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In the meta predictions mega thread, a discussion about templates had got me thinking about an easy rules design, that implements a template style weapon.

I want to present here how I would do it, and hear other peoples opinions and their own approaches.

My take on templates:
Template weapons should be weapons that punish clumping up in one spot.
This happens mostly because several units want to benefit of an aura, cover or staying out of line of sight
Currently, only few abilities allow hitting several units (C'tan powers, the Deathstrike missile, any other?).
Template are mostly critiqued that it forces people to perfectly space or their models, which is time consuming, and encourages arguments in edge cases, if a model is hit or not.
As these all slow down the game and are quite unsatisfying in my opinion, I would suggest a slightly different approach.
Instead of hitting all models that are under a template, the template weapon instead hits all units that are within the template diameter. I would refrain from a scatter mechanic.

Example: A weapon has D3 shots with a blast radius of 3". The shooting player chooses an enemy model. All units within 3" of the center of the chosen model are target of the D3 shots hitting on the ballistic skill of the shooting model.

Current issues with my proposal: determining the center of the unit might be cause for debate. Especially with tanks that are not a traditional box shape and don't come with a base.
Using just within 3" of the chosen model, measuring from the base, increases the size of the blast with the size of the chosen model. For infantry, this might not be that much of an issue.
Instead of the center if the model, the blast weapon could alternatively have a caveat that when targeting vehicles or monsters (or even models with a certain wounds threshold) only the targeted unit is hit.

Additionally, the amount of shots should be adjusted for some blast weapons, as certain swings in effectiveness might be undesirable.

What are your thoughts?

I happen to like the blast & scatter mechanic, even though it can admittedly be cumbersome at times. You're right, blast weapons should punish models too tightly packed - a war axiom for over the last hundred years is 'don't bunch up!'. The randomness of scatter also forces players to consider shooting near friendly forces. The mechanic of only striking one enemy unit makes little sense - who is going to shoot a weapon with blast effects near friendlies?

We play rules based upon earlier editions, so this may not completely apply. But if you wanted to rid yourself of random scatter, you could do the following: place the template center anywhere over an enemy unit and roll to hit - on a hit that many enemy models are struck by the blast. If you miss, the opponent places the template one inch away for each number the miss was by. Two inches might be better.
Models from both sides (if applicable) are tallied and hit. This eliminates the scatter die and puts friendly units in jeopardy. Simple.

That sounds like an interesting approach, thanks for sharing!

And thanks to the mods for moving this thread

Designing a 'template rule' in a vacuum is not a easy as it first looks like, because it needs to work in tandem with other stuff like your system for allocation of hits, cover rules and so on.

That being said, measuring distances from a target model is functionally identical to havin physical templates, you just slightly change the way you determine if people are in range.

A system that would be more in line with what you want to do is giving weapons a stat like e.g. Blast 3/1 and saying that the weapon can hit up to three additional models, which must be within 1'' of the original target. You roll to-hit rolls for all applicable models, then start distributing hits with your nominated target, than the nearest model, than the second-nearest and so on. Basically roll to hit up to N times, distributing hits from the target outward. By giving it two parts, you can have very powerful weapons with limited Area of Effect, or weak weapons with huge areas. Then you can add effects like cover reducing the range of such blasts and so on.

Now, in a system that had e.g. a 'size' stat for units, where regular humans are for example size 3, horsemen are size 5 and tanks are sized 20+ and so on, you could do it more abstractly, for exampe by having a gun with 'Blast 4' roll a to-hit die for every 4 size points of the target unit. So you'd roll 7-8 dies against a full unit of 10 marines, 6 against five horsemen, or 5 against a size-20 tank. Again, you can have stuff like fortified emplacements reduce the number of rolls for the attacker and so on. You can also use such a system to make firing into Close Combar comparatively easy: sum up the size of the whole combat, e.g. 10 Marines against 6 Horsemen is combined size 60 so you'd roll a total of 15 dice, and then you split the hits by size: 30 to 30, so an even split in this case. If you have fears of overly lethal blast weapons, give a second value for the maximal number of hits a weapon can score - if you limit the number of rolls you still take BS into account, if you limit the number of actual hits you are at maximum lethality against enemies that are bunched-up in huge hordes. This of course allows for tactical gameplay: if e.g. Marines are pretty resistant to frag grenades, lobbing some into a CC between Marines and comparatively squishy horde units might be a good idea, since the horde gets allocated more hits and the Marines can save the ones they do get.

Brickfix wrote:
Instead of hitting all models that are under a template, the template weapon instead hits all units that are within the template diameter. I would refrain from a scatter mechanic.

Example: A weapon has D3 shots with a blast radius of 3". The shooting player chooses an enemy model. All units within 3" of the center of the chosen model are target of the D3 shots hitting on the ballistic skill of the shooting model.

Current issues with my proposal: determining the center of the unit might be cause for debate. Especially with tanks that are not a traditional box shape and don't come with a base.
Using just within 3" of the chosen model, measuring from the base, increases the size of the blast with the size of the chosen model. For infantry, this might not be that much of an issue.

I kind of likes this. My main pet peeve with most template proposals is, as you mention:

Template are mostly critiqued that it forces people to perfectly space or their models, which is time consuming, and encourages arguments in edge cases, if a model is hit or not.

Your approach avoids that gripe. Having to keep units spread out is WAY less of a hassle than keeping individual models spread out. The only bit of weirdness I see is that shooting at a 5 man unit next to 2 other 5 man units is more effective than just shooting a 15 man unit. But I'd be willing to chalk that up to weird game abstraction. A mechanic to punish having units (not models) clumped up is probably more interesting to me than the current blast rules.

Rather than measuring distance form the center of the target model or from the edge of the target model, why not have them measure from a point on the target model's base selected by the attacker? So your blast doesn't grow in size by virtue of targeting a dreadnaught rather than a tac marine, and you don't have to argue about where the center of the base is. You basically just stick your tape measure against the edge of the model's base and see what's in range.

amanita wrote:
We play rules based upon earlier editions, so this may not completely apply. But if you wanted to rid yourself of random scatter, you could do the following: place the template center anywhere over an enemy unit and roll to hit - on a hit that many enemy models are struck by the blast. If you miss, the opponent places the template one inch away for each number the miss was by. Two inches might be better.
Models from both sides (if applicable) are tallied and hit. This eliminates the scatter die and puts friendly units in jeopardy. Simple.

Seems like this would still run into the problem of rewarding players for meticulous model placement. Wouldn't I be best off keeping my models in one or two ranks (two to avoid coherency issues) but spaced far enough apart so that a direct hit only hits the minimum possible number of models? And then on a miss, 2"should be enough to safely move the blast straight forward or back so that you're not hitting me at all. So functionally, you're either hitting the minimum number of models (depending on my base size and your blast size) or no models at all. Or, I suppose, some number between the minimum number of hits and 0 if my base sizes are large enough that you still hit something even after a scatter.

Maybe I'm missing something?

Tsagualsa wrote:
A system that would be more in line with what you want to do is giving weapons a stat like e.g. Blast 3/1 and saying that the weapon can hit up to three additional models, which must be within 1'' of the original target. You roll to-hit rolls for all applicable models, then start distributing hits with your nominated target, than the nearest model, than the second-nearest and so on. Basically roll to hit up to N times, distributing hits from the target outward. By giving it two parts, you can have very powerful weapons with limited Area of Effect, or weak weapons with huge areas. Then you can add effects like cover reducing the range of such blasts and so on.

If you enjoy this, then more power to you. But personally this sounds like the worst of all worlds.
The physical distance component means that you're still encouraged to slow the game down with meticulous model placement, but the limit on how many models you can hit means that you also aren't really rewarded for placing your shot under a big clump of juicy enemy models. Then, distributing the hits between multiple units seems like it would slow things down even more (although I recognize that you'd be able to do this step relatively quickly if you're good at quick division). So you don't get the satisfaction of landing an especially high number of hits, you do have to slow the game down with more careful model placement, and then you have to take the time to divide your total hits by X and distribute them. And hopefully it won't be unamibiguous which unit is the farthest away from the initial target, because that could lead to arguments over where the plasma cannon hits one extra meganob or merely one extra gretchin.

But again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

If you enjoy this, then more power to you. But personally this sounds like the worst of all worlds. :

But again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

Nah, i personally think that handling templates in an abstract way is the right thing to do, and every system that relies on single-model placement in any way is too slow for a reasonable wargame - that stuff is firmly in the territory of squad-level skirmish, everything platoon-level and up should no longer care about micromanaging of single infantry models.

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

If you enjoy this, then more power to you. But personally this sounds like the worst of all worlds. :

But again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

Nah, i personally think that handling templates in an abstract way is the right thing to do, and every system that relies on single-model placement in any way is too slow for a reasonable wargame - that stuff is firmly in the territory of squad-level skirmish, everything platoon-level and up should no longer care about micromanaging of single infantry models.

This, as per the other thread I remain utterly unconvinced of any of the benefits of the templates when they enforce silly micromanagement practices and have an unreliable physical element.

@ Wyldhunt: sure, spacing out models makes it hard to score hits...on a miss. That is kind of the point. A game should be robust enough with its rules to make always spreading out units to the maximum have some disadvantages. When you combine rules such as giving a cover save to an entire unit if any models benefit from the cover while also implementing a focus fire rule to target exposed models, players are forced to make calculated choices beyond aping maximum spread all the time.

@ Dudeface: templates efficiently regulate the number of models hit. The bigger the blast the more likely the more models are hit. It doesn't scale arbitrarily with the size of the targeted unit either, and there isn't a need to count the models beforehand to resolve the result. If you remove the scatter element like I mentioned above, half your problems are solved right away. It's not a perfect system, but it simulates blast weapons far better than simply assigning a random result to an arbitrary formula. And if a system doesn't have any risk for shooting a BLAST weapon near friendly units, it does a poor job of representation. I'm not saying other methods can't work, I just haven't seen a better one yet.

amanita wrote:@ Wyldhunt: sure, spacing out models makes it hard to score hits...on a miss. That is kind of the point. A game should be robust enough with its rules to make always spreading out units to the maximum have some disadvantages. When you combine rules such as giving a cover save to an entire unit if any models benefit from the cover while also implementing a focus fire rule to target exposed models, players are forced to make calculated choices beyond aping maximum spread all the time.

A good system does not need to spell every benefit or downside out with an explicit rule - they should arise naturally. For example, always spreading everything out maximally gives you less attacks in CC because not many models are in CC range, you can be made to lose unit coherency more easily, more models are outside of 'bubbles' for leadership or auras and so on. If these downsides are not enough to discourage maximum spread, they need to be adjusted.

amanita wrote:
@ Dudeface: templates efficiently regulate the number of models hit. The bigger the blast the more likely the more models are hit. It doesn't scale arbitrarily with the size of the targeted unit either, and there isn't a need to count the models beforehand to resolve the result. It's not a perfect system, but it simulates blast weapons far better than simply assigning a random result to an arbitrary formula. And if a system doesn't have any risk for shooting a BLAST weapon near friendly units, it does a poor job of representation. I'm not saying other methods can't work, I just haven't seen a better one yet.

One advantage that is not often mentioned: templates are extremely intuitive to use, and it's easy to guess how many hits your shot should realistically score just by eyeballing the table. That's a huge advantage compared to abstract formulas or random dice results.

So any template slows things down. You haven't lived until you have sat through a 1 hour set up where the enemy stands in perfect checkerboard formation...

The half way house is a mix of the two systems. For 40k it would be something like - blast weapons may allocate their hits to the target unit and any any unit with a model within 1" of the target unit.

Or as GW likes to layer rules you keep blast as is and add 'area-effect (X)' where X is the number of inches you measure from the unit to see if any other units are eligible targets.

That stops clumping.

 amanita wrote:

@ Dudeface: templates efficiently regulate the number of models hit. The bigger the blast the more likely the more models are hit. It doesn't scale arbitrarily with the size of the targeted unit either, and there isn't a need to count the models beforehand to resolve the result. If you remove the scatter element like I mentioned above, half your problems are solved right away. It's not a perfect system, but it simulates blast weapons far better than simply assigning a random result to an arbitrary formula. And if a system doesn't have any risk for shooting a BLAST weapon near friendly units, it does a poor job of representation. I'm not saying other methods can't work, I just haven't seen a better one yet.

The problem you will always encounter is that any "clumping" counter will immediately push people to maximise model placement, it's going to be fun watching 150+ infantry being spaced out exactly 2" to minimise risk. They regulate peoples behaviour more than anything, which is my biggest gripe.

A while back when working on a streamlined 'simplehammer' system the blast weapons included a hit limit.

i.e. Large Blast (5) meant that up to five hits could be caused the template, even if it touched more than five models.

The logic being that where there was no advantage to eeking out every last hit you'd have less argument, and also when being clumped up didn't multiply incoming damage by a factor of ten there would be less incentive to spend half an hour carefully spacing models.

On a similar 'remove potential points of argument' - the templates were altered to have six directional arrows. Scatter was determined by rolling a D6 and using the corresponding arrow on the template rather than any shaky-hand scatter dice and measuring tape action.

A.T. wrote:
A while back when working on a streamlined 'simplehammer' system the blast weapons included a hit limit.

i.e. Large Blast (5) meant that up to five hits could be caused the template, even if it touched more than five models.

The logic being that where there was no advantage to eeking out every last hit you'd have less argument, and also when being clumped up didn't multiply incoming damage by a factor of ten there would be less incentive to spend half an hour carefully spacing models.

Seems like that would functionally punish players *less* for failing to agonize over model placement, but you'd still be punishing them. With good (read: time-consuming) model placement, you could usually keep a large blast from catching more than 2 or 3 models at a time. Putting the limit at 5 means you're not as screwed after, for instance, piling in during combat, but you're still punished if you don't keep your guys spread out while on the march.

Or in other words, it seems like that would reduce the problem but not solve it.

On a similar 'remove potential points of argument' - the templates were altered to have six directional arrows. Scatter was determined by rolling a D6 and using the corresponding arrow on the template rather than any shaky-hand scatter dice and measuring tape action.

Ah, but see, then you either make it possible to game unit formations so they're harder to hit or risk letting people game the template placement by rotating it so that it's more likely to hit more models. More seriously, this is another good way to *reduce* the problem, but the problem still exists.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Or in other words, it seems like that would reduce the problem but not solve it.

That was the general idea. Put less on the line without invalidating the choice and try to reduce areas where disagreements would occur.

The idea was that people would place the template rotated in a direction of their choice and taking the one in six chance of getting lucky. It was mainly intended to reduce disagreements over scatter direction by giving large straight guide lines on the template itself.

In terms of meticulously spreading models out a time limit works (and the blast limit reduces the penalty for horde players who just don't have the time). But a better solution is probably more risk/reward for players who don't time their turns - such as a much shorter 'defenders react' action leaving spread out units greatly weakened if assaulted.

Dudeface wrote:

 amanita wrote:

@ Dudeface: templates efficiently regulate the number of models hit. The bigger the blast the more likely the more models are hit. It doesn't scale arbitrarily with the size of the targeted unit either, and there isn't a need to count the models beforehand to resolve the result. If you remove the scatter element like I mentioned above, half your problems are solved right away. It's not a perfect system, but it simulates blast weapons far better than simply assigning a random result to an arbitrary formula. And if a system doesn't have any risk for shooting a BLAST weapon near friendly units, it does a poor job of representation. I'm not saying other methods can't work, I just haven't seen a better one yet.

The problem you will always encounter is that any "clumping" counter will immediately push people to maximise model placement, it's going to be fun watching 150+ infantry being spaced out exactly 2" to minimise risk. They regulate peoples behaviour more than anything, which is my biggest gripe.

As I said, a game with mechanics that encourage people to not always spread out to the max helps mitigate this problem but I get what you are saying. It's almost more of a 'slow play' issue than anything else. We had a regular who would treat each model as a chess piece, moving each piece to a new position and without removing his fingers he would look over the entire board to see what enemy models had LOS to his model. This a behavioral issue more than a rules issue, and similar to measuring out a 2" spread. It's more player execution than anything - if somebody is really quick measuring out their squad nobody cares. We've used a movement phase timer to encourage some players to not stall, whether it's intentional or not.

I don't know. Using timers seems like it just makes horde players damned if they do and damned if they don't. They get punished by blasts if they don't spend time placing models carefully, but they get punished by the timers if they do.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I don't know. Using timers seems like it just makes horde players damned if they do and damned if they don't. They get punished by blasts if they don't spend time placing models carefully, but they get punished by the timers if they do.

This, I'm 100% convinced there is no fair or reasonable way for this game to support the templates in any format which present any actual gameplay benefit that outweighs the potential downsides. a 3" template will typically hit 1-3 minis in smaller units, a large blast was rarely more than 5, so the current blast implementation for me is actually almost the exact same outcome for far less hassle. It only goes wonky when you start auto getting dozens of shots at a 12 man unit etc.

So personally I'd look to adjust the current blast parameters and keep it an abstraction.

My suggestion from the prior thread (with slight edit) for your consideration:

Blast: Select a model in the target unit that is visible to the attacking model. If the selected model is Infantry or has a Wound Characteristic of 3 or less, make one attack for the selected model and one additional attack for each model within 2" of the selected model. If any of these models are in different units, resolve those attacks as an attack against that model's unit. If the selected model is not Infantry and has a Wound Characteristic of 4 or more, make 1 attack against that unit for every 3 Wounds (rounded up) of the Wound Characteristic of the selected model.

My thought:
Large Blast: If there are more hits than models in the target unit, once you have allocated a total of least 1 hit for each model in the unit, you may then apply remaining hits to another unit within 2" of any model in the original targeted unit.

This would apply to not all blast weapons; probably anything that was once Ordnance, or anything that you'd reasonably expect to have a very large blast radius; ones with lots of shots really.

It's fairly abstract, sure, and could lead to weird situations, but keeping the game flowing and not getting bogged down in minutiae is also important. Spreading out a unit is no longer necessary, but keeping units spread out from each other becomes so. Much less fiddling with spacing, but you still have to think about it (a little bit).

 alextroy wrote:
My suggestion from the prior thread (with slight edit) for your consideration:

Blast: Select a model in the target unit that is visible to the attacking model. If the selected model is Infantry or has a Wound Characteristic of 3 or less, make one attack for the selected model and one additional attack for each model within 2" of the selected model. If any of these models are in different units, resolve those attacks as an attack against that model's unit. If the selected model is not Infantry and has a Wound Characteristic of 4 or more, make 1 attack against that unit for every 3 Wounds (rounded up) of the Wound Characteristic of the selected model.

This seems like an odd one to me. The 2" part means that you're still forced to keep your models spread out to minimize incoming damage. The 1 attack per 3 wounds thing means that something like a vindicator gets more powerful when targeting an imperial knight than when targeting a a rhino, which feels weird.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kcalehc wrote:
My thought:
Large Blast: If there are more hits than models in the target unit, once you have allocated a total of least 1 hit for each model in the unit, you may then apply remaining hits to another unit within 2" of any model in the original targeted unit.

This would apply to not all blast weapons; probably anything that was once Ordnance, or anything that you'd reasonably expect to have a very large blast radius; ones with lots of shots really.

It's fairly abstract, sure, and could lead to weird situations, but keeping the game flowing and not getting bogged down in minutiae is also important. Spreading out a unit is no longer necessary, but keeping units spread out from each other becomes so. Much less fiddling with spacing, but you still have to think about it (a little bit).

I think I'd be okay with this. Not sure if I prefer this or the OP's suggestion. OP's suggestion would make it easier to threaten nearby enemy units and thus makes blasts more of an anti-clustering mechanic, but that's also a bit gamey.

Something else we haven't really discussed is character sniping.

Implement them as they were but make it so that the scatter is always in the direction of a table corner. Scatter dice could then have four sides showing different table corners, one side that shows a hit, and one side that shows a miss where the marker isn't placed. Measuring between two fixed points is easier than to a die that could land in rather awkward places.

 Kcalehc wrote:
My thought:
Large Blast: If there are more hits than models in the target unit, once you have allocated a total of least 1 hit for each model in the unit, you may then apply remaining hits to another unit within 2" of any model in the original targeted unit.

This would apply to not all blast weapons; probably anything that was once Ordnance, or anything that you'd reasonably expect to have a very large blast radius; ones with lots of shots really.

It's fairly abstract, sure, and could lead to weird situations, but keeping the game flowing and not getting bogged down in minutiae is also important. Spreading out a unit is no longer necessary, but keeping units spread out from each other becomes so. Much less fiddling with spacing, but you still have to think about it (a little bit).

My only gripe with this is that if I had a 5 man unit in a straight line and it takes 6 hits, I get a weird pill shaped explosion. Also, would I need to roll to wound for the second unit?

It's great to see so much different responses and opinions. I would like to add to things:

In my initial suggestion I wrote about measuring from the center if the model. A better approach might be too actually use a template. After holding the center if the template above the target miniature, each unit that has at least one model partially or wholly under the template, is hit. This would simplify rules for monsters, tanks, bigger bases.

Concerning weird "explosion shapes", in my mind the way wounds are allocated in this edition already takes away a layer of "realism" so the exact shape of the explosion can by safely abstracted without a bit immersion loss in my opinion. Additionally, explosions may hurl rocks and shrapnel quite a distance, resulting in a person in the immediate vicinity surviving unscathed, while his mate 5 meter away gets hit by a sharp pierce of iron.

I'm personally not a big fan of scattering templates. It's interesting if a template scatters over friendly units, adding some decision making/risk management, but that's an edge case I have rarely encountered. I don't think that moving the template around after an initial hit is worth it, if the hits to all the units affected by the template are randomized afterwords, anyway. At least this would be true with my initial suggestion. Another interesting mechanic I have encountered in Dropzone: role to hit. If the target is hit, place the template to determine all models hit by the blast. On a miss with a dice of 2+, only the initial target is hit with a -2 strength ( energy in Dropzone) hit. In a natural 1, nothing happens.
This mechanic is might be better suited for fast paced games, but is a bit gamey and less immersive.