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johnpjones1775 wrote:
it was a land raider crusader

And the Chem cannon it’s anti-infantry 2+ but only S2. On top of that it’s a torrent weapon AP-2 damage 2

So, a dedicated chemical warfare weapon is able to bypass armor and wound Infantry well?
I am shocked. Shocked I say.

johnpjones1775 wrote:
it was a land raider crusader

And the Chem cannon it’s anti-infantry 2+ but only S2. On top of that it’s a torrent weapon AP-2 damage 2

I'm going to assume you mean the hurricane bolters did 2 wounds, not the assault cannon and multimelta?

Also no issues with a chem weapon designed to kill infantry killing infantry well. That's actually a well designed profile in the frame of 40ks context.

So, I know this will NEVER happen, but all these issues could be resolved by throwing out the D6. A D10 or best case scenario, D12, would be perfect. The D6 is holding the game back mathematically. You can't make things stronger or weaker without a 16-18% shift. That's too much.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

JNAProductions wrote:Hard disagree on psychic.
“Roll 2d6 and hope for the best” is not an engaging system.

Agreed. Psychic tests are uninteresting, unfluffy, and just kind of feelsbad when they fail. Again, no one expects lieutenants to roll to see if they randomly fail to buff their squad. But charging points for powers and providing a list of options for each psyker would be nice.

Thing is, it generally wasn't "roll 2d6 and hope for the best" - there was always at least the threat of Perils, and often, there was more play than that- so for example a piece of wargear might have augmented the roll- something which could be done in many different ways- roll 3 pick 2, +1 to the roll, rerolls- both those where if you use it you must reroll both, or the version that allows you to reroll just one, etc.

Those are still basically just variations on, "you have an X% chance to cast the power, a Y% chance to not, and a Z% chance to perils." There's usually not an interesting decision being made. It's just that sometimes the cool thing you paid points to do, the thing that makes your librarian or farseer worth more points than a basic infantry guy, just doesn't happen. The most interesting choice there was, "My opponent makes the Z% chance higher. Do I want to choose to not do the cool thing or risk losing my psyker because I wanted to do a cool thing?" Neither of which feel great.

Now I'm not saying that we couldn't come up with a better system; we probably could. But at the very least, Perils needs to feel like the threat to humanity that it is

Psychic powers are generally depicted as being a threat to psychic humans and maybe wyrd boyz. Ancient space elf wizards, chaos sorcerers, and daemon commander made of warp stuff aren't generally depicted as accidentally making their brains explode because they had a bad Tuesday. So while massive "oops I summoned Cthulhu" style perils are a thing in the lore, they're more something that happens to NPCs.

- adding the hazardous keyword to a shooting attack does not feel like a psychic power that went awry, breached the veil between realspace and the warp and allowed something horrifying to claw its way through the tear.

Hazardous *does* feel like your psyker maybe gave himself a nose bleed causing him to realize that he needs to stop pushing his powers so hard though. Which is more consistent with what we see from psykers in novels. Hazardous gives your abilities a dangerous edge, but you're not just randomly failing to conjure lightning or put up a kineshield.

Deny the Witch is another layer- it isn't the psychic test itself, which may be the only thing that people find objectionable; if so, this next part won't matter much. But Deny the Witch feels better when it is an active roll by the Denier rather than a FNP vs. Mortals. And again, Deny isn't just Deny- there are systems that interact with it.

For me, the DtW is frustrating for a couple reasons. Mainly, it's that competent psykers like the ones we can add to our armies on the tabletop don't generally just have their powers vetoed on the battlefield. And certainly not by random low-level psykers. Rizileth the farseer, master of a thousand runes, lost to the path of the seer and doomed to obsess over exploring the skein... doesn't suddenly have his future sight blocked by Geoff the thirty year-old astropath. And Rizileth's warlock buddy certainly doesn't have his lightning blasts cancelled by Geoff. Like, imagine Ahriman just impotently waving his hands around, utterly incapable of using his psychic abilities because Geoff is rolling hot on his Deny the Witch rolls that day. Or Geoff and one or two of his fellow newbie astropaths, depending on the edition.

The other part of it is just that I remember when they were handing out DtW all over the place, and I'm still salty about it. You want to actually use your psychic powers? Okay, first roll a psychic test to see if you fail. Okay, now I'm going to see if one of my sisters or space wolf units just says no on a 6+. Okay, now I'm going to see if this wolf tail talisman says no on a 5+. Oh, you know what? Njal's here. So let's roll to see if he shuts it down on a 4+.But that's just irrational salt on my part.

I liked the way psyker didn't used to feel like everything else... Just shooting or hitting but with a different keyword.
...
But it's damn sure better than the blandness of 10th's take on it. It does not feel like psychic warfare. Like you finish a fight, and you thin "Geeze, what's all the fuss with psykers and Black Ships? Psykers are just dudes whose guns or melee attacks are tougher than other people's. Why have an Ordo Hereticus at all- just treat psykers like dudes with better guns or knives, because that's all they are."

Great response Wyldhunt, very classy. Always like reading your posts.

I was going to respond to some of the specifics, but by the time I got to the end, it looks like we agree on more than we disagree on.

 PenitentJake wrote:
Great response Wyldhunt, very classy. Always like reading your posts.

I was going to respond to some of the specifics, but by the time I got to the end, it looks like we agree on more than we disagree on.

I'm flattered. You've made my day.

And yeah. I think we have similar tastes regarding powers here. It sounds like I'm just currently leaning towards, "If they aren't going to give us satisfying, fluffy rules for them, then at least don't give us annoying rules where the psykers randomly stop psyking."

+My only hope is that the rules are attractive enough to get my friends and I to actually want to play 40K. I detest what 40K has become.


It wont be, that's the joke. GW will continue chasing mediocrity.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So, I know this will NEVER happen, but all these issues could be resolved by throwing out the D6. A D10 or best case scenario, D12, would be perfect. The D6 is holding the game back mathematically. You can't make things stronger or weaker without a 16-18% shift. That's too much.

The othe pet peeve of mine, no it won't help. People won't take units that hit on a 8+ on a d12, despite the fact that's what an ork should have using a direct conversion. If you want more value sout of the dice people have to stop chasing 2+/3+ for everything and pretending anything else is worthless.

Otherwise you'll just have a game dominated by people stacking buffs to get to a 3+ rerol on a d12 and claiming the rest is trash.

Dudeface wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So, I know this will NEVER happen, but all these issues could be resolved by throwing out the D6. A D10 or best case scenario, D12, would be perfect. The D6 is holding the game back mathematically. You can't make things stronger or weaker without a 16-18% shift. That's too much.

The othe pet peeve of mine, no it won't help. People won't take units that hit on a 8+ on a d12, despite the fact that's what an ork should have using a direct conversion. If you want more value sout of the dice people have to stop chasing 2+/3+ for everything and pretending anything else is worthless.

Otherwise you'll just have a game dominated by people stacking buffs to get to a 3+ rerol on a d12 and claiming the rest is trash.

9+ on a d12, for Orks that hit on a 5+ right now.

I am not saying it's a perfect solution, but it won't tie the entire game to a 1/6 change system. IT would allow such a greater scope of "Effectiveness". IE we could finally make S3 weapons have a meaningless impact on T12-16 platforms, etc.

D12 don't work with the buckets of dice some units can throw around.

The buckets of dice would have to be curtailed. Or somehow altered. Instead of 12 shot rolls, you roll the D12 to see how many of the 12 shots hit. Then you'd be able to calculate wounding individually. People act like math is hard, or abhorrent.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The buckets of dice would have to be curtailed. Or somehow altered. Instead of 12 shot rolls, you roll the D12 to see how many of the 12 shots hit. Then you'd be able to calculate wounding individually. People act like math is hard, or abhorrent.

Nah, people tell you that your initial idea is half-baked and won't work with the rest of the system (in a practical way) as is. Your initial proposal should have included the last one about how hits will be altered. This is by itself a much bigger change to how 40k works than the D12.

 a_typical_hero wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The buckets of dice would have to be curtailed. Or somehow altered. Instead of 12 shot rolls, you roll the D12 to see how many of the 12 shots hit. Then you'd be able to calculate wounding individually. People act like math is hard, or abhorrent.

Nah, people tell you that your initial idea is half-baked and won't work with the rest of the system (in a practical way) as is. Your initial proposal should have included the last one about how hits will be altered. This is by itself a much bigger change to how 40k works than the D12.

Also, changing from hitting X% of the time with Y number of attacks is very different from just hitting d12 times. Maybe you're thinking of having the number of hits be based on degrees of success? i.e. roll 1d12, and score hits based on how much higher you were compared to a BS stat or something?

Either way, that's a huge overhaul in its own right. The die size we use (degree of granularity) is a whole separate conversation to be had after figuring out exactly how your more fundamental overhaul would work.

That said, you probably *could* switch to some sort of "degrees of success" roll where the stats of the gun determine the degrees of success and the number of guns being fired serve as some sort of modifier or multiplier to that roll. If you wanted to it. It would be a huge amount of work, but you could potentially use that approach to reduce the overall number of dice rolled or create a minimum number of hits for the unit or something. Not sure that approach is better or necessary, but you could do it.

I'd rather 40k go the way of de-converting all attacks to properly allign with a D12 system, then continue to use a "All weapons wound 1/6th of the time" system. I'd rather GW massively alter the game, then continue it's current track.

Wanting an overhaul is fine, but low strength wounding high toughness is both unrelated the default die size and also a lever we can pull without a complete overhaul. See: previous suggestions of making vehicles with T > (2xS) immune to attacks and the several pages of accomponying discussion about giving units replacement methods of interacting with high-toughness targets.

And even if you do overhaul things, you don't necessarily need to end up using D12s to do it.

For example, if you're switching to a degrees-of-success approach based off a single die roll for the whole squad modified by weapon stats and squad size (which I *think* is what you were implying with your earlier post), then you could just as easily use a 2d6 roll instead of a d12 roll. This would get you a similar range of results (11 results instead of 12) and would also create a bell curve that could be used to make extremely successful or unsuccessful results more rare.

Using a d12 can't be the end goal. If your end goal is the greater granularity that would come with leaving 40k mostly unchanged but switching to d12s instead of d6s, then you don't need to overhaul the attack resolution process. If your end goal is to streamline the attack resolution process to involve fewer dice or to make vehicles immune to small arms, both of those things can be accomplished without using d12s.

I will say, I like rolling d12s. They're just the right amount of roundness.

Said before, will continue to say:
Giving blanket immunity is the laziest thing you can do.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The buckets of dice would have to be curtailed. Or somehow altered. Instead of 12 shot rolls, you roll the D12 to see how many of the 12 shots hit. Then you'd be able to calculate wounding individually. People act like math is hard, or abhorrent.

People aren't acting like anything. A system where each member of a squad has a chance to hit is just objectively better than roll to see how many shots hit. FFS, people bitch and whine enough about torrent being roll to see how many shots hit. You want to do that for every unit in the game? Are you trolling?

You've got to think your ideas through a bit before you write them down man. That might be the worst suggestion that I've ever seen.

I understand the argument for a different die type. I'm kind of indifferent- Dudeface's point above is spot on; if all anyone is interested in is min maxing the best units available to every army to win, it won't matter how many sides the die has, because people are only ever going to pick the unit that has the best target number they can hit, and they'll say everything else sucks and is useless and nothing changes.

Oh sure, the cost will go up once you're no longer using the most ubiquitous and mass produced die type in the world, and sure, it'll roll further and knock more models over, but other than that, I'm not sure it guarantees the kind of ositive change that people think it will.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I am not saying it's a perfect solution, but it won't tie the entire game to a 1/6 change system. IT would allow such a greater scope of "Effectiveness". IE we could finally make S3 weapons have a meaningless impact on T12-16 platforms, etc.

Look at it from a percentage chance. It's less about the faces on the dice and more percentage chance of success. Moving to a d12 or d10 just shrinks the jumps and makes them far less useful, the difference becoming one on paper but not much in practice.

Once the chance of success reduces to a certain amount, the failure becomes intolerable to players. 6+ becomes 11+, which won't be used.
6The current rules float around 3+, 4+ and 5+, or 33%, 50% and 66%. That range is about the only one that provides enough success for people to use. on a D12 you're getting 5 usable options in that range 5+ (~66%), 6+(~58%), 7+ (~50%), 8+ (~42%), 9+ (~33%).


The thing is, the finer the range of numbers the BIGGER your dice bucket needs to be, in order for those finer slices to come up statistically often enough for them to warrant existing. Otherwise you're creating differences for appearance rather than function.

I have no doubt that seeing 5+, 6+, 7+, 8+, 9+ as options FEELs like bigger and more important differences. But the function will not work that way.

If you really want to fix the granularity problem, you need to start with moving the game away from being a model-based to unit-based. That allows you to streamline lots of things, including target numbers.

For example, you can change the rules so that every die roll's normal target is 4+. You can adjust the number of dice rolled and the result of the success rather than making the die roll easier or harder. Target number adjustments can be universal rather than unit based. There is no reason every model has to push out X shots or Y attacks if the rules are by unit rather than model.

But this will never happen. GW is too wed to each model counting as an individual.

Just want to point out that we're once again discussing whether giving the to-wound system the nitpicky granularity of 8% increments will finally fix 40K, while the to-hit system that precedes it is still completely unaffected by how far away you are from the target, how big it is, how fast it's moving, or what weapon you're using. Maybe the problem is less that the shallow and simplistic mechanics lack single-digit-percentage granularity and more that they're shallow and simplistic.

Also: If anyone is pushing for D12s just so you can have an 8% chance of damaging the target, you can do that with D6s. Roll a D6, if you get a 6, then roll again and need 4+. You can even get crazy and have a further possibility of 6 followed by a 6. Not that any of this is a good idea, because throwing buckets of dice to likely accomplish nothing is really bad design, but you could do it.

Also: If anyone is pushing for D12s just so you can have an 8% chance of damaging the target, you can do that with D6s. Roll a D6, if you get a 6, then roll again and need 4+. You can even get crazy and have a further possibility of 6 followed by a 6. Not that any of this is a good idea, because throwing buckets of dice to likely accomplish nothing is really bad design, but you could do it.

We can do that, and we all do it every game we play. For the minority of people who didn't pick up on that paragraph, there are already a lot of stages in attack resolution, a lot of butterknifing

This is really bad game design, but it's super good product design. If you want a good game, you make most of the variables those on-field decisions like distance and movement. If insyead of that you want people to daydream about their lists and what box to buy next, you give the units a surfeit of different stats and stages of attack resolution.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the D6 system. I don't think more granularity of desired dice results would add anything to the game.

In terms of "should more things impact the hit roll" - that is I guess a potential limitation with the D6 system, but more generally it comes down to what sort of game you want 40k to be.

I.E. Do you want a game of "I caught your unit flat footed out in the open, I do massive damage" versus "I'm taking pot shots at your unit in cover with my own unit hiding in cover, so I do nothing". But then you need to have rules that encourage players (beyond being bad) to ever be out of cover. In practice any rules which focus on "movement/positioning" tend to feel abusive/not fun with IGOUGO (since it tends to devolve into "these units/factions can exploit them, these units/factions can't).

Which then leads you to... well, writing a whole new game which has very little connection to 40k as it exists today.

Which is fine perhaps - but it removes any bearings from the conversation.

I guess I'd like more mission variety - but also not going back to the old days. Because to cross the threads - I'm sorry Haighus, but the idea say the Rearguard Mission is fair is sort of alien to me. Maybe if two players have a massive collection and can therefore draw very specific lists with the limitations in mind. But I feel its one of those game types where the result is almost certainly known from deployment - i.e. unless the dice really skew one way or the other. I'm not saying the attacker or the defender always wins - but like above, you have this "you can, or you can't" phenomenon. Its hard to create optionality in game when you just don't have that many "moves".

As for the "never wounding armor debate" I will admit the 100% ban on it is ham fisted, but I like the idea that someone posted of anything not listed as keyword "AT" does minimum damage. I don't care if your Master Crafted and psyker boosted gun is made by the Emperor himself, it does 1 damage if at all, ever.

On the response to the AT Keyword thing, make all power weapons keyword AT. Make AT in grades. AT 1 is flat damage. AT2 is x2 damage. AT 3 (Volcano Cannon) is MAX possible damage.

So a Autocannon would be AT 1 and do a flat 2. A Plasma cannon might be AT 2, and roll for damage, say 2. Then multiply it. So 4. A Volcano cannon, if it hits a tank, would do it's max possible damage per wound. Which I think is 12.

This would make larger AT feel more effective, and not related to bad swingy rolls.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
As for the "never wounding armor debate" I will admit the 100% ban on it is ham fisted, but I like the idea that someone posted of anything not listed as keyword "AT" does minimum damage. I don't care if your Master Crafted and psyker boosted gun is made by the Emperor himself, it does 1 damage if at all, ever.

Aren't 99% of the S4 and lower weapons in the game D1 anyway? Feels like you might be fixating on some specific scenario.

On the response to the AT Keyword thing, make all power weapons keyword AT. Make AT in grades. AT 1 is flat damage. AT2 is x2 damage. AT 3 (Volcano Cannon) is MAX possible damage.

So a Autocannon would be AT 1 and do a flat 2. A Plasma cannon might be AT 2, and roll for damage, say 2. Then multiply it. So 4. A Volcano cannon, if it hits a tank, would do it's max possible damage per wound. Which I think is 12.

This would make larger AT feel more effective, and not related to bad swingy rolls.

How is this meaningfully different from just using the Damage stat? And how often do you think a weapon should be doing 2 or more damage to a tank but not to infantry?

Also, max damage is worse than X2 damage about half the time. If my weapon is Dd6, then rolling a 4+ would give me more than the max of 6 damage.

I don't see the point of this unless GW wanted to somehow separate out weapons which are say damage 2 or 3, but this is only meant to apply to infantry and not vehicles and/or monsters.

And I can sort of see GW trying for that distinction on the grounds that endless bloat is presumably fun fluff for someone somewhere, but I don't really see it.

I'd just scrap things like D6 damage. Have say Lascannons always do 4. You can then reverse engineer the comparable maths back from that.

I'd have blast weapons changed to just be a fixed number of shots too. Maybe with sustained. Or completely rebalance them, because right now I don't feel "anti-horde" weapons feel right. I don't want templates back, but I guess there was something visceral about putting down the pie plate. Rolling dice to determine how many dice you roll feels like and unnecessary extra step. Or tweak it so they are just like flamers, and the dice rolled=hits somehow.

Tyel wrote:
I don't see the point of this unless GW wanted to somehow separate out weapons which are say damage 2 or 3, but this is only meant to apply to infantry and not vehicles and/or monsters.

And I can sort of see GW trying for that distinction on the grounds that endless bloat is presumably fun fluff for someone somewhere, but I don't really see it.

I'd just scrap things like D6 damage. Have say Lascannons always do 4. You can then reverse engineer the comparable maths back from that.

I'd have blast weapons changed to just be a fixed number of shots too. Maybe with sustained. Or completely rebalance them, because right now I don't feel "anti-horde" weapons feel right. I don't want templates back, but I guess there was something visceral about putting down the pie plate. Rolling dice to determine how many dice you roll feels like and unnecessary extra step. Or tweak it so they are just like flamers, and the dice rolled=hits somehow.

how do you make blast weapons be a fixed number of shots while letting them scale with larger units? if you make them a fixed number, it risks being too good against small units, or too weak against bigger units, and so on. i really don't think that's the solution

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:


how do you make blast weapons be a fixed number of shots while letting them scale with larger units? if you make them a fixed number, it risks being too good against small units, or too weak against bigger units, and so on. i really don't think that's the solution

I assume they mean that a havoc launcher would be

4 shots + blast bonus

instead of

D6 shots + blast bonus

Tyel wrote:

I'd just scrap things like D6 damage. Have say Lascannons always do 4. You can then reverse engineer the comparable maths back from that.

Nah. This changes the nature of a lot of Dd6 weapons pretty significantly, and not in a way that I'd like. The point of weapons with Dd6 or Dd6+x is that they're "spiky". You might average 3.5 damage with them, but the potential to roll hot on damage can be a game changer. In practical terms, a lascannon that always does 4 damage will always need 3 unsaved wounds to kill a rhino or 2 unsaved wounds to kill a venom. Whereas a spiky Dd6 lascannon can potentially kill a rhino in two shots or a venom in 1.

Is your goal here just to avoid feelsbad low damage rolls? If so, doing something like the bright lance's Dd6+2 might be a better way to address this. Or do that thing they were doing with a couple weapons in 8th (9th?) where a weapon is Dd6, but you treat rolls of 1-2 as 3. (Which would mean you always do at least 3 damage, but you retain the ability to spike on damage.)

I'd have blast weapons changed to just be a fixed number of shots too. Maybe with sustained. Or completely rebalance them, because right now I don't feel "anti-horde" weapons feel right. I don't want templates back, but I guess there was something visceral about putting down the pie plate. Rolling dice to determine how many dice you roll feels like and unnecessary extra step. Or tweak it so they are just like flamers, and the dice rolled=hits somehow.

I feel like the obvious approach here is to lower the base number of shots (which can be random or not; doesn't really matter) and then make the number of extra shots from Blast either higher or variable. That is, you could make Blast into Blast(X) where X is the number of extra shots you get per 5 models in the enemy unit. Currently, Blast weapons are functionally Blast(1). This would mean that you could make (random example) a frag missile Blast(2). So it wouldn't really be more effective against small units, but its effectiveness against larger squads would scale up quickly making it more effective against hordes of gaunts and what have you.

Basically, if the point of Blast is to make a weapon anti-horde, then there's an easy way to adjust that dial so that they scale better *specifically* against hordes. But we don't really need the number of shots to be random. The to-hit roll already models the idea that sometimes blast weapons miss entirely.