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I have posted these ideas in a few different areas and forums but figure I would put them some place together. Also when I think about rules changes I try to make as minimal a change as necessary.

Devastating Wounds - Change the wording to "on a critical hit saving throws cannot be taken against this damage". This would do the same thing as mortals but without the spill over which seems to be the part that is causing the most issues.

Towering (I guess aircraft as well) - Can see over obscuring ruins but not through, i.e. if the line of sight can be drawn without having a piece of the ruin on both sides of it then the units can see each other, but if the line needs to go though a spot where the ruins would be on both sides, then the units can't see each other (or maybe the non-towering can). This eliminates the main problem with this rule which is windows, cracks, doors etc. in ruins. This might also be a cool rule for units on a high piece of terrain to see over smaller ruins (but not though). Also if you shoot over a ruin the unit on the other side always has the benefit of cover regardless of whether they are actually obscured or not.

Indirect fire - cannot target a unit that is not visible to any units in your army. So if can hide completely, they can't target it. I think this would help, but might not be enough. indirect is hard as it is either too good or too bad. Also these units all probably need a price increase regardless.

Also perhaps the following really should be in the rules:

Designer's commentary: Rules that allow altering the value of a dice roll. "If your army has a rule that can alter the value of a dice roll by changing the value directly, i.e. Fate dice or miracle dice, if that value is changed to a two, three, four, five, or six, it does not count as an unmodified two, three, four, five, or six, and as such is not a critical." (the reason the other numbers are in there is because sometimes a critical can be scored on a roll other than a six.

Just my thoughts

I agree with the fate dice change. Basically, "counts as modified". So you can guarantee a success, but not a critical success. Makes numbers other than 6 more useful, which I think matches the intent of the dice mechanic.

Another possible change to towering: keep the rule as it currently stands, but only within 24". This incentivizes such models to push up the board, where they are more vulnerable if they want to use this ability. Plus, it fits the physics of angles. You could even have very tall models have "towering 24", and slightly towering models "towering 12", and titans "towering 36".

I think the terrain visibility rule that lets you be seen but not see when you're partially within a ruin is worse than all those.

I think the charge and fight phase rules that limit where you can move are worse than all of those.

I don't think you have actually fixed Fate Dice, they might not be part of any broken broken combo and might help balance Eldar, but they're still just better than Miracle Dice and it doesn't really make sense for an Autarch and his Aspect Warriors to get this does it?

Indirect Fire thing seems very minor and unnecessary. Just change points, there is already enough downsides to shooting at things out of LOS. Even if the rule is a good idea in theory I think it needs to meet a minimum bar before it's worth having people need to read and update their game knowledge for unless it's a typo to be fixed or something like that.

Honestly.... pretty reasonable. No notes.

I think Aircraft probably should be able to fly over terrain in a related note.

Hello, I have two ideas:

Catachans should get a bonus for being in cover, not for charging. They're jungle fighters, masters of ambush and guerrilla warfare. They should be fast in dense cover when others are slow.

Has there ever been a Dakka Edition of 40k, a houserule edition created on this forum?
Someone (not me, I'm busy with a remodel) could host the free datasheets provided by GW and mark them up as PDFs with comments. If each datasheet and rule page could also be commented on, preferably sorted by popularity, then feedback could be monitored for balance updates.

 kingpbjames wrote:
Hello, I have two ideas:

Catachans should get a bonus for being in cover, not for charging. They're jungle fighters, masters of ambush and guerrilla warfare. They should be fast in dense cover when others are slow.

Has there ever been a Dakka Edition of 40k, a houserule edition created on this forum?
Someone (not me, I'm busy with a remodel) could host the free datasheets provided by GW and mark them up as PDFs with comments. If each datasheet and rule page could also be commented on, preferably sorted by popularity, then feedback could be monitored for balance updates.

No, but there was a huge poll that listed a bunch of differences between editions, you could design an edition around all the most popular options. There are some contested areas though so why would anyone devote their time to make the biggest possible number of Dakkanauts happy instead of just making an edition that will make themselves and their local group happy? Keep in mind that most of the people that chime in aren't willing to take the step to actually play it, the cult of officialdom is strong. It's just pragmatic to play the official rules or find a different game to play instead of playing Dakka Edition.

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/807445.page

Take 5th edition and make a new asymmetric mission set with progressive scoring, add chapter tactics and the units released since 5th to every faction and rewrite DS and you pretty much have your Dakka edition. I'd probably adjust Instant Death to 3 damage (enough to kill HQs but not one-shot monsters), I think that'd be popular as well. But I think if you measure whether people want to play with even this relatively light changes they'd rather just play 5th edition, flaws and all.

 vict0988 wrote:
-- you could design an edition around all the most popular options.

I didn't mean a standalone edition like Mezmorki's Prohammer, I meant taking all the suggestions for "fixes" of 10th edition and making 10th ed errata PDF.
Hosting PDF 's on Google drive would be easy but I'd rather have a system where the most popular comments per datasheet rise to the top...

Right, so when someone suggests you change vehicle T to armour values and that is popular you do that. When someone suggests you remove a lot of the bespoke abilities and use core rules instead you do that as well. You do the same for letting flying units not having to go over buildings, remove Stratagems entirely, replace OC 0 with being forced to fall back and sweeping advances in melee, re-implementation of Initiative you basically end up with 5th edition. So it'd be easier to just start with 5th edition because it's so popular if you want to make an edition based on popularity polls.

I don't think design by poll is a good idea, not that you don't have some terrible ideas be brought to life by smaller teams and especially individuals, I think having worked once with a larger team I know how unreliable that is compared to just being able to grind as much as you want and make what you like. Sorry if I'm being a negative Nancy, I get you might just be throwing a fun idea out there or feel like the community complains too much and does too little to actually change things.

 xeen wrote:

Designer's commentary: Rules that allow altering the value of a dice roll. "If your army has a rule that can alter the value of a dice roll by changing the value directly, i.e. Fate dice or miracle dice, if that value is changed to a two, three, four, five, or six, it does not count as an unmodified two, three, four, five, or six, and as such is not a critical." (the reason the other numbers are in there is because sometimes a critical can be scored on a roll other than a six.

Do we run into a lot of people who think that a die roll that has been completely replaced has not been modified?

I guess I can see why we might need this clarification since "modifiers" are usually very specific things.

 LunarSol wrote:
Honestly.... pretty reasonable. No notes.

I think Aircraft probably should be able to fly over terrain in a related note.

They actually can. Any terrain can be climbed. It just costs move. But as aircraft have unlimited upper speed...

As is terrain helps aircraft in tha the 20" minimum can be reached by flying over tall ruin.


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 odinsgrandson wrote:

 xeen wrote:

Designer's commentary: Rules that allow altering the value of a dice roll. "If your army has a rule that can alter the value of a dice roll by changing the value directly, i.e. Fate dice or miracle dice, if that value is changed to a two, three, four, five, or six, it does not count as an unmodified two, three, four, five, or six, and as such is not a critical." (the reason the other numbers are in there is because sometimes a critical can be scored on a roll other than a six.

Do we run into a lot of people who think that a die roll that has been completely replaced has not been modified?

I guess I can see why we might need this clarification since "modifiers" are usually very specific things.

Seeing miracle dice/fate dice specifically say they are unmodified...yes?

As is op's text isn't valid designer commentary as those clarify. He's trying to change rule so that would be errata material, not designer commentary.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
Do we run into a lot of people who think that a die roll that has been completely replaced has not been modified?

I guess I can see why we might need this clarification since "modifiers" are usually very specific things.

Yes because that's exactly how it works. This is why Eldar have been such a problem and why fate dice needed a major nerf. Your automatic 6 is a critical wound, automatically triggering the devastating wounds rule and dumping a bunch of mortal wounds into your target.


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 xeen wrote:
Indirect fire - cannot target a unit that is not visible to any units in your army. So if can hide completely, they can't target it. I think this would help, but might not be enough. indirect is hard as it is either too good or too bad. Also these units all probably need a price increase regardless.

AKA "nerf guard even more". No.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:

 xeen wrote:
Indirect fire - cannot target a unit that is not visible to any units in your army. So if can hide completely, they can't target it. I think this would help, but might not be enough. indirect is hard as it is either too good or too bad. Also these units all probably need a price increase regardless.

AKA "nerf guard even more". No.

I kind of like that one, actually. Involving "spotters" makes your more expendable and mobile units more valuable and creates counterplay against indirect fire (thus making it less of a feelsbad mechanic.)

If guard need help, that's a semi-distinct topic. A proposed change hurting guard probably shouldn't invalidate the proposal entirely, though obviously its impact on guard is something that would have to be considered.

Then again, ignoring line of sight is kind of the only thing some options have going for them. Like, if you take away one of the main advantages of fielding night spinners and shadow weavers, I'm going to start taking fire prisms and d-cannons instead. Plus, not having to look the enemy in the eye is kind of the point of weapons like mortars and artillery. Maybe this would work better as a spotter USR given to appropriately scout-y units that lets you overcome the usual drawbacks of firing indirectly. It wouldn't do anything to reign in indirect fire (the opposite really), but it does make positioning/mobility feel more important.

Part of me likes the idea of bringing back minimum firing distances for some weapons (including many LoS-ignoring weapons), but the size of a 40k table just makes that really awkward.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe this would work better as a spotter USR given to appropriately scout-y units that lets you overcome the usual drawbacks of firing indirectly.

This is what scout Sentinels do, as well as a stratagem that lets you add +1 to hit for artillery if you have a vox unit with line of sight. It's a nice mechanic that makes getting a spotter into position have value without creating the awkward problem of "if I have to get line of sight anyway why not just put a LRBT there and kill the target more efficiently" or letting units become nearly invulnerable if they have the right arrangement of LOS blocking ruins.

tneva82 wrote:


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 odinsgrandson wrote:

 xeen wrote:

Designer's commentary: Rules that allow altering the value of a dice roll. "If your army has a rule that can alter the value of a dice roll by changing the value directly, i.e. Fate dice or miracle dice, if that value is changed to a two, three, four, five, or six, it does not count as an unmodified two, three, four, five, or six, and as such is not a critical." (the reason the other numbers are in there is because sometimes a critical can be scored on a roll other than a six.

Do we run into a lot of people who think that a die roll that has been completely replaced has not been modified?

I guess I can see why we might need this clarification since "modifiers" are usually very specific things.

Seeing miracle dice/fate dice specifically say they are unmodified...yes?

As is op's text isn't valid designer commentary as those clarify. He's trying to change rule so that would be errata material, not designer commentary.

Ah yes. This is perfectly clear rules as written and requires errata to change rather than designer's commentary. I often get annoyed when errata and clarifications are confused.

- I tend to also have a "the author is dead" mentality when reading rulebooks. I find that game designers sometimes get the thousand iterations of their rules in development get confused when answering questions casually.

Indirect fire should just hit on unmodified 6's only. The whole mechanic is a feels bad rule.

Then, add a stratagem/ability for armies that truly rely on indirect fire (although one would argue there shouldn't be an army that relies on it) to allow a unit to fire indirectly slightly better.

Or, assign a different weapon type to make indirect fire weapons unable to fire without remaining stationary. The whole [Heavy] weapon type negating -1 to hit is a load of shenanigans.

Characters need to be able to do something when not part of squads.

1. Lone Operative when not leading a unit is a must.
2. Wargear items (Psychic Hoods being a good example) should function without the need to be leading a squad.
3. Abilities that characters bestow upon their unit should be something they can give to a nearby unit in a lesser manner. For example, a Librarian provides a 4+ Invul save to the unit he's leading, but should be able to provide a 5+ Invul save to a unit within 6" if he's not leading a unit.

Also need to be a little less restrictive with who can join what units. Not necessarily the number of joined characters - we don't want to create deathstar situations with squads tha that have 6 characters attached - but we have to made a clear delineation between "Commander" level characters, where a squad can only have one, and "Lieutenant" level characters, who can join a squad even if there's a "Commander" that's part of it. The Keyword system helps here.

Other types of characters need ways of protecting themselves. Daemon Princes and even Flyrants spring to mind. They're wildly vulnerable to anything and everything.

Also, flying movement should just be horizontal. The current rules make it out that the things that are flying land every time they finish moving. That might be true of Jump Pack units or even Crisis Suits, but things with wings generally stay in the air and aren't landing in little "hops", so the need to measure literal distance doesn't make much sense.

 skchsan wrote:
Indirect fire should just hit on unmodified 6's only.

No one would take something so unreliable.

skchsan wrote:Indirect fire should just hit on unmodified 6's only. The whole mechanic is a feels bad rule.

Hitting on 6s is so unreliable that it's almost not worth rolling though. This feels more like a way to spite people who want indirect fire to be a thing than an enjoyable mechanic.

Then, add a stratagem/ability for armies that truly rely on indirect fire (although one would argue there shouldn't be an army that relies on it) to allow a unit to fire indirectly slightly better.

Or, assign a different weapon type to make indirect fire weapons unable to fire without remaining stationary. The whole [Heavy] weapon type negating -1 to hit is a load of shenanigans.

I feel like both of these ideas are workable and have merit.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Characters need to be able to do something when not part of squads.
1. Lone Operative when not leading a unit is a must.

Would that only apply if you started the game without a squad? My concern is a scenario where you attach a character to a unit, then place a second unit right in front of them and end up with functionally two squads' worth of ablative wounds. You could, for instance, force someone to chew through 40 intercessor wounds to get at your captain (assuming your opponent doesn't kill the character in the same volley that takes out the first squad of intercessors.

3. Abilities that characters bestow upon their unit should be something they can give to a nearby unit in a lesser manner. For example, a Librarian provides a 4+ Invul save to the unit he's leading, but should be able to provide a 5+ Invul save to a unit within 6" if he's not leading a unit.

I feel like this could get messy if applied as a blanket rule, but you could probably go through and make a stratagem version of this for any wargear/character buffs that it makes sense on. Taking the time to recalibrate your gear or redirect your psychic protection or whatever seems like a good thing for a stratagem to represent.

Also need to be a little less restrictive with who can join what units. Not necessarily the number of joined characters - we don't want to create deathstar situations with squads tha that have 6 characters attached - but we have to made a clear delineation between "Commander" level characters, where a squad can only have one, and "Lieutenant" level characters, who can join a squad even if there's a "Commander" that's part of it. The Keyword system helps here.

Agreed. It might be worth noting that flexibility in what squads a character joined combined with being able to attach to a new squad mid-game was how we protected characters in the past. 10th seems to be doing a decent job of getting around to clarifying how special rules between characters and their squads work. Would it be terrible to basically go back to the old method of attaching/detaching characters, but keep a list of which units they're allowed to join? For example, maybe my phoenix lord can break off to go solo an enemy unit and can then reattach to a unit on my turn, but he's still only allowed to join units of his aspect.

Also, flying movement should just be horizontal. The current rules make it out that the things that are flying land every time they finish moving. That might be true of Jump Pack units or even Crisis Suits, but things with wings generally stay in the air and aren't landing in little "hops", so the need to measure literal distance doesn't make much sense.

Agreed. Although to be fair, if my wave serpent ends its movement behind a ruin to hide from incoming fire, then apparently it *did* "hop" back down to lower elevation to benefit from cover. But still, units with Fly feel weird under the current system. My infantry situationally feels faster than my jetbikes because the infnatry can go through walls while my bikes have to go around them. Was there an issue with the 9th edition version of Fly?

Something has to be done about the keyword sharing. A unit suddenly becoming ultra-susceptible to anti-psyker abilities because a Psyker is leading them, a unit becoming vulnerable to Anti-Fly weapons because a character with Fly joins them (Winged Tyranid Prime + Tyranid Warriors) and, the worst one, vehicles becoming Infantry because of a Datasmith is a level of stupid that ranks up there with "Plasma guns explode more often at night!" that we had in 8th Edition.

I mean, sure, it was fun to munch through a unit of Infernus Marines in a single turn with my Psychophage thanks to the Librarian leading them giving the whole unit the Psyker keyword, but it didn't feel right. It felt like gaming the system.

Perhaps there should be a list of keywords that aren't shared when units are joined:

1. Infantry.
2. Swarm.
3. Mounted.
4. Vehicle.
5. Walker.
6. Monster.
7. Fly.
8. Psyker.
9. Character.
10. Warlord.
11. Epic-Hero.

And anything else anyone can think of.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Would that only apply if you started the game without a squad? My concern is a scenario where you attach a character to a unit, then place a second unit right in front of them and end up with functionally two squads' worth of ablative wounds. You could, for instance, force someone to chew through 40 intercessor wounds to get at your captain (assuming your opponent doesn't kill the character in the same volley that takes out the first squad of intercessors.

I hadn't thought of that aspect of it - what happens to a character that loses their squad - but at the same time, why should they be able to pick out your character? You could make it so weapons with Precision can ignore Lone Operative. Want to snipe a character? Then use an actual sniper!

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I feel like this could get messy if applied as a blanket rule, but you could probably go through and make a stratagem version of this for any wargear/character buffs that it makes sense on. Taking the time to recalibrate your gear or redirect your psychic protection or whatever seems like a good thing for a stratagem to represent.

I'm not saying blanket, but there are a lot of powers that don't make sense to just cease functioning because the character is alone. For example, the Psychic Hood on the Libby. I wouldn't make that a transferrable ability. But at the same time it would always work on the Libby, regardless of whether he was with a unit or not.

It would apply to a lot of psychic powers more than anything else, and Emperor knows that psychic powers need a boost in 10th, as they are D-U-L-L-DULL in this edition. And "Psyker" is nothing but a downside. There is zero upside to having the Psyker keyword or Psychic attacks. It only makes you more vulnerable to anti-psyker attacks, or gives people more protection against your attacks.

And I wouldn't want to add any Stratagems. There are already too many, even with the reduced amount. The game doesn't need more generic strats.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Agreed. It might be worth noting that flexibility in what squads a character joined combined with being able to attach to a new squad mid-game was how we protected characters in the past. 10th seems to be doing a decent job of getting around to clarifying how special rules between characters and their squads work. Would it be terrible to basically go back to the old method of attaching/detaching characters, but keep a list of which units they're allowed to join? For example, maybe my phoenix lord can break off to go solo an enemy unit and can then reattach to a unit on my turn, but he's still only allowed to join units of his aspect.

Once upon a time characters could join, leave and not join as they pleased. Then suddenly one editon (5th?) they made it so characters that ended up within 2" of units auto-joined, even if you didn't want to. I don't trust GW to get leaving/joining rules right, but to give credit where credit's due, I think the rules that govern starting strength and how that's impacted when a character loses their squad work quite well.

I very intentionally made a character-heavy Marine force for our first game of 10th as I wanted to see how it worked. We had no problems with characters leading, and then subsequently losing their squads. The only problems were where abilities they had suddenly ceased working because they were sad all their friends died.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Agreed. Although to be fair, if my wave serpent ends its movement behind a ruin to hide from incoming fire, then apparently it *did* "hop" back down to lower elevation to benefit from cover. But still, units with Fly feel weird under the current system. My infantry situationally feels faster than my jetbikes because the infnatry can go through walls while my bikes have to go around them. Was there an issue with the 9th edition version of Fly?

Not that I'm aware of. This is one of those "fixing something that ain't broke" that GW does occasionally. There was nothing wrong with how "Fly" worked. I'd've preferred a little more granularity with a 'Fly' and 'Hover' to distinguished things that are not flying but better at getting over terrain than ground-based units, but putting that aside I never encountered any problems with that rule.

The terrain rules in 10th are overly simplistic, and they lead to dumb situations where ground troops move through dense terrain faster than things flying above it. Part of that is that terrain doesn't slow you down in 10th, which is just weird (forests are basically open ground!), but then adding in unnecessary and unrealistic movement to flyers doesn't help.

Well, I do get why terrain no longer slows you down. A bad difficult terrain roll back in the day basically meant that a melee unit wouldn't get to the enemy lines until it was too late to matter, and it's generally just a feels-bad moment when you roll low and fail to walk onto an objective because of it. But then, the starting Movement stat of most infantry is so low that it's hard to meaningfully lower it without going overboard. -1" is so minor that it feels like it isn't worth the book keeping, but -2" is a 1/3rd reduction in most infantry units' speed.

So it is slightly tricky. I think just letting flying units fly through walls would probably be enough of a fix. Just enough so that I'm not using the first 6" of my jetbikes' Movement to go around the wall that my banshees just ghosted through.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There was nothing wrong with how "Fly" worked.

There was something wrong: the absurdity that a FLY model can move 24" per turn as long as there's a tall piece of terrain in its path, but only 6" over flat ground. Only measuring horizontally would have been fine if FLY units followed aircraft-like rules where they were assumed to be high over the table and never benefit from cover but I don't think most people would have liked that one. So now FLY gives you the ability to move through the air instead of being constrained to moving along the ground but doesn't give additional movement distance.

The real issue here is letting infantry move through solid walls without any loss of movement distance. Terrain is supposed to be an inconvenience as well as cover, it's absurd that a wall simultaneously blocks all fire through it but is so flimsy and/or full of holes that units can move through it without even slowing down. Force infantry units to move only through designated doors and suddenly FLY becomes a far more valuable ability.


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 Wyldhunt wrote:
A bad difficult terrain roll back in the day basically meant that a melee unit wouldn't get to the enemy lines until it was too late to matter, and it's generally just a feels-bad moment when you roll low and fail to walk onto an objective because of it.

Then you don't go through the terrain if you aren't willing to take the loss of speed. Terrain in older editions used to have both positive and negative effects that you had to plan around, now it's just a magic "no shooting" box so melee units can teleport straight into combat and nobody has to think about anything but brawling on the center objective. Terrain needs to be more diverse and we need to fix the game so that it's playable without having an entire city of ruins and no line of sight beyond 12".

Yeah terrain should slow you down.

I mean, I'm open to terrain slowing units down in some way, but what specific implementation would you recommend?

The old system where a squad of ork boys or blood letters basically lost a turn when they rolled snake eyes on a dt test got a lot of complaints from what I recall.

We could remove the move-through-walls thing for infantry, and that would probably be a noticable change. But then I suspect we'd see a lot of | shaped ruins with 1" doors rather than L shaped ruins. Which might be enough?

Honestly, I don't hate where ruins are at right now. Having a decent amount of BLOS is important to avoid one-sided matches against gunlines. Being able to move a unit forward safely by jumping from BLOS terrain to BLOS terrain feels like a rare interesting maneuvering choice. My biggest pet peeve with terrain right now is probably just that so many people play with boarded up first floor windows. That is, I like there being some BLOS, but the BLOS in my neck of the woods is maybe just a smidge too prevalent.

I will say that plunging fire is kind of neat.