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The character targeting rules are, in my opinion, not that great.

If you want to shoot a character who is out in the open, but another unit, locked in combat, is closer, you cannot shoot it, because the unit you physically cannot target is closer.

Armies of all characters, or mostly characters, are a thing, too. Yes there's a few characters behind the Culexus, but you have to shoot at the Culexus first, because it's closest. It's like being able to pay some points to give another character a nice shield.

Here's what I would change:

You cannot target a character in the shooting phase if there is a non-character, eligible target that is closer to your shooting unit.

What do you think?

Not a bad change, but I'd just make it that the character has to be within 3" of a shielding unit.

Personally in my house-rules I'm leaning more towards obscurity based targeting. Basically you can't target anything that is more than 75% obscured by intervening models (includes all units and terrain). Anything that is at least 50% obscured by intervening models is considered to be in cover (I'm using -1 to-Hit rather than +1 to save).

This seems to work pretty smoothly most of the time; you may need to make the odd exception for larger models, and also for models that are clearly bigger or smaller than they should be (i.e- don't penalise your opponent for giving their models fancy bases).

It should mean no more Primarchs shielded by ratlings and other odd situations where you could fairly easily take pot-shots at a more important target. It also gives a middle-ground between fully screening something and basically having your units count as cover for it. So Guiliman can probably get cover from larger marines, but won't be obscured by most models, and anything smaller won't grant him cover either.


There are still a few teaks to make; for example I'm thinking of having 1's hit the nearest intervening unit instead, since it may be one of your own that you're firing past; I suppose it depends whether you interpret the -1 to-Hit penalty as being "shooting carefully" versus "might hits something else", but I think it's better just to have the risk. Another thing I'm considering is either disallowing auto-hit weapons from firing over units, or having them roll to-Hit on 2+ so they have that chance of missing/hitting something else.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Not a bad change, but I'd just make it that the character has to be within 3" of a shielding unit.

But then you still run into those scenarios where you've got 2 characters next to each other, and one is a half inch back, so you have to kill the other first.

I don't want to overcomplicate the targeting rules. But If two characters are standing side by side, and there's nothing else nearby, you should be able to pick who you shoot.

These house rule changes always make me think that people don't understand why the rule works the way it does.

Let's say you've got a few Assault-based units, one of whom is a character. You charge, and succesfully get the squads into combat, but your character fails his roll.

That character is now dead.


Honestly, I just want characters that can attach to units again. :/