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I've played certain games where an opponent or yourself are shooting at a model that has troops in front of it.

Like, for instance, a deffdred is walking behind a blob of boys. The shooter takes a shot at the deffdred and the dred takes a 5+'cover save.

Now, if you take the cover save, nothing happens, but shouldn't you lose an ork? Technically the shot was absorbed by cover, being an ork body.

Same should go if you're shooting thru your own troops. If the opponent decides to take a cover save and makes it, shouldn't you hit one of your own troops?

If this were a strict simulation you should, but there's a degree to which we need to consider how much this might slow down the game. Not to mention the fact that we then have to start looking at how much Stealth and Shrouded on the model affects whether the attack was stopped by the cover from the intervening models or the cover on the target and it starts to get byzantine and fuzzy.

I believe the rulebook says that a cover save conferred by troops represents the distraction of A)the possibility of hitting your own guys, or B) a closer, more imminent threat.

Johnnytorrance wrote:

Now, if you take the cover save, nothing happens, but shouldn't you lose an ork? Technically the shot was absorbed by cover, being an ork body.

Not necessarily the case, as in all the threads like this, you're missing the fact that cover saves in 40K combine failed shots due to both cover and concealment. If you fire a lascannon at a model standing in tall grass, and it makes its cover save, it's not that a particularly tough stalk of grass soaked up the shot, but instead the firer missed, due to not having a clear view of the target.

For units providing cover, the model is aiming for the target behind the intervening unit, trying to keep whatever's between them from ruining the shot. A successful cover save maybe means an ork boy just took a multimelta to the face, or it means that the howling scrum of boyz kept blocking the good shots, and the one he took was a bad angle. Or he got distacted by someone chuckign a choppa at his head.

Ork grots used to have a rule like this.