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Your leader questions are clearly addressed in the Rules Commentary.

While This Model is Leading a Unit: These rules only apply while the model with that rule is part of an Attached unit, and otherwise have no effect. While a model with such a rule is part of an Attached unit, it will also benefit from its own rule. If an Attached unit contains more than one model with such a rule, both models are considered to be leading that Attached unit, and so all such rules apply. Such rules cease to apply if that unit ceases to be an Attached unit (such as when the last Bodyguard model in that unit is destroyed) – if this is as the result of an enemy unit’s attacks, all ‘while this model is leading a unit…’ rules cease to apply after the attacking unit’s attacks have been resolved.

 alextroy wrote:
Your leader questions are clearly addressed in the Rules Commentary.

While This Model is Leading a Unit: These rules only apply while the model with that rule is part of an Attached unit, and otherwise have no effect. While a model with such a rule is part of an Attached unit, it will also benefit from its own rule. If an Attached unit contains more than one model with such a rule, both models are considered to be leading that Attached unit, and so all such rules apply. Such rules cease to apply if that unit ceases to be an Attached unit (such as when the last Bodyguard model in that unit is destroyed) – if this is as the result of an enemy unit’s attacks, all ‘while this model is leading a unit…’ rules cease to apply after the attacking unit’s attacks have been resolved.

Oh sorry, I forgot that a company that writes all its rules in legalese so there's no misunderstanding also needs a supplemental commentary to tell you what they actually mean.


Regardless, this means my original point regarding Leader abilities was entirely correct.

Ah yes. Every other company is fine using glossary but for gw its bad.

Lol. People are so desperate to bash gw they bash it for doing what others do and get praised for doing.

And if players have trouble parsing meaning "while leading unit" gw has to spell english basics for them

tneva82 wrote:
Ah yes. Every other company is fine using glossary but for gw its bad.

Lol. People are so desperate to bash gw they bash it for doing what others do and get praised for doing.

And if players have trouble parsing meaning "while leading unit" gw has to spell english basics for them

Except that they didn't use a glossary. That's the point.

If they had used a glossary in the first place, they wouldn't have needed a commentary to define terms they couldn't be bothered defining in the core rules.

A glossary by another name (Rules Commentary) is still a glossary.

A.T. wrote:

leopard wrote:
Not sure how long you've been playing, but it sounds like you're describing the 7th edition version of "Look Out Sir!".

Going back further there was target priority, leadership test or be forced to fire at the closest target (or closest 'large target').

"My lascannon heavy weapon squad will shoot the onrushing landraider carrying Abaddon and his personal retinue"
(flips coin)
"... my lascannon heavy weapon squad will shoot the empty, unarmed rhino idling in heavy cover"

Thank you for illustrating why this idea is so awesome.

Command and control breakdowns can cripple an army - and if your army is no better than a coin flip at interpreting and following orders, then perhaps the army should be better trained then some farmers with Lascannons.

I love the idea that the local farmers have no idea what a Land Raider is or that the much closer (=more dangerous, farmers remember?) Rhino is actually empty - heck, the Land Raider is so festooned with guns they may not even know it is a transport!

Fortunately, you can buy your army actual radios to allow orders to be given more clearly and precisely (or simply bring an experienced Captain, since your armor already includes radios if you have Power Armor).

This might run into the same narrative problem as leadership. Who is this army of farmers supposed to be?

I can see it for GSC, some cultists and maybe Orks. Everybody else in the setting is a highly trained professional.

a_typical_hero wrote:
This might run into the same narrative problem as leadership. Who is this army of farmers supposed to be?

I can see it for GSC, some cultists and maybe Orks. Everybody else in the setting is a highly trained professional.

"Crappy" armies appear within the setting, they just don't have a codex representation in the modern era. There used to be a unit/force called the Frateris Militia, and that was made up of regular civilians or just ***t men-at-arms.

a_typical_hero wrote:
This might run into the same narrative problem as leadership. Who is this army of farmers supposed to be?

I can see it for GSC, some cultists and maybe Orks. Everybody else in the setting is a highly trained professional.

That's why leadership stats exist and are almost universally better than a coin flip

I feel like there's room for some sort of targeting priority rule in the game, but I don't particularly like randomizing it. Having your expensive anti-tank squad flub a Ld check and waste their shots on a nearer non-threat or severely sub-optimal target just sounds like a feels-bad moment.

It also doesn't seem like it would be good for representing the fluff of most armies. My centuries-old drukhari scourges that have been raiding realspace their whole lives probably shouldn't get confused about whether to shoot the chimera or the leman russ with their dark lances. But with Ld 6+ (which is considered quite good Ld at the moment), they'd end up making that mistake about 28% of the time.

But having like, binary screening rules (either you can target the russ or you can't based on whether something else is threatening you) and then having strats or character rules to allow units to ignore those limitations could be interesting. For armies that have cheap, "low-ranking" characters like lieutenants, warlocks, fireblades, etc., I could see that being a decent niche.

 alextroy wrote:
A glossary by another name (Rules Commentary) is still a glossary.

a glossary is actually a parsable document, the rules commentary really isnt

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Thank you for illustrating why this idea is so awesome.

In practice you would just get arbitrarily boned at the whim of the dice - not just failing to hit or wound, now you weren't even shooting in the right direction.

It's one of those things that got heavily gamed in terms of unit positioning - there was some peak silliness in very early editions where you'd line up stuff so that your heavy weapon couldn't draw line of sight anything except the enemy HQ model standing in the middle of their unit, and as the only valid target...

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
A glossary by another name (Rules Commentary) is still a glossary.

a glossary is actually a parsable document, the rules commentary really isnt

What's not parsable about the Rules Commentary? It contains a list of rules terminology with details on how to interpret them for game play.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


My centuries-old drukhari scourges that have been raiding realspace their whole lives probably shouldn't get confused about whether to shoot the chimera or the leman russ with their dark lances. But with Ld 6+ (which is considered quite good Ld at the moment), they'd end up making that mistake about 28% of the time.

Dark Eldar are also a bunch of self-serving and backstabbing a-holes, so if that chimera is directly threatening them by being closer then it make sense they would need a Ld check to target a Russ that is farther away (and thus someone's else problem).

 Tyran wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:


My centuries-old drukhari scourges that have been raiding realspace their whole lives probably shouldn't get confused about whether to shoot the chimera or the leman russ with their dark lances. But with Ld 6+ (which is considered quite good Ld at the moment), they'd end up making that mistake about 28% of the time.

Dark Eldar are also a bunch of self-serving and backstabbing a-holes, so if that chimera is directly threatening them by being closer then it make sense they would need a Ld check to target a Russ that is farther away (and thus someone's else problem).

But a Chimera isn’t scary to them, while a Russ is.

Plus, it’s not like the Russ is impossibly far away to shoot. It’s maybe a football field away at most-that’s a clear and present danger.

Also, if they disobey their superior, that could be a LOT worse than getting killed by a tank or transport. Dark Eldar can come back from that without much trouble-but a superior being angry with you? That’s a rough time for you.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:


My centuries-old drukhari scourges that have been raiding realspace their whole lives probably shouldn't get confused about whether to shoot the chimera or the leman russ with their dark lances. But with Ld 6+ (which is considered quite good Ld at the moment), they'd end up making that mistake about 28% of the time.

Dark Eldar are also a bunch of self-serving and backstabbing a-holes, so if that chimera is directly threatening them by being closer then it make sense they would need a Ld check to target a Russ that is farther away (and thus someone's else problem).

But a Chimera isn’t scary to them, while a Russ is.

That doesn't make sense. Multilasers and Heavy Bolters should be plenty scary to light infantry.

Now should they have a high Ld to represent their ability to discern targets and retain discipline under fire? Sure they should. But a "mere" Chimera should be a non-trivial thing to ignore, especially if it's blazing away at them.

Also, Dark Eldar had other advantages back in the day such as night vision for when that was a thing.

So there would be times when the closer enemy is the more dangerous one, as the further enemy is unlikely to be able to see you in the first place.

 Insectum7 wrote:

That doesn't make sense. Multilasers and Heavy Bolters should be plenty scary to light infantry.

Now should they have a high Ld to represent their ability to discern targets and retain discipline under fire? Sure they should. But a "mere" Chimera should be a non-trivial thing to ignore, especially if it's blazing away at them.

Admittedly it probably also needs a further condition beyond simply being "closer", if the Chimera is only an inch closer than the Leman Russ then it doesn't make much sense, it needs to be a blatantly direct threat to the Scourges.

Yeah, there's some work that needs to be done, but in general the idea is better than "I shoot those five men over there behind a building to deny the objective (silly man touched the ruin base with his base, the fool!) , because that makes more sense to the hive mind I am currently a part of than shooting the unit literally six inches in front of me screaming like madmen and waving bayonets or chainblades"

A.T. wrote:
In practice you would just get arbitrarily boned at the whim of the dice - not just failing to hit or wound, now you weren't even shooting in the right direction.

Lascannon firing on a Titan at point blank range, an easier target than the broad side of a barn, whiffs half the time and does nothing: Yeah sure.
Lascannon hitting a Guardsman rolls a 1 to wound, no effect: Totally fine.
Lascannon bounces off power armor rolling a 6 to save, zero damage: Also reasonable.
Lascannon fails a target priority test that you could completely avoid taking with good positioning, and merely fires on the closest target of appropriate type: Whoah buddy you can't have that, that's a FEELS BAD moment at the whim of the dice.

I never thought the target priority test as implemented was particularly elegant design, but wargamers have some weird ideas of which things are acceptable to leave up to dice and which aren't. There are about thirteen million mechanics in this game where a bad die roll can just screw you over and there's no way to prevent it, and players complained about the one where (1) you had the power to avoid having to roll entirely, and (2) still got to shoot something even if you failed.

I think the real reason 40K players disliked target priority, and to a lesser extent the old fall-back morale system, is a general expectation that they be in perfect omnipotent control of their dudes at all times. It has nothing to do with whether you 'get arbitrarily boned at the whim of the dice'; the game is chock-full of mechanics that do that, and nobody seems to complain when they roll a 1 to hit and the whim of the dice is that their artillery shell vanishes into thin air. It's only mechanics that take control away from players and limit what they can do with their units that draw this sort of criticism.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
But having like, binary screening rules (either you can target the russ or you can't based on whether something else is threatening you) and then having strats or character rules to allow units to ignore those limitations could be interesting. For armies that have cheap, "low-ranking" characters like lieutenants, warlocks, fireblades, etc., I could see that being a decent niche.

Many historicals use troop ratings and then have rules apply differently to the different ratings, rather than using stat checks. Having better quality troops allows circumventing restrictions applied to lesser quality ones. So maybe an army like Marines could have free targeting army-wide, while an army like Guard would need officers, strats, or tests to freely target.

You could also tie these capabilities into morale pretty easily. Intact units can target whatever, suppressed units can only target the nearest visible enemy. So instead of needing to pass dice rolls, you have perfect control of your forces until the bullets start flying, and then friction gradually limits your options. Elite troops get better morale and are harder to suppress, so have more freedom to engage as they see fit and are more likely to remain fully capable until the bitter end, while green forces are more susceptible to morale.

Or just focus on screening like you said. Maybe the game doesn't need something as strict as needing a Ld check to target anything other than the closest enemy, but it's silly when you can freely target a lone dude hiding at the back of the table when there are a hundred other dudes in between you and him.

Although that gets into the issue of giving Marines (aka the most common army) ways to ignore a mechanic quickly means said mechanic becomes irrelevant.

 catbarf wrote:
Lascannon firing on a Titan at point blank range, an easier target than the broad side of a barn, whiffs half the time and does nothing: Yeah sure.
Lascannon hitting a Guardsman rolls a 1 to wound, no effect: Totally fine.
Lascannon bounces off power armor rolling a 6 to save, zero damage: Also reasonable.
Lascannon fails a target priority test that you could completely avoid taking with good positioning, and merely fires on the closest target of appropriate type: Whoah buddy you can't have that, that's a FEELS BAD moment at the whim of the dice.

I have that song from Sesame Street stuck in my head. You know the one:

"One of these things is not like the others. One of these things does not belong..."

Your fourth example isn't related to the first three, and you even know the reasons why:

 catbarf wrote:
It's only mechanics that take control away from players and limit what they can do with their units that draw this sort of criticism.

Precisely! You're taking away the player's choice of actions.

It's one thing to choose to do something and then fail at it (those first three examples). But it's another entirely to choose to do something, and then have the game tell you that you can't and you have to do something else. You can call it battlefield omnipotence or whatever you want, but at the end of the day people like to control their troops. They can't control the dice, but they can at least control what their units do, or try to do. Take that away? Of course people are not going to be happy.

"... not like the others. One of these things does not belong!"

But if you had to do it, then it would need to be integrated with the command/leader rules, so that players could have their command figures (or synapse, magical kabal nonsense, or collective Waaagh! energy, or whatever) allow for it, but players could make the choice not to bother with that. So I choose to have a command unit order a Devastator Squad to split fire, or I choose not to, realise I need to split fire, and maybe can't. And also the morale side of things you also mentioned.

But a choice has to be involved somewhere along the road, especially when you are taking control of units away from the player.

^Eh, in my view the choice has already been made by way of positioning.

 Tyran wrote:
Although that gets into the issue of giving Marines (aka the most common army) ways to ignore a mechanic quickly means said mechanic becomes irrelevant.

Disagree. For starters if you have suppression rules that effect these tests, an opposing player can strive to make the Marines have a harder time by putting a lot of firepower into them, for instance.

 catbarf wrote:
There are about thirteen million mechanics in this game where a bad die roll can just screw you over and there's no way to prevent it

Hit and wound rolls were cumulative odds. Firing one bolter at a grot on an objective could easily go wrong, firing 20 bolters was highly unlikely to.
Target priority was one dice roll upon which your whole action was determined. One bolter or twenty, made no difference.

In terms of being able to avoid the roll entirely... not so much. Old heavy weapons were often immobile and your opponents only criteria was to move something closer.
It probably would have worked better as a screening rule with the test made to shoot over intervening units. GW ultimately chose to simplify it down to a screening cover save instead.

Without re-writing 40k from the ground up, I don't think this mechanic would make the game more fun.

With that said - the argument "it isn't a choice" feels flawed. The player has chosen to shoot unit X instead of unit Y, split fire, or whatever else is forcing you to take a leadership/cool test. The test then decides if they can or they can't.

Its not obvious why failing this is different to say failing a charge or battle shock test, failing a 2+ psychic power activation etc. (Or, stripped down, failing to do damage with a lascannon). I think the hostility is just that you don't have to do it at the moment - so it would feel lame.

Like if Heavy went back to -1 to hit on moving. Or snapshots only. Or can't shoot at all. Saying "but this rewards cleverly deploying your devastators (etc) in a big tower with LOS of the whole board" feels kind of false.

A.T. wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
There are about thirteen million mechanics in this game where a bad die roll can just screw you over and there's no way to prevent it

Hit and wound rolls were cumulative odds. Firing one bolter at a grot on an objective could easily go wrong, firing 20 bolters was highly unlikely to.
Target priority was one dice roll upon which your whole action was determined. One bolter or twenty, made no difference.

But at the same time, the single Laacannon in a Tac Squad was only one weapon. You also sacrificed your bolter shots as your squad tageted the Lascannon at a vehicle. And then you roll a one. No "padding out the cumulative odds" there. It's a feelsbadman moment, sure, but you also hopefully weren't just relying on that one Lascannon to make the magic happen either, right?

Same with target priority. It's one roll per unit, but your unit shouldn't be isolated and unsupported. You as the player get to set your priorities by moving units together to ensure a degree of support and redundancy. And in the case of lesser troops you might even have more units to support each other because each unit is cheaper.

 Insectum7 wrote:
But at the same time, the single Laacannon in a Tac Squad was only one weapon.

You were shooting one lascannon, you were getting one lascannon odds. If it was a four lascannon devastator squad you were getting four lascannon odds.

Think of it like playing poker - one lascannon is placing a bet with one ace, four lascannons is placing a bet with four aces. You can win or lose with either but the odds are not the same.
Target priority was more like having to pull a card out of the deck after betting, but before the hand was played, and if it was a club you just lost.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Precisely! You're taking away the player's choice of actions.

It's one thing to choose to do something and then fail at it (those first three examples). But it's another entirely to choose to do something, and then have the game tell you that you can't and you have to do something else. You can call it battlefield omnipotence or whatever you want, but at the end of the day people like to control their troops. They can't control the dice, but they can at least control what their units do, or try to do. Take that away? Of course people are not going to be happy.

Well, if we're all on the same page that this is the real reason players don't like it, then the previous explanation of 'you just get arbitrarily boned at the whim of the dice' is nonsense. At best it's a more objective-sounding justification than just not liking when your dudes don't get to do exactly what you want.

The distinction is splitting hairs in any case. The game will also have dice tell you that you don't get to move where you want (roll a 1 to Advance), that you don't get to charge what you want (snake eyes on the charge roll), that you don't get to use stratagems on who you want (failed a Battleshock test), or that you don't get to use psychic powers that you want (rolled a 1 on an ability that needs a 2+ to go off). These don't seem to get criticized as a categorically different sort of dice punishment from whiffing shots, they're just consequences of a game gating your full capabilities behind dice checks. Sometimes your troops move at the double, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they sprint into combat, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they shoot at a Cultist two miles away instead of the horde of Berserkers in front of them, sometimes they don't.

If the charging mechanic allowed you to redirect a failed charge into a unit your roll can actually reach, would that actually make it feel worse? It'd be shifting from 'I chose to do something and failed' to 'I chose to do something and the game told me I can't and have to do something else'.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

A.T. wrote:
Hit and wound rolls were cumulative odds. Firing one bolter at a grot on an objective could easily go wrong, firing 20 bolters was highly unlikely to.
Target priority was one dice roll upon which your whole action was determined. One bolter or twenty, made no difference.

See above. If players can handle charge rolls as one dice roll upon which your whole action is determined, I think there could be a viable mechanism for similarly handling target priority. Except less punishing, because again, if you failed the test you still got to shoot, whereas currently if you fail a charge you sit there with a thumb up your rear.

The actual, mechanical difference between advance rolls, charge rolls, and target priority is that as it was implemented, only the latter was a binary pass/fail against a fixed value. You still get to move an additional distance no matter what you roll for advance, and you can mitigate the risk in charging by minimizing the distance to the target and/or stacking bonuses and re-rolls. A target priority system where the likelihood of being able to engage a target was variable depending on the circumstances rather than just a straight Ld check would create more dynamic results.

But it's still a clunky mechanic in any case. Most wargames don't do target priority this way anymore; they either set hard limits on what a unit can do or bake penalties into the firing mechanics. If the goal is just to penalize targeting units in the backfield, then screening mechanics accomplish it without adding more rolling. If the goal is to better model troop quality as discussed, tying targeting capabilities either directly to quality or to morale status does the job.

You can even get both at the same time if screening penalties apply to your to-hit chance- the sniper with a 2+ to hit can handle a -2 penalty a lot better than Guardsmen with a 4+ base to hit. But then you're using BS as a proxy for troop quality, which may not always be appropriate.

The main difference, to me, between a target priority test and the various attack resolution rolls is that the attack resolution rolls not going my way tell me that the thing I tried didn't work out whereas a failed target priority roll tells me I'm not allowed to try attacking my preferred target in the first place.

This is, admittedly, a matter of presentation/interpretation. However, presentation/interpretation does matter when it comes to enjoying the mechanics of a game.

Games are often described as being "a series of interesting choices." I accept that having all my attacks be successful 100% of the time would make for a less interesting game, so I'm fine with failing a to-hit roll even though the outcome might not favor me. Failing a target priority test doesn't (seem like it would) make the game more engaging. It randomly removes rather than adds interesting decisions *unless* you happen to be in a scenario where you can negate the targeting roll in some way.

With that said - the argument "it isn't a choice" feels flawed. The player has chosen to shoot unit X instead of unit Y, split fire, or whatever else is forcing you to take a leadership/cool test. The test then decides if they can or they can't.

The thing is, shooting unit X instead of Y isn't a real choice (unless there are additional factors to determining if you can shoot straight that we haven't discussed so far.)

If it's clear that shooting the russ is the smart decision, then the target priority test is just a random chance to be forced to go with the bad decision instead. Voluntarily making the worse play so you don't have to roll to see if you're forced to make said play is just... protecting yourself from disappointment by not trying for the desirable outcome in the first place I guess.

Lascannon fails a target priority test that you could completely avoid taking with good positioning, and merely fires on the closest target of appropriate type: Whoah buddy you can't have that, that's a FEELS BAD moment at the whim of the dice.

Two things here:
A.) *Can* you avoid the test with good positioning though? If my lascannon devastators want to shoot at the russ in your backfield, there's only so much I can do to keep you from "screening" it with your chimera. If the alternative is to suicide rush my devs up the table to make the russ the closest target, I feel like that option is impractical (and unfluffy) enough to be a non-option.

B.) If the intention is to make successfully targeting preferred targets a reward for good positioning (or use of abilities or what have you), then a random Ld test still doesn't support that goal. You'd be better off expanding on solid rules that empower players to meet the conditions needed to target what they want.

So for instance, maybe remaining stationary lets you target whatever unit within range you want. That means I can make the choice to hold my scourges still for a turn rather than flying them onto an objective in order to guarantee they can go after their preferred target. Or maybe I spend a command point to call out a priority target, thus letting every unit in my army target the enemy russ this turn without worrying about screens. In both cases, the result feels like a decision I made rather than the dice randomly forcing my army to behave inefficiently.

 catbarf wrote:
See above. If players can handle charge rolls as one dice roll upon which your whole action is determined, I think there could be a viable mechanism for similarly handling target priority.

Random charge distances weren't exactly popular either, helping to further 6th editions legacy of adding more dice rolls to everything.

Target priority being like a random charge roll where you always need to roll 6+ on 2d6, regardless of whether your target is 1" away or 12.