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I've been playing a lot of Kill Team lately, and I totally love the lack of the roll to wound.

It makes the game quicker and cleaner.

Do you think that it would work in regular 40k?

You can already kill a Knight with lasguns...

Infinity has an interesting system where they don't have a wound roll and instead the Str and AP of a weapon are effectively combined into an armour save modifier called the "Probability of survival".

Could be interesting, but you'd need to do things like give tanks negative armour save values and make it so that natural 1s don't automatically fail saving throws

Probably hard to do with D6's. You remove a lot of the design space that 10th has really effectively leveraged to differentiate weapons.

OPR has that. Yes, it's much faster, the lethality doesn't jump through the roof, but you lose some specialness of high S, weak AP weapons, like heavy Bolters vs Autocannons, Scatter Lasers and such.

Problem with Kill Team style dice pool mechanic ATM would be how to represent larger, tougher, better armoured models in the same design space. Current Kill Team rules have problems tackling anything more durable than a Custodes/terminator.. which is probably why vehicles have never manifested for any version of Kill Team..

Also, "resolves faster"? Not too sure about that.. Some Kill Team resolutions can take a while, especially if the target model has an invulnerable save. CC is a bit slow as due to alternating "blows", sometimes it takes a while to figure out a best way to allocate your die.. what to parry, what to hit, and in what order..

If there's one thing I'd like to adopt to 40K from Kill Team, it would be the "concealed/engaged" mechanic. This could also work super well in 40K, especially if most factions were allowed to combat squad (ie split units in half).. Would create a lot of interesting new tactical decision making and that..

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I've been playing a lot of Kill Team lately, and I totally love the lack of the roll to wound.

It makes the game quicker and cleaner.

Do you think that it would work in regular 40k?

You can already kill a Knight with lasguns...

Could it work?
Sure.

Would it work?
Only with a major overhaul of the entire system.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I've been playing a lot of Kill Team lately, and I totally love the lack of the roll to wound.

It makes the game quicker and cleaner.

Do you think that it would work in regular 40k?

You can already kill a Knight with lasguns...

What would the Knight's wound count be in that system? 150? 200? Keeping track of that many wounds for that many models would be a nightmare. Primaris Marines have what? 2 wounds in 40k? and 14-18 in kill team. I don't personally think it would make it quicker or cleaner.

If you want you can also up the damage of big weapons.

You can finally have weapons feel appropriately scaled... a Lasgun does 1 damage while a Lascannon does 10 damage.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
If you want you can also up the damage of big weapons.

You can finally have weapons feel appropriately scaled... a Lasgun does 1 damage while a Lascannon does 10 damage.

It works in Kill Team because everything is approximately the same scale.

A Ravener is much beefier and tougher than a Ratling, but they're in the same scale.
A Grot to a Questoris Knight? Not so much.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
If you want you can also up the damage of big weapons.

You can finally have weapons feel appropriately scaled... a Lasgun does 1 damage while a Lascannon does 10 damage.

It works in Kill Team because everything is approximately the same scale.

A Ravener is much beefier and tougher than a Ratling, but they're in the same scale.
A Grot to a Questoris Knight? Not so much.

I've lost an Armiger Helverin to nurglings. I can imagine losing a Knight to Gretchin.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
If you want you can also up the damage of big weapons.

You can finally have weapons feel appropriately scaled... a Lasgun does 1 damage while a Lascannon does 10 damage.

It works in Kill Team because everything is approximately the same scale.

A Ravener is much beefier and tougher than a Ratling, but they're in the same scale.
A Grot to a Questoris Knight? Not so much.

I've lost an Armiger Helverin to nurglings. I can imagine losing a Knight to Gretchin.

It CAN happen. Nurglings are better than most little things at that thank to Lethal Hits.

But, for reference, each base of Nurglings does about one fourth of a wound to an Armiger per fight phase.
You can take 36 Nurglings, if you max out on them. If every single Nurgling you can possibly field in a 2,000 point list ganged up on one Armiger, it'd live through the fight phase more than 90% of the time.

For something like Grots, without Lethal Hits? They average less than 2% of a point of a damage per attack.
You can take 120 Grots in a 2k list. If they all ganged up on one Armiger, you'd expect to see it survive with 6+ wounds (so not even bracketed) more than 99% of the time.
To kill it in one fight phase? Less than a percent of a percent chance of happening.

All of that put together means that, right now? Grots killing Land Raiders or even Rhinos just doesn't happen. Shave a wound or two off, sure. Kill it outright? Nah.
Remove the wound roll, and that's now a lot likelier to happen.

I would probably shift it up into unit categories.

Ie anti infantry weapons auto wound infantry, by only wound non infantry on a 6.

Anti tank auto wound everything not titanic. Which requires a 6.

Anti titan auto wounds everything.


I'd probably also scale the number of hits based on the weapon and target. Ie anti tank vs tank, 1 hit per hit. Against infantry, 2 hits per hit.

Anti titanic 1 hit per titan, 2 hits per tank, 3 per infantry.



Wounds can be used to proxy toughness:

T3 or less = 1 wound per non character
T4 = 2
T5 = 3
T6 = 4
Etc

For infantry..double for tanks, triple for titans. Ie a T6 tank has 8 wounds, a T6 titan 12.


So you roll to hit, roll the number of saves the scale of weapon requires (1 hit from a titan weapon requires 3 saves on infantry).

One game system which has no wound roll is Legions Imperialis. So its not like it cannot be done, but would require rewriting the entire rulebook and doing away with classic warhammer paradigms altogether..

A quick and dirty way to attempt such without a major overhaul is to simply convert the S vs T chart to be a modifier to Save rolls instead of the result needed on a To Wound roll. Having Strength at least twice Toughness would be a -2 save modifier for example, having higher but less than x2 would be -1, under +1, or +2 if Strength is half or less of Toughness (all this would ignore the max modifier of 1 rule). If one wanted to bring back immunity to small arms fire then one could impose no limitation on that so that it is possible to always make the save (Terminators become very scary), or one could keep a limit and say 1s always fail and possibly that 6s always succeed, although I would also think it would be okay to let anything needing more than a 6 on a save just fail. Personally, I think would go with 1s always fail along with saves needing more than a 6 after penalty always fail, but having benefit of cover instead allows 6s to always succeed along with the usual +1 to save benefit if I was going to try out such a rules hack, and would probably allow Invulnerable saves to always succeed on 6 too.

After second thoughts, that would greatly increase lethality (which is definitely not needed in current 40k) and it makes more sense to have the modifier apply to the To Hit roll, since what one is trying to account for is the difference that failed To Wound rolls would result in. I first went with adjusting Saves because 40k already has a lot of To Hit modifiers, but it does make more sense to apply to that compared to saves. In this case I would convert the S vs T chart to something like this: S at least twice T would be +1 to hit, higher than T but less than x2 would be normal, S=T -1, S less than T -2, and half of T or less would be -3. This would skew things slightly to more lethality towards the high end (having S over T equates to more hits than with using standard To Wound rolls), but possibly balances that out by making immunity to small arms possible if the penalty To Hit pushes the result needed beyond 6.

 Jammer87 wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I've been playing a lot of Kill Team lately, and I totally love the lack of the roll to wound.

It makes the game quicker and cleaner.

Do you think that it would work in regular 40k?

You can already kill a Knight with lasguns...

What would the Knight's wound count be in that system? 150? 200? Keeping track of that many wounds for that many models would be a nightmare. Primaris Marines have what? 2 wounds in 40k? and 14-18 in kill team. I don't personally think it would make it quicker or cleaner.

Wound tracking should be pretty much unaffected. You'd presumably still have the same number of models/units on the table. You'd just potentially need an additional die or counter or whatever you use to track wounds for models whose wounds go into the triple digits. Basically, if you can count two digits worth of wounds now, you could count 3 digits worth of wounds in the hypothetical new system.

I've kicked around the idea of getting rid of the to-wound roll. I think it's probably doable. Obviously it would be a pretty big overhaul to the math of the game that would require a whole edition change, but it's doable. You'd basically just need to:
A.) Up the Wounds of most things in the game accordingly.
B.) Finagle the Damage stats on weapons accordingly. And
C.) Turn things like good toughness/druability into a modifier.

So it's less that you're dropping the Wound roll and more that you're combining the wound and save rolls together. Some units might have rules like "Armored (2)" that modifies the roll and represents things like the unit's power armor. And then you'd have rules on weapons like "Armor Penetration (1)" that lets you negate 1 point of the Armored rule. (So weapons with good armor penetration are still good against armored targets but not necessarily better against unarmored targets.)

What the to-wound roll *is* has become very muddled over time, as has the distinction between toughness vs Saves vs lots of Wounds. This approach basically gets rid of that muddled roll and turns a lot of the offensive/defensive considerations into modifiers.

I've posted something like this a while back.

What I do is only roll for WS/BS and have it be modified from the S vs T and Armor Save.

Basically you can't roller better than your WS/BS.
You get -1 to hit for every +1 of armor save. Armor save can be negated by AP.
You get +1 to hit if your Strength is better than the target's toughness, then additional +1 for every multiple. -1 if S is less than T and same additional -1 for multiples.

You only have to roll once for attacks but this system does make attacks more lethal and buff/penalties stronger, but I also use harsher penalties like -1 for moving/charging and long range penalties.

What about Invuln saves?
Lethal, Sustained, or Dev Wounds?

And do 6s still always succeed?

My Fantasy/Historical system (Conqueror: Fields of Victory) does it that way.

It dramatically increased the lethality of combat, removing the need for the old bonuses for standards and ranks.

AP weapons are as a result very much restricted, since a little goes a long way. For people who want space marines to always get that 3+ unless facing a heavy weapon, it's one way to do it.

Mechanically, it saves quite a bit of time since there is less dice being rolled and in a melee (both sides strike simultaneously) you can each roll, call out the hits and then do the saves.

You can still fit some fluff in by giving "tough" races a bonus on their safe, so Dwarfs have a default save of 6+, and if they have heavy armor and shield, go down to 3+, which makes them very hard to kill.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I've been playing a lot of Kill Team lately, and I totally love the lack of the roll to wound.

It makes the game quicker and cleaner.

Do you think that it would work in regular 40k?

You can already kill a Knight with lasguns...

Getting back to this original idea.... Conceptually, you have the soldier firing a weapon at a target, it can hit or miss, and then glance off the body armor, or some terrain, or what have you, or not bounce off and then damage the target in some way, hopefully enough to make them not participate in the battle.

I'm assuming you want to reduce it to two rolls?

You could combine, the BS of the attacker vs range penalties, concealment/terrain/stealth of the defender to determine a "to hit" roll

You could then combine the power of the weapon/projectile vs the toughness/armor/reflexes of the defender to come up with a "save" roll.

Thinking about how "hit, wound, save" works in 40k makes me think that it probably was a process that was continued on from warhammer fantasy, where you might conceptually think that yeah, you could hit someone with a sword or a mace or something, but just because you touch them with the weapon doesn't mean you're going to actually hurt them with it, and this concept can be stretched to bows and arrows, but it is a little harder to stretch that concept to sci-fi where weapons are blowing through chunks of buildings, like the steps/process doesn't quite map out the same way.

Yeah that's why I suggested a size keyword based wounding mechanism.

Anti infantry weapons auto wound infantry but require a 6 to wound anything else.

Anti tank weapons auto wound anything not Titanic, which requires a 6. Against infantry it causes 2 hits per hit.

Anti titan weapons auto wound anything, cause 2 hits per hit to tanks and 3 hits per hit to infantry.


So you use size to reflect how devastating the attack is. And it allows you to scale weapon effects when a lasgun and a heavy wraith cannon both wound a grot the same. One just causes more hits on smaller targets.

You’re eliminating the wrong roll. Get rid of the Hit Roll and keep the Wound Roll. Everything gets easier from there. Then all you need to do is adjust the number of attacks to account for accuracy.

 alextroy wrote:
You’re eliminating the wrong roll. Get rid of the Hit Roll and keep the Wound Roll. Everything gets easier from there. Then all you need to do is adjust the number of attacks to account for accuracy.

Doesn't that make Orks a little too powerful?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
You’re eliminating the wrong roll. Get rid of the Hit Roll and keep the Wound Roll. Everything gets easier from there. Then all you need to do is adjust the number of attacks to account for accuracy.

Doesn't that make Orks a little too powerful?

Not if you adjust the number of dice. It wouldn't be a direct conversion because too many models have 1 attack, but in principle, multiply their number of attacks by the chance to hit and you have new attacks.

2 A at WS/BS 4+ becomes 1 A
3 A at WS/BS 3+ becomes 2 A
3 A at WS/BS 5+ becomes 1 A
Etc. and so forth.

 alextroy wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
You’re eliminating the wrong roll. Get rid of the Hit Roll and keep the Wound Roll. Everything gets easier from there. Then all you need to do is adjust the number of attacks to account for accuracy.

Doesn't that make Orks a little too powerful?

Not if you adjust the number of dice. It wouldn't be a direct conversion because too many models have 1 attack, but in principle, multiply their number of attacks by the chance to hit and you have new attacks.

2 A at WS/BS 4+ becomes 1 A
3 A at WS/BS 3+ becomes 2 A
3 A at WS/BS 5+ becomes 1 A
Etc. and so forth.

Gets a bit trickier with 2A BS3+ weapons like bolters, shuriken catapults, splinter rifles, immortal gauss/tesla, etc. though, right?

To me, it makes more sense to keep the to-hit roll than not because that's the roll that I (personally) want to see played around with the most. Things like positioning, targets moving quickly, stealth, taking time to aim (heavy keyword), etc. would all make sense tying into either the to-hit roll or the range stat/targeting rules.

The to-wound roll and save rolls have a certain amount of behavior/factors that go into them as well like hitting harder on the charge (lance), stronger weapons hurting durable units more reliably, etc. But to me, the distinction between toughness and saves is kind of a gray area. Especially where something like a tank is concerned. A rhino has a high Toughness stat because it's big and made of metal, but it also has a good Sv stat because it's... big. And made of metal. And weapons with low strength but good AP are good at punching through metal, so they're good against power armor, but they're bad at hurting a rhino... even though they're good at punching through metal. And melta guns are simultaneously really good at hurting tanks because they melt right through their metal armor, but also really bad at hurting tanks because their strength isn't high enough to reliably get through their toughness... Toughness which represents their metal armor.

So in theory, combining two quirky rolls into one means you could have all the strengths of both the weapon and the target's durability accounted for in the same place. Instead of melta being weirdly good *and bad* at hurting tanks, you would just give it "Armor Pen(X)" and a high "Strength" or "Power" or whatever we call it stat, and both of those would modify a roll that's also being modified by the tank's "Armored (X)" rule.

We don't *have to* ditch any rolls from the game, but it makes more sense to me to combine the rolls with a lot of nebulous overlap rather than getting rid of the to-hit roll that seems to be more clearly its own thing.

 LunarSol wrote:
Probably hard to do with D6's. You remove a lot of the design space that 10th has really effectively leveraged to differentiate weapons.

Exactly my thoughts as well.

Gw have gone out of their way to reduce the space by removing comparison mechanics for ws.

The dynamic changing roll in comparison mechanics keep the stats different depending on the opponent.

its one of the things I've disliked the most about the current rules. Always hitting on A 2+ regardless of your opponent removed a lot of tactical consideration.

 alextroy wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
You’re eliminating the wrong roll. Get rid of the Hit Roll and keep the Wound Roll. Everything gets easier from there. Then all you need to do is adjust the number of attacks to account for accuracy.

Doesn't that make Orks a little too powerful?

Not if you adjust the number of dice. It wouldn't be a direct conversion because too many models have 1 attack, but in principle, multiply their number of attacks by the chance to hit and you have new attacks.

2 A at WS/BS 4+ becomes 1 A
3 A at WS/BS 3+ becomes 2 A
3 A at WS/BS 5+ becomes 1 A
Etc. and so forth.

The issue is you lose a lot of the Ork flavor when they become the "low volume" shooting faction. Realistically though you can bring it back by making things like Lootas and the like get d3 hits or something. The bigger issue is that realistically most models in this game hit with less 1 attack per model. It's going to be difficult to provide any interesting variety while still scaling with unit size.

Removing The to-wound roll would be a great idea if 40k used d20s or even d10s to resolved combat; but a flawed idea with D6s. With 3 D6 roll opportunities per combat sequence (hit, wound, armor save). There are 216 possible outcomes. With only 2 D6 roll opportunities, there are only 36. 36 outcomes to represent the entire 40k combat balance. And since a hit roll of 1 is always a fail and a hit roll of 6 is always a success, it is more like only 24 outcomes where a unit's hit number or armor save actually makes a difference.

Having infantry be automatically wounded could work instead, but you would then have to rebalance all infantry units and would likely lead to wound bloat.

Personally, if you really wanted to reduce randomness and rolling time in 40k. You're better off just making advancing, charging, or battle-shock tests a fixed value instead of being a roll.