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So, Inspired by the Hellhound & Inferno cannon I was thinking, instead of rolling to hit, then rolling partial hits, why not try the inferno cannon mechanics for all blast/ordnance template weapons?

So, roll to hit, if you hit all models under the template are hit.
If you miss, all models under the template are hit on 4+.

Seems so simple, seems so easy, what do you think?
I think you'd need a different mechanic for the indirect fire weapons, but for things like missile/grenade templates, plasma cannons, and whatnot, I think it works out very well.

BanjoJohn wrote:
So, Inspired by the Hellhound & Inferno cannon I was thinking, instead of rolling to hit, then rolling partial hits, why not try the inferno cannon mechanics for all blast/ordnance template weapons?

So, roll to hit, if you hit all models under the template are hit.
If you miss, all models under the template are hit on 4+.

Seems so simple, seems so easy, what do you think?
I think you'd need a different mechanic for the indirect fire weapons, but for things like missile/grenade templates, plasma cannons, and whatnot, I think it works out very well.

This makes it basically impossible to miss completely if you're targeting a squad.

Even against a single model (like a vehicle or monster) an Ork hits on a 5+, rerollable into a 4+, for an effective BS4 (BS3+ to anyone not used to old nomenclature).

I feel like people who are using blast templates do so because they like the feeling of simulating where exactly the shell lands. They like the potential to scatter fully off-target mitigated by the size of the blast itself, and they like the potential to scatter onto a different unit unexpectedly. So I feel like this would remove that appeal for the people who like blasts.

And for people like me who didn't like the way 3rd-7th handled blast templates, this still keeps some of the main problems (punishing people if they don't meticulously spread their models out exactly 2" apart and punishing melee armies for clumping up in the assault phase).

So while this is arguably simpler, and easier to resolve, I'm not sure it provides much of a net positive. The people who like the old approach to blasts will feel like it gives up too much of the quirky simulationist aspect, and people who disliked templates will grumble that it still doesn't address the main issues with templates.

Well, the scatter concept was also an impossible to miss completely thing as well.

Basically we're looking at ways to make a blast have degrees of success, without worrying about rolling to scatter. This means that there's now 0 chance of it landing on a different unit, but in the interests of speed that's fine.

Small blasts only needed usually to scatter 2 or 3" before they stopped hitting anything, while larger ones needed further.


So you can look at it like this:

Roll to hit
success 6 - all models hit automatically
success, all models under the template are struck on a 2+.
Miss, all models under the template are hit on a 5+
Miss on a 1, no models are hit at all.


That gives you a range of options that imitates the success of a scatter with a little abstract maths.

Idk, Hellebore. That feels a lot like the sort of, "Roll dice to roll dice to see how many dice you roll," mechanic that we were happy to ditch in the move to 8th.

Like, 4 devastators shooting frag missiles (small blast) at some infantry looks like:
* Placing the template.
* (Arguing with your opponent about how many models are under it.)
* Rolling 4 different hit rolls.
* Ending up with up to 2 to-hit roll pools to resolve (for attacks hitting on 2+ and attacks hitting on 5+) plus a third pool of auto-hits that need to get added back into the to-wound roll pool later.

And you give up the thrill of seeing your blast scatter somewhere unexpected while also still punishing people for not perfectly spacing out their models.

It's less complicated than rolling for scatter and resolving partial hits. The question is, do you want to reflect the vagaries of templates partially missing or not?

If not, then just roll to hit and if you hit, you hit X many models. If not you miss all of them.


I think there's a wider range of preferences on that spectrum than either 2nd ed scatter or 10th ed abstract roll 2D6 attack dice to hit with.


Another way you can do it is put the onus onto the wound roll instead, so you're still using a fixed hit roll as the 3-7 roll had.

So:
1 miss - no hits
missed by 1 (need a 3+ and roll a 2) - roll against targets at half strength rounding down
successful hit - roll against targets at normal Strength

So a plasma cannon can either hit 5 models and wound them at S7, S3 or fail.

If you wanted something faster perhaps a hybrid of 4th and 5th:
- Barrage and large blast weapons scatter.
- Small blast weapons roll to hit - if you miss then you miss everything, and if you hit there is no scatter on the template

Now scatter direction and partials are a whole problem of their own but this does speed up a lot of weapons that are fired in clusters like frag missiles, plasma cannons, shredders, etc.

 Hellebore wrote:
Well, the scatter concept was also an impossible to miss completely thing as well.

Basically we're looking at ways to make a blast have degrees of success, without worrying about rolling to scatter. This means that there's now 0 chance of it landing on a different unit, but in the interests of speed that's fine.

Small blasts only needed usually to scatter 2 or 3" before they stopped hitting anything, while larger ones needed further.


So you can look at it like this:

Roll to hit
success 6 - all models hit automatically
success, all models under the template are struck on a 2+.
Miss, all models under the template are hit on a 5+
Miss on a 1, no models are hit at all.


That gives you a range of options that imitates the success of a scatter with a little abstract maths.

A faster version of this could be "if you roll a hit, models are hit on 2+, if you roll a miss, they are hit on 5+ (or 4+, or whatever)

Roll to hit normally.

On a hit small plates hit up to 4 models in the unit. On a miss you reroll once. On a success you hit up to 2 models. Miss again and you don't hit anything.

Same with big plates, simply adjust the number of hits caused accordingly to whatever you feel is right.

Takes away the minutae to space models at max distance and kinda simulates a plate scattering while retaining the shooting unit's BS as a factor.

BanjoJohn wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Well, the scatter concept was also an impossible to miss completely thing as well.

Basically we're looking at ways to make a blast have degrees of success, without worrying about rolling to scatter. This means that there's now 0 chance of it landing on a different unit, but in the interests of speed that's fine.

Small blasts only needed usually to scatter 2 or 3" before they stopped hitting anything, while larger ones needed further.


So you can look at it like this:

Roll to hit
success 6 - all models hit automatically
success, all models under the template are struck on a 2+.
Miss, all models under the template are hit on a 5+
Miss on a 1, no models are hit at all.


That gives you a range of options that imitates the success of a scatter with a little abstract maths.

A faster version of this could be "if you roll a hit, models are hit on 2+, if you roll a miss, they are hit on 5+ (or 4+, or whatever)

Certainly quicker, but it increases blast potency. With scatter they at least have a chance of 0 hits.

So unless you're also looking to buff blasts in addition, I would look for something that imitates scatter in a simpler manner.


Something else to consider.

Roll to hit. Place the template count up number of models struck (including partials).

roll a scatter d3. Subtract the number rolled from the number of models hit by the template.

If you roll a 6, you auto miss all of them.
If you roll a 1, you auto hit all of them.


So that leaves you just counting models struck and rolling one extra dice. It shouldn't require too much extra effort.

Just place the template anywhere within range and line of sight, then roll to hit for every model under the template. (It's silly for the Russ to miss the ground it's shooting at, what it misses is the infantry that ran away from the spot the gun was pointing.) Also reduce the diameters to 2" and 4" since it will be easier to get models under.

Still punishes anyone who groups their models though, for better or worse.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
Just place the template anywhere within range and line of sight, then roll to hit for every model under the template. (It's silly for the Russ to miss the ground it's shooting at, what it misses is the infantry that ran away from the spot the gun was pointing.) Also reduce the diameters to 2" and 4" since it will be easier to get models under.

Still punishes anyone who groups their models though, for better or worse.

My concern is: who is the target audience for this change? You'd lose the "cinematic" effect of blasts scattering onto unexpected targets, but you'd still have the downside of punishing people for clumped models. So people who want it to "feel like artillery" presumably won't be happy, and the people who are annoyed about punishing clumped models aren't happy. Functionally this would just kind of make the effectiveness of blast weapons scale based on opponent's laziness with clumping models, and I'm not sure that's a result anyone is particularly excited about?

Even the 10th edition approach of having it scale in effectiveness with target unit size would probably work a bit better because it's clumping-agnostic.

For example with... frag missiles. I have never seen people choose to use frag missiles when they could shoot a krak missile. With the same chance to hit, the krak missile gives an almost automatic chance to wound, and most units get no save. Its the rolling to wound and armor/cover saves that make the frag missile weak, especially if you do hit there have been plenty of times when you miss all partials, or don't get but more than 2 hits anyways, so the 1 hit with a krak missile is almost always more effective when compared to a frag. This can expand to almost everything that uses a blast template, but perhaps does not apply to the ordnance template weapons.

If you can get 2 hits with a small blast from a frag missile, you have a better average and max number of successful wounds compared to a single krak hit against T4 or worse. (Krak has a 5/6ths chance of wounding a T4 target whereas 2 hits from a frag missile have 2x(1/2) chance.)

I don't recall what the AP of the old frag missile was, but I *think* this means that it actually maths out pretty okay into things like orks, termagants, guardsmen, and probably fire warriors/eldar. Especially if they're clumped together. (For instance, because they had the audacity to get into melee on the previous turn.)

If you're shooting at marines, you *do* want to use the krak missiles, which seems appropriate.

It has been a while since I played 7th edition or earlier, but I vaguely recall that the problem with missile launchers wasn't usually that they were *bad* at their jobs; it's that they were usually one of the more expensive weapon options because GW charged you for their versatility even though they were straight up worse at a given job than a more specialized weapon. In other words, it was usually just a matter of needing a points decrease.

I'll also note that most of my missile launcher experience was with eldar plasma missiles (S4, AP4, small blast), and the AP4(?) on those made them perform reasonably well into most non-marine targets.

Also worth noting that small blasts are kind of a different beast from large blasts. Small blasts were prone to scattering off-target completely whereas large blasts were big enough that they typically hit at least one model in whatever you pointed them at. (Average scatter distance was 3" because 2d6 averages 7" - BS with the most common BS being 4. And the radius of a large blast template is something like 2.5".) As a result, large blasts were useful as a weapon that was likely to get a piece of the target while the small blast was kind of dependent on the enemy clumping up from melee, deepstrike, etc. to reliably land a lot of hits.

I'd back up a step and re-ask yourself what your goal is here. If your goal is just to swap out the blast rules with something simpler, then fair enough. But you have to ask yourself if giving up the quirkyness of shots actually scattering is worth it. And also whether you really want to go to the trouble of popularizing a homebrewed rule in your local area *without* fixing the model clumping issues that come with templates.

Frag missile is S4, AP6. Frag grenade is S3 AP6.
Krak missile is S8 AP3, Krak grenade is S6 AP4

My main thought was this "Flamer template weapons automatically hit all models fully or partially under the template, and my own personal experience with small blast template weapons is that you usually get 1 or (if you're lucky) 2 automatic hits, and most of the time partial hits will miss, so frag missiles are almost always worse than krak missiles, and plasma cannons are almost always worse than lascannons, what kind of mechanic could work that might be procedurally simple, that might increase the average number of hits compared to the rules in 3rd edition (a miss fully misses, a hit will hit partials on 4+), but won't be too much stronger than the normal rules"

BanjoJohn wrote:
My own personal experience with small blast template weapons is that you usually get 1 or (if you're lucky) 2 automatic hits, and most of the time partial hits will miss

Depends on the edition, 5e and onwards had no partials.

Faster to resolve in some ways (no extra to hit rolls) but the extra lethality really encouraged extra time spent spreading units out and that could really slow the game down.

This really does come down to what you're wanting to represent as wyldhunt has said. The current 10th model of just rolling a bunch of hit dice does the job if you don't care for modelling the activity. The scattering template is fine if you're keen on a more 1:1 representation of the action.


If you're just looking for a way to stay close to the modelling of a template while streamlining the mechanism, there are a few options in the thread already.

Modelling a blast without a template you can have a blast (X/Y) rule that tells you how many wound rolls you get when you score a hit (X), and how many you roll when you score a critical hit (Y).

This frame shifts the partials to the standard hit and makes the full amount less common, rrather than trying to balance partial misses when your shooter is already hitting at high levels.

If you want more granular approach, the do blast (X) and roll to hit and for each pip above what you need you add 1 wound roll to the total. Ie a Guardsman rolls a 6 to hit, beating their BS requirementsl by 2, adding 2 additional hits to the pool. A marine would add 3 if they rolled the same.


But if you are in need of the more literal template resolution for hits, then using an abstract scatter die that subtracts or adds to the hit total (to represent the template moving without needing to reposition it) is also an easy way to do it.

my own personal experience with small blast template weapons is that you usually get 1 or (if you're lucky) 2 automatic hits

This is also my experience, and I think it might be reasonable to ask whether or not small blast templates should even exist in the first place. Like, setting aside the issues I've already brought up with templates in general, small blasts *are* prone to missing a lot and only picking up multiple hits if you get lucky or enemy models are clumped up.

So in a roundabout way, the "small blast" rule is functionally a, "Get lots of hits if the enemy deepstruck or charged last turn," rule. And if that's not a mechanic you actually want in the game, then just changing Small Blast weapons to X number of non-template attacks. Way faster and easier to resolve than scatter dice/partial hits. Doesn't punish opponents for model clumping. Still lets you hit about the same number of models on average if you set the number of shots correctly.