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Tone down lethality.

A return to S+2 wounds on 2s, and S-2 wounds on 6s.
A removal of AP-1/2 from almost all current AP-1/2 weapons.
A drop or reduction of most ++ saves (wtf do DA exarchs have a free 4++?).


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Oh, and if a Tactical Squad gets up to a standard tank or transport with a pair of Meltas, there should be a reasonable chance the tank is going boom - even if it's unhurt.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
Have rerolls occur after modifiers. This is much more intuitive, at least to me.

40k really does need the notion of "unmodified" rolls added to clarify this sort of thing. It would also make some of the patches unnecessary. If a Plasma Gun only exploded on an unmodified to-hit roll of 1 then you wouldn't need the extra rule to spell out that a +1 to-hit doesn't make the gun completely safe to overload.

Cover and Terrain is about the only thing I'd really want more detail in currently with the range of units and force sizes 40k plays at, especially if staying with D6's. I actually didnt mind the old 5E-7E TLoS rules too much, the 3E/4E area terrain rules made it really easy to keep entire offensive wings hidden until you were right on top of someone, especially with some of the faster armies out there.

Vehicle facings and firing arcs are no big loss, especially when they didn't apply to Monstrous Creatures and other similar units like artillery. Nobody ever seemed to mind a Wraithlord shooting out its butt and being T8 from all angles It also didnt help that most vehicles had similar or identical front/side armor so maneuver wasnt huge most of the time unless with something like a Deep Striking unit hitting a transport that had rolled up the board.

If we want to move away from D6's and into smaller force sizes or much longer games, D10's and greater stat varition would be great, but that would be a whole other edition at that point.

Armour facings should make a come back, even if it's as simple as 'hitting a target from X removes Y additional wounds'.

I see a lot of ideas confusing sophistication for complexity.

The only thing I can think of right now is to remove auto wound on 6. There really should be a cap on when a grot or nurgling can deal damage. It makes hordes and small arms fire much stronger than it has any right to be. Throwing pebbles at a steel door wont do anything, whether you throw 5, or 500. Something that brought a lot of tactical choices to the previous editions was the ability to literally tie up a unit in CC with a dreadnought or tank. It made armored targets feel like they were legitimately armored. Instead dreadnoughts and many vehicles have lost a deal of their utility. I enjoy the simplicity of every model being toughness based, but miss the tactical choices that armor value brought.

 gwarsh41 wrote:
I see a lot of ideas confusing sophistication for complexity.

The only thing I can think of right now is to remove auto wound on 6. There really should be a cap on when a grot or nurgling can deal damage. It makes hordes and small arms fire much stronger than it has any right to be. Throwing pebbles at a steel door wont do anything, whether you throw 5, or 500. Something that brought a lot of tactical choices to the previous editions was the ability to literally tie up a unit in CC with a dreadnought or tank. It made armored targets feel like they were legitimately armored. Instead dreadnoughts and many vehicles have lost a deal of their utility. I enjoy the simplicity of every model being toughness based, but miss the tactical choices that armor value brought.

When you do the math behind that, you'll find that it's not a problem at all. Anything that couldn't damage AV10 bevor is still so ineffective at damaging T7/3+ that you would only ever do it if there is no better target to attack.

 Jidmah wrote:

 gwarsh41 wrote:
I see a lot of ideas confusing sophistication for complexity.

The only thing I can think of right now is to remove auto wound on 6. There really should be a cap on when a grot or nurgling can deal damage. It makes hordes and small arms fire much stronger than it has any right to be. Throwing pebbles at a steel door wont do anything, whether you throw 5, or 500. Something that brought a lot of tactical choices to the previous editions was the ability to literally tie up a unit in CC with a dreadnought or tank. It made armored targets feel like they were legitimately armored. Instead dreadnoughts and many vehicles have lost a deal of their utility. I enjoy the simplicity of every model being toughness based, but miss the tactical choices that armor value brought.

When you do the math behind that, you'll find that it's not a problem at all. Anything that couldn't damage AV10 bevor is still so ineffective at damaging T7/3+ that you would only ever do it if there is no better target to attack.

Ah yeah it was so bad idea for me to destroy wraithknight on overwatch wih my conscripts. Yep yep.

Better terrain rules, yes, but also better rules for all the fortifications / kits they sell. At the moment very few of these are worth taking.

Actually, even just some missions where one / both players gets an allowance to spend on fortifications would go a long way.

In terms of vehicle facings, I would use the crossfire rules from Epic Armageddon. Basically if you can draw a line from the firing unit through the target to a friendly unit then the the target gets an additional negative to it's save (I would suggest -1). This would apply against infantry as well and would give another role for deep striking/ outflanking units.

tneva82 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 gwarsh41 wrote:
I see a lot of ideas confusing sophistication for complexity.

The only thing I can think of right now is to remove auto wound on 6. There really should be a cap on when a grot or nurgling can deal damage. It makes hordes and small arms fire much stronger than it has any right to be. Throwing pebbles at a steel door wont do anything, whether you throw 5, or 500. Something that brought a lot of tactical choices to the previous editions was the ability to literally tie up a unit in CC with a dreadnought or tank. It made armored targets feel like they were legitimately armored. Instead dreadnoughts and many vehicles have lost a deal of their utility. I enjoy the simplicity of every model being toughness based, but miss the tactical choices that armor value brought.

When you do the math behind that, you'll find that it's not a problem at all. Anything that couldn't damage AV10 bevor is still so ineffective at damaging T7/3+ that you would only ever do it if there is no better target to attack.

Ah yeah it was so bad idea for me to destroy wraithknight on overwatch wih my conscripts. Yep yep.

I wasn't aware you could pick other targets for overwatch.

Removed, rule#1 please! - BrookM

Sonsoftherock wrote:
Better terrain rules, yes, but also better rules for all the fortifications / kits they sell. At the moment very few of these are worth taking.

Actually, even just some missions where one / both players gets an allowance to spend on fortifications would go a long way.

They already have this via all of the Planet Strike missions. The defender can include an unlimited number of fortifications for FREE! They even recommend that you take a minimum of 6 fortifications and make each one a mission objective.


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I don't play competitively so many of the rule changes I would like to see regarding things like terrain, I've already house ruled with my friend. The terrain section of the rulebook even suggests that players implement their own special terrain rules, and makes some suggestions for "advanced terrain rules." With the tournament scene being what it is, I can understand GW wanting to keep the core game as simple as possible. There's nothing stopping you from introducing your own rule changes with your local group.

One thing I would like to see, however, is the elimination of weapons that get D3 or D6 shots in favor of replacing them with blast templates and scatter dice. D6 weapons are usually too expensive to justify a string of rolling 1s and 2s because you forgot to sacrifice your first born to the dice gods. Plus blast templates seems far more believable. As it is now, it feels like there's a rookie on the tank crew loading shells and he keeps dropping them.

The need to address the horde durability issue, and the allies issue.

I'd prefer to see the Horde durability addressed through making Flamers (all factions have these) do 1D6 shots per 5 models in the target unit.

I'd prefer to see the ally issue fixed by nerfing Stratagems. I feel the game would get better if you only had access to the stratagems available to your Warlord.

tneva82 wrote:
Ah yeah it was so bad idea for me to destroy wraithknight on overwatch wih my conscripts. Yep yep.

Considering it takes an average of 1,296 Conscripts rapid-firing on Overwatch to kill a Wraithknight from full health, over 5000pts of Conscripts, I'm going to guess that either a unit of Conscripts was the very last straw that broke the camel's back after actual AT weapons had done their job, or you rolled the mother of all flukes that shouldn't be considered representative of typical behavior.

I mean, needing 54 Conscripts rapid-firing on Overwatch to average a single wound sounds pretty much like 'so ineffective at damaging T7/3+ that you would only ever do it if there is no better target to attack' as Jidmah put it.

Reemule wrote:
I'd prefer to see the Horde durability addressed through making Flamers (all factions have these) do 1D6 shots per 5 models in the target unit.

I'd really like to see something like that implemented for all former Blast weapons- maybe throw in that you only get 1 attack if the target is a single model. As a Guard player it bothers me that weapons historically intended for anti-horde use are now poor at killing hordes, but are better tankbusters than dedicated AT weapons.

Remove pre-measuring from the game. It slows the game down and is one of the few things I feel really removes player skill from decisions. Being able to eye ball a shot was a skill and messing that up could really effect the game.

Reemule wrote:
Flamers (all factions have these)...

Not Necrons.


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HoundsofDemos wrote:
Remove pre-measuring from the game. It slows the game down and is one of the few things I feel really removes player skill from decisions. Being able to eye ball a shot was a skill and messing that up could really effect the game.

As a player with substantial vision issues, I'd rather we don't go back to a game style that highlights my disability. Premeasuing has made the game far far more playable.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
Remove pre-measuring from the game. It slows the game down and is one of the few things I feel really removes player skill from decisions. Being able to eye ball a shot was a skill and messing that up could really effect the game.

Coming from the changeover between Warmachine Mk2 and Mk3 (which introduced full pre-measuring) I find the idea that eyeballing distance should be a stand-in for player skill kind of silly; it's a simple gate mechanic that makes the game annoying to new players and is completely uninteresting once you get over the curve. It doesn't make the making of decisions any more interesting, it just makes the actual carrying out of the decisions you've made more annoying; it's like mandating all players roll their dice by throwing them into a tray from a distance of at least five feet and any dice that bounce out of the tray count as failures.

While I wouldn't say these add sophistication, the things our group does are pretty simple...

1) We play tokenhammer, so the IGOUGO is gone and it changes entirely the way you think about the game of 40K.
2) We tone down the "shoot from any point on a model" to be more fair...generally if 1/3rd of your model can see the other we go with it.
3) We keep vehicle carcasses on the table as added terrain, so disabling or destroying vehicles on bridges or key points is valuable.
4) We've invented new deployment cards and a "control of the battle space" deployment method where the person controlling the engagement has deployment options.
5) We've added plenty of house rules for terrain, frequently playing with acid oceans of rivers (savvy tank drivers will park in the acid and risk damage to protect themselves from infantry swarms)
6) We've used basic old school line of sight. If your unit is obscurred you get cover - we don't care if you're "in" cover.
7) We've modified some units (Terminators etc.) to be more reasonable so people actually get to play them.
8) We play with heavier terrain when possible...but this is something we've always done.

We're working on revamping drop pods, etc. Always fiddling with the game to make it more enjoyable. We've hit a pretty good spot so far - the biggest change of course being Tokenhammer.

 Elbows wrote:
While I wouldn't say these add sophistication, the things our group does are pretty simple...

1) We play tokenhammer, so the IGOUGO is gone and it changes entirely the way you think about the game of 40K.
2) We tone down the "shoot from any point on a model" to be more fair...generally if 1/3rd of your model can see the other we go with it.
3) We keep vehicle carcasses on the table as added terrain, so disabling or destroying vehicles on bridges or key points is valuable.
4) We've invented new deployment cards and a "control of the battle space" deployment method where the person controlling the engagement has deployment options.
5) We've added plenty of house rules for terrain, frequently playing with acid oceans of rivers (savvy tank drivers will park in the acid and risk damage to protect themselves from infantry swarms)
6) We've used basic old school line of sight. If your unit is obscurred you get cover - we don't care if you're "in" cover.
7) We've modified some units (Terminators etc.) to be more reasonable so people actually get to play them.
8) We play with heavier terrain when possible...but this is something we've always done.

We're working on revamping drop pods, etc. Always fiddling with the game to make it more enjoyable. We've hit a pretty good spot so far - the biggest change of course being Tokenhammer.

I've never heard of tokenhammer before, can you explain?

Without going into too much detail, each unit in your army creates a token. Tokens are gathered into a cup/mug/bag and players play a battle round "together" by drawing tokens from the bag --- drawing until an opposing token is drawn. Players then apply the tokens to units of their choice and play a mini turn with those units. It removes IGOUGO and removes 1st turn bonuses or alpha strikes. I'm doing a proper write-up on it now, and may have it on my blog at some point, so I'll link it if I do.

 Elbows wrote:
Without going into too much detail, each unit in your army creates a token. Tokens are gathered into a cup/mug/bag and players play a battle round "together" by drawing tokens from the bag --- drawing until an opposing token is drawn. Players then apply the tokens to units of their choice and play a mini turn with those units. It removes IGOUGO and removes 1st turn bonuses or alpha strikes. I'm doing a proper write-up on it now, and may have it on my blog at some point, so I'll link it if I do.

So, basically the system from Bolt Action?

Similar, but different. Bolt Action is one dice at a time, using tokens you can draw until your opponent's token is drawn --- and we occasionally add tokens in for environmental effects, etc. (another highlight is that this allows multi-army games, such as three-player games to be played without issue - something more or less impossible in standard 40K).

This allows you to have the occasional run of tokens (which you know ahead of time, unlike something like Bolt Action). However, a run of 3-5 tokens means you're more likely to have your opponent gain a run later in the turn.

It requires some minor changes to the basic game rules but fits in pretty well - we started using it playing 2nd edition a couple years ago. When 8th become popular we just switched it over to the current game with little issue. It's not reinventing the wheel, just ditching the IGOUGO nature of 40K for something more involving.