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On Average. But no game I have ever played has been an average game. There will always be above and below average results in every game you play.

Now am I saying this is a great mechanic? Nope. But it is the rule we have an there is no reason to just ignore it because there is only an 8.3% chance of doing 4+ MW.

It's not like we ignore Overwatch because there is only an 8.3% chance of doing a Wound with a Bolter shot against a T4 target.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Elfric wrote:
You still have a 50% chance of rolling 4 or more MW after the roll of a 6, no?

You do. You have an ~8% (assuming no re-rolls) chance of getting more than 3 damage over the two die rolls. Is that worth the extra roll? For every ~13 times you use this power, one of those times you will exceed 3 damage.

With no modifiers there is a 5.6% chance to safely cast a D6 smite (only on an 11).

This spell has an 69.5% chance to be cast without perils and a 16.7% chance to be D6, which makes it 11.6%. A CP reroll takes it above 20%.

Averages are also fine, but when dice are involved it tends to be hard to land a 2 in 36 over a 1 in 6. Hot dice will have a far better chance of landing big damage than a regular smite will so people will probably see this causing noticeable spikes - especially when sniping characters.

Ultimately it's because JJ honestly believes RanDoM is the pinnacle of good game design.

Not sure how this should work - Random
Not sure how many dice to roll - Random
Not sure which rules stack - Random
Not sure which rules apply - Random

JJ's golden rules to game design - The more dice rolled the better, Random= Balance/Fun.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

One roll, maybe not, but if you pile them on that is the result. It also has a gatcha mechanic build in

Gacha.. And that is not how that word means.

In fact the time factor is there not just in rolls durning the game. All the lore and painting etc is there to create a feed back loop, that makes the person that spend time reading stuff and painting stuff, add value to the game, which does not require any of those things to be played. It is also probably why people are ready to deal with bad rule writing better, it is like football fans. If your grandfather, your father and you were hooligans for a team, that is ~80 years of time investment in to the team, there is no way your suddenly going to decide that just because the team droped out of first division it is time to find another team to fight for.

What.

It amazes me sometimes with what analogies Karol will use for his perceived folly of buying into Grey Knights...

GW puts a lot of value in things that are very unlikely, because they can be memorable.
It's all about that game where a grot finished a knight and won the game, or in this case the Yncarne popping out of nowhere and one-shotting a 6W character with a single psychic power, completely tilting the battle. That's the kind of "heroic" things GW wants people to experience, so they add a lot of "if you roll 3 6s in a row, your small guy kills a big one, or your big one kills itself".
Most of the time it's useless rolling, slowing things down for the odd chance of something meaningful happening. So whether or not it's worth it depends on how much value you put into unlikely scenarios happening.

I'm curious as to why a lot of people play the game when all it seems they want to do is point at a guy and say "He hits X times, you take Y wounds, which means you remove Z models from that unit."

Isn't the whole point of the rule set to roll dice... and here we are fussing about rolling dice?

Gaze of Ynnead is just another way to randomize a result. The result is NEARLY the same as Smite, but different paths to get there, to make it feel different.

Pretty sure every psychic discipline has a power where you cast on Warp Charge, and then roll some dice again to evaluate results... this one just has a third roll (as opposed to rolling 9 dice and fish for 6's or whatever).

Pretty sure most of the forum here is made up of failed CPAs looking for a reason to get their excel on.

Purifying Tempest wrote:

Pretty sure most of the forum here is made up of failed CPAs looking for a reason to get their excel on.

They call themselves 'competitive' players here.

Purifying Tempest wrote:
Isn't the whole point of the rule set to roll dice...

No. If the whole point of your rules is to roll dice then you have made bad rules.

The point of the rules set is to provide rules to play the game. Some of those rules involve rolling dice to determine a random result. Oddly enough, Gaze of Ynnead involves rolling dice to determine a random result. So its a Win for Gaze of Ynnead.

 alextroy wrote:
The point of the rules set is to provide rules to play the game. Some of those rules involve rolling dice to determine a random result. Oddly enough, Gaze of Ynnead involves rolling dice to determine a random result. So its a Win for Gaze of Ynnead.

Successfully generating a random result does not make a rule good. I could make a smite variant that, instead of rolling a D3, has you roll a D6 to determine how many D6s you roll, roll those dice, roll another D6 to determine which number on your D6 results you're allowed to re-roll if desired, re-roll that D6 just because, ignore all of the D6s you've rolled so far, and then inflict D3 mortal wounds. You're rolling dice to determine a random result but I don't think anyone could claim that this hypothetical rule is anything other than awful.

You can't claim it's automatically bad either.

 Mmmpi wrote:

Purifying Tempest wrote:

Pretty sure most of the forum here is made up of failed CPAs looking for a reason to get their excel on.

They call themselves 'competitive' players here.

_Double_ ouch.

Does that mean more damage?

Moriarty wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:

Purifying Tempest wrote:

Pretty sure most of the forum here is made up of failed CPAs looking for a reason to get their excel on.

They call themselves 'competitive' players here.

_Double_ ouch.

Does that mean more damage?

Yes, but they'll 'math hammer' a reason why a lamer burn is somehow .00001% better, and therefor the only option.

Some other game systems (mostly thinking about historicals here) can have close to no randomness. Rolling a bunch of dice isn't required to play a tabletop wargame.
It is, however, deeply ingrained in 40K's identity (and GW's design philosophy as a whole). That's a big part of what makes it a beer & pretzel game.

Some people want to play the game competitively, and therefore want a ruleset that emphasizes tactics and strategy a lot more than random dice rolls, which isn't what 40K rules were designed for (maybe the design philosophy changed a bit with 8th ed., but it's still pretty much based on rolling buckets of dice, and having game changing events decided by a single die roll).
Usually the answer would be to play something else, but I guess lots of competitive player really enjoy 40K because of the minis/setting/is the big one out there/whatever, and couldn't care less about a 200 pages Napoleonic ruleset played by ~10 old guys with 30 years old pewter minis.
I think that's why many people are true 40K fan, but still criticize the rules a lot.
But there are also tons of players who do enjoy the random nature of some outcomes, and have a thrill every time they throw a die to find out if their supa-duppa psyker is going to obliterate a unit or nuke itself with a perils. In that sense, I'm not sure GW is actually bad a designing this type of rules, because randomness and a slim possibility of something big happening is appealing to many.

To be honest some of that randomness works. Enemy exploding your unit on a 6 and suffering casualties is memorable and fun. So GW probably just try to put this stuff everywhere. But sometimes too much is too much, and all these Not-Smites just like all the re-rolls of 1 make system bloated and samy.

 Peregrine wrote:

But why does this chance need to exist when the average damage is still the same? It's a change that seems to exist for the sole purpose of making people who are bad at math think they're doing something cool.[/quot

4d6 and 1d6*4 averages out to same. Are you claiming it's irrelevant which way you do it?

(hint. they are not. distribution of probabilities differ etc)

I can understand why GW did this (And all of the Not-Smite powers. The worst example, the C'tan ones).

People love to crutch out the math of this things.
As a fan RPG writer I have wrote a couple of systems.

One was a system of magic that had a ton of spells for specific effects, but then you had a couple of generic spells (Single damage one, area damage one) with generic descriptions to use them as you like: You could use the 3d6 generic fire damage as a fireball, as a flamethrower, as a ash whip, it didn't mattered, the interpretation and the roleplay part was free.

I also accepted suggestion for spells. And you know what suggestions people sent me? A ton of variatios of damage spells that at the end accomplished the same result.
Like "Instead of 3d6 why not 1d3 for each 2 levels into the spell?" That at the end of the day , accomplish the same result, don't give anything to the roleplay part, are pure mathematical cruntchs that people like. Why? Because when they can squeeze that little extra damage, something in their brain gives them a nerd-orgasm.

Thats why GW does all of those not-smite powers that are at the end of the day absolutely redundant. But people LOVES them, looking for the one that gives them that 0,5% more damage in that specific circustance is soooooo rewardig. As this thread shows.

And at the end of the day, when you write a rulebook for so many people, is very easy to fail into the trap of listening too much to what your fans want.

Gaze of Ynnead does 3 damage for each successful cast. The game is so much better now!

You guys spent more energy worrying about this bs than the extra time you'd wait for that single die roll from Gaze for the rest of your lives.

Randomness is a part of almost every game.

fresus wrote:
GW puts a lot of value in things that are very unlikely, because they can be memorable.
It's all about that game where a grot finished a knight and won the game, or in this case the Yncarne popping out of nowhere and one-shotting a 6W character with a single psychic power, completely tilting the battle. That's the kind of "heroic" things GW wants people to experience, so they add a lot of "if you roll 3 6s in a row, your small guy kills a big one, or your big one kills itself".
Most of the time it's useless rolling, slowing things down for the odd chance of something meaningful happening. So whether or not it's worth it depends on how much value you put into unlikely scenarios happening.

This, by the dark gods, THIS!

WH40k is an excuse to put the awesome models on the table and fight a battle in the 40k universe.

It has never been a particularly 'tight' ruleset, it has always had balancing issues and sometimes has had some awful, awful design choices which have mostly been fixed in 8th (I god damn hate you Gladius and infinite Daemon summoning from 7th, and I was a freaking Daemon player!)

A lot of people on this forum decry GW as bad game designers and how poor everything is, spouting off the maths behind it and moaning the game isn't good. It may not be good for you, GW have been very clear they wanted to make a Beer and Pretzels type of game, and with 8th they've succeeded to me! Local scene is thriving, narrative focused games are a blast and matched play... gets the job done. It's a game to play and relax, have fun and make those memorable moments of when a Grot took out that Terminator in overwatch, or when that single Firewarrior holds off a broodlord for 2 turns.

If you're bemoaning the lack of overall tightness and optimal play I honestly think you're looking at Gamesworkshop games wrong and only setting yourself up for both disappointment and bitter feelings.

(No but seriously, a single firewarrior vs my Broodlord for 2 turns? that damn blueberry better of been promoted to the biggest battlesuit he could find)