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So, with the ability of stats to go over 10 and the new wounding chart... Why are Marines and Guardsmen still only 1 point of Strength/Toughness apart?

Let's fix that!

Strength 1-Brimstone Horrors
Strength 2-Ratlings, Blue Horrors
Strength 3-Grots, Nurglings
Strength 4-Guardsmen, most Eldar, Lasguns, Pink Horrors
Strength 5-Shuriken Weaponry, Daemonettes, Plaguebearers
Strength 6-Marines, Bolters, Bloodletters
Strength 7-
Strength 8-Heavy Bolters
Strength 9-
Strength 10-Assault Cannons

And Toughness...

Toughness 1-
Toughness 2-Ratlings, Grots
Toughness 3-Nurglings, Horrors
Toughness 4-Daemonettes, Bloodletters, Eldar, Guardsmen
Toughness 5-Some guard characters, Scouts, Sisters of Battle, Flesh Hounds
Toughness 6-Marines, Plaguebearers, Bloodcurshers
Toughness 7-Terminators, Gravis Marines
Toughness 8-Centurions, Plague Drones
Toughness 9-Daemon Princes
Toughness 10-Rhinos
Toughness 11-Keeper of Secrets, Bloodthirster, Lord of Change
Toughness 12-Great Unclean One

Obviously the list is woefully incomplete. But would this be of interest to anyone?

It's an interesting thought, for sure.

But i would say this is built around classes.

Because strength 6 is the magic number where you start being effective against light armor vehicles, 7 is the number where you become effective against medium armor vehicles, and 8 is where you become effective against heavy armor vehicles. In that sense it is reasonable that these would be 1 apart.

Especially if you apply the same train of thought to models. 3 toughness is galactic norm, 4 is sturdy, 5 is very sturdy, and 6 is where you start bridging the gap between monster and light vehicle.

What they need is armor classification, and a weapon classification that improves or reduces effectiveness against specific types of armor.

For instance, a flamer could be Assault D6, Shred 3. Meaning, that against models toughness 3 or less, you max out the number of hits and double it. So your flamer would do D6 hits against marines, but 12 hits against guardsmen.

This is one example. It is not a perfect example. But i'm trying to illustrate how we can realistically go about having weapons be effective against their desired targets. We kind of have this with poison. Poison is great against monsters, but terrible against other things.

So the questions that spring to my mind looking at your table are these:

1. What result are you trying to get from moving the numbers around.

2. Could this result be achieved without such a dramatic overhault (you'd have to rewrite literally every statblock in the game)

3. What are the drawbacks to making such changes.


Regarding #1, I'd point out that the current stats are very abstract and put forth that the level of nuance you're suggesting might kind of be splitting hairs. It seems odd to me that a bolter is just barely strong enough to wound a horror on 2s but not a guardsman, for instance. Or put another way, why are we roughly doubling stats instead of tripling them? Multiplying them by 10? Surely a 1-to-100 scale of strength and toughness would allow an even better level of nuance, no? Why not make it a 1 to 1000 scale so we can give space wolves the 7 extra imaginary strength points we feel they should have over an imperial fist by virtue of being more outdoorsy or whatever?

My point here is that I'm struggling to think of a lot of egregious examples of stats being too similar or dissimilar. It was weird last edition when orks lost every arm wrestling match against marines, but are there many instances of that sort of thing this edition?

Regarding #3, I feel this opens the door to lots of weird little non-benefits. If I bump my wyches' strength up by 1 with combat drugs, for instance, there's now a new swathe of enemy units that the +1 strength no longer matters against because the target is T6 instead of T5 or what have you.

1) More graduating and precision.

2) I mean, probably? But I can't think of any way to achieve it.

3) The amount of work required. I do think it'd be for the benefit of the game to expand it a little, so we can have "Tougher/Stronger than a Guardsman, Weaker than a Marine" without some weird pseudo-stat.

 JNAProductions wrote:
1) More graduating and precision.

But what is the end goal of having more precise numeric descriptors of a unit's capabilities? If the goal is precision for its own sake, then we could switch to the hyperbolic 1 to 1000 scale I jokingly suggested. Why specifically do we need to have a toughness value between a guardsman and a marine? Is there a unit that feels dramatically misrepresented by its statline on the tabletop? Is there a mechanical quirk that is detrimenting gameplay?

In the Toughness 5 category (which is between guardsmen at 4 and marines at 6), you listed things like...
* Scouts, which are already tougher than humans and less durable than marines by virtue of a lower armor save.
* Sororitas, which are already tougher than humans and less durable than marines by virtue of a higher armor save than a guardsman.
* Flesh Hounds, which are magical spirit realm puppies whose exact durability, we can probably agree, is not really a known entity.

So what unit needs to be precisely squishy enough to be wounded on 4s by shurikens but 3s by boltersand 5s by lasguns? And is it really so unfluffy for that unit to just be T3 or T4?

I'm not necessarily opposed to your suggestion; I just don't really see a concrete example of its merit.

Would the current damage chart be used?

If so, Pulse weapons would go in the S7 slot

Yeah, it's really hard to see what the point of this is. What is the problem that you're hoping to solve by introducing "more graduating and precision"?

Something like this is going to produce a bunch of annoying interactions that significantly affect game balance. Like, for some reason you've decided that shuriken weapons need to be a step below bolters. Of course, this makes them significantly worse against Marines and Sisters. And this also has the probably unintended effect of making them much worse against Rhinos and most Greater Daemons. This is overall just a massive nerf to shuriken weaponry, because...? In general anything that you place on these odd values that your system is creating in between where the old values used to be is going to suddenly become much worse or much better, because you're reducing the space where things wound on a 4+ and then because a 1 point difference in S still means that there's a 2 point T range where one weapon wounds on a 5+ and one on a 6+.

I can understand why the OP wanted to improve the graduation of results .

However, if you wanted more graduation and proportional results you could just use the values of 1 to 10, in an opposed table for all three stages of combat resolution.(Still keeping the D6.)

Even though this would drastically reduce the amount of special rules, and improve the diversity and range of the interaction available.It would require a complete re write.

Like any real concepts to actually fix 40k, you need to use more modern game mechanic and resolution methods to cover the expected diversity the 40k background implies..