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Here we go again, another rule change for hitting.

Its an interesting one that I wanted to share, it's pretty simple in concept but feels unintuitive.

Units only need to hit and their target having a failed armor save to inflict POTENTIAL wounds. Units with potential wounds don't remove their models or apply the wounds until they receive real wounds.

There is a new phase before the morale phase called the endurance phase. At this phase, for each unit, roll a toughness check for each potential wound. If they roll equal or lower to their toughness, they remove the potential wound and are safe, if they roll higher, it becomes a real wound and they get remove models if they received all their wounds.

They main objective of this rule is to nerf alpha strikes and give units a chance to act. I'm not too keen on this, as if model can really only move before they die, the phase felt pointless.

FYI, for mortal wounds, they auto fail the wound, and for poison weapons, they always roll on a 3 or less.

And to clarify, you do it on YOUR turn for YOUR models.

I assume a 6 is an auto fail and a 1 always succeeds?

But yes, as a biased Knight player, I love this rule.

1s are auto success but 6s no, if they have 7+ toughness, its like old editions with 7+ BS. If you roll a 6, you roll again and go against your toughness minus 5. So if your toughness is 8, you would need to roll 5 or less, if you didn't, then you need to roll a 3 or less.

The Apocalypse rules released a few years ago was designed with damage at the end of the turn. The game was well received, but not supported or maintained.

They tracked damage with blast markers and only removed models after both sides had acted. So units could be overkilled and still fire. In that instance they completely resolved damage and left a marker to denote it, rather than half resolving and then completely resolving as you've got.


Conceptually I think it helps with the simultaneous nature of real combat, but yeah it does come across as weird.


It worked in apocalypse though so there's no reason it couldn't work.


If you're concerned about the lack of simultaneity you could have all units get a reaction to coming under fire, like returning fire or moving.

On the one hand, this is a crazy buff to my GUO.
Even with a Torrent weapon, you'd be looking at 1.2% chance of doing any damage. A 2+ to-hit drops it to less than 1%.

But on the other hand, this entirely removes Strength from the equation, which is not good.
A S18 Rupture Cannon does 1d6+6 damage, but each point of damage (or the one roll for all the damage) still has a barely 2% chance of hurting my GUO.

A squad of 20 GEQ with Lasguns and FRFSRF has...

40 shots
20 hits
10 failed saves
An average of .23 damage.

A Tyrannofex with a Rupture Cannon and the Heavy bonus has...

2 shots
10/6 or 5/3 hits
5/6 failed saves
An average of .22 damage.

Personally, I have a few issues with this.

They main objective of this rule is to nerf alpha strikes and give units a chance to act. I'm not too keen on this, as if model can really only move before they die, the phase felt pointless.

FYI, for mortal wounds, they auto fail the wound, and for poison weapons, they always roll on a 3 or less.

And to clarify, you do it on YOUR turn for YOUR models.

So first of all, I don't agree with the stated goal here, but I also don't think it accomplishes what you want it to. This removes the option of softening up a durable target before finishing it off with a melee unit. So no using the shooting phase to turn the odds of the upcoming fight phase in your favor.

This also basically makes any squishy melee units into suicide units. Sure, my banshees or wyches or whatever charged you and did enough damage to wipe out most of your unit. But now your guys get to stick around and wail on their low-toughness single-wound elf bodies before dying. Or maybe complete an action at the end of the turn even though they're all dead men walking.

Come to think of it, it's also weird that my banshees/wyches would then proceed to just... stand there during my opponent's following turn, possibly even getting to fight again if you charge me for some reason, before falling over like samurai in a Kurosawa film on my turn. It creates this odd delay/separation between the source of the harm and the actual harm itself. Like the bullets and knives take a couple of minutes to actually take effect.

So I don't think I like the stated goal as it kind of removes some existing tactical choices in favor of just letting units power forward until the end of the turn.

But also, this doesn't help against an "alpha strike" in the traditional sense because you'd be testing for casualties in your command phase. Unless "alpha strike" here just meant getting the drop on the enemy in melee. In which case, I agree there's probably a better system to be found than the current one.

In addition to the above, this proposal requires you track how many toughness saves each unit "owes" until the controlling player's next turn. You'd also either have to make this bookkeeping more complicated if there are any sorts of "special" wounds that make the toughness save more likely to pass/fail (such as the poison rule you pitched), or else ditch such mechanics and thus leave yourself with a smaller overall design space.

And as JNA points out, removing toughness from the equation isn't great. Being able to model a meltagun being better at hurting a marine than a lasgun is probably a good thing.

So overall, it seems like your pitch
* Creates extra bookkeeping.
* Reduces tactical options.
* Creates a fluff/crunch disconnect (delayed deaths, removes ways to model "strength", etc.)

With the only real "benefit" being that units have a chance of punching the enemy before they die *if* the enemy opts to get into melee with them. Which I see as more of a negative than a positive as it screws over fragile units.

Not a fan of this one. Sorry, friend. :(

 Hellebore wrote:



If you're concerned about the lack of simultaneity you could have all units get a reaction to coming under fire, like returning fire or moving.

I've look up some rules and tested something like that a while back, its nice but I think reactions should generally be limited in some way and not be a proactive as forces with unbalanced action economies as they basically get double the difference of advantage, and its allow for reactive units to exist, which is why I like OW being a stratagem.

In my games, I have reaction actions and features that allow reactions to make a counter/parrying archetype.