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This is less a game design thread than a game analysis thread. I'm trying to work out some stuff about dice. It seems like getting a 6 on 3D6 is roughly equivalent to getting a 4+ on 1D6 (better, even) so it seems like all else being equal a Warhammer weapon that has three shots at S5 (A) is better than one with one shot at S10 (B) because i. A is just as likely to cause a wound as B and ii. more likely to cause a wound against T10 or less and iii. can cause more wounds against T10 and iv. more wounds against T10 or less. So more wounds and a better chance of at least one wound.

Presumably this can be balanced out by increasing armour piercing, to increase the chance of an unsaved wound, or by increasing damage, to increase the number of unsaved wounds. After all, while the likelihood of causing at least one wound may be slightly better, the likelihood of causing two or more unsaved wounds may be significantly worse. It's like blowing up a result after narrowing it down. But I'm not a dice-rolling enthusiast, and I was wondering about any better ways to differentiate between weapons that would kill a tank in one shot and weapons that would kill a few guys if they were unwisely lined up for it.

6 on 1D6 pick 1 is 17%
6 on 2D6 pick 1 is 31% (roughly 5+ on 1D6)
6 on 3D6 pick 1 is 42%
6 on 4D6 pick 1 is 52% (roughly 4+ on 1D6)
6 on 5D6 pick 1 is 60%
6 on 6D6 pick 1 is 67% (roughly 3+ on 1D6)
6 on 7D6 pick 1 is 72%
6 on 8D6 pick 1 is 77%
6 on 9D6 pick 1 is 81%
6 on 10D6 pick1is 84% (roughly 2+ on 1D6)

5+ on 1D6 pick 1 is 33%
5+ on 2D6 pick 1 is 55% (roughly 4+ on 1D6)
5+ on 3D6 pick 1 is 70% (roughly 3+ on 1D6)
5+ on 4D6 pick 1 is 80% (roughly 2+ on 1D6)
5+ on 5D6 pick 1 is 87%
5+ on 6D6 pick 1 is 92%

4+ on 1D6 pick 1 is 50%
4+ on 2D6 pick 1 is 75%
4+ on 3D6 pick 1 is 88%
4+ on 4D6 pick 1 is 94%
4+ on 5D6 pick 1 is 97%
4+ on 6D6 pick 1 is 98%

Edited to fix the math.

I think you should check your numbers, the chance of you rolling one or more 6s with three dice is 42%, not 52.
You need 4 dice to have a 52% chance.

You can work it out as; 1-(<#.failures> / <#.faces> )^<#.dice>
For our case of needing a 6 on a 3d6 that's 1-(5/6)^3 = 0.4213... (42%)

There you go, that's what you get by adding up the negative spaces consecutively instead of using that formula. Thanks!

I'm not certain what your end game is with this but it's certainly interesting.

It makes me wonder if there is a system in there for roll X and pick Y and compare to armour, so roll 5 pick 3 to get through armour. not sure how it would work for rapid fire, though to roll 3 shots with the above weapon could be made to roll 15 and pick 3 groups of 3, making rapid fire weaponry more powerful...

 some bloke wrote:
I'm not certain what your end game is with this but it's certainly interesting.

It makes me wonder if there is a system in there for roll X and pick Y and compare to armour, so roll 5 pick 3 to get through armour. not sure how it would work for rapid fire, though to roll 3 shots with the above weapon could be made to roll 15 and pick 3 groups of 3, making rapid fire weaponry more powerful...

I'm not quite sure what you mean.
Do you mean roll 5 and pick the three highest? What's rapid fire doing that's any different?

Awhile ago, I had a thought experiment for 40k where vehicles had a 'damage grid' ala Warmachine. Essentially, you would roll to hit, but then you would roll add your Strength & damage, and subtract the vehicle's armor (or toughness) minus its save modifier. So a Lascannon versus a Rhino would be d6+9-7 (minimum 1), assuming it didn't fail its armor save.

Each time you damaged a vehicle, you rolled to see which 'column' you damage, such that you could have a rapid-fire weapon risk doing a lot of armor damage to different columns but little internal damage, but a well-placed lascannon could tear through an engine block and the crew behind it.

Of course, this is something that would not be recommended once there are more than, say, three-five vehicles per players. This would be essentially unplayable in 5th ed.

Another option would be...just do vehicle penetration like 3rd-7th 40k.

Given the nature of Blast weapons, I thought it might be something to organize weapons by their utility, so that a weapon like a Melta Gun would fire multiple dice, but any damage it caused would have to apply to a single model in the target unit. No problem against a tank, but not useful vs a horde.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
I'm not certain what your end game is with this but it's certainly interesting.

It makes me wonder if there is a system in there for roll X and pick Y and compare to armour, so roll 5 pick 3 to get through armour. not sure how it would work for rapid fire, though to roll 3 shots with the above weapon could be made to roll 15 and pick 3 groups of 3, making rapid fire weaponry more powerful...

I'm not quite sure what you mean.
Do you mean roll 5 and pick the three highest? What's rapid fire doing that's any different?

I guess I was thinking of a completely different way to get through armour, EG something has armour 10 and a weapon has "roll X pick Y" to add up to 10. So a weapon with "Roll 10 pick 2" is reliable at beating low armour but cannot get above 12. A weapon with "Roll 3 pick 2" is much less reliable.

X, being how many you roll, would define the reliability of the attack
Y, being the number of dice you pick, will define the armour piercing of the attack

I don't think it would work very well - roll 10 pick 2 will be about as reliable as roll 3 pick 3, but roll 3 pick 3 would be capable of more. So no-one would favour lower pick amounts over higher roll amounts.

My concern with rapidfire was that you couldn't add the dice together (IE2 hits with roll 4 pick 2 can't become roll 8 pick 2 or roll 8 pick 4, as these are both way different to roll 4 pick 2).

I wasn't really thinking in terms of 40k either, just generic "how to decide if an attack succeeds".


For making melta and anti-tank weapons more effective, They should give everything +1 to hit large vehicles (they are, after all, large) and then give vehicles more wounds (so machine guns don't kill them easily) and give anti-tank a lot more damage (as in D6 damage becomes 4D3 damage). Then give anti-tank weapons -1 to hit infantry so they don't get used for character sniping.

Maybe it's less a matter of rolling dice than what players can do with the results? In Epic Armageddon, and in many versions of 40k since 5th edition, players can allocate incoming hits to models in their detachments. Of course, that game does a hard differentiation between anti-infantry and anti-tank (muddled by light vehicles and macro-weapons, amusingly), but the point is that the defending player can pass off chaff like grots or attempt to tank shots with better armoured models, and the type of weapon affects the kind of casualty the defender can choose. So you could roll a handful of dice for an anti-tank weapon but it'll just result in one enemy model being extremely dead.

To expand, maybe different weapons would result in different hit/casualty allocation. A machine gun, for example, might require hits be allocated to the closest models, artillery from a random model and then one hit each to the next closest model, and weird stuff resulting in guys at the back taking hits. Anti-tank/sniper weapons (.50 caliber rifles are both!) might only be able to gank one model in the target unit.

Put another way, I'm trying to brainstorm ways about the intuitive 1 shot = 1 dice thing that Warhammer uses both effectively and maybe less effectively. Currently in Warhammer there's the weird thing where high-powered anti-infantry weapons are better anti-tank than the anti-tank weapons because they're more reliable and the way vehicles (including tanks) are treated as giant infantry (minus the vestigial morale, etc).

Nurglitch wrote:
Put another way, I'm trying to brainstorm ways about the intuitive 1 shot = 1 dice thing that Warhammer uses both effectively and maybe less effectively. Currently in Warhammer there's the weird thing where high-powered anti-infantry weapons are better anti-tank than the anti-tank weapons because they're more reliable and the way vehicles (including tanks) are treated as giant infantry (minus the vestigial morale, etc).

I think I understand better now - you want to stop medium-strength high-ROF weapons from being used to hunt down superheavy tanks whose armour should be there to stop that exact thing happening?

It's a cause I can get behind.

My first thought (this being in relation to 40k) is to ditch the system which has proven itself to be an incredibly poor choice - the "double" and "half" mechanics.

Currently, to wound on a 2+, you need strength double target toughness, and to wound on a 6+, you need strength half the target toughness. This works at low S&T, up to about 5. Because then, to wound T5 on a 2+, you need S10. to then make this weapon designed to mow down tougher-than-average troops ineffective vs armour, you need Toughness 20. But then to make anti-tank weapons work against these, you need S21-40. Then to make superheavies better, you need T 21-80. Someone in GW HQ never learnt the story of the grain of rice which doubles on each square of a chessboard.

So you remove this non-linear system and end up with the old style damage chart, modified to allow anything to still hurt anything:
S<T-1, 6+
S=T-1, 5+
S=T, 4+
S=T+1, 3+
S>T+1, 2+

Now we get a swathe of weapons which kill weak things on 2+, and a swathe of weapons which just aren't strong enough to hurt high toughness effectively. S6 needs 6's to wound T8 - so bring anti-tank guns!

I think it's not so much a matter for the dice to be changed, but instead the targets. S7 used to have a chance to hurt medium vehicles, and no chance against heavy ones - you needed S8 or higher for them!



Another option would be for the tanks to have a simple "maximum hits" they can take per weapon - so a landraider might have max hits of 2, so if you fire a punisher cannon at them, they can only take 2 hits - the rest are just assumed to bounce off. Thus low ROF weapons will win out against tanks, because they can inflict their high damage in one hit.

I'm inclined to agree with a reversion back to the old wound chart so long as we can append a curve to the extreme ends, so that something like S4 can still wound T7 by rolling a 6 and then a 4+ (T8 by following the 6 with a 5+, T9 with another 6).

I think something like S v T should have been implemented for WS/BS vs Initiative - I don't think dropping it was a good idea even when the flat to-hit numbers are practical in the basic case (and infuriating when it comes to anything but the basic case). That's more of an issue with how modifiers work in 8th/9th though.

Something Pulp Alley does, which is a game I love and don't get to play enough, is enable heroes (and villains) to roll extra dice and larger dice to make them heroically reliable and able to both batter their way through mooks, but still be at risk doing so (particularly when faced with a large enough crowd of mooks). The latest Apocalypse rules did that well (and I need to buy more 25mm and 32mm trays), and so did SST by Andy Chambers. But that's really deviating from the structure offered by the D6.

There's something about the notion of the Blast weapons that I like though, even if I kind of miss the 3" and 5" blast markers, and that's how it depends on the target, and that kind of interaction between attacker and target is kind of the appeal to me about Warhammer in the first place. I like the notion of hitting more stuff when there's more to hit while enabing a blast to inflict multiple hits on a single large target.

I'll get back to this...

I've reminded myself that this is how Epic Armageddon works, by dividing weapons into anti-infantry, anti-tank, anti-air, and macro varieties they address targets in different ways. Anti-infantry affects infantry and light vehicles, anti-tank affects light vehicles and tanks, anti-air affects aircraft before they've landed, and macro affects everything except in-flight aircraft (and denies the extra armour bonus). The irony is that Epic Armageddon is where stuff like a flat WS (CC) and BS (FF/weapons) was first implemented and worked really well. But generally a unit in Epic (and Apocalypse I think? I need to find the rules for that and look at them again) uses one or two dice, and can address 0-2 enemy units with them.

Conversely the weapon types that stuff tends to carry in Warhammer 40k does the reverse, excepting the new blast rules, and affects the attacker in the hit modifiers (assault/heavy) and number of dice (rapid fire/pistol), and while a machine gun may have Heavy 3, there's weapons with Heavy 6 and even Heavy 20, for reasons.

Nurglitch wrote:
Maybe it's less a matter of rolling dice than what players can do with the results? In Epic Armageddon, and in many versions of 40k since 5th edition, players can allocate incoming hits to models in their detachments. Of course, that game does a hard differentiation between anti-infantry and anti-tank (muddled by light vehicles and macro-weapons, amusingly), but the point is that the defending player can pass off chaff like grots or attempt to tank shots with better armoured models, and the type of weapon affects the kind of casualty the defender can choose.

Not exactly how it worked in E:A, there was no defender's choice. Hits were allocated to closest eligible units in the target detachment one by one until all had at least one, repeating the cycle again and again until there were no more hits left, then the defender made saving throws unit by unit. It's a bit archaic in that regard. It does present lots of other tactically interesting levers to the game as a mechanic, but ths particular bit is not one of them

Totally was in 40k 5th, though. As long as the models in the unit were technically different by loadouts, you could juggle wounds between them and not have anyone die, joy of joys.

 Sherrypie wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
Maybe it's less a matter of rolling dice than what players can do with the results? In Epic Armageddon, and in many versions of 40k since 5th edition, players can allocate incoming hits to models in their detachments. Of course, that game does a hard differentiation between anti-infantry and anti-tank (muddled by light vehicles and macro-weapons, amusingly), but the point is that the defending player can pass off chaff like grots or attempt to tank shots with better armoured models, and the type of weapon affects the kind of casualty the defender can choose.

Not exactly how it worked in E:A, there was no defender's choice. Hits were allocated to closest eligible units in the target detachment one by one until all had at least one, repeating the cycle again and again until there were no more hits left, then the defender made saving throws unit by unit. It's a bit archaic in that regard. It does present lots of other tactically interesting levers to the game as a mechanic, but ths particular bit is not one of them

Totally was in 40k 5th, though. As long as the models in the unit were technically different by loadouts, you could juggle wounds between them and not have anyone die, joy of joys.

There you go. I participated in way too many discussions of how it worked at the time. I still hold that there's ways around it, but I do prefer the closest models being the victims.