it. I really enjoy the brutality of melee now. Melee was a joke in 7th. In 8th melee is where gak gets done. I don't want mechanics that make less happen in melee while rolling more dice. Thats a step backwards.

What about save modifiers? Similar to how shooting and cover interact. I don't like it personally, but somebody might.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
What about save modifiers? Similar to how shooting and cover interact. I don't like it personally, but somebody might.

Well, that is kind of what the swarmlord has as his special trick. His 5++ save becomes 4++ in melee. do you want his save to increase to compensate for the change to other characters? And then, again, more dice for less effect.

The one problem I see here is one that's carried over from trying to play shooty orks: Since modifiers are cumulative, having high penalties in melee can make some entire armies entirely inviable in Close Combat, or near enough. Too many sources of -1 to hit is bad, not even touching -2 to hit.

Maybe a General Character Rule?

It seems a little weird that Characters basically hit each other on a 2+, usually rerollable.

Maybe as a standard character rule, attacking a character suffers a -1 to hit

I've always enjoyed systems that have a concept for "heroic actions", but not sure how best to apply such a thing to 40k. Simplest would perhaps be some kind of "heroic" stratagems that only apply to characters, letting you do things like re-roll all a particular type of dice (hit, wound, save) for a turn?

Otherwise maybe a separate concept of Heroism Points that can be earned and spent to do the same thing, separately from command points?

 Lance845 wrote:
don't like it. I really enjoy the brutality of melee now. Melee was a joke in 7th. In 8th melee is where gak gets done. I don't want mechanics that make less happen in melee while rolling more dice. Thats a step backwards.

I get that, and I'd hate to see combat overall become significantly less lethal. But I still feel odd when I realize that an ork boy can slap my X-thousand year old melee specialist around as easily as he can a guardsman. I assume we can agree on the two following points:

A.) Units should have a non-zero amount of durability in melee. A guardsman should probably not auto-kill a terminator squad by virtue of making a charge and activating to fight, for instance.
B.) The durability of different units should vary. A terminator being punched by a guardsman should be more durable than a gretching being punched by that same guardsman.

So assuming we agree on those two points, is it fair to say that my PL6 Solitaire (5 wounds) should be more durable against a squad of guardsmen or orks or whatever than 5 wounds of Sisters of battle? Conceptually, the Solitaire is meant to a lone operative that is still "slippery" and survivable enough to be a threat on the battlefield despite not operating in a group. Yet currently, he's pretty good at dying to a little bad luck when he charges into a unit with a decent number of attacks.

Yes, he should survive one squad of boyz on average, but it doesn't take too many standard deviations for a little bad luck to see him splattered by one of the most common foes in the galaxy. If I'm not mistaken, 10 ork boyz with 4 attacks apiece (if I'm not mistaken) should land about 26 hits and then inflict about 18 wounds on the solitaire. The solitaire will then fail about 6 3++ saves and thus be one-rounded by the orkz. Even if I'm misremembering and boyz only have 3 attacks apiece, you're still looking at 30 attacks -> 20 hits -> ~14 wounds -> Slightly under 5 failed saves for the solitaire. So with barely any luck, that's still enough to finish him off, and that's after he's spent some time possibly getting shot at. And even if he does survive the first round of combat, heck, even if he wipes out the ork squad, he'll be limping along and ready to die to a stiff breeze. Which. Y'know. Somehow doesn't feel quite right for one of the galaxy's fastest and most skilled melee combatants. If we were to impose a -2 penalty to hit the Solitaire, those 30 attacks would suddenly result in ~10 hits -> ~6 wounds -> ~2 unsaved wounds on the Solitaire leaving him with a little over half his starting health. Significant progress would still have been made towards killing him, but it no longer feels as though it took everything he had to survive.

TLDR; While making a handful of units more survivable in combat does slightly reduce the "brutality" of combat, I feel that the increased survivability of certain models is warranted. Also, it wouldn't be that big a decrease in the lethality of melee overall. I'm proposing buffing like... a dozen-ish characters in the entire game, most of whom are unique. And even with such a nerf to melee in place, there's a pretty big gap between "you hit me on 4's instead of 3's" and the rerollable 2+ shenanigans of 7th edition.




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 Frozen Ocean wrote:
What about save modifiers? Similar to how shooting and cover interact. I don't like it personally, but somebody might.

I wouldn't be opposed to this, but I'm not sure it really represents the whole, "I'm way better at melee than you" thing as well as a to-hit modifier. Granted, a power fist is probably harder to parry than a combat knife, but the characters I'm proposing giving this "can't touch this" rule to seem like the sorts who should be able to sidestep an attack. Also, you run into situations where a save modifier does absolutely nothing to help a given character out. A phoenix lord or some space marine character might already be getting a 2+ save. Even if you improve that to a 1+, you're still failing the same number of saves against a mob of orkz or guardsmen.


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Waaaghpower wrote:
The one problem I see here is one that's carried over from trying to play shooty orks: Since modifiers are cumulative, having high penalties in melee can make some entire armies entirely inviable in Close Combat, or near enough. Too many sources of -1 to hit is bad, not even touching -2 to hit.

I definitely agree that having too many sources of modifiers is asking for trouble. That said, I'm not sure that melee to-hit debuffs are actually all that prevalent at the moment. Is there any particular combo you can think of that seems really devastating? And is that a combo that could severely limit the offensive power of multiple units at once, or is it more of a, "You could make this one squad of orkz really bad at hitting for a turn" type of scenario? If the latter, do the debuffs seem unreasonable given the number of resources involved? For instance, teaming a solitaire up with a shadowseer and applying my proposed rule would put several debuffs in play at once, but you're still investing 13 PL to do it, and at least one of the debuffs (a psychic power that might fail to go off) would only affect a single enemy unit.


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 Talamare wrote:
Maybe a General Character Rule?

It seems a little weird that Characters basically hit each other on a 2+, usually rerollable.

Maybe as a standard character rule, attacking a character suffers a -1 to hit

Hmm. Are we talking about a "characters take a penalty when fighting characters" rule, or a general -1 to all attacks against any character period? The former could be cool to make "duels" favor whomever swings first slightly less, but it would feel odd for a phoenix lord or keeper of secrets to take a penalty when punching a runtherder or an etheral. Some characters just aren't that good in melee. I'm not a fan of the latter for similar reasons; a runt herder should probably not be significantly harder to hit than your average ork boy.




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 Haravikk wrote:
I've always enjoyed systems that have a concept for "heroic actions", but not sure how best to apply such a thing to 40k. Simplest would perhaps be some kind of "heroic" stratagems that only apply to characters, letting you do things like re-roll all a particular type of dice (hit, wound, save) for a turn?

Otherwise maybe a separate concept of Heroism Points that can be earned and spent to do the same thing, separately from command points?

These could definitely be cool. I'd worry that introducing a new resource might be too much additional complication for the payoff, but I'm always a sucker for resource pools that let important characters do interesting things! I worry that, in a game where some armies end up spamming lots of "lesser" characters (beast masters, runt herds, arguably even the standard commissar), this might result in more bookkeeping than it's worth.

If you were to handle it as a strategem, I could see something like, "Spend two Command Points after your opponent declares that a unit is shooting or fighting to allow all characters in your army to reroll failed saves of 1 against wounds inflicted by non-character models until the start of your next turn," working. The idea being that, for a price, you can have a turn where your cool action movie protagonists develop a thicker layer of plot armor that can only be cancelled out by enemies with their own plot armor.