Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So instead of rolling to wound and then inflicting a set amount of damage, this revised system would see a player roll hits, take saves (bringing this step forward in the roll order), and then for each unsaved hit that gets through, roll a number of wound rolls equal to the weapon's Damage. Each successful wound roll would inflict 1 wound on the target.

This could never kill more models than the number of hits initially landed. So for example, if an Autocannon (Damage 3) landed two unsaved hits on a section of Marines, it would then roll six wound rolls, each requiring 2+ to succeed (Strength 9 vs. Toughness 4). A maximum of two Marines could sustain wounds or die as a result (capped at the number of initial hits).

As a separate but related idea, any D3 and D6 value in a weapon's Damage stat would become a 2 or 4 respectively.

While this would make high-Damage weapons a bit more deadly against lower-Toughness/Wounds models (as they should be IMO), and would require players to roll extra wound dice with them, it would also make multi-Damage weapons far more reliable and dynamic across the board. E.g.:
- A D2 weapon wouldn't always insta-kill MEQ (or fail to do any damage entirely, with no middle ground). Instead it would roll 2 wound dice per unsaved hit, and would be more likely to get at least 1 point of damage through.
- A Meltagun (which is Damage D6/D6+2 and needs a 5+ to wound most of its typical targets, and as a result is currently very hit-and-miss with its 1 attack) would roll 4-6 damage dice and almost always be able to get at least 1-2 points of damage through against tougher things.
- Same story with the Rupture Cannon (aka the 'casino gun') and its extremely swingy Damage 2D6, which would instead become Damage 8 and roll 8 damage dice per hit.

Edited to clarify.

It's late here, so maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like you'd basically be destroying the ability to have high-risk-high-reward weapons. Weapons that don't always get wounds through but do a high amount of damage when they do get through are a feature not a big.

So for instance, my starweavers are light vehicles that depend on their holograms/evasion to avoid taking harm. If someone shoots a lascannon at it, the lascannon is more likely to miss/be baffled by the holograms than not, but if it *does* hit (meaning it made its to-hit roll, to-wound roll, and I failed my invuln save), that star weaver it at risk of being devastated by that single shot. This is pretty intuitive and reasonably well reprsented by the current rules.

Under your rules, I'd be unlikely to take the full damage, but I'd be more likely to take *some* damage. Essentially, this means the lascannon's single-projectile attack is now behaving like a bunch of smaller shots or a blast weapon or something. The opposite of how you'd expect the weapon to behave.

Additionally, automatically changing all random damage from d6 to 4 removes the potential for a major spike in damage. Spiky damage is a feature on some weapons. It interacts with certain mechanics (think miracle dice or command rerolls) to make some weapons more desirable even if their average damage might be lower than an alternative weapon. You're essentially lowering the maximum damage and replacing the potential for a lucky damage spike with a severe bell curve (extremely unlikely to spike damage).

Also, having to keep track of the original number of hits, though not a big deal, could be minorly annoying.

This seems like a bad idea to me. It's sure to require a huge amount of work to adjust all the impacted weapons, and it seems like it would do a worse job of telling a story than the current rules.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
It's late here, so maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like you'd basically be destroying the ability to have high-risk-high-reward weapons. Weapons that don't always get wounds through but do a high amount of damage when they do get through are a feature not a big.

This... wouldn't really change that much? Hitting and penetrating already count as 'gatekeeper' mechanics to determine whether damage gets through, and a high-Damage weapon that hits and penetrates is still going to inflict lots of hurt. Also, to say all-or-nothing damage is a feature and not a bug is just your personal preference (it was never that way until recent editions, and leads to as many feels-bad moments as it does good ones IMO).

Can you explain what battlefield circumstances all-or-nothing (especially d3/d6) damage rolls actually represent... that aren't already covered by hit, save and wound roll mechanics? And how they benefit the game when there are already so many elements of randomness involved?

As for your Starweaver, yeah. A Lascannon would have to hit and penetrate (which should be the hard parts given the 4+ Invuln), then roll well on its 5 to-wound dice to do its damage. The damage would still be random, just less-so than the current Dd6+1... rolling a 1 as it currently stands is just a bad feeling that makes the game seem further out of your control, especially after passing 3 tests already. At least under this system, the probability of damage would depend on the S/T differential and not just blind luck. IMO that S12 Lascannon deserves to do some damage against a T6(!) vehicle if it's already passed the other rolls.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Additionally, automatically changing all random damage from d6 to 4 removes the potential for a major spike in damage. Spiky damage is a feature on some weapons. It interacts with certain mechanics (think miracle dice or command rerolls) to make some weapons more desirable even if their average damage might be lower than an alternative weapon.

I don't necessarily agree that variable-damage weapons should swing (or 'spike') as much as they do. You also seem to be focusing on the highs and ignoring the lows. This system enables variable damage without the wild (bidirectional) swings of the current system.

I can't think of any weapons that absolutely 100% need to do bonus 'lucky' D3/D6 damage. I'm sure such weapons exist, but their rarity indicates they should probably have a special rule to represent that.

Miracle dice and command point re-rolls interact with almost every other roll as well, so that seems like a fairly weak argument for keeping super-swingy weapon damage. But point taken that the interaction exists.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Also, having to keep track of the original number of hits, though not a big deal, could be minorly annoying.

Yeah, that's a downside I admit. But it's only one number.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
It's sure to require a huge amount of work to adjust all the impacted weapons, and it seems like it would do a worse job of telling a story than the current rules.

Agree (kinda) with the first point, but can you explain the second? I'm doubtful that this will dilute the experience as much as you think; 40k existed (and was compelling) long before random damage rolls were a thing.

Can you explain what battlefield circumstances all-or-nothing (especially d3/d6) damage rolls actually represent... that aren't already covered by hit, save and wound roll mechanics? And how they benefit the game when there are already so many elements of randomness involved?

Sort of! First, I'll admit that what they cover is partially already covered by the hit and wound rolls. Between to-hit, to-wound, and saves, 40k's attack resolution process definitely has at least one step that could be eliminated if someone were inclined to do so.

As for what they represent, the existence of a variable Damage stat allows you to have weapons that are consistently able to inflict *some* amount of damage on a target and potentially able to inflict a *large* amount of damage on the target, but isn't guaranteed to do a large amount of damage. So in practical terms, a lascannon fired by a marine is allowed to have a good chance of hitting and wounds, and it has the potential to kill my star weaver in a single shot. This tells the story of a potent single-shot weapon (more on that later), can be a very dramatic/memorable moment, and makes games less predictable when that lascannon in the corner overperforms and significantly changes the game state.

But at the same time, you wouldn't want the lascannon to just do a flat 6 damage because one-shotting a star weaver would probably be a bit much (hard to balance), and because you don't get the benefits of it being as dramatic/hard to predict.

I'm less of a fan of Dd3 weapons. They *can* be a little more dramatic in the context of seeing how many multi-wound models you manage to kill, but they could generally be set to a flat D2 and I wouldn't complain.

rolling a 1 as it currently stands is just a bad feeling that makes the game seem further out of your control, especially after passing 3 tests already. At least under this system, the probability of damage would depend on the S/T differential and not just blind luck. IMO that S12 Lascannon deserves to do some damage against a T6(!) vehicle if it's already passed the other rolls.

I agree that bad damage rolls can be a bit of a feelsbad. It sounds like the problem you're trying to address here isn't necessarily that the output of things like lascannons is random but rather that they have the potential to be lower than you're comfortable with. If that's the case, your proposal does kind of address that (by strengthening the bell curve), but it creates some mechanical casualties along the way.

Consider: how would you feel about simply setting Dd6 weapons to something like d3+3 or d6+2 (like a brightlance) instead? Personally, I've come to like d6+2 on my brightlances as 3 damage (the minimum) is still better than most flat-value weapons, but the potential to damage spike is still there.

Agree (kinda) with the first point, but can you explain the second? I'm doubtful that this will dilute the experience as much as you think; 40k existed (and was compelling) long before random damage rolls were a thing.

In the current rules, the lascannon vs star weaver makes the lascannon feel like a powerful weapon with the potential to blast the weaver out of the sky with a single attack, but it also feels like a one-shot weapon that doesn't hurt the weaver at all if it can't connect with its target.

In your rules, the D4 lascannon feels very different/tells a different story. It's not a weapon that will knock weaver out of the sky with one hit. Even if the weaver gets hit, it can rest safe knowing that it can comfortably take at least one (and probably several) hits from the lascannon before it's incapacitated.

But strangely, the lascannon is now very reliable at doing a small amount of damage. The potential to miss entirely is still there, but rather than worrying about one big knockout punch, you'll instead consistently take a non-incapacitating amount of damage.

In your version, it almost feels like the lascannon is really good at doing glancing hits but really bad at delivering knock-out blows. It behaves in a way that feels more like a "machinegun" rather than a big-wind-up attack.

Math.

BS3+ Lascannon (Current)
72.22% chance of doing nothing.
9.26% chance of one-shotting.
18.52% chance of injuring but not killing, evenly split between 2, 3, 4, and 5 damage.

BS3+ Lascannon (Proposed)
41.05% chance of doing nothing
0% chance of one-shotting
22.05% chance of 1 damage
23.63% chance of 2 damage
11.25% chance of 3 damage
2.01% chance of 4 damage

Some issues with those numbers:

- A lascannon is Damage d6+1, so under the new system it would roll five to-wound dice, not four.

- Either lascannon is going to have its probability of doing anything to a Starweaver sliced by at least 66.67% due to the BS and 4+ invuln. Those factors don't change.

So here are the damage probabilities under the proposed system (S12, so each of the five damage dice would wound on rolls of 2+), assuming a penetrating hit has already been scored:
- 0 damage: 0.01%
- 1 damage: 0.29%
- 2 damage: 11.5%
- 3 damage: 16.0%
- 4 damage: 59.8.%
- 5 damage: 40.1%

If you want the overall chances (factoring in hit and save rolls), just divide by 3.

I forgot the +1 on that, so it would have one more die rolled. That’s my bad.

And the odds of rolling five 2+ and failing five 4+ after a 3+ to-hit is not 40%. It’s barely over 2%.

Maybe there's a crossed wire here... under this system, the saves would be taken before the wound/damage rolls (just to minimise the number of rolls, mathematically still the same).

Updated my previous post with probabilities.

That was not what I read.

That means that there’s a 2/3 chance of doing nothing with every shot, on a 3+ hit 4+ save.

Yep. So for a current lascannon (which needs to get through a 3+ to hit, 2+ to wound and a 4+ invuln before it can do damage) the probability of it doing nothing is actually higher (72.23%, or almost 3/4).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
As for what they represent, the existence of a variable Damage stat allows you to have weapons that are consistently able to inflict *some* amount of damage on a target and potentially able to inflict a *large* amount of damage on the target, but isn't guaranteed to do a large amount of damage. So in practical terms, a lascannon fired by a marine is allowed to have a good chance of hitting and wounds, and it has the potential to kill my star weaver in a single shot. This tells the story of a potent single-shot weapon (more on that later), can be a very dramatic/memorable moment, and makes games less predictable when that lascannon in the corner overperforms and significantly changes the game state.

I mean, I agree it makes the game less predictable... but there are so many mechanisms that already do that, and this wouldn't be as predictable as the flat damage example you gave. I think there's some wiggle room between no randomness (e.g., a Damage 3 Autocannon) and total randomness (e.g., a Damage D6 Krak Missile) that still enables interesting stories and moments.

I also feel like you're a bit fixated on the Starweaver example... yes, a D5 Lascannon with 5 damage rolls would no longer be capable of insta-killing a W6 Starweaver. If that was an absolute dealbreaker then I suppose you could alternatively keep the random D3/D6 Damage values and this system would still allow more reliable and dynamic damage. E.g., after hitting the Starweaver and it failing its invuln save, you'd roll a D6 to work out the number of wound dice. So as long as the result was a 5+, you'd be rolling enough dice (Damage D6+1) to potentially insta-kill the Starweaver.

You'd add an extra step that way, but there'd be no more overall than with the current system (hit, wound, save, damage, as opposed to just hit, save, wound with the original system I proposed).

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Consider: how would you feel about simply setting Dd6 weapons to something like d3+3 or d6+2 (like a brightlance) instead? Personally, I've come to like d6+2 on my brightlances as 3 damage (the minimum) is still better than most flat-value weapons, but the potential to damage spike is still there.

I mean, that helps a lot, but it doesn't address my other main issue - i.e., the wound bottleneck. I could literally fire something like a Strength 24, Damage 12 Volcano Cannon at a puny GEQ... and upon hitting, still fail to wound 1/6th of the time. 0 or 12 damage per attack, no in-between. With the new system, that Volcano cannon would roll 12 wound dice, needing a single 2+ across all of them to kill that model.

Part of me also wonders if saves should work that way too...