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Dysartes wrote:The better question there is "Should the Wraithlord have been a Monstrous Creature at all?" when, as you point out, it is both functionally and materially an Eldar Dreadnought (and, prior to 3rd, was literally an Eldar Dreadnought)...

I literally discuss that. The argument proves just how subjective the application of different rule types is.

Tyran wrote:With some luck, a lascannon could one-shot pretty much any vehicle. It couldn't one shot a Wraithknight regardless of how many 6s you rolled. While on the other hand of the spectrum, the Wraithknight will operate at 100% efficiency until the last wound is lost.

It is hilarious people argue for a more simulationist system and yet don't see the issue with MC rules. They argue for the importance of maneuvering and suppressing for counterplay and yet don't see the issue with a unit rules that didn't allow anything of that.

You've made no argument except 'it wouldn't '. A a lacannon through the power source will kill a wraithknight.

In 2nd ed wraithlords could be struck that way no problem.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arschbombe wrote:

Hellebore wrote:

Because they bothered with a dreadnought, sentinel and Killa Kan? Carnifex and wraithlord legs are entirely equivalent in that comparison.

I don't think they are. The dread, kan, and sentinel are crewed vehicles so they use the vehicle rules. The carnifex is a living creature, essentially a very large infantry model so it uses the same basic rules. The wraithlord is like a golem. It is a construct animated by the soul of a dead eldar. Deciding to not use vehicle rules for it seems entirely reasonable to me.

Still, I don't understand the particular hang up about monstrous creatures. Why not insist on the same degradation mechanic for all multiwound models? Like let's make it so that Eldrad loses one psychic power when he goes from 3 wounds (4th ed) to 2. And then when he gets to one wound he takes psychic tests at LD-2. Wouldn't that be flavorful and cool (and fair to the oppressed class of vehicles)?

The game doesn't use that many mechanics that the distinction is necessary. If one model can be designed to lose its gun or stop moving, so can something else that fills the equivalent space in another army. Argument from tradition, or simply personal preference shouldn't enter into it.

So every game that has ever treated vehicles differently from other classes of models is wrong?

To your first, you're making a false equivalence based on a rule assumption we're specifically disagreeing on, so I reject your premise entirely.

A character is not the equivalent of a monster. Before you assign mechanics you decide how things should be treated, and a monster fills the same game niche as a vehicle/robot, not as an infantry character.



As to your 2nd point, you are again working from faulty premises. I never made any claim about any other game. The way 40k treated monsters and vehicles was not actually different enough to warrant different rules systems to cover them.



Every single argument I've seen so far on this is starting inside the premise that these rules should already be like this.

I am saying, step back, look at the units, there roles and functions and use that to determine the mechanic. There is no need to have special minigames inside the rules to deal with one type of unit. Or if there is, then it should apply to all things that fill that game role.









Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I can see where that view comes from, but I do think damage to machines tends to manifest differently than damage to living creatures, and their reaction is different. Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically.

I get why degradation of MCs is a desired thing too, mind you. I just think it's fine that the two things are different.

At the scale we are discussing I don't think it is different. Vehicles have driven with smashed drive shafts, destroyed wheels, engines on fire etc.

You can justify anything in this subjective space.

It's also trivially easy to counter your position in a set of rules if you want to. Special critical effects simply represent a damage that can't be adrenaline-ignored, or any minor damage effect is where you lump the broken wheel/adrenaline ignoring effects.

While we're on the topic, I for one think 40k would be a more interesting game with unique systems for wounding vehicles, monsters, and infantry. A lot of us like the armor penetration table for crewed vehicles and a degrading statline feels more organic for giant creatures.
Of course with 40k there are outliers and exceptions and room for special rules but I still think it's worth doing for the fun factor. If properly balanced, Tyranid could have been the army of monsters and Tau the army of vehicles. (Battlesuits should be vehicles, obviously.) Necron could be a mixture and rely on their Living Metal special rule to stand out.

What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?

 Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:
While we're on the topic, I for one think 40k would be a more interesting game with unique systems for wounding vehicles, monsters, and infantry. A lot of us like the armor penetration table for crewed vehicles and a degrading statline feels more organic for giant creatures.
Of course with 40k there are outliers and exceptions and room for special rules but I still think it's worth doing for the fun factor. If properly balanced, Tyranid could have been the army of monsters and Tau the army of vehicles. (Battlesuits should be vehicles, obviously.) Necron could be a mixture and rely on their Living Metal special rule to stand out.

What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?

Then I'd argue they'd need to be a lot cheaper or would simply bot be taken as those are too harsh. It wound depend what you did to vehicles as well ofc, but I think you just birthed infantryhammer.

 Hellebore wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I can see where that view comes from, but I do think damage to machines tends to manifest differently than damage to living creatures, and their reaction is different. Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically.

I get why degradation of MCs is a desired thing too, mind you. I just think it's fine that the two things are different.

At the scale we are discussing I don't think it is different. Vehicles have driven with smashed drive shafts, destroyed wheels, engines on fire etc.

You can justify anything in this subjective space.

It's also trivially easy to counter your position in a set of rules if you want to. Special critical effects simply represent a damage that can't be adrenaline-ignored, or any minor damage effect is where you lump the broken wheel/adrenaline ignoring effects.

Not sure how a vehicle drives with a non-functioning drive shaft, but yeah miracles happen there too. Like that F-15 that flew back to base without a wing.

My point isn't that you can't homogenize the two, but rather that the separation of rules by unit type isn't necessarily just "gamey". Though many are high tech, many more of the core vehicles in 40K are very unsophisticated things trundling about, and having them feel different is meaningful. It's less about "game" and more about the character of the units. The tanks couldn't punch you but they could try to drive over or ram you. They left a big block of cover when they died. They exploded upon death. They got immobilized and you could maneuver away from their lodged firing arcs. You could flank them because they're more predictable in their movements than a big monster. Those are great "This is a tank" characteristics.

"That thing is a big animal, I have to engage it like X. That other thing is a big vehicle and I have to use different tactics Y." Or it's a 6th-7th edition Riptide and you mostly spend a lot of time swearing at the thing.

Dudeface wrote:

 Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:
What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?

Then I'd argue they'd need to be a lot cheaper or would simply bot be taken as those are too harsh. It wound depend what you did to vehicles as well ofc, but I think you just birthed infantryhammer.

If that's too harsh then they could just be -1 to hit at half and then also -1 to wound at quarter health.
Or maybe save two-tier wounding for gargantuan monsters and all smaller creatures just suffer one disability at half health.

My point was that it was interesting to have vehicles use the armor pen test and it could have been balanced against wounded monsters.

I first got into 40k in 8th edition and was surprised it wasn't what I was expecting from a tabletop wargame. Then I looked into previous editions, saw blast templates and vehicle facings, and said, "oh, there's the wargame I was expecting."
All those systems may have been clunky or problematic, especially blast templates, but I think they should have been improved upon, not discarded.

And why is there still no friendly fire in 40k? "The risk of hitting your own troops is too high"?! Clearly the rules team did not ask the orks for their opinion on the matter.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Or it's a 6th-7th edition Riptide and you mostly spend a lot of time swearing at the thing.

The correct method for engaging with a Riptide is defined as "2lb lump hammer", regardless of edition.

 Dysartes wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Or it's a 6th-7th edition Riptide and you mostly spend a lot of time swearing at the thing.

The correct method for engaging with a Riptide is defined as "2lb lump hammer", regardless of edition.

I wish I'd seen that strategy guide back when I was playing 6th.

I'd rather raise the point of why MC's or infantry was special to begin with. One of the better ways to speed up the game isn't to remove AV, but to just replace armor saves with AV and to hand out multi sided armor to monsters as well. The argument of 'well a monster isn't a vehicle' doesn't really make all that much sense when a lascannon punching a hole through the circulatory system of a Carnifex isn't all that much less lethal than the ammunition or nuclear reactor of a tank being struck and going kaboom. Plus if have AV and start ablatively rolling invuls like ward saves in fantasy so they actually mean a damn thing, the game should go at a quicker pace since penetration is just decided by the attacking player instead of the defending player also needing to roll, for some reason. Personally I'm all in favor of Guardsmen with AV 6 or 7 Flak armor, or AV 8 Mesh armor.

 Wyzilla wrote:
I'd rather raise the point of why MC's or infantry was special to begin with. One of the better ways to speed up the game isn't to remove AV, but to just replace armor saves with AV and to hand out multi sided armor to monsters as well. The argument of 'well a monster isn't a vehicle' doesn't really make all that much sense when a lascannon punching a hole through the circulatory system of a Carnifex isn't all that much less lethal than the ammunition or nuclear reactor of a tank being struck and going kaboom. Plus if have AV and start ablatively rolling invuls like ward saves in fantasy so they actually mean a damn thing, the game should go at a quicker pace since penetration is just decided by the attacking player instead of the defending player also needing to roll, for some reason. Personally I'm all in favor of Guardsmen with AV 6 or 7 Flak armor, or AV 8 Mesh armor.

So as a fun thought exercise, a lot of the bipedal nids have the most armour on their back, so this would facilitate either monsters that have to walk backwards and assumingly they'd gain weapon facings so could no longer shoot, or would be most vulnerable when performing their intended functions.

aphyon wrote:

On another note, I’ve been lurking in this thread since its inception and, given that 10E was the push I needed to jump off the Official 40K churny-go-round and start cooking up my own homebrew rules, thanks to everyone whose comments on rules stuff in here has given me food for thought.

Depending on what edition you want to base it off of both Mezmorki and myself have done a bunch of work in this area. his is based on 7th ed and mine is off 5th ed.

Mine
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/806639.page

Mezmorki's prohammer (he is a madman with the amount of work he put into his version)

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/796101.page

Best of luck-build community and you will have a great time.

Cheers – I've clocked both of those and found them a useful source of stuff to consider. I'm currently in the first-draft stage and am kinda throwing together a cherry-picked mix of my favourite elements of 2nd–4th, 8th and 9th, with a unit activation mechanic loosely-based on – but heavily inspired by – X-Wing and some mad old gak I've just cobbled together myself.

Bosskelot wrote:
GW basically heard the vocal minority of garagelord 1-game-every-3-month dadgamers complaining about "complexity," got spooked by some of 9th's crazy balance issues, and then massively overcorrected for 10th. It's a rules system designed for new players, and the aforementioned garagehammer players, and to its credit it does a good job of appealing to both. But if you're anyone else? I just don't see what the game has to offer currently.

Interestingly, I'm very close to being part of the demographic you reference here – I played pretty regularly in 9E but found the amount of stuff to keep track of quite a pain – but I absolutely can't *stand* 10E. I would have been quite happy with Index 8E with a few of the core rules tweaks of 9E tbh (ones that specifically come to mind are detachment/army comp rules) and terrain rules that were more in-depth than 8 and less wildly convoluted than 9.

Personally, I feel like jettisoning the "3 ways to play" concept in favour of an attempted one-size-fits-all approach was a mistake and has kind of resulted in a worst-of-both-worlds situation, but I think the writing on the wall was there for that when Chapter Approved went from "here's some fun optional rules" in 8E to "constantly-churning tournament rules tweaks" in 9.

Tyran wrote:

 aphyon wrote:
To Tyran's point with a few exceptions most MCs are susceptible to small arms fire from any direction in the older edition, most vehicles are not. As nearly all MCs are T6 (with the exception of an upgraded carnifex from 4th or a wraith lord). meaning that even a las gun can wound them on a 6+ all vehicles in the game had a minimum of 10 armor(some even higher) on the rear meaning you had to have a bolter or stronger weapon to hurt them. you also had to maneuver into position to get that sweet back shot. on the flip side-force weapons can one shot a MC.

It is really a trade off that makes them different from vehicles with different tactics employed to deal with them. it also gives AT weapons a defined role in the setting. as a general of the force you need to fight the right fight. bring the right tools to get the job done and put them into a position where they can. overall it enriches the setting and the feel of the game.

Leaving all aside the very real balance issues that made MC rules dominate vehicles from 6th all the way into HH 2.0. It is a very gamey trade off, not a simulationist one.

To be blunt it comes kinda hypocritical that you want vehicles to have highly simulationist rules but are fine for MCs to only get to be blatantly gamey rules.

The way i see it, your trying to turn MCs into vehicles and GW did the opposite turning vehicles into MCs and it didn't turn out well. in my experience it isn't enough of an issue in the older editions to need to make any changes.

Insectum7 wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Adrenaline isn't going to keep you swinging a severed limb as though it's still attached.

That's true, but I think there's many a hunter that can tell a story about an animal getting shot and running off before succuming to their wounds later. Likewise a number of war stories about similar occurences involving humans.

 waefre_1 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
...Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically...

Regular machines might not, but lest we forget we are talking about 40k machines, some of which might be daemonically possessed and/or have self-healing metal surfaces (note: I don't recall the exact rules for daemonic possession/necrodermis, they may have had some special rule to account for that w/r/t damage). Besides, on the scale of the game itself, I don't think there's any point distinguishing between a shattered femur that will heal over time and a metal spar that will need external repair. A shot leg is a shot leg is a shot leg.

That said, I'm not averse to having a separate damage table or set of effects for MCs (there would necessarily be some overlap for things like damaged weapons and immobilization, ofc), and I wouldn't even mind MCs getting a chance to repair some of the damage naturally in later rounds to account for adrenaline/regeneration/etc, so long as it was balanced. For my part, the issue is that vehicles can be degraded/mission killed without dying whereas MCs are magically perfect until they very suddenly aren't.

Back in the day those semi-magical or high tech vehicles specifically had rules to ignore or mitigate various damage effects. Like Daemonic Posession allowed a Vehicle to ignore Stunned/Shaken results, iirc.

3.5 chaos codex. it made chaos vehicles super durable but also expensive- mutated hull=+1 AV to all facing up to 14, parasitic possession=regrow immobilized results and destroyed weapons on a 4+, but you had to give up shooting the turn it makes the attempt. and demonic possession as noted previously, of course none of that helps against being dead from a penetrating destroyed result.

The past few pages of the thread have been a bit odd to me.

People write about how much they miss being able to suppress vehicles, without remembering what it felt like being suppressed.

It's going to be a great game, I've got 5 vehicles I'm really proud of can easily become- Well, first turn one was destroyed by a single penetrating hit, two were prevented from moving, one lost its main gun for the rest of the game- also in some cases, the result of single penetrating hits.

And so it goes.

Much rather have the current system, personally.

Agreed, the ability to just nullify a tank for a whole turn is huge in a game that only has at most around 6 turns and of those turns 2-4 are going to be the big impact ones. so that's 3 turns where things really count. Get shaken two or three times on a tank and its basically sat there for half the game doing nothing.

Degrading profiles is far more fun because the unit remains viable - it can DO something. It can fire back or limp into hiding or at least respond to the attack.

I remember having my tanks stunned. I'll take that over the height of 9th Ed lethality, where half of them were gone after turn one, any day.

Having your units temporarily incapacitated may be a '''feels bad''', but at some point you need to accept that this is a wargame where your units will take damage and are not guaranteed a chance to shine before they are mission killed. At least when your tanks were suppressed for a turn, they might do something useful next turn.

Besides, if you're upset because IGOUGO alpha striking is incapacitating all your tanks before you have a chance to do anything, or because the entire game boils down to just two or three turns, your complaint isn't really about the existence of damage effects. They're just exposing a deeper problem.

 catbarf wrote:
I remember having my tanks stunned. I'll take that over the height of 9th Ed lethality, where half of them were gone after turn one, any day.

The is the two aren't mutually exclusive. We can agree that the height of insane lethality where an alpha strike can easily wipe out half an army in a single turn; and that shaking tanks into a useless state - are both BAD things.

I think tank shock would be more fun if you have a lot more tanks on the field and perhaps if the game had a lot more turns. I just don't feel that 40K offers either of those options; with the former only being a potential if you take a massive tank core in some armies.

GMGs DA Codex supplement review has some good analysis on the topic, starts around 37:20 with summing ip his thoughts on the Codex but starts going into a broader analysis and critique around 38:30.

Ironically, this really brought me back to late 4th and early 5th edition which had the same issues. Starting with the 4th edition Dark Angels (!) book GW moved in the direction of blandness and simplification with its Codex design (ie units and army construction) ostensibly because Jervis Johnsons kid wasn't smart enough to figure out how to build an army. Ashs comments reminded me of that era of the game a lot, and it seeks the pendulum really has swung back in that direction internally. Good news is, we only have to wait another 2.5 years for that to be resolved probably.

PenitentJake wrote:
People write about how much they miss being able to suppress vehicles, without remembering what it felt like being suppressed.

It's going to be a great game, I've got 5 vehicles I'm really proud of can easily become- Well, first turn one was destroyed by a single penetrating hit, two were prevented from moving, one lost its main gun for the rest of the game- also in some cases, the result of single penetrating hits.

Being suppressed wasn't fun, sure. But nor was having your vehicles blown out from under you, which is all we've been offered instead.


If you want to look for intermediaries, perhaps instead of shaken/stunned, damage could be a cumulative effect. e.g. each 'wound' could give -3M, -1WS/BS (maybe also +1 on the damage table, if one is used).

Still a blow but you need 2-3 such results to fully most vehicles, rather than just 1. If you get a certain number of them, you get an additional effect similar to weapon destroyed or immobilised (e.g. losing a weapon, having movement permanently halved). More still and a vehicle is destroyed.

Vehicles could shake some or all wounds (but not weapon destroyed/crippled movement) at the end of their turn.

(Obviously this would be based on the old AV system, not the current wounding system.)

I'm just spitballing, obviously, but I'm trying to think of how to maintain the spirit while making the mechanics less all-or-nothing.

What frustrated me the most in those days wasn't so much the immobilization, but the frequency with which it was inflicted by single penetrating hits.

When 3 units focus fire to bring down a vehicle, sure it sucks to lose the vehicle. But when the first die a dude roles blows up your vehicle or makes it's primary weapon useless... That's what used to get me.

It's true though that both systems have advantages and disadvantages, and like so many of the things we discuss here, it is a matter of personal taste.

Vipoid's suggesting a fusion of the two systems has a lot of potential.

I still haven't played 10th; it's coming soon, but I haven't done it yet. Two big work projects should be coming off my plate this week, and that's going to be a game changer for me.

This is how we play it:

Vehicle Damage Table
D6 - Result
1 - Nothing happens
2 - Nothing happens
3 - Temporary weapon damage - The vehicle suffers a -1 to hit roll penalty. Stacks with itself. Lasts until the end of the model's next activation. Also applies to passengers.
4 - Temporary engine damage - The vehicle reduces its movement speed by 1/3 of the starting profile value. Stacks with itself and Engine damage. Completely immobilised vehicles can’t move anymore. Lasts until the end of the model's next activation. Also applies to passengers.
5 - Weapon destroyed - The owner of the vehicle chooses a weapon which cannot be used for the rest of the game. If all weapons are destroyed already, the vehicle instead suffers a “Structural damage” result.
6 - Engine damage - The vehicle reduces its movement speed by 1/3 of the starting profile value for the rest of the game. Completely immobilised vehicles can’t move anymore. If the movement speed cannot be reduced any further, the vehicle instead suffers a Structural damage result.
7 - Structural damage - The vehicle loses 1 Hull point.
8 - Heavy structural damage - The vehicle loses 1 Hull point. Roll one more time on the vehicle damage chart. The second roll does not benefit from the +2 bonus from a penetrating hit.

A glancing hit means your roll does not get any bonus on the table apart from the "Anti-Tank" value of your weapon.
A penetrating hit means your rolls gets a bonus of +2 on the table in addition to your "Anti-Tank" value for the first roll.

Vehicles in cover reduce the "Anti-Tank" value (or the penetration bonus) by 1, to a minimum of 1.

We use the old AV values. Front 10-11 gets 2 Hull points. Front 12-13 gets 3 Hull points. Front 14 gets 4 Hull points.

A missile launcher got "Anti-Tank 1", a lascannon got "Anti-Tank 2" and a multi-melta in melta range got "Anti-Tank 3".

"Additional armor" makes you ignore the first temporary damage result each round.

Works very well in practice in a system with alternate activation.

Overread wrote:The is the two aren't mutually exclusive. We can agree that the height of insane lethality where an alpha strike can easily wipe out half an army in a single turn; and that shaking tanks into a useless state - are both BAD things.

Yes, but the presence of temporarily incapacitating effects allows the designers to strike a middle ground- vehicles can be made very tough to permanently eliminate, but much easier to stun.

It was extremely difficult to kill an AV14 vehicle when an autocannon couldn't even scratch it and the best a missile launcher could do is glance. That's changed, and while 10th makes vehicles an awful lot tougher than they were in 9th, the susceptibility to being whittled down by mid-strength firepower is an unavoidable result of how vehicles are now modeled. Either they die when you throw enough firepower at them, or they're too hard to kill- there's no incremental erosion of capability, especially when damage effects have been watered down to little more than -1 to hit when it's about to die.

So yes, I genuinely much prefer being suppressed- with the ability to redeploy my forces to cover the stunned vehicle and/or deal with anti-armor threats, to ensure that it's back up next turn- over the more straightforwardly bland implementation of numbers popping out the top of the Leman Russ until it suffers critical existence failure like a 90s RTS.

I would also go so far as to extend that principle to the rest of the game, where having my troops take 25% casualties and flee from a failed morale test was more interesting than having them take 50% casualties, flub a Battleshock, and suffer nothing of consequence. Interim effects of fire beyond a binary fine/dead allows the game to be less lethal while still having stuff actually happen. This isn't rose-tinted glasses. I still play Oldhammer as well as more modern games that have those sorts of effects.

 Tyran wrote:

Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.

No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.

It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.

It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.

40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.

On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.

I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?

 Arschbombe wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.

No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.

It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.

It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.

40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.

On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.

I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?

Not better per se, but fairer.

PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).

 Overread wrote:
Agreed, the ability to just nullify a tank for a whole turn is huge in a game that only has at most around 6 turns and of those turns 2-4 are going to be the big impact ones. so that's 3 turns where things really count. Get shaken two or three times on a tank and its basically sat there for half the game doing nothing.

Degrading profiles is far more fun because the unit remains viable - it can DO something. It can fire back or limp into hiding or at least respond to the attack.

We fixed that problem by importing snap fire into 5th ed from 6th and 7th so that they can at least contribute something while being stunned. so it is something akin to temporary degradation to BS1 without being a permanent effect. so the vehicle is still a threat to be dealt with next turn.

 waefre_1 wrote:
I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).

It'll've been during whichever edition introduced Hull Points - suddenly vehicles (in general) had few "wounds", but no save, and still had a damage table on top. Was the start of when mid-range high-ROF weapons started to become reliable vehicle killers, outside of the few bricks with AV14 all around.

That's 6th ed. hull points were a design disaster.

 catbarf wrote:
I would also go so far as to extend that principle to the rest of the game, where having my troops take 25% casualties and flee from a failed morale test was more interesting than having them take 50% casualties, flub a Battleshock, and suffer nothing of consequence. Interim effects of fire beyond a binary fine/dead allows the game to be less lethal while still having stuff actually happen. This isn't rose-tinted glasses. I still play Oldhammer as well as more modern games that have those sorts of effects.

The sad thing is that effects like Pinning exist in 10th. However, rather than being a USR, it's a bespoke special rule for the Night Spinner (and I think the Death Jester?).

Seems a massive waste of an idea.

I'd also agree that units running away was more interesting and thematic than spontaneously combusting (8th-9th) or being worse at holding objectives (10th).

 Arschbombe wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.

No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.

It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.

It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.

40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.

On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.

I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?

Some thoughts:

40k wasn't originally designed in a vacuum, but it often feels like the current design studio haven't played another wargame in years or are only tangentially familiar with competitor games.

The armor penetration system of yore was just not good game design as it used a bespoke and separate resolution mechanics from the standard "roll to wound" utilized by the majority of models in the game, and did so by attempting to co-opt the same stat used to engage meaty fleshbags. It might have been a good abstract simulation in terms of helping forge narratives, and there's certainly merit to that, but it created many problems from a mechanical standpoint and pushed the system to its breaking limit by making it difficult to balance weapon statlines and capabilities against different types of targets. The emergence of monstrous creatures superiority was a consequrnce of that and was a longstanding and obvious potential issue from pretty early on, but wasn't as apparent to many due to the relative rarity of MCs until 4th/5th edition when they started becoming more and more accessible to more and more armies. That's not to say that it couldn't work or continue to be used without tweaks, just that as it existed at the time it was pretty fundamentally flawed and poorly implemented.

 waefre_1 wrote:


PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).

As already noted, that was 6th edition when hull points were introduced as a corrective to the vehicle dominance in 5th. As I understand it the story goes like this:

3rd. Rhino rush is a thing.
4th. As a corrective to Rhino rush, destroyed transports can entangle their passengers and can kill them all outright with a vehicle annihilated result. There are three damage tables: glancing, penetrating, and ordnance penetrating. Glances can destroy vehicles. Any penetration of a transport will cause passengers to disembark.
5th. One damage table. Glances resolve at -2 so can no longer destroy vehicles. Best they can do is immobilize. Vehicles can potentially survive every hit they take. Penetrations that do not destroy a transport will not cause passengers to get out.
6th. As a corrective to the resilient parking lots of 5th, hull points are introduced. Glances remove a hull point. So a Rhino or a dreadnought dies after three glances. Sentinels and War Walkers go down after 2. Penetrations remove a hull point and roll on the damage table. AP2 adds +1. AP1 adds +2 to the roll. Wraithknight and Riptide are introduced as MC when they probably should have been vehicles. Vehicle rules are too punishing for the new shiny centerpiece models so MC it is.
7th. Not sure what changes were made in 7th.
8th. Removes the AV system entirely. And there was much rejoicing.

 Arschbombe wrote:

 waefre_1 wrote:


PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).

As already noted, that was 6th edition when hull points were introduced as a corrective to the vehicle dominance in 5th. As I understand it the story goes like this:

3rd. Rhino rush is a thing.
4th. As a corrective to Rhino rush, destroyed transports can entangle their passengers and can kill them all outright with a vehicle annihilated result. There are three damage tables: glancing, penetrating, and ordnance penetrating. Glances can destroy vehicles. Any penetration of a transport will cause passengers to disembark.
5th. One damage table. Glances resolve at -2 so can no longer destroy vehicles. Best they can do is immobilize. Vehicles can potentially survive every hit they take. Penetrations that do not destroy a transport will not cause passengers to get out.
6th. As a corrective to the resilient parking lots of 5th, hull points are introduced. Glances remove a hull point. So a Rhino or a dreadnought dies after three glances. Sentinels and War Walkers go down after 2. Penetrations remove a hull point and roll on the damage table. AP2 adds +1. AP1 adds +2 to the roll. Wraithknight and Riptide are introduced as MC when they probably should have been vehicles. Vehicle rules are too punishing for the new shiny centerpiece models so MC it is.
7th. Not sure what changes were made in 7th.
8th. Removes the AV system entirely. And there was much rejoicing.

Decent rundown. Imo 4th ed was the best. The only thing I would adjust is the auto-Pinning mechanic was a little too harsh. If it was a less binary suppression sort of thing that would have been better.

Reading that summary, the thought occurs to me that distinguishing vehicles from MCs (with regards to wraithknights and riptides) is a bit pointless, as what defines a vehicle (to me) is that it's crewed - but if you dont really track the status of the crew in a meaningful way or allow them to dismount, then there's no point treating them as anything different than any other model or a monstrous creature, etc. As such, "vehicles" really stopped being conceptually relevant as a distinct category after 2nd edition. The abstract crew shaken/stunned (and presumably also immobilized/weapon destroyed results, if you think about them in terms incapacitating drivers and gunners) were a clever way of streamlining and simplifying that in some respects, but in other ways were just an unnecessary vestigial artifact that had outlasted any reason for them to continue existing in the face of other changes.

You weren't really tracking crew status at that point, you were tracking vehicle status in an arbitrary and opaque matter which pretended to care about the crew inside without actually delivering any meaningful verisimilitude pertaining to crewed weapon systems. Shaken and stunned results became frighteningly common and basically the default outcome for most attempts at engaging a vehicle, despite the fact that in the real world crew incapacitation (crew shaken/stunned) and/or losses (theoretical possibility for immobilized/weapon destroyed) in modern armored combat vehicles are relatively rare and often the result of a mission kill or hard kill. Spall liners and composite armors have limited the risk to crew from glancing hits on even very lightly armored vehicles and largely reduced the risk to penetrative damage, and even if they didn't a glance from small arms (a very common occurrence in 3rd-7th) wasn't going to produce any such effects that would harm the crew.

Likewise the threshold of lethality needed to engage a vehicle was dramatically lowered as armor values dropped from being as high as 26-28 down to 10-14, while the penetrative capabilities of weapons arguably increased in relative terms - a heavy bolter went from 5+d6+d4 to 5+d6, but the front armor value of a rhino went from 20 to 11 (yes in 2nd edition rhinos had track AV 15 and weapon AV 12, but in total you had a 7.64% chance of damaging a rhino hit by a heavy bolter in 2nd ed, vs a 16.67% chance in 3rd/4th - the probability more than doubled). Add to this that there was no means by which crew could be targeted or harmed directly (not even open topped vehicles) nor did weapons offer the potential of doing direct damage to the crew (I like the example of warp spiders death spinners being able to shoot inside a vehicle and kill the crew without damaging the vehicle), to my recollection weapons that allowed you to auto shake/stun/immobilize/weapon destroy a vehicle were a rarity to represent that capability were an absolute rarity if they existed at all.

So the "crewed" nature of the vehicles truly had no real mechanical or gameplay relevance any longer and the shoehorned attempt of inclusion was actually the downfall of the system as it resulted in vehicles being expensive and maybe not "fragile", but difficult to get value out of because they were very easily mitigated and managed (ie - "soft killed") by an opponent. Higher armor values and/or separate strength/ap stats for antivehicle attacks could have mitigated this alongside a modification to the glancing hit table such that say a 1-4 produced no effect, a 5 shook, and a 6 stunned - a damage result modifier stat could have been used to render small arms incapable of shaking or stunning on a glancing while increasing the likelihood of a glanced battle cannon of spalling the crew or immobilizing/destroying weapons (say on a result of a 7/8 such that only certain weapons could achieve this).

Even then though, without making "crew" anything more than a narrative byword to describe what are actually vehicle statuses, there would be no point to really distinguishing a vehicle from a monstrous creature. If a carrier having an arm or leg shot off isn't worth tracking, or losing a turn because it's wincing in pain from taking a powerful to the ribs, then there's no point holding vehicles to that same level of detail. Likewise if you aren't having your infantry suffer amputations or meaningful psychology, then why bother holding vehicles to an arbitrary standard of greater detail? The remedy then is to give vehicles crew points which are used to purchase actions (movement, attacks, special actions) - each shaken result then becomes -1 crew point for the duration of the turn, stunned a -1 crew point until a successful ld check is made to get them back into operation (or something), and crew killed is a permanent -1 crew for the duration of the game, or until the vehicle is recrewed from another vehicle (or infantry trained in vehicle operations for marine style flavor). Now crew actually matters and there's a point to differentiating vehicles from a monstrous creature.

My 2 cents anyway.