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I can understand the enjoyment of rolling lots of dice, but I feel it's better when it's not every weapon/squad. In WHFB 6th some squads might only get 5 attacks if you try to maximize rank bonuses, like Clanrats. But then you could bring out an elite unit that can manage 18 attacks, like Plague Monks with 6 in front. Then you could truly maximize the amount of attacks with hyper elite units, such as Chosen Chaos Warriors, with a Mark of Khorne, and two Hand Weapons, and suddenly, 4 attacks per model, with one that has 5, with 7 in front to maximize the amount of attacks, for a total of 29 attacks. Rolling tons of dice for that is a lot of fun, when you might have Norscans in ranks of 5 getting one attack each as standard.

The longest part of rolling lots of dice tends to be the gathering of said dice, other wise once you are at 10 or more dice the extra don't add a huge amount of time. Whilst I could see this rule working for an averages game, 40K ain't that. There is glory in a Punisher cannon unleashing 40 shots and hitting nothing or a troop squad on their game bringing down a Dreadnaught with some amazing rolls. It's these moments that give the game a story and excitment. Yes a majority of the time you make 20-30 hits but those aren't the rolls you care about, it's the epic/awful ones you do.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
I can understand the enjoyment of rolling lots of dice, but I feel it's better when it's not every weapon/squad. In WHFB 6th some squads might only get 5 attacks if you try to maximize rank bonuses, like Clanrats. But then you could bring out an elite unit that can manage 18 attacks, like Plague Monks with 6 in front. Then you could truly maximize the amount of attacks with hyper elite units, such as Chosen Chaos Warriors, with a Mark of Khorne, and two Hand Weapons, and suddenly, 4 attacks per model, with one that has 5, with 7 in front to maximize the amount of attacks, for a total of 29 attacks. Rolling tons of dice for that is a lot of fun, when you might have Norscans in ranks of 5 getting one attack each as standard.

Agreed. WHFB is a good example of how restraint with this kind of thing works well. Most units got 5-6 attacks. Really elite units, in specific formations, could get almost 30 but that was very rare. In later editions the floor went up to 10-11 attacks but the ceiling didn't really change much. It made elite units feel elite, even if they were only swinging at S3 or S4.

In 40k it's far too common to see units rolling 40+ dice, even very basic ones like Hormagaunts. Then you add various buffs on top and it gets ridiculous. That's why I think any rule that seeks to speed up the dice rolling in some way is missing the wood for the trees. The problem is the number of dice. The solution isn't shortcuts to rolling, but fundamental changes to how many attacks a lot of units actually get.

So I would be in the camp of having less dice rolls.

But you generally approach that in terms of game design.

That is either having fewer dice rolls build into the system.

Or having mechanics to limit dice rolls.

That could be instead of rolling lots of dice for squad a shooting b, you roll one and add 1 for every squad member left.

Or instead of say doubled shots with first rank fire, second rank etc, here the order/special rule becomes shots auto hit (36 shots hitting on a 4+ don't deviate much from 18 hits most of the time).

Of course then you ask why roll at all? There are a bunch of rulesets that count enough hits to kill on average results in a kill. A game I played recently did x shots per element (with modifiers). Every 6 shots killed one enemy element, with remainders being the target number for a dice roll to kill. Very fast to play, and here the game was to outmanoeuvre the enemy and bring force to bear (movement could be tricky). You wanted combat done quickly to get on with the game.

Because there will always be poeple that are extreemly lucky with dice. my oponent always trows an average of 5 sixes on 10 dice. i would love to let him use you system agains me. so my men would have a far greater chance to live.

 skeleton wrote:
Because there will always be poeple that are extreemly lucky with dice.

There are no people who are extremely lucky with dice. There are people who fall victim to confirmation bias and assorted other fallacies but dice are dice, period.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 skeleton wrote:
Because there will always be poeple that are extreemly lucky with dice.

There are no people who are extremely lucky with dice. There are people who fall victim to confirmation bias and assorted other fallacies but dice are dice, period.

I mean, in theory, there could conceivably one day be born a person who just so happens to roll very above average on their dice rolls over the course of a lifetime. Which I suppose you could call "lucky with dice."

D12 > D10

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I mean, in theory, there could conceivably one day be born a person who just so happens to roll very above average on their dice rolls over the course of a lifetime. Which I suppose you could call "lucky with dice."

In theory. In practice the odds against such a thing are so overwhelming that it will almost certainly never happen.

Playing a horde army, I never really found rolling lots of dice to be an issue. Just get a dice tray so that the dice aren't being spread across the gaming table, and you become quite quick at gathering successes and failures, you kind of just sweep your hand through pulling out either all the successes or removing all the failures. If using D6's then counting dice is fast, just learn your multiplication table and arrange the dice in a rectangle to count them out.

The nightmare when playing a horde army is the movement phase, deployment phase, and put-my-army-away phase I barely played any games with my Tyranid army because it was mind numbingly boring individually moving so many gaunts around the table.