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best example of 40k randomness is that the by fluff best anti-tank weapons are 1 shot with D6 damage

so of course the supposed anti tank weapons are not taken because they can swing very hard and people rather use something more reliable even if this means using high rate of fire anti-infantry weapons

other games going into similar mechanics have such weapons with an equivalent of 2 shots and D3 damage, which has the same damage potential as 1 shot D6 but is less random

 kodos wrote:
best example of 40k randomness is that the by fluff best anti-tank weapons are 1 shot with D6 damage

so of course the supposed anti tank weapons are not taken because they can swing very hard and people rather use something more reliable even if this means using high rate of fire anti-infantry weapons

other games going into similar mechanics have such weapons with an equivalent of 2 shots and D3 damage, which has the same damage potential as 1 shot D6 but is less random

I don't think this is a symptom of the randomness in the damage stat, it's more to do with the fact that GW has decided that in order to minimize skew lists they should make anything bigger than a rifle wound tanks on 5+ and actual dedicated AT wound tanks on a 4+. Other games tend to try and make it actually harder to do any damage at all to a tank without dedicated AT weapons.

 kodos wrote:
best example of 40k randomness is that the by fluff best anti-tank weapons are 1 shot with D6 damage

We've seen the opposite. We spent 2 editions with 3+D3 and 6+D6 and stuff like that. Things were too dangerous. Too reliable. Too lethal.

I don't mind the rolling, to begin with, or the swingy damage weapons. I like the high of rolling well, and the 'Ah! Maybe next time!' of rolling low. Every time I fired my Tyrannofex (a very swingy weapon with 2D6 damage) we both held our breaths over what was going to happen. Once I rolled double 6. Another time a 5 and a 6. The hits were devastating. Another time I rolled a 3, and did nothing. His Lascannons did a similar thing back to me, and having my big bugs hanging on with 1 or 2 wounds made the game more interesting.

It never felt out of place. It honestly felt exciting.

Now I'm all about efficiency and consistency, but I've long since accepted that I can do everything in my power to help increase the chances of an outcome, but I cannot ensure that result because this game uses dice... and I'm ok with that.

I also don't mind rolling To Hit/To Wound/To Save. I don't think every hit should automatically do something, and I think saving throws add in much-need interactivity to the game. I played so many damned games of 2nd Edition where all cover did was decrease the chances of hitting your target; it did nothing to actually protect you. Then they'd roll To Wound, and the abundance of armour save modifiers would mean that you just removed models. Guard vs Eldar was an exercise in frustration, as the only thing you got to do during the Eldar turn was remove your Guard models. 3rd onwards changed that. I could always attempt to save my guys.

I think saving throws are absolutely vital to the style of game 40k is. They can be make or break, they can be miraculous, and they can be soul-crushing. I think saving throws keep the non-player player involved in the game, and I think they add to the story each game tells.

You're all free to disagree with me, but in much the same way I think that Alternate Activation is not the panacea people think it to be, I don't think further abstraction is going to help 40k all that much.

it is not only the damage stat but also the single shot

1 shot, 4+ to hit, 4+ to wound, 1-6 damage is something were you say to reliable take down a target with 6 hit points you take 8 such weapons
so 5+ to wound is still better if you have a fixed 2 damage and much higher rate of fire

and this is nothing new, it was already a problem in 6th for the same reason

40k has a lot of randomness going for it that can be avoided by taking weapons/options that roll more dice, which slows the game down and swings the balance to something that was not expected by the designers (and called unfluffy and WAAC, as by the fluff you should use the supposed weapon and not the one that gets the job done)

other games design their weapons to get the job done, and balance that by getting only that job done and not all others as well by accident (have a laser cannon being 2 shots damage 3, or 1 shot 2D3 damage would solve issues, and people asked for this since vehicles got hit points)

Oh I agree about the high-rate of fire/mid damage thing. But as you said, that's been a problem for a while, exacerbated further in 8th/9th/10th due to the idiotic To Wound rules that do not prevent damage at all, which tends to make bumps in Strength not all that important, but things like +1 To Wound overly important.

Dust Warfare has target classes (eg Soldier 2, Vehicle 5, and so on) and each weapon has a different firepower rating against each class. Find your weapon profile, go over to the correct column for the target class, roll that many dice, any that show 5+ are a hit, sustained fire lets you re-roll fails. The target then takes armor saves and damage is assigned.

Those are not target classes they are armor values.

Armor 1 soldiers have no armor, 2 have flak, 3 are power armor, and 4 are heavy mech suits. to represent how hard they are to damage the number of attack dice you get for the same gun goes down as the armor goes up to the point you sometimes cannot hurt them. it is very evident on vehicles as light or open topped vehicles can be hurt by small arms, once you get to medium tank level (4) you can no longer hurt them with small arms and must use AT weapons. it also helps that aside from the one special super weapon each factions gets all guns in the game have the same stat-IE a machinegun is a machinegun no matter what faction uses it. they added in the fact that even though the armor class is "all around" for vehicles the weapon mounts themselves have facings. lethality is as you said further reduced by the fact aside from characters with the ace gunner skill...everybody shoots like ORKs

On top of that there are a couple other mitigating balance mechanics
-reaction
if an enemy unit activates within LOS and 16" of a unit that has not yet activated the reacting unit can roll 2 dice and on a 5+ can get up to 2 (both dice) activations that interupt the active unit.
-hard counters
several weapons in the game specifically ignore infantry saves (artillery), others cover saves(grenade) and a few ignore all saves (fire, railguns, and close combat attacks)

This leads to games where both players are very actively involved even when it is not their turn. additionally since activated units only get 2 actions per turn it is quite impossible to "deathstar" a unit or alpha strike an enemy army.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

I also don't mind rolling To Hit/To Wound/To Save. I don't think every hit should automatically do something, and I think saving throws add in much-need interactivity to the game. I played so many damned games of 2nd Edition where all cover did was decrease the chances of hitting your target; it did nothing to actually protect you. Then they'd roll To Wound, and the abundance of armour save modifiers would mean that you just removed models. Guard vs Eldar was an exercise in frustration, as the only thing you got to do during the Eldar turn was remove your Guard models. 3rd onwards changed that. I could always attempt to save my guys.

I think saving throws are absolutely vital to the style of game 40k is. They can be make or break, they can be miraculous, and they can be soul-crushing. I think saving throws keep the non-player player involved in the game, and I think they add to the story each game tells.

You're all free to disagree with me, but in much the same way I think that Alternate Activation is not the panacea people think it to be, I don't think further abstraction is going to help 40k all that much.

I agree about the saving throw, but I wonder about the Wound roll. Compacting the experience down to just two rolls, one per player, incorperating the S v T into modifiers for To Hit /Save. Not sure how that would hold up with all the possible variety, but it feels possible. Grimdark Future forgoes a To Wound, iirc.

Like I said, I don't think more abstraction would really add anything to 40k.

Yes, you could represent a Guard Lascannon and Marine Lascannon with different "firepower" levels, or whatever term you want to come up with, but I'd prefer it if the "Lascannon" was the same no matter who was using it, but how effectively it was used came down to the skill of the user.

GW core games have always been about rolling lots of dice; its a big thing they've always had and honestly I don't see that going anywhere. I'd also argue that whilst you can make the game more efficient in cutting out dice rolls; having lots of dice rolls isn't inherently a bad thing.

The issue isn't so much how many times you roll a dice; the issue often swings back to how GW often has very finalistic results on dice. Either almost or actually nothing happens or everything happens.

GW leans into very swingy results and high lethality. Which means for all that dice rolling you often come out the other end either doing nothing or obliterating whatever it was you attacked.

Even if you change to gunnery tables or back to the old table system or approach things like One Page Rules does; you still hit the core issue which is what those rolls define in game and how powerful they are.

At its most insane extreme of this we have the AoS double turn mechanic where a single, non modified, non game state influenced, dice roll can give you two turns in a row; or not.

 LunarSol wrote:
What makes 40k highly random is everything is technically pretty low odds overcome with brute force volume. Like, hitting on 3s, wounding on 3s with a 5+ save is pretty good odds for 40k, but the actual probability is quite low. Like even, 2s, 2s, no save fails a bit less than a third of the time. You can definitely work within expected outcomes, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of variance when it comes to the actual outcome.

That's so true. I discovered this when I played Aeronautica and realised that having perfect positioning and average rolls results in exactly as meh outcome as positioning poorly and getting lucky. The only moment when some really impactful result was achieved was when you got positioning right AND rolled great.

And it translates to other "GW-style probabilities". The ceiling of how well you perform an action is pretty low (point and click super-range shooting for example) but on average doesn't result in anything spectacular. For that you need above average rolls.

This is opposed to, for example, Warmachine, where setting up a perfect solution to a situation with so many tools and options is rather hard (I have a lot of experience in this game and I still think how I could have squeezed a few more % of efficiency out of my moves every time I play) but if you do this you can expect great results even with average or below average rolls. Play well and bad luck can't hurt you and good luck is just unnecessary overkill.

 JNAProductions wrote:
It also allows the same quick resolution system for anything from a Lascannon to a Lasgun.

How would you implement a look-up table that accounts for hitting, wounding, saves, and FNP?

basically by having the lookup relate to the number of actions not the probability itself directly. throwing in FNP or similar and its now a 4d6 distribution. the probability can be a lookup, you now have a die roll for a column shift on that table.

that said though the point I made is basically does that make for a more enjoyable or less enjoyable game? it could well be a lot faster, and once you start playing with percentages you have a much wider range of results possible over base d6, but you end up with a game that isn't 40k

 Insectum7 wrote:
I agree about the saving throw, but I wonder about the Wound roll. Compacting the experience down to just two rolls, one per player, incorperating the S v T into modifiers for To Hit /Save. Not sure how that would hold up with all the possible variety, but it feels possible. Grimdark Future forgoes a To Wound, iirc.

This is how Conqueror works. Since it's a fantasy/historical system, melee is the decisive form of combat and so both players can roll hits, announce results and roll saves. It goes pretty quickly.

The key question is: what is the player's job in the framework of the game? What role is he playing? In most games it's battlefield commander, but 40k makes army selection a key element of play, so one could argue that's a logistics function.

The point is that just designating targets and rolling buckets of dice doesn't require a lot of strategic thinking. If you start in range, going first is what you want, but that's random, and then how the buckets of dice fall is random. I would say GW has consistently rated the ability to maximize list/special rules combinations over any battlefield-oriented skill.

This is also a function of churn, because GW needs ever-growing product lines to make money. The old 2nd ed. concept of everyone using essentially the same gear (with some tweaks and variations) and therefore fighting in similar ways (or standing apart, as the Tyranids did), placed the emphasis on tactics because there simply wasn't as much to choose from.

Some weapons were just good in general, and most had more flexibility, yet at the same time there was a sharp division between anti-infantry and anti-tank.

Shorter weapon ranges, more protective cover (and LOS rules) meant armies had to advance to contact, and units with high movement rates could make some radical flanking moves to transform the battlespace. I don't think that's happening now.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I think saving throws are absolutely vital to the style of game 40k is. They can be make or break, they can be miraculous, and they can be soul-crushing. I think saving throws keep the non-player player involved in the game, and I think they add to the story each game tells.

I'd be more sympathetic to this if A. I weren't usually in the position of my armies routinely being denied saves altogether, though admittedly this has gotten better in 10th, and B. Rolling saves actually involved some sort of interactivity with the game, rather than being a mechanic that the other player could just as easily resolve.

I don't mind how Grimdark Future or Dust do it, where the attacker rolls to hit and the defender rolls saves and that's it, each player gets one roll so it's quick and easy and outright ignoring the defender's save is rare. But I'd still rather play a system where the defender has the opportunity to react, immediately act, or otherwise actually do something to interact with the game besides just roll dice for thirty minutes to see how many of their dudes die.

And while I understand your reservations about AA, I think the fact that GW has to find something for the inactive player to do- and settles on a mechanic where they don't actually have any input, and are just contributing to the mechanical resolution of the active player's decisions- speaks volumes about the current level of player interactivity.

Battlefleet Gothic is another pure IGOUGO game and one where the inactive player does very little rolling, but the inactive player having the option to Brace For Impact at any time gives them agency and has them hanging on the result of the attacker's rolls. At any time you can decide to brace and get a 4+ FNP against all damage, but at the cost of reduced capability in your next turn.

Horus Heresy 2.0 is also IGOUGO but with a reaction system. Your primary responsibility as the inactive player isn't rolling, it's looking for the right opportunity to spring a reaction and throw a wrench in the enemy's turn.

AA isn't a panacea and there are other ways maintain player interactivity, but it is a straightforward way to keep player engagement up and increase the number of decision points beyond big pendulum swings where the only thing stopping the inactive player from going to make a sandwich is the game requiring them to be dice monkey.


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 Insectum7 wrote:
I agree about the saving throw, but I wonder about the Wound roll. Compacting the experience down to just two rolls, one per player, incorperating the S v T into modifiers for To Hit /Save. Not sure how that would hold up with all the possible variety, but it feels possible. Grimdark Future forgoes a To Wound, iirc.

When I started looking at Grimdark Future I thought the condensed hit system (roll to hit -> target takes saves) was going to make units feel bland, but after spending some time with the game I changed my mind. 40K uses Toughness, Save, and Wounds as mechanisms to represent durability, but the separation between some of those is more arbitrary than modeling any meaningful difference between them. If I compare two tanks, what does it mean that one of them has a point higher Toughness? Is that more armor- and if so, why isn't that part of the armor save? Is it more mass- and if so, why isn't that more Wounds? What does it actually mean that a meltagun, the supreme anti-armor weapon with super high armor penetration ability and damage, only wounds a tank on a 5+? It's really good at penetrating armor and does a lot of damage when it connects, but it just... doesn't do anything 2/3 of the time?

Really the most significant effect Toughness has on 40K is acting as a mild filter for differing durability of infantry units, but the difference between wounding on 3+ and 4+ (for most things) is so minor that it can still be captured elsewhere or abstracted out, and nowadays GW has no problem with multi-wound infantry to show significant increases in durability. Once you get past basic W1 dudes, the combination of save to represent armor and wounds to represent overall toughness provides pretty intuitive levers for 'how hard is this thing to hurt' versus 'how much hurt can this thing take'.

And at the risk of beating a dead horse: 40K doesn't do much with the to-hit roll, using it as a largely static filter to uniformly reduce damage. I'd wager that making to-hit into an opposed check against a how-hard-is-it-to-hit stat would add a lot more to the game than consolidating some of the current defensive stats would take away, while still reducing the amount of rolling overall.

Kill Team uses this single opposed roll of Attack vs Defence and it works well enough. Most importantly it doesn't have these high-impact, high-variance singular rolls like charge or D6 damage which make big WH40K feel so silly and unpredictable.

I think looking up tables and stats is a chore. The main gameplay loop being asking your opponent to look up abilities and stats and then using your 3+ gunnery tables sounds like something that should be a video game and not a board game. Rolling 20 dice is not a big deal. Finding a way to make a mob of Ork Boyz only roll 20 dice would be neat, but I don't see value in making everything into a 2d6 roll if you spend tonnes of time looking at a gunnery table instead of having a simple system with reasonable and easy to remember break-points.

Toughness determines how durable something is vs Poison and various common types of weapons and acts as fractions of a wound, so if a unit is more durable than a 1W T3 Guardsman but not quite 2W T3, it can be 1W T4. GW aren't really using it optimally so I'd be okay with removing it. If not removed then simplify what doesn't need to be complex. Make all vehicles the same Toughness unless you find a good reason for them to be different. Don't give units unique abilities to differentiate them from units that are already plenty different in the first place.

 vict0988 wrote:
I think looking up tables and stats is a chore. The main gameplay loop being asking your opponent to look up abilities and stats and then using your 3+ gunnery tables sounds like something that should be a video game and not a board game. Rolling 20 dice is not a big deal. Finding a way to make a mob of Ork Boyz only roll 20 dice would be neat, but I don't see value in making everything into a 2d6 roll if you spend tonnes of time looking at a gunnery table instead of having a simple system with reasonable and easy to remember break-points.

Toughness determines how durable something is vs Poison and various common types of weapons and acts as fractions of a wound, so if a unit is more durable than a 1W T3 Guardsman but not quite 2W T3, it can be 1W T4. GW aren't really using it optimally so I'd be okay with removing it. If not removed then simplify what doesn't need to be complex. Make all vehicles the same Toughness unless you find a good reason for them to be different. Don't give units unique abilities to differentiate them from units that are already plenty different in the first place.

This I think is the way to do this, take that ork mob and find a way to cap the number of dice rolled

Can think of a few ways, like say each dice counts as two attacks (half the number), if it works it does double the damage. 1-20 attacks, roll however many dice, 21-40 each dice counts as two, 41-60 each counts as three etc.

keeps it manageable.

 vict0988 wrote:
I think looking up tables and stats is a chore.

A game designer once said that resolving an action in game should take about as much time as it does to perform it in real life.

Complex gunnery tables in BFG are entirely appropriate as the crew actually do ballistic calculations before firing.

For shooting an assault rifle, person to person, in 40k, not so much. Three rolls of dice, with re-rolls on at least one of them usually, is already pushing it.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Complex gunnery tables in BFG are entirely appropriate as the crew actually do ballistic calculations before firing.

You're talking like I described tax code.

'My cruiser has 12 firepower, you're a capital ship with 5+ armor and you're closing on me. Okay, going across, that's 4 dice. Oh wait, you're inside of 15cm, so it's 6 dice needing 5+.' And then you roll six dice and the attack is resolved.

I understand disliking tables on principle, but this method is inarguably faster than figuring out all of the same conditional modifiers and resolving them via a sequence of discrete rolls. That's the whole point of using a table- instead of needing 3 rolls that whittle 12 dice to 8 dice to 6 dice and then figure out the final result, you abstract out the first two rolls and just roll for the last. It has implications on the randomness of outcomes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
I think looking up tables and stats is a chore.

A game designer once said that resolving an action in game should take about as much time as it does to perform it in real life.

I must remember it the next time I play Civilisation:Through the Ages ;D

the gunnery table stuff works exceedingly well in naval games, but more because of how naval gunnery actually works

e.g. "Victory at Sea" (more or less 40k naval) uses the buckets of dice principle, 12 gun battleship? that will be 12 dice.. apply modifiers and roll 'em.

GHQ Micronaughts uses a single D20 for the salvo to see if the firing ship gets the range (again with modifiers) and if it gets the range a second dice to see how many shells hit.

this works because the 12 guns fire a spread to increase the chances of getting a hit, all hitting is essentially impossible.

GW adopt the bucket of dice model and generally stick with it, and until you start rolling more than 20 dice it more or less works for what they are doing. just leads to very predictable actions of large groups and very swingy actions for smaller groups

Maybe a good side of sticking to D6 is that you don't need a lot of different dice and to remember what dice is used for what, that'd mostly apply to people not playing too often?

I hold no grudge against D6, works perfectly in BA that is largely inspired by early 40k, however, I always felt that it restrained the granularity as we already said above.

Granted, more granularity may improve the feel of the game by better suiting the lorew but I doubt it'd change neither bad play testing letting through ridiculous units nor GW being willing to revamp the system often anyway.

 catbarf wrote:
I understand disliking tables on principle, but this method is inarguably faster than figuring out all of the same conditional modifiers and resolving them via a sequence of discrete rolls. That's the whole point of using a table- instead of needing 3 rolls that whittle 12 dice to 8 dice to 6 dice and then figure out the final result, you abstract out the first two rolls and just roll for the last. It has implications on the randomness of outcomes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is that 40k bounces back and forth between being based on individual models or units. BFG works because you're aggregating ship salvos, and tables were perfect for that.

The bigger scope 40k games (Epic at one point IIRC), used to essentially do the same thing, with unit fires aggregated in the same way, i.e. "these two tactical squad and that Land Raider are firing at that terminator squad."

But because 40k started out as a game of individual models, GW still keeps vestiges of that around, so we get the whole problem of sniping characters, taking out special/heavy weapons, casualty removal, etc.

That also impacts LOS and cover, because it changes how it works. Is it the aggregate of the squad, or model by model? Do models block other models or not. Can dead monsters/vehicles serve as cover?

Part of the churn is that there are no consistent answers two these problems from edition to edition. The words remain the same, but the meanings change adding to the confusion.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
The problem is that 40k bounces back and forth between being based on individual models or units. BFG works because you're aggregating ship salvos, and tables were perfect for that.

Agreed, a pure gunnery table isn't suitable for individual trials. BFG doesn't use the gunnery table for one-shot weapons and it wouldn't be an appropriate solution for resolving a single lascannon shot in 40K.

But the underlying principle of 'baked-in' values still has applicability, like how Dust uses varying firepower stats depending on target type to skip the first roll and avoid needing a strength/toughness model, or how SST combines the to-hit with the to-wound to resolve an attack in one roll.

The point is just that the game doesn't need to rigorously simulate each step of the firing process, it needs to appropriately vary units and weapons and deliver appropriate results with a minimum of fuss, and other systems show various shortcuts to avoid the need for endless rolls upon rolls upon rolls to generate a result.

An interesting solution in Hobgoblin is a chart telling you what you need to roll to damage, crossreferencing attacker's unit type vs target's unit type.

Like, cavalry damages infantry on 3+, infantry damages monsters on 5+, etc.

For 40k, maybe this but with weapon vs unit type. Or the reverse, give a unit different saves vs different weapon classes.

 catbarf wrote:
But the underlying principle of 'baked-in' values still has applicability, like how Dust uses varying firepower stats depending on target type to skip the first roll and avoid needing a strength/toughness model, or how SST combines the to-hit with the to-wound to resolve an attack in one roll.

The point is just that the game doesn't need to rigorously simulate each step of the firing process, it needs to appropriately vary units and weapons and deliver appropriate results with a minimum of fuss, and other systems show various shortcuts to avoid the need for endless rolls upon rolls upon rolls to generate a result.

Yes, that's an example of solid game design. I'm going to have to dig into my Bookshelf of Forgotten Rules Sets because Dust sounds familiar.

If we shift to a historical approach, no one tries to kill a Tiger tank with rifle fire because no one is going to design a system that makes it feasible. One of the "glitches" of Battle Tech was the notion that a 'mech armed to the teeth with machineguns could actually chew through tank armor somehow. "If I just shoot that Panther with the .50 cal I'll get through to the crew eventually" said no one ever.

The GW system worked reasonably well in the 1980s because it was straightforward and intuitive. Also because the main competitor for Fantasy combat was TSR's atrocious Battlesystem. I saved my copy because sometimes I forget how bad it was.

Porting the WHFB system into a future/sci-fi environment worked, in part because the scale was small but also because it was accepted that T8 monsters laughed at the folly of shooting them with S3 weapons. The armor rules relied too much on pilfering D&D dice, but the gist of it was that some AVs were too high to bother shooting at, and one nice feature was that it preserved the sense that armor values vary by angle, and that penetrating hits can be fatal or merely inconvenient.

But that relied on a low model count game, and GW saw that as a problem. So 3rd cut the points, doubled the armies, slashed through the rules, and created this new confusion of whether the game was fought man by man or squad by squad. I don' think that tension has yet been resolved. It's part of the churn.

Something worth pointing out is that while it was IGOUGO, 2nd edition was in a sense a series of individual squad activations. If a squad ran, it doubled its move, but nothing could shoot. If it went into hiding, nothing could shoot.

Movement was by figure, so a squad could maneuver to both protect but also uncover a heavy weapon to take a shot. Or it could go on overwatch.

So while it was IGOUGO, players have to move each squad in sequence, deciding what overarching mode it will be in, and then addressing the individuals. Because there is an overwatch mechanic, the opposing player could also intervene and did so on a squad by squad (or vehicle) basis. Additionally, within each overwatch action, there often several options open to the squad in terms of targeting and weapon used (heavy weapon, grenade or pistol?).

The rules for all these things are constantly in flux thanks to the churn. Are all power weapons the same, or are there differences among them? Is a choppa materially different from a chain axe? How is a chainsword different from either of them? Depends on the edition.

I frankly have no idea how people keep track of the myriad boltgun variants, or how the modeling works, but GW obviously enjoys making all the variations of them, and enjoys the sales even more.

lord_blackfang wrote:An interesting solution in Hobgoblin is a chart telling you what you need to roll to damage, crossreferencing attacker's unit type vs target's unit type.

Like, cavalry damages infantry on 3+, infantry damages monsters on 5+, etc.

For 40k, maybe this but with weapon vs unit type. Or the reverse, give a unit different saves vs different weapon classes.

Yes, that's a great example.

Epic and Apocalypse did it in a very simplistic way with giving weapons anti-infantry or anti-tank values, which accomplishes the task of making weapons differ against different target profiles without needing to explicitly model damage effects. Dust essentially does the same thing, except it expands out 'infantry' and 'tank' and 'aircraft' into different subcategories (so you can have weapons that are good against light vehicles but not heavy ones), and then rates weapons by number of dice rolled rather than what value must be rolled (because one of the central caveats is that everything in Dust succeeds on 5+).

I don't think it's necessary for 40K to abandon the simulationist approach entirely, but it could at least take cues from how other games in the space have made it more elegant in resolution.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:and created this new confusion of whether the game was fought man by man or squad by squad. I don' think that tension has yet been resolved. It's part of the churn.

Bingo. A lot of 40K's problems stem from it being a mass battle company-level wargame that evolved out of a squad-to-platoon level RPG-influenced one, but without ever really dialing back the granularity. I think 3rd Ed was an admirable attempt and does a pretty coherent job of rescaling- Andy Chambers is the sort of designer who understands when you need to simplify in the interest of playability- but subsequent editions layered back on the chrome.

Lord_Blackfang's game design maxim about resolution time reminded me of another common one, which is that in a good wargame, you wear two 'hats'. Which is to say that playing as the company commander alone and only being able to control your 3-4 platoons isn't especially fun, so you take on the roles of both company commander and the platoon leaders, issuing orders to your entire force (CC) while also issuing orders to individual squads (PL).

But the platoon leader doesn't dictate the positions of individual men- he gives orders to a squad, and the squad leader then assigns individuals to execute. A game where you're commanding a company-sized force but also positioning individual troopers is essentially having you wear the hats of company commander, platoon leader, and sergeant simultaneously.

2nd Ed or Chain of Command have you commanding a reinforced platoon. You're both the platoon leader and the sergeants. Two hats.

Advanced Squad Leader typically has you commanding a reinforced company, but your playing pieces are chits representing entire squads, with the individual men abstracted out. Company commander, platoon leaders. Two hats.

Kill Team, Infinity, and other skirmish games have you manage a single squad. Sergeant. One hat. They tend to play pretty quickly and cleanly as a result.

Modern 40K requires you to micromanage the positions of every trooper lest TLOS make the entire squad an eligible target, but also has you commanding up to two hundred models on the board, up to and including strategic ballistic missiles and skyscraper-sized god machines. Three hats, minimum. Is it any wonder that it struggles to be a playable system?

 catbarf wrote:
I'd be more sympathetic to this if A. I weren't usually in the position of my armies routinely being denied saves altogether, though admittedly this has gotten better in 10th, and B. Rolling saves actually involved some sort of interactivity with the game, rather than being a mechanic that the other player could just as easily resolve.

But they don't resolve it. You do. You are saving your men. You could have your opponent do everything, but part of the interactivity is the fact that you are the one making the effort to keep your guys alive.

"There's no 'effort' in rolling dice!"

It's not a struggle to roll dice, no, but this is an intangible thing - something you feel whilst playing - not a mechanics or rules-based thing. If you sat there and your opponent did everything including rolling armour saves for the things he's shooting at, the game would be remarkably passive when it was't your turn, and you might as well not be there. But you are there, and rolling saves is how you are involved when it's not your troops taking actions. It's the reason the game uses dice rather than set determined outcomes based upon specific inputs.

 catbarf wrote:
I don't mind how Grimdark Future or Dust do it, where the attacker rolls to hit and the defender rolls saves and that's it, each player gets one roll so it's quick and easy and outright ignoring the defender's save is rare. But I'd still rather play a system where the defender has the opportunity to react, immediately act, or otherwise actually do something to interact with the game besides just roll dice for thirty minutes to see how many of their dudes die.

That's a matter of taste, and the game does have reaction methods built into it.

 catbarf wrote:
And while I understand your reservations about AA, I think the fact that GW has to find something for the inactive player to do- and settles on a mechanic where they don't actually have any input, and are just contributing to the mechanical resolution of the active player's decisions- speaks volumes about the current level of player interactivity.

I don't have reservations about AA - I adore BattleTech! - but I have reservations about it in 40k. I just don't think it solves any of 40k's real problems. I don't think that rolling lots of dice ranks up there with 40k's real problems either.

 catbarf wrote:
Battlefleet Gothic is another pure IGOUGO game and one where the inactive player does very little rolling, but the inactive player having the option to Brace For Impact at any time gives them agency and has them hanging on the result of the attacker's rolls. At any time you can decide to brace and get a 4+ FNP against all damage, but at the cost of reduced capability in your next turn.

Horus Heresy 2.0 is also IGOUGO but with a reaction system. Your primary responsibility as the inactive player isn't rolling, it's looking for the right opportunity to spring a reaction and throw a wrench in the enemy's turn.

And 40k has Strats that are starting to edge into that territory. Yes, they're not as fleshed out as these other systems, but that's because - as I've been saying for months now - GW doesn't iterate, they just replace, so they never learn anything from the previous two editions and keep trying new things rather than developing and evolving the things that worked.

 catbarf wrote:
And at the risk of beating a dead horse: 40K doesn't do much with the to-hit roll, using it as a largely static filter to uniformly reduce damage. I'd wager that making to-hit into an opposed check against a how-hard-is-it-to-hit stat would add a lot more to the game than consolidating some of the current defensive stats would take away, while still reducing the amount of rolling overall.

I don't disagree with making a To Hit roll an opposed test like a Toughness check.

That way speed/size could be a defence to getting hit, and toughness a defence on whether that hit does anything. 40k currently lacks speed as a form of protection, or, as you keep bringing up, size as a weakness (the difficulties of hitting a Grot vs a Warlord Titan).

If its opposed, you can scale it. Unfortunately 8th-10th's scaling has been neutered with 6's always succeeding. If 6's always succeed then any test has a break point where rolling more dice is just better than using specialist tools. Therein lies the problem: Not that we need to roll lots of dice, but that the basic core mechanics give greater rewards for simply drowning your opponent in small, colourful numbered cubes.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

"There's no 'effort' in rolling dice!"

It's not a struggle to roll dice, no, but this is an intangible thing - something you feel whilst playing - not a mechanics or rules-based thing. If you sat there and your opponent did everything including rolling armour saves for the things he's shooting at, the game would be remarkably passive when it was't your turn, and you might as well not be there. But you are there, and rolling saves is how you are involved when it's not your troops taking actions. It's the reason the game uses dice rather than set determined outcomes based upon specific inputs.

I don't feel like that at all. Both players participating in the non-interactive process of generating random numbers necessary for the game to produce a result isn't "engaging both players in the game" IMO. It's "dividing an upkeep/maintenance phase process between players by making it twice as long". It's like telling players in a card game that when one player shuffles a deck the other player must shuffle the same deck too because otherwise he will sit there bored.

If that's what you refer to rolling dice as - generating random numbers necessary for the game to produce a result - then what are you doing even playing 40k? Rolling dice to find the outcomes of actions isn't just a core mechanic, its a fundamental foundational element of wargaming in general.

If dice ain't doin' it for you, find another hobby.

Dice are ok, some games need a random element and dice do that fine. But prolonging the process ad absurdum, making the passive upkeep part last several times longer than active gameplay part is 40k's problem IMO. And is exactly the reason why I don't play 40k and find it boring, while I play other games, including miniature wargames that include dice and don't bemoan their presence.

There's a reason video games in general hide the RNG process behind gameplay and make it invisible to the player. Having to perform it manually every single time would just detract from the game.