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And lets not forget this was back in the day when armies were much smaller than they are today too. Even a good many 3rd edition armies are smaller than forces we have today.

Though my impression is armies (esp troops) are smaller than they were a couple of editions back. Same for AoS as well.

Granted part of that has been GW pushing for smaller infantry blocks.

Some of that is kind of inevitable. As collections grow, players want to be able to field more of said collection at the same time.

Where it’s gone wrong in the past (WHFB 8th Ed) was allowing that desire to ultimately set the Average Game too large for folk starting out.

I don’t think 40K and AoS have quite the same problem though, because neither has the rank’n’flank limitation. And both can work at smaller points, even if the game isn’t the most fun at smaller points.

AoS 2.0 had armies as big as rank and flank
40K did too - it wasn't that long ago you could take multiple 40 model gaunt squads on the table.


I do 100% agree that too many models starts to push newbies out. Not just on price, but time. It was one of the big problems that Old World suffered from.

However I think the solution wasn't to cut army size. The solution was GW marketing, promoting and creating multiple smaller format games.

Killteam has been around for utterly ages, but for most of that time it was a few pages in the main rule book and more of a "we'll play this as a demo game but the REAL game is the wargame full rules".
As soon as they spun it out as its own game; with its own boxes (which are just 40K infantry/troop boxes); rules and marketing - suddenly it became a game. Underworld, Warcry*; killteam; spearhead etc.... These all serve the same purpose of being smaller "one purchase" type formats that Gw pushes to help bridge that gap as people get into the hobby; get into an army and get building up to a full force.

WAY easier to encourage people to get a spearhead; play around; then get another spearhead to play with and now they've basically got most of a 1-2K army there that just needs a few more models to bulk up to a full force.

*which seems to be a bit dead at present

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Certainly 3rd Ed cut much too deep. But, if we also look at Epic 40,000? That seems to have been the studio approach at the time.

3rd Ed is a more accessible game. But too much of the nuttiness was removed.

For instance? Sure, 2nd Ed Ork Artillery was daft in terms of rules, with often multiple rolls needed to work out a single shot. And 3rd Ed was just…not very good heavy weapon teams.

One was too much, the other too little. And there’s a lot of design space between the two.

Yet at the time they also introduced Inquisitor, which allowed for that RPG granularity for those that wanted it. They really did try to accommodate everyone with the different systems at the time. I still hold that they went exactly far enough, and the sales from the 3rd Ed. era are a testament to that.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Some of that is kind of inevitable. As collections grow, players want to be able to field more of said collection at the same time.

Where it’s gone wrong in the past (WHFB 8th Ed) was allowing that desire to ultimately set the Average Game too large for folk starting out.

I don’t think 40K and AoS have quite the same problem though, because neither has the rank’n’flank limitation. And both can work at smaller points, even if the game isn’t the most fun at smaller points.

That's on the group organizers. During 6th Ed WFB and 3rd Ed. 40K our group in Ft. Wayne set 1,000 point games as the "entry" point for people with new armies, and we always had a list ready to go at that value in case new people showed up.

Seems like a lot of the argument about 2+ save and 2d6 could have been solved if GW ever did a battle report in WD which might have used that specific character set up. hmm.

BanjoJohn wrote:
Seems like a lot of the argument about 2+ save and 2d6 could have been solved if GW ever did a battle report in WD which might have used that specific character set up. hmm.

I did look for that, but there were very few battle reports using Chaos, and the few I found didn't have that information.

Studio battle reports almost always used the studio models, and there were no Khornate Terminators in the studio collection.

As much as I'm not a fan of some of the core tenets of 3rd, it is the only real time they were forced (by LotR hogging production time) to revise rules through incremental changes rather than new editions.

They still wanted to maintain interest in the game and added tweaks, but they were prevented from wholly redoing the rules.

It went from 98 to 04, which is the longest gap between editions GW has ever done (1st to 2nd was similar, but they also some bigger mid 1st shifts in game play and rules than 3rd did).

Then 4th went from 04 to 08 and it was mostly a collection of the WD rules updates for 3rd, with some additional rules (like target selection and proper abstract LoS which are the two best things they ever added to the game imo).

So, there was a 10 year period between 98 and 08 where the game went through relatively minor incremental changes, including updated army books, without throwing previous games out.

From a design philosophy perspective, that was imo the best period for rules updates.

I would have loved to have seen what 2nd ed looked like if it had a 10 year refinement period like that. The core charm of the game remaining while the somewhat combersome aspects are refined and in some cases simplified.

BanjoJohn wrote:
Seems like a lot of the argument about 2+ save and 2d6 could have been solved if GW ever did a battle report in WD which might have used that specific character set up. hmm.

They could have just written the rule better. I went back and looked and the Ork book (which came out earlier) had a wargear section and the various types of armor are described, including that it uses a D6. I think because it was in the Marks section, it was compressed. The Chaos book was very dense, a nice long read. All the books of that era had great fluff in them.

The SG Necromunda edition released in the 2000s was as close to a 2.5 edition of 2nd ed as we got, where they streamlined dice down to D6s or D3s.

I quite like it and never really cared for the need to have the platonic solids available just for one part of the game - armour penetration.

But I do think the area that 2nd ed could have refined was melee, when you're using squads rather than individual character on character.

Not sold on any particular method, but the 2nd ed rules just took too long because they required you to do one model at a time.

If you can use that same combat system to enable unit on unit attacks, then I'm all for it. But I expect you'd need to find a way to simplify it enough to allow batch rolling and resolution.

The shooting was already done as a unit, so it's not out of the them of 2nd ed to do the same for CC. Two different scales of resolution seems unnecessary.


I'm torn on the detailed datafaxes, ramming and out of control aspects. I love them, but again the amount of effort is a lot to generate it.


I think you could retain the flavour and streamline the concept by creating a standard effect rather than a model by model specific one.

ie, if you get the out of control result, all units do X.

You can shrink the vehicle entries a lot that way.


Scattering blast markers or stays in play blast markers are useful tactical elements, but again simplifying would reduce the burden on play.

 Hellebore wrote:
But I do think the area that 2nd ed could have refined was melee, when you're using squads rather than individual character on character.

Not sold on any particular method, but the 2nd ed rules just took too long because they required you to do one model at a time.

If you can use that same combat system to enable unit on unit attacks, then I'm all for it. But I expect you'd need to find a way to simplify it enough to allow batch rolling and resolution.

The shooting was already done as a unit, so it's not out of the them of 2nd ed to do the same for CC. Two different scales of resolution seems unnecessary.

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week or so. The problem with batch rolling melee is that with units able to have every model carrying different melee weapons, it gets too complicated to track who is hitting whom, and with what.

The easiest fix is to go the 3rd edition route of consolidating most of the melee weapons into a single 'Close Combat Weapon' statline. This was widely reviled when 3rd edition arrived but did allow for most units to roll their melee attacks together.

The other option is to move to a system where the unit rolls all of their attacks in one go, and the attacker just chooses which weapons to wound with from those available in the unit, perhaps limiting the number of wounds by each weapon to correspond with the Attacks stat of the models carrying them. This allows for batch rolling and keeps the existing melee weapon statlines intact, but means the best weapons are always going to be doing the damage and cheaper weapons are essentially just delivery vehicles for those better weapons.

Both options would be faster to resolve than the 2nd edition system... but I don't think either would be a significant improvement from a gameplay perspective, in any way other than resolution speed.

Edit - it occurs to me that an alternative to the first option, rather than consolidating weapons would be to consolidate weapon options. A unit would take the same melee weapons, with a limit on the number of different weapons available to the unit. So an Assault Squad, instead of being entirely mix and match, would be all equipped with the same pair of weapons with only one or two models allowed to take something different, as it works with special and heavy weapons. That would also be an opportunity to limit regular troops to 'basic' weapons options, removing the option to do things like field entire armies of chainsword/powerfist equipped jump-packing Blood Claws.

I'm torn on the detailed datafaxes, ramming and out of control aspects. I love them, but again the amount of effort is a lot to generate it.

Out of Control is fantastic, and I'm a big fan.

Ramming is a great mechanic, but is too powerful. In the groups I played with in 2nd edition, Rhinos were rarely used for anything other than popping grenades and zipping around ramming tanks... because of the cost discrepancy, the fact that running a rhino into the side of a predator was likely to kill the rhino was worth the risk, because you were likely to do worthwhile damage to the more expensive tank.

Datafaxes are another thing I've been pondering over the past few months... For my 2nd Ed Necron Codex, I've switched them around a little to put the options on the back, so that all of the information you need during the game is on the same side of the card. But I've also been considering consolidating the damage charts. Not to the extent of the 3rd ed and onwards vehicle damage, but it would be nice to at least narrow things down to types of vehicles, so that the charts don't need to be printed on each card. It would just say 'Damage - Tracked Tank' or 'Damage - Walker' or the like, and you would refer to the corresponding damage table in a summary.

Scattering blast markers or stays in play blast markers are useful tactical elements, but again simplifying would reduce the burden on play.]/qoute]
In my house rules, I've limited throwing grenades to one model per unit. That helps avoid filling tables up with smoke or plasma quite as much. I like persistent grenade effects, but it did get a bit silly.

On Datafaxes the damage tables, as I remember, were identical. The damage for the Whirlwind and Predator had the same charts by my memory - though different armour values.

Tygre wrote:
On Datafaxes the damage tables, as I remember, were identical. The damage for the Whirlwind and Predator had the same charts by my memory - though different armour values.

Most of the results are copy-paste with the name of the vehicle changed, but there are a couple different results. The Predator can have it's turret get stuck and fire only in a straight line, while the Whirlwind can go haywire and fire at the closest target in a random direction. There are a couple other minor differences, like the rolls for some of the crew results and the fact that the Predator has a separate table for its sponsons. Looking at a few more datafaxes, like 90% of the results are essentially identical though, and should be pretty easy to generify at least by "class" (Tank, Walker, Fast/Skimmer?)

 Hellebore wrote:
As much as I'm not a fan of some of the core tenets of 3rd, it is the only real time they were forced (by LotR hogging production time) to revise rules through incremental changes rather than new editions.

They still wanted to maintain interest in the game and added tweaks, but they were prevented from wholly redoing the rules.

It went from 98 to 04, which is the longest gap between editions GW has ever done (1st to 2nd was similar, but they also some bigger mid 1st shifts in game play and rules than 3rd did).

Then 4th went from 04 to 08 and it was mostly a collection of the WD rules updates for 3rd, with some additional rules (like target selection and proper abstract LoS which are the two best things they ever added to the game imo).

So, there was a 10 year period between 98 and 08 where the game went through relatively minor incremental changes, including updated army books, without throwing previous games out.

From a design philosophy perspective, that was imo the best period for rules updates.

I would have loved to have seen what 2nd ed looked like if it had a 10 year refinement period like that. The core charm of the game remaining while the somewhat combersome aspects are refined and in some cases simplified.

I agree with much of this. 2nd has a certain texture which is unmatched, but 3rd - 4th was a great period of the game building on itself in a very positive way. The thin codexes of 3rd meant we all still looked back on the 2nd ed codexes to get our fluff fix, but 3rd also saw a lot of growth in game-option variety for a lot of factions which was amazing. It was a little shocking for me to look through the 2nd ed Chaos book and see that there was no capacity to give normal CSMs Marks, for example. But late 3rd ed, despite much streamlining, gave so many more ways to customize your army. Tyranid Mutations, Chaos Marks and Veteran Skills, Imperial Guard Doctrines were all a great replacement for the loss of 2nd ed's Character customization through Wargear Cards.

Imo there's some "perfect" version of 40k that mashes together the best qualities of 2nd and 3-4th, with a touch of the mentality of 8th in the sense of condensing the necessary main rules and improving overall accessibility.

Tygre wrote:
On Datafaxes the damage tables, as I remember, were identical. The damage for the Whirlwind and Predator had the same charts by my memory - though different armour values.

Nope.

For example, for Hull damage, on the Predator a 1-3 has an explosion in the crew compartment, killing each crew member on a 4+. That's a 2-3 on the Whirlwind chart, with a 1 killing the driver.

On the Predator, a Turret roll of 2 jams the turret. On the Whirlwind, it causes the launcher to fire a barrage at a random target.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Insectum7 wrote:
... but 3rd - 4th was a great period of the game building on itself in a very positive way.

3rd to 5th was positive game building. 4th killed my interest in the game for a time. The extreme nerfing of transports in reaction to the rhino-rush era of 3rd was painful, as were the complicated wound allocation rules and endless arguments over the widely misunderstood hybrid-LOS terrain rules. It packed a lot of the missing detail back in, but the end result was just not particularly fun to play.

It was a little shocking for me to look through the 2nd ed Chaos book and see that there was no capacity to give normal CSMs Marks, for example.

There was no real need to, as you could take the various Cult troops as standard units.

I do think rolling Guard Doctrines and Marine Chapter Traits (and similar structures for other factions) into 2nd edition would be fun, though.

 insaniak wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
... but 3rd - 4th was a great period of the game building on itself in a very positive way.

3rd to 5th was positive game building. 4th killed my interest in the game for a time. The extreme nerfing of transports in reaction to the rhino-rush era of 3rd was painful, as were the complicated wound allocation rules and endless arguments over the widely misunderstood hybrid-LOS terrain rules. It packed a lot of the missing detail back in, but the end result was just not particularly fun to play.

I disagree. 5th definitely felt like a side-grade with a couple of wtf? design choices sprinkled in. Going back to TLOS, specifically having forests and ruins not block LOS through them was obnoxious. Bumping more cover up to 4+ cover save was meh, and while I appreciate pulling back on how troops in transports were effected, the changes to the damage tables made the game more vehicle focused in a way that really changed the nature of it, imo. And the wound allocation rules were just *facepalm*. Codexes also were getting stripped of much customization and we went into the Ward Era. I definitely preferred 4th.

 insaniak wrote:

It was a little shocking for me to look through the 2nd ed Chaos book and see that there was no capacity to give normal CSMs Marks, for example.

There was no real need to, as you could take the various Cult troops as standard units.

Taking Plague Marines isn't quite the same as taking Nurgle Marines with access to Heavy Weapons, or Bikers with the Mark of Khorne. The 3rd and 3.5 books opened up a lot a great army building opportunities. You could really imbue more character into your units.

 insaniak wrote:

I do think rolling Guard Doctrines and Marine Chapter Traits (and similar structures for other factions) into 2nd edition would be fun, though.

Agreed!

I've been thinking some more on the close combat issue, and I think I've come up with an interesting idea...

Part of the problem with the 3rd Edition+ version of close combat is that it gave players nothing to do in their opponent's close combat phase aside from rolling saves and pulling models off the board. With the removal of Overwatch, this effectively left players with very little to do at all in an opponent's turn, which led to a lot of players just switching off (or in a couple of my past tournament games, wandering off) during opponents' turns.

But, with 2nd edition handling charges in the Movement phase, it occurred to me that there is actually no particular need to have a separate close combat phase. Instead, the Shooting and Close Combat Phases would be rolled in to a single Attack Phase. If you're not in base contact in that phase, you shoot. If you are in base contact, you attack in close combat instead, using the 3+ Editions' 'WS vs WS' attack process.

There's still going to be a certain amount of dice pooling and wound allocation process required to deal with mixed weapon units, but it's still going to be a lot faster than the 2nd edition system. And integrating it in along with Shooting makes it feel like less down time for the off player than keeping it in an entirely separate phase, even though it's technically still the same number of unit activations.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Daba wrote:


Not to mention that the characterhammer after 2nd was worse, as they could sweep through hordes of troops far better than anyone in 2nd could.

Not true. CC was base to base, so if all the models in contact were killed, the survivors could voluntarily break without the "free strike."

Voluntarily breaking was a great way to leave a hth monster stuck in the open for massive retaliatory shooting. Also, CC did not prevent troops from firing into it, which was absolutely the case in 3rd. In 3rd you could do sweeping advanced and whip across the board, and so long as you reached the next squad, no one could shoot at you.

In 2nd, you could fire into the combat in such a way as to sweep aside your own feeble troops) which took half the hits, until only the bad guy was left and NOW you throw the heavy guns into it.

That was why IG troops in 3rd began adopting parade formations because cc monsters could hopscotch across the table without being shot if the units were too close together.

I've been playing 2nd for a long time, and while you can trick out a cc monster to absolutely get into combat, there were lots of ways to bog them down or cut them down. Maybe you played it differently, but I've never seen a character sweep through hordes.

I said it was worse after 2nd (i.e. 3rd onwards) mainly due to what you mentioned, and the Rhino rush.

In 2nd edition, 'overpowered' characters were because they could do heroic feats like get behind enemy lines and blow up a tank. In 3rd, it was measured by how much you could slice through chaff grot units, like Eldar Guardians.

 Hellebore wrote:


Not sold on any particular method, but the 2nd ed rules just took too long because they required you to do one model at a time.

If you can use that same combat system to enable unit on unit attacks, then I'm all for it. But I expect you'd need to find a way to simplify it enough to allow batch rolling and resolution.

The model-on- model aspect of 2nd had a couple advantages. First, it allowed all the weapon options to have a full effect rather than making broader categories, which enhances the fluff. It also avoid situations where players min/max which models are in contact or assume formations designed to take enemy characters out of the fight - reducing them to "throwing rocks" whilst your character hit will full force.

Assigning losses also can be an issue with troops like assault marines who aren't identically equipped.

My my resource page, I have a streamlined system that is still model-to-model but it consolidates all the variables into a single opposed die roll. Pick the duel, roll the dice, each player called out their modifier and roll, loser takes the hits as normal. None of this "roll a bunch of dice, now reroll some" nonsense. Once you internalize the bonuses, it goes pretty fast.

I love the vehicle rules for 2nd, and while the hit charts are similar, the effects are fun, and worth a little extra time to have turrets fly off and land on people.

You can eliminate the "death trap" problem by simply saying that whenever you get a "crew/passengers killed" result, they get to roll an unmodified save, which makes perfect sense. Flak armor won't help much, but power armor is still power armor and should convey some advantage. Also fun to imagine Terminators cutting their way out of the wreck.

Consolidating dice is also an easy fix, but it's more than armor, as weapons doing bunches of wounds were a significant check on monsters and characters. The Multimelta was scary not just because it sliced through tanks but also because it did 2d12 wounds to everything else.

Just getting rid of all the extraneous rolls for jump pack scatter, random movement of templates that linger turn after turn can speed things up a lot.

In a lot of ways, Bolt Action is what 3rd was meant to be.

Like much with 2nd Ed, the complexity of the combat phase has snowballed with the telling over the years, it’s really not that difficult. It’s rolling some dice and adding a few numbers together. Once you know the modifiers each player can announce their combat score in a matter of seconds, then work out wound rolls and saves.

It’s more that there’s no way to further streamline it. Each fight in a given punch up must be worked out individually.

Not a long process per fighter. But for a 10 on 10 unit fight? With parrying? It takes a relatively set amount of time.

You can’t batch roll, as each fight is a contested roll.

Each fight will also generate an uncertain number of to wound rolls, and saves where eligible. And you need to check your opponent isn’t rolling more than their entitlement. All to potentially kill a single model at a time.

There are doubtless ways to streamline the process, but the idea that the close combat of second Ed is some sort of unplayable morass is from the same camp as those who say the games take seventeen hours… it’s people who never played it repeating something they heard online, and embellishing it. In real life, the combat phase clips along at a similar rate to any other game, with the added bonus that it leaves space for epic fights. The basic grunt 10 on 10 squad fights don’t generally happen (Nids excepted) as normally your chumps are better off firing their weapons once they’re in charge range.

I still play 2nd Ed one or two times a week, so am perhaps more familiar with the game than most, but can safely say that even new players pick up the close combat quickly and soon rattle through it.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s more that there’s no way to further streamline it. Each fight in a given punch up must be worked out individually.

Not a long process per fighter. But for a 10 on 10 unit fight? With parrying? It takes a relatively set amount of time.

You can’t batch roll, as each fight is a contested roll.

Each fight will also generate an uncertain number of to wound rolls, and saves where eligible. And you need to check your opponent isn’t rolling more than their entitlement. All to potentially kill a single model at a time.

Yes, but you can reduce it to a series of single contested rolls, and only then roll the wound pool while the other player gets ready to do the save dice.

If you play often, it goes quickly. The biggest slowdown is rolling all the attack dice and then having to do re-rolls for parries. Chopping it to a single opposed roll does speed it up.

And it's unlikely to have the mosh pits typical of 3rd because armies had a clear hierarchy in close combat performance.

Which is imperfect. Not saying it wouldn’t work with both players agreement.

But consider the lily the variety of equipment I could stick on Assault Marines. Yes, I could arm them all with Power Sword and Handflamer. But I could also arm each dude individually.

There? Batch rolling the unit’s total unsaved wounds could see me spare my most expensive individuals. Or those best armed for what I hope to do in coming turns.

Likewise? Each model can only be killed the once. And I don’t think a right proper “you have one wound, but failed five saves” buttering spilled over to the rest of the unit? It was just that one guy that was notably dead.

Of course, when discussing this we must keep in mind even a 2,000 or 3,000 point army was tiny in those days. And so a 2nd Ed Mass Pagga* was still involving far fewer models than 3rd and onward might suggest to the casual reader.

*Pagga. A free for all fight between anyone who wants to join in.

I don't seee why unit-to-unit batch rolling woukdn't work with different weapons. It seemed to work fine from 3rd onward. There's also not that many units that really take more than a few weapon types, and many of the CC focussed factions (Nids) can wind up with big units with the same weapons and really benefit from a system where batch rolling is possible.

I think my ideal 40k would allow Assault Squads to have their full variety of weapons again, and I don't think that becomes an issue with batch rolling because you probably don't have that many squads armed with such variety, so it's not slowing the game down too much. Or if you have a couple squads like that, you're instead probably not taking other shooty squads with their variety of weapons, so you're just claiming time that you would have otherwise spent in the shooting phase. I think as long as you're not giving hordes of models lots of custom weapon options, your ok. Fewer model, elite armies can have more resolution, and hordes get loads of dice and maybe a couple weapons. I'm remembering like a 30 Boy unit with a Nob-Power Claw, Burna-Power Weapon, then 28 Boyz with Choppas. That was pretty fast to resolve.

If it’s all set equipment (Ork Boyz with Bolt Pistol & CCW vs Banshees with no Exarch, for instance) you could batch roll.

But. You’d still need both players to agree, or limit casualties to the number of those that lost their fight.

Even then? A given model might only lose by a single point, whereas Private Wimpy “Cackhanded” McGee to their left completely whiffs it, and suffers multiple wounds to save. Someone might make a Double 6 save against two wounding hits and so should survive that scrap.

So whether you can realistically batch roll is going to be situational.

Though anyone who rolls their saves one at a time can still get in the bin.

Also also. We should keep in mind with even the humble and ubiquitous Chainsword having a -1 save, and Flak armour (6+) being super common? There are lots of situations where you just don’t get to roll a save.

The tricky bit will be if you have anyone outnumbering their opponents, tracking whose dice have a higher ws as a result.

If you decide that one model being hit 4 times and another being hit once means you just apply 5 hits to both, I think you run into even higher lethality issues.

The overkill on a single melee is usually wasted because it can't transfer to another model. If you ignore individual melees and apply the total hits to the whole unit, I think there would be more causalities.

Each model can have different ws and a values in the same squad. Before you get to weapon groupings.

So knowing which model rolled which dice is important for more than which weapon makes the wound rolls. It determines whether the model won its fight in the first place

^I think I would just rethink the whole assault Phase to work with batch rolling. Outnumbering just means you swing more attacks and hit more. Up for extra bonusses for outnumbering by x amounts.

Yeah my comments were more aimed at the idea that the current 2nd ed rules could be batch rolled already.

If you drop outnumbering you can do batching easier, excepting of course that if you have different weapons you still want to make sure you aren't just letting people apply their best rolls to their best weapons.

But in the 2nd ed rules outnumbering was essential for overcoming higher stat units so I can't see it working.


Taking some form of 3rd ed style of combat and applying it to 2nd seems to be the most common suggestion people give which I'm ok with.

However I've thought about this for a while and the initiative order combat thing being too one sided (despite it being the only real melee advantage Eldar got).

What would you say to simultaneous combat but higher initiative grants a bonus. Like +1 to hit or +1 attack.

Or alternatively, attacks are split up like so:

All attacks are simultaneous.
If a model has a higher initiative, it can make 1 attack before all other attacks are resolved.

You could have special rules like strike Frist or fast reflexes which change that 1 attack first to X attacks first.

Whilst you may need to 3rd Ed character stats as well? You could just port over the 3rd Ed Combat Rules.

Group by weapon and WS type. Perhaps specific groups where paired models have parry in the mix?

I dunno. I’d just leave it as is. Sure, it does take longer than other systems. But it’s not that much longer.

It also allows big, powerful, well skilled things to absolute massacre enemy characters with a deluge of to wound rolls. Which is funny.