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So I haven't played for a year or so now and I have forgotten, or just wasn't playing right anyway, what guns do "splash" or "spill over" damage. example shooting a regular squad of space marines with a autocannon, each model having 1 wound, you make 1 hit and 1 wound the weapon does 2 damage. Does that damage "spill" over to another model? Is it the same with a lascannon used on infantry it does d6 damage.
How do you know when the damage "spills" over?

I play this game very casually and often with a lot of house rules and others rules thrown out the window so pardon the ignorance.

No melee or shooting weapons in 40k do spill-over damage, with the very very rare exception.

The only exception to no-spill damage I can think of is a Death Guard melee weapon.

If you do 6 dmg with a lascannon to a unit of guardsmen, you're only killing 1 Guardsman.

Just for clarity. The only "spill-over" damage in the current edition is Mortal Wounds (which clearly state in their rules if it's a mortal wounds damge or not)

So, shoot a unit of 3 wound Ogrynns with a lascannon (a weapon that has a damage characteristic of d6, and does not do Mortal wounds)and roll a 6 for damage, you kill one Ogrynn and the remaining damage disappears. However, be aware that some things get a roll to avoid wounds/damage. If that Ogrynn had say a roll of 5 or 6 to ignore damage, he would have to make 6 rolls, taking 1 damage for each failed roll.

Mortal Wounds: these do carry over. You smite (a psychic power that states it does d3 mortal wounds) a unit for d3 damage and roll a 3. If the unit had 1 wound models, the damage carries. so 3 one wound models would die. If the unit had 2 wound models, 1 two wound model would die, and a second would take 1 damage. Yes, it has grown complex.

Before giving you an answer, I'd strongly, STRONGLY, recommend coming to grips with the basic rules here:

https://whc-cdn.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Warhammer-40k-Battle-Primer-English-3.pdf

House rules are awesome, but the base rules need to be known so that massive confusion doesn't result when you encounter other players.


With that out of the way, here's the rules that are important:



#1 - Nothing does spill-over damage. If you deal more damage to a model than it takes to kill it, it just dies and the rest of the damage is wasted.

#2 - Mortal Wounds are dealt 1 at a time, so each of them can be considered to be 1 damage. In this way, if you roll to deal d3 mortal wounds to a unit of 1-wound models, and you roll a 3, you'll still kill 3 guys.

#3 - When you make a lot of attacks at once, because you're shooting a whole bunch of bolters, or slashing with a whole bunch of chainswords, we tend to total up and roll all the dice together. This is called "fast rolling" because you're going "fast" through rolling all the dice, but the actual rules are that you roll attacks 1 attack at a time (even if a gun shoots multiple shots, each of those shots is taken in sequence). Since all the attacks are identical and follow identical rules, you can roll all the dice together though.

This "fast rolling" can make it look like damage is spilling over to other models in a squad, but really, it's just that you've skipped going over 1 roll and 1 dead model at a time for the sake of expediency and because rolling all together or 1 at a time is exactly the same on a statistical basis.

How you know when the damage spills over? Well it should be mentioned in the weapon profile but as mentioned before I can only think of the DG Flail of Corruption when it comes to normal weapons with spillover damage (outside of mortal wounds).

The two weapons that do spill over damage are the two flails that exist in 40k: The Plague Marines ones and the one that the Deathwing Knight sargeant can be equiped with.