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Either 3+, 4+ or 5+, depending on what works best and how many dice are rolled, as long as the Y+ is consistent to avoid too much codex-flipping—only the number of dice would vary. This would give the number of MW's a stronger trend towards an average (because frankly, D6 MW's for a Land Raider is way too swingy), but would also leave a small chance of a unit suffering zero damage through some trick of fate.

You could use this to achieve a more precise scaling of Deadly Demise to the size of the vehicle or monster (such as its Toughness or starting Wounds), rather than resorting to D3, D6 and D6+2 tiers. But if we want to keep tiers (because Toughness only has a variance of 8 to 13 across non-Forgeworld models that have Deadly Demise, and using starting Wounds and a 5+ roll would increase the average number of MW's), we could simply replace Deadly Demise Dx with "roll x dice, each 4+ is a MW".

To be honest, my main reason for preferring this MW mechanic is just that I find rolling a bunch of dice to be more fun than rolling just one. On a psychological level, rolling a 6 on D6 mortal wounds on myself feels frustrating, whereas rolling 12 dice and getting 8 rolls of 5+ feels almost funny.

.

Honestly, I'd rather make Deadly Demise an attack, with Strength, AP, and Damage just like any other attack. It'd be more work, since you'd want to assess what profile befits each big model, but to me, it's the best approach.

Something like, for a Rhino for example...

Rhino [Blast, Deadly Demise 5+, Torrent]
Range......6"
A..............3
BS...........N/A
S..............5
AP............-1
D.............1

Blast and Torrent work as normal.
Deadly Demise makes it so, when the model is destroyed, roll a d6. On an X+ (five or better in this case) you resolve an attack using that profile against every unit in range, friend or foe.

Honestly, Deadly Demise is a flavorful-but-minor part of the game. I don't think we'd improve things by slowing it down with extra dice rolls or a bunch of bespoke attack profiles.

In regards to Guardsman's suggestion specifically, as I understand it, you want to keep the initial d6 roll to see if the vehicle explodes in the first place. That means there's already a 5/6ths failure point for the rule to do anything. Adding an additional failure point by making it possible for the actual damage rolls to generate no successes means that you go from rolling a single die to see if something happens to rolling a bunch of dice for potentially nothing to happen.

So it slows things down (very slightly) and also creates the potential for your excitement at seeing the initial 6 to be quashed by subsequently seeing no successes on the damage rolls.

And while your love of rolling dice for the heck of it is valid, I think that's also firmly in the territory of mechanics that we ditched in 7th edition. That is, the roll dice to see how many dice you roll so you can roll dice to see what happens style of mechanic.

I think Wyldhunt has hit this nail squarely on the head. One of the places where Mortal Wounds works most effectively in the game is avoiding the roll lots of dice for little effect in niche corners of the game. There simply isn't lots of value in wasting rules space on making Deadly Demise any more bespoke than it already is. You can have an army full of models with this rule and yet very easily never use the rule during a game because you never roll a 6.

I remember how it used to be, where it wasn't guaranteed. The Imperial Knights had a stratagem to help you explode.

Let's not go back to the old ways.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember how it used to be, where it wasn't guaranteed. The Imperial Knights had a stratagem to help you explode.

Let's not go back to the old ways.

It's still not guaranteed though. You only explode 1/6th of the time unless there's a special rule/strat improving those odds.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Honestly, Deadly Demise is a flavorful-but-minor part of the game. I don't think we'd improve things by slowing it down with extra dice rolls or a bunch of bespoke attack profiles.

In regards to Guardsman's suggestion specifically, as I understand it, you want to keep the initial d6 roll to see if the vehicle explodes in the first place. That means there's already a 5/6ths failure point for the rule to do anything. Adding an additional failure point by making it possible for the actual damage rolls to generate no successes means that you go from rolling a single die to see if something happens to rolling a bunch of dice for potentially nothing to happen.

So it slows things down (very slightly) and also creates the potential for your excitement at seeing the initial 6 to be quashed by subsequently seeing no successes on the damage rolls.

And while your love of rolling dice for the heck of it is valid, I think that's also firmly in the territory of mechanics that we ditched in 7th edition. That is, the roll dice to see how many dice you roll so you can roll dice to see what happens style of mechanic.

A better version would just be Deadly Demise X, when the model dies roll X dice and each 6 inflicts a mortal wound on every unit within 6". Only one roll needed.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Honestly, Deadly Demise is a flavorful-but-minor part of the game. I don't think we'd improve things by slowing it down with extra dice rolls or a bunch of bespoke attack profiles.

In regards to Guardsman's suggestion specifically, as I understand it, you want to keep the initial d6 roll to see if the vehicle explodes in the first place. That means there's already a 5/6ths failure point for the rule to do anything. Adding an additional failure point by making it possible for the actual damage rolls to generate no successes means that you go from rolling a single die to see if something happens to rolling a bunch of dice for potentially nothing to happen.

So it slows things down (very slightly) and also creates the potential for your excitement at seeing the initial 6 to be quashed by subsequently seeing no successes on the damage rolls.

And while your love of rolling dice for the heck of it is valid, I think that's also firmly in the territory of mechanics that we ditched in 7th edition. That is, the roll dice to see how many dice you roll so you can roll dice to see what happens style of mechanic.

A better version would just be Deadly Demise X, when the model dies roll X dice and each 6 inflicts a mortal wound on every unit within 6". Only one roll needed.

That would work. Depends on what you're trying to model, I guess. The current system makes it so that it's rare for a vehicle to explode, but it's inevitable that those nearby will take some damage when they do. Your proposal would model vehicles exploding constantly, but said explosions frequently do little or no damage (depending on X).

Maybe that's why wrecks never remain on the field?