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Everybody once was in one of the following situations:
You shoot your lascannons into an enemy tank that has 2 hp left, get one unsaved wound and roll the d6 for damage, which results in a roll of 1. No problem, you saved the reroll stratagem for this situation, but you roll a 1 again.
You want to do an easy charge and need like a 4 or 5 to make it, and even though you can reroll the charge roll, you still don't make it and your expensive melee units dies without having achieved anything.
A unit with let's say 3 flamers or other weapons with a random number of shots wants to roast some chaff off an objetive that might decide the outcome of a game, but you roll so poorly that you get just about half of the shots you'd have on average and can't kill enough of them to contest the objective.



With stratagems, 8th edition offers a framework to tackle such situations (if you feel like you need to). Since this kind of situation really, where one roll with a huge variance can decide the outcome of a game, feels really bad, I want to houserule a stratagem that allows you to take the average value instead of rolling dice when determining random numbers.


It should read something like
"When you have to roll one or more dice to determine a random profile value, the extra movement a units may advance, or the distance of a charge, instead of rolling the dice, you may instead take the arithmatic mean value (rounded down)."

I hope the formulation makes clear that it should not work on rolls that are 'hit (or whatever) on 3+', since overheated plasma weapons or shuriken weapons would be hard to handle that way.
I ruled out psy test because getting perils is a drawback for rolling high, while in the other situations, higher rolls are always better.
If a unit fires several flamers, the stratagem should work on all dice. 3 flamers should be 10 shots (floor(3*3.5) = floor(10.5)), not 9 (3*floor(3.5)).

As for the cost, I would suggest making it free but limiting it to once per game turn (not player's turns) instead of once per phase.


Do you have any suggestions, thoughts or critique regarding that stratagem and would you use it?
Are there any units that would completly break the game with that stratagem?
Are there any other rolls that should be included as well?

8th edition is targeted to 11 year olds. I am surprised they included D3s. This simply doesn't fit into 8th's design philosophy.

The randomness is there to balance the weapons (poorly, but still). You have the Command Re-roll to re-roll bad rolls.

trhe randomness can be what makes a game exciting though, the "I should be dead but I'm not" feeling is euphoric.

BaconCatBug wrote:8th edition is targeted to 11 year olds. I am surprised they included D3s. This simply doesn't fit into 8th's design philosophy.

The randomness is there to balance the weapons (poorly, but still). You have the Command Re-roll to re-roll bad rolls.

You're right, but I don't want to write a mail to GW saying "Implement this into the game!", I want to use it in my group, we are not 11 year olds.

BrianDavion wrote:trhe randomness can be what makes a game exciting though, the "I should be dead but I'm not" feeling is euphoric.

These situations will still occur more than enough.

Nah, the dice are part of the game. The randomness should stay, or we might as well be playing with spreadsheets in MS excel.

There is already a stratagem against randomness in the game:

1CP: reroll any 1 die.

Not as strong as you might like, and typically in high demand on non-CP-starved armies, but it's there.

I think I must rephrase the question:

My group wants something like that, how do I make it fair?

Trollbert wrote:

It should read something like
"When you have to roll one or more dice to determine a random profile value, the extra movement a units may advance, or the distance of a charge, instead of rolling the dice, you may instead take the arithmatic mean value (rounded down)."

I hope the formulation makes clear that it should not work on rolls that are 'hit (or whatever) on 3+', since overheated plasma weapons or shuriken weapons would be hard to handle that way.
I ruled out psy test because getting perils is a drawback for rolling high, while in the other situations, higher rolls are always better.
If a unit fires several flamers, the stratagem should work on all dice. 3 flamers should be 10 shots (floor(3*3.5) = floor(10.5)), not 9 (3*floor(3.5)).

So you've basically set this up to do 1 of 3 things:
* Guarantee a 7" charge
* Guarantee a 3" advance
* Guarantee you roll an average result when determining a weapon profile.

That third option, I feel, is slightly fallacious. As others have pointed out, you already have a way of mitigating randomness by rerolling a die once per phase. Because of the multi-step nature of resolving attacks, this stratagem basically serves the same role as the die reroll. You don't negate the randomness so much as you just move where the opportunity for bad luck is. For instance, you might guarantee that you'll get an average number of shots from your flamers, but you don't eliminate the chance that you'll then proceed to roll subpar on your to-wound rolls. Sure, the math is a little different, but not so much so that this rule is, in my opinion, warranted. Unless of course you're just looking to give yourself multiple opportunities to modify statistics over the course of a single turn.

I'm not really opposed to the other two options, but it would probably be reasonable to just make those their own separate universal stratagems. Much more user friendly than making people calculate averages (even when such math is relatively simple.) Rolling snake eyes for charges stinks. Automatic 3" advances are just a weaker version of stratagems that aeldari already get. I say go for it.

Trollbert wrote:
I think I must rephrase the question:

My group wants something like that, how do I make it fair?

Change anything 1D6 to 2D3. This will give your lascannons at least 2 damage. Change anything 2D6 to 4D3. This will let you auto succeed charges of 4".

Wyldhunt wrote:

Trollbert wrote:

It should read something like
"When you have to roll one or more dice to determine a random profile value, the extra movement a units may advance, or the distance of a charge, instead of rolling the dice, you may instead take the arithmatic mean value (rounded down)."

I hope the formulation makes clear that it should not work on rolls that are 'hit (or whatever) on 3+', since overheated plasma weapons or shuriken weapons would be hard to handle that way.
I ruled out psy test because getting perils is a drawback for rolling high, while in the other situations, higher rolls are always better.
If a unit fires several flamers, the stratagem should work on all dice. 3 flamers should be 10 shots (floor(3*3.5) = floor(10.5)), not 9 (3*floor(3.5)).

So you've basically set this up to do 1 of 3 things:
* Guarantee a 7" charge
* Guarantee a 3" advance
* Guarantee you roll an average result when determining a weapon profile.

That third option, I feel, is slightly fallacious. As others have pointed out, you already have a way of mitigating randomness by rerolling a die once per phase. Because of the multi-step nature of resolving attacks, this stratagem basically serves the same role as the die reroll. You don't negate the randomness so much as you just move where the opportunity for bad luck is. For instance, you might guarantee that you'll get an average number of shots from your flamers, but you don't eliminate the chance that you'll then proceed to roll subpar on your to-wound rolls. Sure, the math is a little different, but not so much so that this rule is, in my opinion, warranted. Unless of course you're just looking to give yourself multiple opportunities to modify statistics over the course of a single turn.

I'm not really opposed to the other two options, but it would probably be reasonable to just make those their own separate universal stratagems. Much more user friendly than making people calculate averages (even when such math is relatively simple.) Rolling snake eyes for charges stinks. Automatic 3" advances are just a weaker version of stratagems that aeldari already get. I say go for it.

Thank you for your feedback. You are right, I want more opportunities to modify statistics in a single action.
I mean, you can get rerolls on hit rolls pretty easily, some armies can reroll wound rolls in melee or give their units +1 to all wound rolls. But only Catachan IG tanks can modify the number of shots they have.
In addition to that, the reroll stratagem is not really effective if you have 3 or even 5 flamers in a unit and get really bad rolls.

p5freak wrote:

Trollbert wrote:
I think I must rephrase the question:

My group wants something like that, how do I make it fair?

Change anything 1D6 to 2D3. This will give your lascannons at least 2 damage. Change anything 2D6 to 4D3. This will let you auto succeed charges of 4".

That's a nice idea. I might propose that to my group as well.