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Pepsihammer
Pepsihammer, titled warhammer 999.m41, celebrates what most of us would consider classic 40k at its height of glory from 4th to 6th edition, we well as some new ideas too. Pepsihammer is about playing games of warhammer like you remember, while smoothing over the rough spots you might have forgotten about. Its made of the best versions of things from 4th to 6th, and when nothing suited my fancy I made something up to fill the gap. I have been working on this for over a decade now, The project started as a simple terrain and mission rules packet for 6th and 7th edition, and eventually grew to be a full rule book, and then custom tailored codices as well.

This project went through various versions throughout its lifetime, alternating activations, state-space phases, simultaneous resolutions, before circling back to classic I-Go-You-Go. Ultimately that was what my friends and I wanted: a game just like the one we played in our formative years, but with some of the forgettable rough spots smoothed over. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did working on it.

With its latest version I consider it now ready for play, all the rules can be found here (link to mega)


----Whats Old----
The goal of pepsihammer is to play the game like you remember. I don't like to use nostalgia as a way to describe the game, but thats really what it is at the end of it. The philosophy that I have with wargame design is that rules should always be intuitively inferred, if something or other makes a player reel back and make a double take, thats bad. If a player has to ask "why cant I do this I should be able to" then thats a flaw as well. There are lots of easily forgotten and glossed over quirks with the older rulesets, and unfortunately the linear progression of time and new editions did not simply improve things.


----Whats New----
Pepsihammer brings together a carefully curated collection of all the best forms and versions of rules from various editions together. And sometimes I take creative liberty to weave it all together. For example, I use a hybrid approach for pre-measuring that allows for appropriate levels of in-phase measurements. Telling novices who are used to pre-measuring they can no longer do so is a steep hill to climb, but at the same time you wont have to worry about players triangulating unit positioning down to the Angstrom. The goal of any game is to be a fun and immersive experience, and the rules are designed to encourage just that.


----Key Features----

Detailed rules and guidelines for terrain classification and play. This was always one of the weakest aspects of the game, especially as editions moved forward. You cant walk through solid walls in pepsihammer. I break down terrain and cover rules in depth as well as have chapter on guidelines for how to classify battlefield terrain.

A new to-wound chart and overpower mechanics is one of the biggest core changes, as it is used so often. I have lopsided the classic to-wound chart with a underdog's advantage, making the change from a 5+ to a 6+ to wound occurs at S-T = -3 rather than -2. The non-linear change from a 5+ to a 6+ (a 50% reduction) compared to the much smaller change from 3+ to 2+ (a 25% increase) placed limits on what you could do with the design space. T5 infantry basically did not exist because they could not be balanced along side the presence of prevalent S3, which I can and do now make great use of. Terminators for instance have been made T5.

Overpower is a mechanic that replaces double strength vs toughness ==> instant death. If you are 3 strength greater than your opponents toughness, an unsaved wound becomes two, and armour saves are taken at a -1 penalty. This combined with the to-wound chart makes for much improved transitional states with less sharp edge cases. For instance, a wound from a s7 ap4 auto cannon will now be no better than a s3 ap- lasgun vs a space marine, as the space marine will be making his armour saves with a -1 penalty (3+ --> 4+).

Save stacking is a new mechanic to pepsihammer. As a default now, a model can make all its saves, but each successive save is made at a stacking -1 penalty. For instance, take a space marine with a 3+ armour save is in medium cover providing him a 4+ cover save, would be able to make a 3+ armour and 5+ cover save against a lasgun. This is one of my favorite additions to the game.

Classic style overwatch has been added in as an alternative for not shooting or running, and there are now multiple charge reactions (retreat, counter offensive, and hold the line), as well as an improved charge declaration ruleset that solves the awkward multi-charge rules from the past. Additionally, a tactical withdrawal is now an option if combat is going in your favor.

A new psychic power system, which allows me to scale the difficulty and risk of casting spells with their power level.

Vehicles are handled using 6th edition hullpoint system, but with a new vehicle damage chart and gunnery rules. Vehicles can be a powerful and important part of your force, but it takes infantry to win you the game.

More strict rules governing army creation, deployment, reserves, and objectives. In pepsihammer by default all units are capable of scoring objectives except vehicles and monstrous creatures. There is no such things as objective secured. Non-scoring units can still find great use in contesting objectives. To compliment this, there is one new rule governing the force organization chart, which dictates that you may not field more points in a category (hq, elites, fast attack, heavy support) than you have points of troops. These rules, combined with a new sequential deployment and reserve rules help guide towards more balanced games for players.

And last but not least, a complete collection of diverse and engaging missions well suited for normal play, including a wide spectrum of win conditions that heavily encourage thematic and well rounded list building. These missions include a mix of end of turn and end of game scoring requiring players to be ready for anything.

----Codecies----
Pepsihammer was designed with the full intent of being backwards compatible (mostly) with any of your favorite printed codices from 4th to 6th ed. But as the project grew, custom codecies were made for the most of the major factions. My approach to codices is roughly the same as the rulebook, a curated selection of the best from various editions, along with my own spins to knit it all together. I do try to stay true to the expectations of original source material where appropriate, and you can still use your favorite codex with minimal tweaking.

I strive to have really fun codecies, and do my best to balance them. Flavor is the most important part for me so I worked really hard to try and make units feel and behave on the table like I (and my play group’s) expectations. But also some the majority of the rules are pretty similar you can really use any codex from the era with minimal on the fly tweaking.

I have the following armies: Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Tyranids, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Eldar Corsairs, Tau, Necrons, and Orks.


----Backporting----
Backporting is not a major focus for this project, but you will find some newer units. I am very careful in selecting which new released. Does the unit fit the design space of the era? Is it a fitting addition to the codex and theme, or is it bloat. Far too often new units end up filling purposefully unfilled niches, or being too similar to existing units, in which case one always ends up better than the other.


----Closing Notes----
The readability and document formatting of pepsihammer is maintained to high standard for pleasant reading.
I hope you find it such, I worked very hard on it. Its also bookmarked, hyperlinked, and indexed! And you will find a hyperlink to the table of contents on every page for quick navigation.

I'd love to read any thoughts and feedback you might have, or to discuss or clarify rules.

-
Pepsi


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Lets try the link now here (link to mega)

So Terminators are T5, with the ability to take a 2+ armor, 6+ invuln (5+ with an Iron Halo or something, 4+ with a Storm Shield) and sometimes ALSO a cover save?

Sounds very fair and not at all Marine-centric.

Thank you for the first reply! You have the mechanics nearly right, say you had a unit with a 2+ armour save, a 4+ invulnerable save, and a 4+ cover save. The rules dictate that you must take your best save first (as this does actually change the odds) so the model would make saves like this: a 2+ armour save, a 5+ (-1 penalty) invulnerable save, and a 6+ (-2 penalty) cover save.

I do try my very best to be fair with my balance, I play as and against all the factions so I get to be in the driver seat and the onlooker. One of the reasons why I like this rule a lot is that is makes points pricing wargear more straight forward, as the effect of an invulnerable save is more well rounded, rather than only working under conditions where your armour save does not. When it comes to terminators specifically my play group hasn't had any outstanding balance issues with them, but I hope to hear more feedback (and a bigger sample size) from more players in the future if I'm lucky!

p.s. the storm-shield rules follow that more closely to the 4th edition book and do not provide a 3+ invulnerable save.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to share your work! It sounds like your group has already been playing with this system, so I hope you're all enjoying your games.

Initial impressions just form your summary:

----Key Features----
Detailed rules and guidelines for terrain classification and play. This was always one of the weakest aspects of the game, especially as editions moved forward. You cant walk through solid walls in pepsihammer. I break down terrain and cover rules in depth as well as have chapter on guidelines for how to classify battlefield terrain.

Sounds neat. Looking forward to reading it. Personally, I tend to lean towards a small number of broadly-applicable terrain rules so that you don't have to do a study session reviewing what ever barricade, hill, and ruin on the table does pregame, but I always enjoy seeing what people come up with for terrain.

Overpower is a mechanic that replaces double strength vs toughness ==> instant death. If you are 3 strength greater than your opponents toughness, an unsaved wound becomes two, and armour saves are taken at a -1 penalty. This combined with the to-wound chart makes for much improved transitional states with less sharp edge cases. For instance, a wound from a s7 ap4 auto cannon will now be no better than a s3 ap- lasgun vs a space marine, as the space marine will be making his armour saves with a -1 penalty (3+ --> 4+).

What's the goal of making it basically 2 Damage instead of insta-death? I feel like I was kind of okay with farseers and marine captains getting wiped out if they were allowed to take a direct hit from a lascannon.

Higher strength granting bonus AP seems like it should be *fine*. Feels a little wonky given that you could have just given such weapons a different AP value, but I guess this lets you introduce a bit of save modifier system on top of the classic AP system. Doesn't necessarily fix the weirdness of something like a krak missile completely obliterating power armor but being no better than a lasgun vs terminator armor though.

Save stacking is a new mechanic to pepsihammer. As a default now, a model can make all its saves, but each successive save is made at a stacking -1 penalty. For instance, take a space marine with a 3+ armour save is in medium cover providing him a 4+ cover save, would be able to make a 3+ armour and 5+ cover save against a lasgun. This is one of my favorite additions to the game.

On paper, this sounds super annoying, tbh. It breaks up what would have been a single save roll into potentially 3 different rolls while also making those additional rolls unlikely to succeed and thus prone to being a lot of dice rolling for very little effect. But you're the one who has actually played it.

Vehicles are handled using 6th edition hullpoint system, but with a new vehicle damage chart and gunnery rules. Vehicles can be a powerful and important part of your force, but it takes infantry to win you the game.

Sounds promising. Hull points with a damage table seemed like a decent system to me; just perhaps in need of a few more hull points per vehicle.

More strict rules governing army creation, deployment, reserves, and objectives. In pepsihammer by default all units are capable of scoring objectives except vehicles and monstrous creatures. There is no such things as objective secured. Non-scoring units can still find great use in contesting objectives.

Okay. So no scoring points with your tanks, but you can prevent enemies from scoring using them. I could see that working.

To compliment this, there is one new rule governing the force organization chart, which dictates that you may not field more points in a category (hq, elites, fast attack, heavy support) than you have points of troops.

Oof. Kind of kills 99% of my interest right there, tbh. You do you. Personally, I don't want 50% of my army to have to be guardians or tactical marines or whatever. I disliked the troop tax from the force org chart, but this sounds way worse.

Reading through the CSM Dex now...

Shielded By Spite feels like it'd be very time consuming for little gain.
Terminator Armor better be VERY expensive. +1 Toughness, +1 Wound, and a 2+/5++ is a lot.
Why no Palanquin Of Nurgle?
Blight Launchers auto-wounding on 6s... Does it matter? They're Strength 6 already. They can wound up to Toughness 10 in these rules.
There's a lot of "May Snap Shot at BS2 when moving". Feels like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too here, or should just be a USR, or something.
Why does the Sonic rule just give another USR?
Blight Grenades have a use case for Blighted (S8+ would need it). But it feels SUPER niche at 8" and on a blast template.
Inferno Bolts look insane-a squad with 20 shots gets an average of 12 or so hits. If each one hits just two people with the template, that's more hits than original shots.
Mechatendrils being S8 but AP- feels weird.
Why do Daemon Princes have worse BS than a regular Lord?

Stopping here for the moment. Making cheesecake and gotta check on it.

Edit: Apparently, Princes had BS3 in 3rd Edition.
That feels so, so dumb. If you need to up their points cost to make them BS4 or better, do so, but they should NOT be worse than a regular Marine.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Yes I have been playing my homebrew for about as long as I have been making it, including a game just this weekend of CSM vs guard. It ended in a brutal 6 to 6 tie with loads of casualties on both sides. I got plasma gunned to death but I had a great play summoning some plague bearers to counter a cavalry charge.

>Terrain
Broadly applicable is a good way to describe how I put it. One of the aspects I go into detail I call "hybrid" terrain which uses a super position of True LoS and area terrain, and guidelines on how to play it. For example if a ruin is an L shaped, you may wish to play it in a manner where flanking to one of the exposed sides denies your opponent their cover save.

>Overpower
I would say the goal wasn't so much to replace instant death as it was to add a new mechanic that plays a bigger part in regular game. Because of the x2 nature of old ID t5 troopers basically were immune (there are like 2 guns that are s10) and t6 trooper were immune. Overpower is a compliment to the to-wound chart change and consequently I have pushed a few units into the t5 t6 space.

Your case against terminator is actually a great example, because the s8 ap3 missile vs the t5 2+ save terminator will now apply overpower (8-5=3) and so the terminator will take a 3+ armour save instead of 2+. This doubles the chance of killing him which is pretty big.

>Save Stacking
I guess I can only really suggest you try it yourself and see if you change your mind? Rolling dice is fun for me and its never been a standout as the part of the game that takes too much time. Personally I enjoy it and think it helps. I have toyed around with so many different ideas for cover save, ballistic modifiers, toughness modifiers, ap modifiers, save modifiers, etc. I have long come to the conclusion that first off all of these things can have some strange fence post problems, but more so that a d6 system just does not comfortably support any dice modes more than +/-1. Dice gates are a much better way to handle shifting of odds because the granularity of a d6 is just too low. Thats likely where the whole to-wound and armour save thing came from in the first place, where in other games a combination "armour class" is used. Arguing the abstraction of total separation of strength and AP has always been a bit hand wavy as it is.

>Vehicles, Scoring, and List building.
These are all connected so Ill group my thoughts together on the topic. I wont spin words, I hated how only troops could hold objectives in 4th, 5th, and 6th. But the only thing I hated more than that was objective secured from 7th ed. Only in 7th (the worst edition by far) could vehicles score, but I think letting them deny objectives is a nice balance and seems thematic, its reasonable to argue that its difficult to focus on an objective while a tank is trying to run you over and shooting at you. But these were the rules GW came up with to force a troop tax, and at the end of the day I think a troop tax is important and here is why. Its fun for your opponent to have chumps to shoot at and kill. It's good for the game for both players to take a healthy well rounded army that includes troops.

So to encourage troops being taken in my games I did two things: I tied my best to to make it it so troops are good and fun to take, and also the troop tax for leading a skew list. But its not quite like you put it so I will try to explain better. For any given category you cannot take more points than troops. E.g. if you wished to take 200 points of elites, you need 200 points of troops, but you can also take 200 points in fast attack and 200 points in heavy support and 200 points in hq; you can get a very nicely balanced list for a low tax. But the more you try to skew the more you pay, if you want to field 500 points of heavy support you must take 500 points of troops to compensate. Its sort of like how fantasy did it with percentages but I think its neater.

But ill also point to my catch all "The Most Important Rule"
The most important rule is to have fun. While the rules provided in this book are all with good intent, inevitably something will not match your desired expectation. I strongly encourage making changes as you deem a better fit for your needs and tailoring the experience to your liking. If you don’t want control over your experience, then you probably are not interested in this project anyways.

I think its impossible to satisfy everyone. My hope for this project is simply that for anyone who finds themself wishing to play some old edition warhammer, that they will have a better time playing pepsihammer, even if they only end up using a single of my ideas it would make me happy.

Making Necron Quantum Shielding optional could be confusing, which ones have it and which ones don't? Game to game or model to model. Necrons are built to be this ponderous durable force, but that completely fails the moment you make fast vehicles without the upgrade that makes them tanky the meta build. Suddenly people forget the Necron identity, putting units outside the fantasy of the faction into the faction is a bad idea. Of course you cannot help GW making bad decisions, but I don't see a reason why this should be an upgrade.

Necron Warriors being mixed with Immortals and getting a champion is antithetical to the whole vibe of the faction. It'd be like removing special weapons from Space Marine Tactical Squads or adding eight bigger and bigger mechs to Tau /sarcasm.

A lot of random name changes.

Canoptek->Canoptic

Triarch Praetorions->Praetorians

Locust Heavy Destroyers->Locus Heavy Destroyers

Crypteks->Cryptecs

Skorpekh->Skorpek

Necrontyr->Necrotyr

A group of models being called a triark for some reason? What is a Deathmark Triark?

Not a big fan of classic core rules, I doubt I could offer any critique worth listening to.

 JNAProductions wrote:

>Shielded by spite (armour of contempt)
Ive been struggling with coming up with a cool special rule to help with space marines getting blown away for a while now, this is the current iteration. The most given complaint from space marine players is "I dont get to make my 3+ saves ever", especially as the editions rolled late, and I wanted something to try to address this. Im not married to my solution I just dont have anything better right now. I didnt want to just end up with an invulnerable save, and personally 2 wound marines only exacerbates the problem by making them even stronger vs small arms fire (which they dont need) and no change vs big guns that they are already super vulnerable too.

>Terminator armour
is very expensive, its a 30 point upgrade on the chaos lord. Although I did notice a discrepancy between that and the SM captain where its 35pts so I have to address that thanks for bringing my attention to that.

>Palenquin of Nurgle
The basis of the csm book is mostly 3.5, which doesnt have the palenquin so I just missed when I made the book. CSM was basically the only codex and faction I didnt have an inate understanding as no one in my circle ever played them. I spent over a month just learning the books and writing it all out. I was also heavily invested in trying to make the books of Chaos really feel like something awesome, and I worked into them ways to re-create many of the newer realeased sub-faction specific miniatures without having to actually make a unique entry for them. That said, this one slipped through the cracks and its on my to-do list; the steeds in general could do with a bit of a touch up.

>Blight launchers & Grenades
Not auto wound on 6, but overpower, which is double wounds and -1 armour save. Blight grenades true power comes from them being the only space marine defensive grenades.

>BS2 movement snap shot, Sonic, and other USRs
I likely will end up turning this into a usr. The general workflow for a new usr is that it starts as a new rule (and in this case its one of my more recent tweaks) is that it generally just put it in the codex in question first. Then if I start to use it else where I put it in the big rule book; I try not to make single use USRs.
Sonic hooks into a few things I think, but it also might just be legacy.

>Inferno bolts are blast
These are what they did in 3.5, but I wont lie, I didn't realize that thousand suns didnt get inferno bolts until 4th ed. Ill have to reconsider balance for these, but at 23 ppm they are pretty expensive for a s4ap5 blast. I might rework them to be heavy 1? A non-csm vet with a storm shield and kraken rounds is about 20 points so its not too far off basis I reckon. Ill need to put it to some testing. but 115 points for a 5 man squad seems fair at first glance, thats the same price I have a tyranid warrior with a deathspitter (s5ap5 blast).

>Mechatendrils
At s8 you will overpower even a t5 terminator granting you ap-1, but maybe they should have a -1 built in? I just wanted to differentiate them a bit from a powerfist, which they are not, nor did I want the warpsmith (or techmarine) to take the front stage as the melee hq just because he gets some free bonus attacks.

>Daemon Prince
Daemon princes upgrade made you s6 but bs3, I just wrote it out as a stat line for convenience. How often does a daemon prince want to shoot a gun anyways? I think the balance behind this was likely to keep you from making too powerful of an MC psyker, but that is just my guess.

p.s. how did you cheesecake turn out?

 pepsi wrote:


p.s. how did you cheesecake turn out?

Yeah come on don't leave us hanging

 vict0988 wrote:

>Quantum Shields
I would say the making quantum shields and upgrade is just to allow taking cheaper versions of the units for flexibility. It’s such a powerful upgrade that baking it into the vehicles might mean you can’t play with them as much as you might wish. Necrons already struggle with the fact their units are so expensive. I can’t say that the presence of quantum shielding as an upgrade has ever caused a huge issue but I also havnt delved into it, thanks for pointing it out I’ll have to mull it over. Part of me also just felt off that necrons dont have any vehicle upgrades so I think I remember feeling incentivized to make some, even though I ended up only with quantum shields.

>royal warden
Necrons aside for one moment, one of the realities of homebrew is that, lacking the distant irrefutable authority of GW I can’t just do whatever I want. I have to make compromises with my friends because they are playing the game with me. Tying this back to necrons means adding rules for miniatures that we have in our collection (indomitus starter set). Now I also happen to think that the royal warden is a cool mini so I put it in. I hate tomb kings in space 5e necrons, most of that stuff is not in the book (except crypteks those are cool). The Necron codex is a blend of the original 3rd ed plus the 9th ed war of the world’s release. I also re-wrote the necrons lore to match my own vision, in a way that I think satisfies many players both oldcron and nucron. I got rid of the Mary Sue retcon where the necrons win the war in heaven, but wrote in a way to justify necrons having enough wiggle room to have “your dudes” that was strictly lacking in the original release.


As for the NehKrōn spellings, small indie homebrew, please understand. Phonix worked for me. Ill add a spell check to the queueue.

Triark = spider leg things. Deathmark triarks are literally skorpek minis with deathmark rifles, I saw a cool conversion (reddit link) and made some. I also won’t lie at the time I thought they had discontinued non-heavy destroyers so I felt like they were the perfect fit.

I am most curious as to what your major gripes were with classic core rules were. I should have made it more clear in the OP that the core rulebook and its mechanics is my passion behind the project. But I do recognize that without the codecies it’s empty air.

It was good!
Made it for my mother for Mother’s Day, and we enjoyed it a lot.
Phone posting, so no more critiques/insights on the rules.

3rd ed Necrons did not mix Immortals with Warriors. Having Immortals alone with the option of adding a Royal Warden would help. I don't recall how you made it work, but allowing half a unit of Warriors to take shotguns and the others to take assault rifles really irks me as well, it takes away from the uniform soulless horde feeling.

I liked 8th edition giving more control to players when it came to moving their models for melee and the removal of the random fall back. I dislike the distinction between vehicles and monsters, not a fan of some guns not being able to shoot based on where they are mounted. I dislike randomly scattering deep strikes. Not a fan of judging whether units were in cover in older editions. I disliked dangerous terrain for vehicles. I dislike kill counter missions.

I'm ambivalent about no pre-measuring and blast templates, pros and cons, but could be a reason to play an older edition or a project like this if I got tired of the alternative and had a community to play an older or homebrew edition with.

Things that jump out at me as I skim the main rules document:

* Plural of codex is codices (I think.) I've also seen "codexes," which I'm pretty sure is wrong but is intuitive enough to be forgiven.

* Absolutely hate not pre-measuring. I turns too much of the game into a test of how good you are at imagining a tape measure. Which just isn't an appealing type of game to me. It also strains my immersion a bit because even if *I* struggle to tell whether or not my toys are within 18" of their target, I'd think the in-universe soldiers would know whether they could reasonably get into rifle range of the enemy.

* Not a fan of templates. I enjoyed getting a juicy template hit on the enemy as much as the next guy, but the ambiguousness of blasts and scatter dice and the way flamer templates tended to punish melee armies for being melee armies just wasn't great. But the topic of templates comes up often enough that I know the nostalgia and tactile reward of using them is very appealing for some.

* Don't like stacked bad saves for the reasons discussed above. But while I dislike them, I do believe OP has made a reasonable case for them. This largely comes down to how annoyed a person is by spending extra time fishing for 5s and 6s.

* Reforging Units is interesting. I'd have to see it in play. Seems like it's probably prone to wonky rules interactions, but there's probably something to be said for lowering the overall number of units you have to activate as the game goes on. My brain instantly jumps to questions of, for instance, being able to put more special weapons than normal into a reforged squad because you kept all your exarchs or plasmagunners, etc. alive. So if the eldar Guide power (hypothetical; haven't read the eldar rules yet) lets you grant a single unit in your army rerolls like it used to and the Reforge a Unit rules let me stick multiple guardian defender weapon platforms into a single squad, then suddenly I'm guiding 3 squad's worth of big guns instead of 1.

* The terrain rules largely look good to me. My main "criticism" here is just that when you make terrain rules as flexible as this with as many *possible* ways of interpreting a given piece of terrain, it can become pretty difficult to keep track of what's what. I feel like this is one of the big reasons people tended to only use a couple of different terrain types in editions that had rules for a bunch of different terrain types: it was just easier to call everything either ruins, trees, or craters than to remember a dozen different special rules and which bits of terrain they applied to. I've even seen tournaments in some of those editions print out paper with lengthy explanations of which rules apply to each piece of terrain. tldr; what you have looks good, but be aware that there is some value in keeping terrain rule streamlined enough that people aren't afraid to actually use/remember them.

* I lied. Slightly more terrain notes: Difficult terrain seems mildly wonky to calculate to me? Maybe you get the hang of it once you do it for a few games.

* Short Obstacles: I feel like having a rule that depends on models having legs is going to raise some questions. My brain immediately goes to guardian weapon platforms or things like sslyth. (Snake bodies; no legs.)

* Can you explain the difference between Jump Movement and Hover Movement. A jump pack marine and a tau drone both want to move over a lava river. Neither of them is considered to touch the lava during that movement. Both are considered to be "landed"/on the ground at the end of their movement. What's the mechanical difference?

* Your coherency rules seem pretty restrictive and potentially annoying to enforce when dealing with large squads. Even just dropping it down to needing to be within range of 2 or more models instead of 3 when dealing with large squads seems way more managable. Are conga lines really so game breaking that they need all this?

* Advancing being a separate move sounds really annoying. It should theoretically basically double the time it takes to move an advancing unit.

*Only shooting with one gun seems like a slightly weird rule at a glance. Generally, if a model in 40k *has* more than one gun, they're the sort of model that can reasonably fire more than one gun. I expect terminators to fire their missiles as well as their assault cannons or storm bolters, for instance. And crisis suits should absolutely be able to fire all their guns. The only common exception I can think of is that units probably shouldn't be shooting their pistols in one hand and their rifles in the other, but 10th's "you can either shoot all your pistols or all your non-pistols" rule seems like it covers this better. You also end up making it tricky to price certain bits of wargear. A warlock on bike presumably is still required to have shuriken catapults on that bike even if he also wants to take a Singing Spear or the Destructor power. So how many points is he paying for this gun he might never opt to use all game?

*Splitfire being standard is good to see. Not sure I like the idea of a model with multiple guns not being able to split their fire. If my terminator has a missile pod and a storm bolter, then I probably want to shoot those missiles at a vehicle and the storm bolter at anything else. I'm not sure what problem this restriction is solving, but it does seem like it makes it harder to price wargear in edgecases like that terminator. Haven't gotten there yet, but I certainly hope vehicles are exempt from this.

* Trigger control instantly raises questions for me. Does this mean I can use one power to buff infinite units so long as I can fit them within coherency of eachother? If the multiple units working together have a combined model count of 12+, does that mean they all have to be within range of 3 other models? Why does this work for non-vehicle but not vehicles? Tank squadrons are a thing, right? You say this lets them share line of sight? Does that mean I can have my cheap, beat-up ranger squad with 1 guy left alive stand out in the open, then have the 10 dark reapers right around the corner draw line of sight from the ranger meaning I can shoot my whole reaper squad, but they're immune to return fire because they're hidden? What's the intended use for this rule?

* Consolidated Targeting: Same questions, but in reverse. If I can throw a buff/debuff on a single unit that I can see (something like farseer's old Doom power) and I use this rule to target multiple enemy units, do I functionally get the buff/debuff against against all the units near that unit? In the previous example, does having a single exposed ranger standing near my dark reapers suddenly expose the dark reapers to danger? How does this interact with weapons that don't need line of sight?

* I don't like the whole "25%" thing for determining whether a unit has cover. It's basically just a roundabout way of saying, "Ask your opponent if he thinks your dudes pretty obscured or not." If anyone ever actually has a disagreement on whether or not something is sufficiently hidden to be obscured and wants to press the point, it's basically impossible to get a real answer if it's genuinely unclear. If you think your model is 26% obscure and I think they're only 24% obscure, then we'd have to take a photo from the attacker's perspective, mark the silhouette, break that silhouette down into a grid, etc. and eventually determine that you are in fact 25.5% obscured. Which is to say, this rule is essentially just a vague gesture towards coming to some sort of a gentlemens' agreement about whether or not a unit is actually obscured. Which may be fine in a lot of gaming groups, but I'd prefer more clearcut rules so that people don't feel bad when they secretly think their models were a good 26% obscured instead of just the 24% their opponent insisted upon.

* Through window and wall - So am I valid in saying that all my models should have 2+ or 3+ cover saves if I manage to have a few bits of scatter terrain or other units between me and the attacker? I like this rule in theory, but I feel like it would benefit from being tightened up somehow.

* Shoot the Big Ones - Again, feels very prone to some feelsbad arguments about whether models are 26% obscured and whether they're 3.9 times the size of the other models or 4.1 times the size, etc. But also, this potentially makes tarpitting a real problem unless you've added some other mechanic to prevent tarpitting. Otherwise, your dreadnaughts will just get instantly tackled by more gaunts than they can stomp all game, and I can take my sweet time picking you off with hive guard. Granted, that makes narrative sense. I'm just not sure it's good gameplay. Genuinely, I'm not sure. I'm ambivalent about this one.

* Allocating shooting wounds: I might be misunderstanding this/confusing myself, but I don't think I like it. Let's break this one down a bit:
1.) First of all, what "a single kind of model" mean? Is my dark reaper exarch the same kind of model as the rest of his unit? Is a plasma gun tactical marine the same kind of model as a bolter marine in the same squad? What about a sergeant marine who has the same loadout as a bolter marine?

2.) What's the order of operations on assigning wounds and taking saves? I assume you basically assign wounds one at a time, taking saves for each of those wounds, and then re-evaluating things like "closest model" etc. after the saves for each individual wound have been resolved. Otherwise, I see several ways for wounds to be "lost"/go unresolved.

3.) I assume "the front" here means "closest model"?

4.) You require that injured models in a hit group have wounds allocated to them first, but why? The rest of your rules here seem to make it possible (required even) to potentially end up with multiple wounded models in the same squad. Is the goal here just to prevent people from spreading damage across multiple multi-wound models? If that's the case, why are you fine doing it that way with blast weapons? Feels like you could cut several paragraphs worth of rules here.

5. I feel like you're going for something cinematic here, but the amount of text needed to explain who's taking which saves feels like a red flag to me. Also, you potentially run into some of the same slow rolling weirdness from mixed profile units that we saw in past editions. Ex: if my exarch (Sv3+) is in a hit group, then maybe I end up slow rolling his saves to see how long he lasts before moving on to the non-exarchs.

6. Also, I want to point out that between this and your stacking saves mechanic, this potentially *really* slows down attack resolution. Now you're potentially resolving 3 different save pools for a given model (4 if FNP is a thing in this system), and then you're having to do that for potentially multiple hit groups within the same unit.

Existing Wound Targets - I think you mean "prior to this attacking unit's attacks" or something, right?

Pick That Up <- Wait. So we just went to all that trouble breaking up our attacks in to a bunch of different hit groups based on model positioning, and at the end of it all, you can just... functionally choose which models get removed as casualties after all? Then what was the point of all that? Also, I'd encourage making this rule more clear-cut instead of inviting arguments over how much time and difficulty a marine would have looting and equipping his sergeant's power fist or whether a tyranid warrior can reasonably lob off his current gun organism and reattach a new one and whether thousand sons should always be able to pick up weapons when they feel like it because they have magic, etc. I'm all for gentlemanly approaches to things, but sometimes a bit of structure is preferable.

* Overwatch. I have a few issues with this section:
1. The "As Response to a Charge" section seems like it's sorta kinda at odds with the "Units in overwatch can make their shooting attacksat any point during your opponents shooting or as-sault phasetargeting any enemy unit which is either inline of sight " bolded text. The bolded text means that you can technically already handle/resolve overwatch by just waiting for the model to move from around a corner and then blast them. Which also means that an overwatching unit that isn't the target of the charge should potentially be able to resolve their attacks against the charging unit without worrying about cover if they just "time it right?" But also, the "As Response to a Charge" section helps resolve some confusing edge cases. But also, it's strictly "better" than resolving overwatch in the assault phase without using that section's specific rules. Basically, I feel like you either want to be more structured about when overwatching occurs (get rid of the "any point" verbiage), or else you want to get rid of the entire "in response to a charge" section because it adds extra complication to a mechanic that should theoretically already function without it. You have a whole section on reactions that can be declared when a charge is declared. It feels like this should tie into those rules somehow.

2. Why can't vehicles overwatch? What makes a sentinel or the guy manning the heavy stubber on a tank so much worse at readying their shots than an infantry guy with the same gun?

3. I find Wall of Death weird here. Firstly because it seems way too complicated for what you're trying to do. Secondly because it seems redundant with the snapshooting rules that already reduce the effectiveness of blast and template weapons. Thirdly because it makes area of effect weapons only about as reliable as other weapons when overwatching when it used to be the case that that such weapons were meant to be *good* at overwatching. (Thus the 7th edition version of wall of death and the current rules for torrent weapons when overwatching.) And intuitively, you'd think that flamethrowers and explosions would be pretty good at hitting things when you're firing from the hip. Horseshoes and hand grenades, you know?

Basically, I think you've made overwatch waaaaay too complicated. I do like the *idea* of things like simultaneous shooting, terrain hopping, and being able to turn off overwatch as a form of counterplay, but this version feels very, very messy.

* Counter Offensive! Reaction - My opponent's orks are 11.9" away from my marines when he declares the charge. I declare a counter offensive which says that the charge is automatically considered successful, but the orks roll snake eyes and only charge 6". So the charge "succeeds," but they're not within engagement range. What happens?

Also, countercharging making you swing *slower* feels weird. My marines saw a bunch of orks coming at them, the marine smade the conscious choice to charge straight at the orks to the point that they get the benefit of charging (the extra attack), yet somehow they also get hit by the orks before they're allowed to swing? Even though they'd normally swing first? Feels weird.

* Last Stand <- How is this not redundant with the overwatching as a reaction to a charge section?

* Needing multiple engagement ranges feels like a red flag.

* Using the WS of the closest enemy model is interesting. Not sure how I feel about it. In some ways, it's kind of an elegant way to reflect something akin to the old Challenge mechanic, and it gives characters or things like exarch some extra protective utility. But on the other hand, it makes you split up your attacks into another pool. Ini a system that already split up your saves into extra pools and had you split up your shooting attacks into extra pools in the previous phase. Definitely a fan of opposed WS in general though.


*Pistols: to clarify, do you *have to* use your pistol in melee to benefit from the two weapon fighting thing? Example: My howling banshee would rather swing her sword an extra time than shoot her gun. Is she *only* able to use that extra attack from two weapon fighting to shoot the pistol, or can she opt to swing her sword an extra time instead? If she has to use the pistol profile, then this change is going to make some pistols less useful than they were in past editions and other pistols (inferno pistols) significantly *more* useful. Also, oh look! Yet another separate pool of dice to resolve.

* Break Checks <- Doesn't this run into a lot of the old-timey problems of turning mook units into liabilities for more powerful units? Your chaos terminators are in combat with some assault marines. They're poised to absolutely wreck those loyalists in the ongoing combat. Unfortunately, the assault marines killed a bunch of cultists in that same combat, so the terminators end up either running away or even taking a bunch of wounds (No Retreat rule) because their expendable meat shields were meat shielding.

* You also end up with the wonkiness off very complicated combats stretching across the table because ork units A and B are fighting marine unit A, but marine B is also fighting ork B, but ork C is also fighting marines B and C, tec.

* "here is a furtherstacking -1 penalty for each succes-sive round of combat " <- Take note that you're adding extra bookkeeping to a mechanic that already adds bookkeeping to the game.

* Harrying - So after you've split your attacks up into multiple attack pools across multiple weapon groups, done a separate subsystem's break checks that possibly resulted in resolving another dice pool's worth of No Retreat wounds, and done an additional round of moving units, you then do an additional pool of attacks. I question having yet another pool to resolve here in the context of all the other pools and steps your system is adding.

* You mention a pile-in move as part of the countercharge reaction, have a popout section about pile-in-moves on page 32, and then have a section about piling in on page 35. Are these all considered to be the same thing, or separate concepts with confusingly similar names?

* Morale - Units in combat <- Being in combat prevents my psykers from psychically freaking you out? Why?

* Pinned <- I saw you reference "going to ground" earlier. Is this different from that?

* Fall Back <- You have a few different rules here that make it pretty easy to end up with units wildly out of coherency. And while I know you acknowledged that in the Fall Back rules, it seems like these rules in combination would be kind of a nightmare to resolve. Like, the unit that has fallen back 18" except for the several members of the unit that are trapped but also theoretically making other people around them freak out and start falling back. And then you have to deal wtih coherency once they're finally un-trapped, etc. Messy. Very messy.

* Ordnance Weapons <- So shooting a leman russ's battle cannon prevents it from firing its sponsons? Definitely a choice, but could be interesting.

* Special Characters being by permission only <- (Insert my usual rant about special characters just being normal units with a 0-1 restriction here.)

* Psychic stuff:
1. Deny the witch is unfluffy and unfun. Swing a cat, and you'll hit one of my many rants on the subject.
2. Pass/Fail psychic tests are unfluffy and unfun. I generally rant about these in the same posts that I rant about deny the witch.
3. While I don't like your psychic system overall, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge you have some cool ideas here and that you do a good job of resolving some of the timing and targeting issues that 10th has struggled with when it comes to psychic stuff.
4. Just want to point out that your chances of Perils are much higher than most versions of 40k. Possibly higher than any other version/edition?
5. You're adding a lot of bookkeeping and rolls within rolls here.

I find myself running out of steam as I reach the unit types section. Overall impressions:

* First of all, your passion definitely comes through. It's clear that you really enjoy the game and that you're excited about making rules for it. I've focused mainly on listing my criticisms in this post, but know that there were plenty of tidbits throughout that sounded cool and were very flavorful even if I don't necessarily like everything about them.

* Second, your system is just way, way, waaaaaay to complicated and clunky. You've quadroupled the number of dice pools that need to be resolved in order to do certain things. You've put every bookkeeping-needing mechanic that has every appeared in an edition of 40k in one place. I feel like you could easily delete half the rules in this document and be better for it, and that's partly because you seem to have redundant (but sometimes slightly different versions of) explanations for how to do certain things throughout the document. Like how you explain what pistols do in at least two places or how you have rules for overwatch, overwatching when charged, and Last Stand.

It feels like you're doing a combination of
A.) Having a bunch of cool ideas and trying to do all of them at once instead of picking your favorites.
B.) Leaning hard into the more cinematic and simulationist mechanics (aka "the fiddly mechanics" while either not thinking about how long they'll take to resolve or not caring.

As written, I feel like a 1k game with this system would take me all day to finish because of all the extra dice pools and the rolls within rolls used to resolve subsystems within subsystems.

It's possible that you're just more comfortable with much longer games that feature a lot of "extra rolling" compared to me, and if that's the case, that's fine! But from my perspective, this rule set would benefit greatly from trimming off a lot of the fat.

Thank you for sharing your work. I hope that my tone didn't come across as overly harsh. I look forward to taking a peek at the eldar rules soon.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

* Plural of codex is codices (I think.) I've also seen "codexes," which I'm pretty sure is wrong but is intuitive enough to be forgiven.

The plural of the Latin word for 'manuscript book' in formal writing is 'codices'.

The plural of the Latin word that has been hijacked into a High Gothic word for 'book' and subsequently used to denote army books in Warhammer 40,000 is 'codexes'.

 vict0988 wrote:

Ill explain my thought process to what lead me to having mixed immortal and warrior units.

For starters, I will just say I prefer the notion that immortals are a troops choice over an elites choice. There were already a lot of elites choices, and previously only a single troop, and immortals are a rather lack-luster elite slot compared to other choices. But one of the challenges of having them as troops is it makes them more directly compete with warriors, a unit which they already overlap a lot with. Close unit overlap is usually a bad thing and I try to stay away from it because from a design standpoint typically one option is just better or more efficient than the other.

With that that, merging them with warriors just seemed like a natural and cool thing to do; I never felt like it broke the sanctity of a the soulless horde. By merging the two units into one I allow the player to do something unique as well as help balance the choice of fielding the right mix. This also ties into my whole make troops valuable and cool talking point I mentioned previously.

>melee control
Then you will be pleased to find that I have added some rules governing what I call a tactical withdrawal, as well as fleeing combat by your own volition. Its still not as free as in modern 40k but I wanted it to fit within the system of modeling unit morale which I think is important to keeping it a wargame.

>Monsters vs vehicles
This is an interesting one because while I'm inclined to agree with you, I would probably shift it the other way were I to make a change, moving monstrous creatures away from using toughness and more into something akin to armour facings. The AV system is a nice separation between small arms and anti tank weapons. The high toughness good armour save is a really bad design corner in the 40k system and really should be avoided.

>Blasts
Blast templates are important to me because, well first off I just think they are fun, but also because no amount of d3 or d6 hits will be able to capture the fact that blast weapons are the counter balance to cramming in all your minis into one little piece of cover.

 pepsi wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Ill explain my thought process to what lead me to having mixed immortal and warrior units.

For starters, I will just say I prefer the notion that immortals are a troops choice over an elites choice. There were already a lot of elites choices, and previously only a single troop, and immortals are a rather lack-luster elite slot compared to other choices.

I agree

But one of the challenges of having them as troops is it makes them more directly compete with warriors, a unit which they already overlap a lot with. Close unit overlap is usually a bad thing and I try to stay away from it because from a design standpoint typically one option is just better or more efficient than the other.

They still directly compete, the only things lost is 5 man Immortals, the only things added is mixed squads and 20 man immortal squads. But 10 man Immortals still competes with 10 man warriors and 20 man warriors. Imagine allowing you to take 4 heavy bolters in a Tactical Squad, it's not a tactical squad any longer. You might think heavy weapons are cool and a Tactical Marine is able to operate a heavy weapon if you give it to him, but it's just wrong.

I never felt like it broke the sanctity of a the soulless horde.

Except it's not a soulless horde, it's 5 different kinds of models mixed into a rag-tag group of 10. Missing rules for half the weapon options isn't great.

>melee control
Then you will be pleased to find that I have added some rules governing what I call a tactical withdrawal, as well as fleeing combat by your own volition. Its still not as free as in modern 40k but I wanted it to fit within the system of modeling unit morale which I think is important to keeping it a wargame.

>Monsters vs vehicles
This is an interesting one because while I'm inclined to agree with you, I would probably shift it the other way were I to make a change, moving monstrous creatures away from using toughness and more into something akin to armour facings. The AV system is a nice separation between small arms and anti tank weapons. The high toughness good armour save is a really bad design corner in the 40k system and really should be avoided.

If you are making a simulationist game I can see the value in being able to lose a turret or arm in combat, but undercosted monsters that were 99% vehicle released in 6th edition really soured me on vehicles as a whole. I could get behind it if all walkers were monsters and tiny vehicles were bikes, but Riptides, Wraith Lords and Dreadknights should all be vehicles, especially if being a vehicle is generally a downside.

>Blasts
Blast templates are important to me because, well first off I just think they are fun, but also because no amount of d3 or d6 hits will be able to capture the fact that blast weapons are the counter balance to cramming in all your minis into one little piece of cover.

Absolutely true, not needing to spread your miniatures out and not needing to spend extra time resolving blasts is the upside, but the fun of a good blast resolution and the tactical implications means blasts belong in more simulationist versions of a 40k ruleset.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

First of all, thank you very much for taking your time to read and review as much as you did, that was very generous of you and I appreciate it immensely.

It has taken me more hours than I thought to address all your points. As I wrote and arranged my commentary its become more of an essay and explanation of some of my thought process rather than a bullet by bullet reply to your remarks.

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Specifics and Stuff
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>premeasuring
Having played roughly an equal amount of both, I can say I prefer the rules dictating no pre-measuring. It makes players not try to ride razor-thin margins and play by feel more. One game of "I'm going to move my models 1 angstrom out of your mathematical threat range with perfect precision" is enough for me to decide thats not healthy for what is meant to be a wargame simulation. But I also recognize that maybe "oops I'm out of range guess I dont get to shoot at all" was a bit too far. I think the in-phase pre-measuring rules I have are an excellent compromise that is beginner friendly and better for the play experience.

>templates
Yeh I like templates they are fun for me. But to repeat my point from my last post, you cannot replicate the counter effect of templates towards clumping units in terrain with d6 hits. I know some people vehemently dislike them citing arguments, and thats totally a valid experience I just dont play with people like that.

>Jump vs Hover Movement
This is another one of those "I was writing the rules and filled a niche while I was there" moments. Historically, all models capable of "flying" must be landed at the end of their move. So you could not move your jump or jetpack infantry on-top of a lava pit and claim they are flying above (though you could fly over it). I added hovering to the game, nominally jetbikes and skimmers, which now do count as floating at all times and so could be positioned over the lava.

>Unit Coherency
You got me, and I wont deny it, I hate conga lines. I wanted something that really made units occupy an "zone" if you will, in which you can imagine the troopers might be moving about in as the battle happens. This ties into some of my allocation rules further on, but for now its mostly about maintaining a feel of how units move about on the table. With a uni of 32 gaunts you can stretch more than the length of the entire battlefield, such that one model wouldn't even be able to move to touch one at the other end by the duration of the game. As for 3 vs 2, 2 model coherent just means you make a conga line with a dog bone on the end. 3 model coherent is actually really restrictive. But 3 model coherent for half a unit is still mostly a blob with some freedom to interact nicely with terrain. I also added in the 12" rule later on, maybe I could remove the 3 models rule.

>Advancing
Im not sure what you mean about advancing being a separate move, the point of the rule is to do your run at the same time as your move. Maybe you meant running though (if Im not mistaken in modern 40k advancing is the generic term for this). I personally like keeping the run move (the one you get for sacrificing your shooting) in the shooting phase because it lets you be more tactical with it. I find it actually speeds things up doing it this way because players do not need to try to play out as many permutation in their head from the get go.

>Tank Squadrons
Vehicle squadrons are in the game, but functionally all vehicles are independent and the rules only govern that the vehicles within a squadron must maintain coherency. They follow the usual rules for firing with a unit and splitfire. When you fire at vehicle squadrons they are mostly treated as individual units, so you decide which shots go into which vehicle. There is nothing larger than a hornet in a vehicle squadron, I think the complete list is: sentinals, killa cans, warwalkers, piranhas, wasps, hornets. Actual tank (like leman russ) squads are not appropriate for normal sized games.

>Shoot the big ones
To not lose your remarks about the mechanics vs the gentalmans agreement, I can just reassure you that from my experience this is not an issue. MCs and Walkers in combat (basically the only models other than broadsides to trigger shoot the big ones) can also just leave combat now on their own volition, so your ability to trap and tie down a unit like this while you try to snap shot it to death just wont happen unless the controlling player chooses to stay in combat. It more is there to lend thematically and give a player facing the unfortunate position of having some of his forces fighting a dreadnaught or the like in combat to at least be able to do, something, even if its a crapshoot.

>Ordinance
Always did something akin to that, but I allow snap shots rather than total prevention, and you will find the leman russ has a special rule for when they don't move, as well as I merged the conqueror rounds into the standard battlecannon.

>Fall back coherency
Good point, I will put it on the todo list to clean this up. I have a catch all that says when a unit moves it must try its best to restore coherency, but thats about it. Im very hesitant to include anything along the lines of "cant do it so its destroyed" as that rule was the cause of the only game ending argument Ive had.

>Pinned
This is an error, thank you for pointing it out. They are supposed to be the same. You can see on page 69 the pinning usr says "forced to go to ground" but I am missing that detail in the morale chapter.

>Special characters
I draw the line at remaking special characters, so none of my codecies will have any of them. That is way to personal a subject for me to try my hand defining someone's special hero character that they likely have a deep emotional connection with; its just asking to get cussed out at. As such my rules say "ask your friend and pick whichever version from whichever book you want".

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Terrain
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>Terrain
My strategy was largely still to provide guidelines for terrain. I think the real novelty here was spelling out the concept of hybrid terrain. But mostly it was just getting it written down all in one place. 4th edition had area terrain rules and not much else. 5th edition had really nice ruins rules, but forgot to include area terrain. 6th edition was more of 5th edition but worse and allowed toe ins, and 7th all but forgot terrain rules that were not explicit GW kits.

One of the things that I want to point out about my ruleset is that I worked to make it as functional as I can with what I refer to as block fort terrain: terrain almost entirely made up of solid objects, books, soda cans, and literal wooden blocks. In all editions of 40k this actually leads to really bad gameplay because you cant simultaneously hide and draw los. The way I fractionalize a units cover save means that a unit can do both some shooting and take some cover in these beginner terrain fields.

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Gentalmens Agreement
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>Short obstacles, 25%, and Shoot the big Ones.
Yes you are correct, the rules as they stand require good faith from both players. The 25% cover rule is how its always been, and truthfully this works for me. I'm not even sure what I would do to replace it. I suppose the easiest way is "not fully visible = cover save" but that just feels, wrong.

This is a design philosophy I take in a few places that I think is acceptable because I know the reality is that even in the unlikely event that someone other than my friend group plays this ruleset, they will be playing it in their own good company. I don't need to design for the pickup game with strangers. The approach to short obstacles is similar, but I do see your point about snakes, thats a funny one.

That said with regards to shoot the big ones, I have a section with designer commentary about model size after the USRs, and if for some reason or another this takes off and I get more people asking I guess ill have to work harder at these soft spots. This topic of model size does kinda tie into the fact that originally my friends and I were all playing out of GW codecies, and so I wrote rules that were fundamentally backwards compatible (models didn't have a size in their entry).

>Through the window and the wall
This is an interesting one because it came about from me accidentally contradicting myself. I originally wrote the rules saying save stacking is save stacking, make your 8 different cover saves, but then at another time changed it to say you can only take one of each type of save. On a whim I just added this rule as a catch all, groundwork to build upon. But you are right it needs work. For a long time Ive thought about adding a genaric "my dudes are hiding" action to the game but havnt yet.

A lot of the work Ive done in the last year or two was to finish and get codecies up to snuff, so some of the more handwavey things in the rulebook (which were good enough for my friends and I) are still like that. The older rules for charging used to literally be "point in the direction you wanna charge, and your models have to go that way (mostly)".

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Philosophy of Unit Boundary
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>Multiple Small Units
One of the things that always dug at me me about the older 40k rulesets was how they handle the notion of the unit. Units pretty much governed everything. A lot of what I adjusted along these lines comes down to adding in catches so that two half size units standing right next to one another can behave as if they were one unit. The rules for cover saves, trigger control, and fire at will are all built around this concept. I run this experiment for many many things. For example, say take two cases, a kneewall providing cover saves, and a tall wall hiding the targets completely. Run the permutations of hiding half a 10 man unit in cover using older existing rulesets, and then again with two identical 5 man units next to one another with one fully in the open. My system produces the best results with the least amount of edge cases.

>Trigger Control and Consolidated Targets
Trigger control basically just lets two nearby allied units shoot through one another (models within a unit can draw LoS through other models in their unit, but otherwise friendlies block LoS) and consolidated targeting lets you lump your shots together so you dont have to decide how many shots to splitfire at each for maximum efficiency, but the defender will have more allocation control so your likelihood of wiping one of the two smaller units is reduced. I will have to address what I meant by "in unit coherency" because you're rights its vague and unclear. In your example about the ranger and dark reapers, LoS (and therefor which miniatures can fire) is always handled on a per-model basis so this would not cause issues (the defender invoke the "no more targets" rule). But you raise a good point about the psychic powers and the like. For example doom is not a psychic shooting attack, it simply says target a single enemy unit, so that is rather ambiguous.

Looks like for trigger control I specially call out two, but for consolidated targets I wrote two or more, I will have to unify this, likely to cap both at two simply to avoid things from getting out of hand in corner circumstances.

>Reforging a Unit
Along the same vein of trying to blur the unit boundary; thematically this is a thing I find cool, but also I nor my friends have ever used it. I wrote it in anyways but condensing units is just so much normally not what is valuable to you as a player playing a game that its never happened. But for the examples you gave I can see some useful times where you might wish to do so to gain extra benefit.

>One gun and splitfire
One gun shooting has been the standard rule for all of 3rd to 7th, I just never changed it because it was never an issue. Thinking it over, units that can even have more than 1 gun (almost exclusively are infantry not capable of fielding more than one non-pistol) that doesnt have a rule (MC, vehicle, special rule) allowing it to fire more than one. Bikes are a good example that dont, and honestly this is fine by me, it makes sense that a rider should either need to concentrate on using his bikes weapon or his side arms, and not both. While I am a proponent of splitfire (so you dont have to fire a squad of boltguns at the same target as the one missile launcher, I don't think a single mini should be able to target more than one thing a turn. Vehicles have a new rule allowing them to (in 3rd to 7th vehicles had to shoot all their guns at the same targeta) and I have had to put in a lot of work balancing that fact that I improved their capabilities. There was a time where vehicles were just wicked strong before I reigned them in.

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Complex Allocation
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>Complex Hit Groups and Allocation
To quote my rules on page 27, "Hit groups are made up of models of similar kind: models with the same name, their sergeant, and any other models in the unit which have identical toughness (or to-wound rolls) and saves." So in your example, the whole unit is comprised of models named "Dark Reapers" (as indicated by their statline) and the Exarch sergeant. I will clear up the wording from sergeant to be squad leader as defined in the characters chapter.

>Hit groups and pools
I should just start by saying I know what I wrote out is a lot, and Its in my mind to try to improve the presentation of information, but really its just written out steps for how to perform fast dice which everyone kinda knows and does intuitively. I think this is really a case where a picture means a thousand words, but Im not an graphic artist, and havnt yet taken the time to draw diagrams because I can just explain out loud to my friends.

Lets give the most complex example. A necron Necron Warrior Phalanx, 10 warriors, 9 immortals, 1 warden, and an lord attached.
0. Identify hit groups: we have 4 hitgroups here.
1. roll to hit with all your guns: say 26 bolter hits, 6 plasma hits.
2. Starting with whichever weapon type scored the most hits,
2.a. Evenly assign out hits one wave at a time such that wound available to be lost has one hit assigned to it. So we assign out 10 bolter hits to warriors, 10 bolter hits to immortals, 2 to the warden, and 4 to to lord. Note this is exactly the number of bolter hits we have, so we dont need to loop.
2.b. Roll to wound and take saves and remove casualties.
2.c. Up next is the plasma guns, but there are not enough hits to be evenly distributed to the groups, so we assign them one hit at a time based upon which models are alive and closest to the firer. In this case the necron player strategically put his immortals behind his warriors, so most of the damage will be on the less valuable minis.

I also have a rule allowing you to hide a different save (like artificer armour or a nob) in the rest of the unit in circumstances where making him his own hitgroup actually makes him more vulnerable, but you have to roll majority saves and toughness in this circumstance. Cant have your cake and eat it too.

>Closest vs The Front
Yes by the front I mean the closest. Thank you for helping me language inconsistencies, Ive looked at these rules so much my eyes just glass over these little things.

>Multi wound targets and Existing Wounded Targets
I suppose when it game to it I wanted to avoid the case where you perfectly allocated 1 wound to each mini before any die (like 5th ed nob squads) but it also irked me that blast weapons put all the wounds on a single mini. I recognize its a bit clunky but its what felt right on the table. As for the existing wounded targets rule:"When it comes to allocating wounds, previously wounded models (that is models wounded from a earlier attacks prior to this turn) may be treated as their own hit group." Remember that hitgroups are from the front, so for this to matter you had better take the time (and movement) to move wounded models to the rear.

>Pick That Up and Wounds from the front
You have pinpointed a weak point in my current rules that are a result of the journey I have taken. Basically when I started a long time ago I decided that I was going to use majorly 4th edition wound allocation. I waived my proverbial hand and declared "there shall be no special weapon sniping" and made sure the rules meant it was so. But as time went on, and having also played a lot of unadulterated 6th edition, I realized just how important the fact that wounds came from the front was to one of the best parts of the game: the shot and midrange firefight. In a game where some factions have zero melee presence, casualties from the front means these units (often wielding rapid fire weapons) have a real reason to move forward towards their enemy because they have a meaningful way of actually forcing your foe back. Without it you end up with gunline armies that just sit all game. Pick that up is kinda a holdover from a prior time when it came into effect much less often. I have plans to change it to hook into the look out sir rules but its not done yet.

Nearly all basic units in the game form a single hitgroup, some example exceptions are warlocks in wraithguard squads, necron phalanxes, artificer armour.

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Overwatch
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Part of the confusion about overwatch comes from the re-use of the word to mean very different things based on if you first played 2nd edition (or games like xcom) or 6th ed 40k where the same word is used to describe the last desperate fire of a unit being assaulted (which I call Last Stand). But I honestly dont know what else to call it.

Overwatch is done in response to enemies movement, charge is a movement. Maybe bad wording, Ill consider renaming the section "In the assault phase". But you correctly identified the difference between a unit placed in overwatch and ready and waiting, vs a unit being charged performing a last stand. Its better to be in overwatch, and rightfully so because you payed for it by not firing last turn. The notion of overwatching in response to a charge is already meant to capture that you missed the prime opportunity (the shooting phase) and so it is weaker.

Vehicles (without initiative, so sentinals can overwatch) cannot overwatch because after having played it like that for a year or so my friends and I decided that it wasn't fun to just always be putting leman russ, hammer heads, and fire prisms in overwatch. Ill be honest I wrote the overwatch rules in thinking it would be cool, but as time has gone on Ive been more and more disenfranchised by them. I still like the notion of laying down covering fire, but I want to rework it to be more complex and thoughtful, so players have to be more intentional with it rather than just saying "and now I put all of my guardsmen squads in overwatch so I can shoot your assault marines when they come around the corner". There are many things I do like about it however, for example how it lends towards giving heavy weapon teams more mobility while not turning them entirely into assault weapons. Closing the gap between relentless and non-relentless anti-tank guns is desirable in my experience. And as you pointed out, its complicated already, things I have thought of to improve it would only make it more so.

>Wall of Death
Wall of death is complicated only at the surface level. But it had to be done because the times when you use wall of death you physically cannot use a template because it handles circumstances where models are in motion. A flamer generating roughly 9 times as many hits as a boltgun (3 hits on average vs 1/3 a hit) in overwatch in defense of a charge seems good to me. Flamers take center stage in our games so maybe its just my friends meta? I love flamers. If you try to run gaunts into a guardsmen flamer team you might even lose so many the charge fails!

>Allies lending aid vs a charge
Yes most of the rules in this section are about goverening the cirumstances as to when an allied unit not being charged can overwatch in the assault phase.

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Melee
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>Last Stand
The way you get to overwatch as a charge reaction is through this rule. If you held the line as your charge reaction you may perform a last stand, which lets you overwatch with your small arms.

>Multiple engagement ranges
This might be a place where I was trying to be too clever for my own good. I wanted to soften the blow of being a lower initiative army than your opponent. By lowering engagement range to 1" (from base contact + 2" which was huge) and then offering a +1" for initiative penalty its a bit more even for huge hoards, where the attacks really pile up. Mechanically its ok.

>Multiple weapon skills
Its something I wanted to incorporate because I like the theme, but because I didnt want to get too crazy with hit dice pools I instruct you to merge the pools after the to-hit roll back into their usual forms (split by weapon). So in practice this is pretty quick, "ok first roll 3 chain swords hitting on 4+, then roll the rest hitting on 3+" and after that it doesnt matter they are all the same. I universally do not maintain keeping track of which hit is at which model, and I recognize this can be an abstraction that may disconnect with some players, but it was a choice I made for bookkeeping's sake.

>Tarpitting
Its addressed, MCs and walkers and stuff can just leave combat. Similarly a unit who wins combat can just leave, provided they are not actually completely surrounded. Additionally with the changes to combat resolution and morale the ability to tarpit in general trended downwards.

>Pistols
Bonus melee attacks must be with the weapon giving you the bonus. So you are correct with the banshee example. And blasting someone with a plasma pistol is very satisfying indeed.

>Pile in moves
I try to use pop-out rules to define things that are needed for context in multiple places. In the case what is a pile in move, I just defined what they are in the box, and leave the when to do them in the appropriate sections. Do you think it would be better to repeat the information on both pages?

>Counter Offensive
The primary thing a successful charge dictates is that you move the models their full distance and that all things which hook into a combat starting work. The check for is combat over happens only at the end of the assault phase.

So in this case you would move the orks forward 6", then the space marines would pile in their 3" (via the heroic intervention rules which dictate that a unit which performed a counter offensive not yet in engagement range may now pile in). If no one is able to reach engagement range still, then all models would have to hold their initiative, and pile in a further 1" and increase striking distance to 2". If you somehow still managed to not reach engagement, the assault phase will end with no attacks struck, and you will perform the end step 3" pile in and the fight continues next turn. At this point if you somehow have not yet reached engagement, then the combat is over and the units will consolidate out.

>Counter offensive bonus attack slow.
The number one and I kid you not, number one, feedback from my friends gave was that counter offensive was too strong and so you always did it. And I agreed with them. You will see that in the change log this was made only 1 version ago to reduce its effectiveness. The argument was that it felt bad to play being that counter charging gave your the exact same benefit to charging with none of the risks of doing so.

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Morale
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>Morale tests in combat
Morale checks in combat have always been disabled unless they are break checks. I think this rule is a holdover from the old sweeping advance rules being so cutthroat, I suspect the original designers didnt want there to be anyway of cheesing this via any means but actually winning combat. Ill have to think over this more.

>Break Checks
One of my (at least I think so) more important features in pepsihammer is that with no-retreat you get to test for leadership rather than it just happening -- if you hold your cool your fine. Youre correct though that their is a bit of an odd disconnect when fighting with both super weak and super tough units in the same side that can feel off, because the rules for who lost combat remains who took the most casualties, but I guess thats just always how its been. In this regard I much favor the 4th ed outnumber rules for break checks. The stacking -1 penalty is something I made up that I like a lot.

>Harrying
Its not really any different from making more attacks using the regular rules. But its obvious this is a point I should try and clean up.

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Psychic Stuff
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I swung a cat, and I can certainly understand how your distates for deny the witch grew over the editions. But I still think that psykers being responsible for psychic defense is as fitting as any. Its certainly toned down compared to existing editions (old psychic hood was frankly insultingly good for something that only space marines got), you cant really deny self buffs in my system (like guide) but you can try to protect against debuffs (like doom). Im not sure what you mean by pass/fail psychic tests is unfluffy, perhaps you mean that there should not be a 3rd state where you both dont cast the power and dont perils? But I also came across your talk about passive powers (like the old The Horror) and how they fell out of favor pretty much after 3rd ed, perhaps there is still room for them. Thank you for reading into the details of the system.

>Perils and Warp Level
I spent a lot of time looking at statistical charts, and so the likely hood that you actually fail a perils of the warp for a baseline power power is within a few percentage points of default. I think the bookkeeping pays off because it lets me have a system where more powerful powers are costlier and riskier to cast, something I wanted in the game.

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Closing notes
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Thank you so much for reading and writing as much feedback as you did. Im sure it was many hours of your time and I have no way truly expressing my gratitude other than trying to put in as much effort into my reply as I can; Ive been writing this post for 3 days now and I know it must have taken you as long. I hope none of my explanations and rational came across as curt dismissals. And your praise for my passion is very much appreciated.

Editing is the hardest part of any document. Its easy to put ideas on the page, much harder to take them off or put them in exactly the right place. Sometimes I try to repeat information where I think the user is likely to look, such as your pistol example, but im not consistent with that fact which I think hurts me in the end.

A trimming is in order for sure. I guess the reason I posted the rules when I did was that I felt like I could be editing these for years to come still and if I dont do it now it will never happen, and that would be a bigger shame then them not being perfect. I do admit I lean towards the cinematic at the expense of fiddleyness, thats a good way to put it. When it comes to more rolling, I guess I just never see this as the major time consuming part of the game (plus its fun to do!). Sure it adds a little to the length, no denying it there, but the decision making always takes center stage for when my friends and I play.

Thanks again for all this wonderful feedback.
-
Pepsi

p.s. I usually play 1250 point games, and we normally clock in at just around 4 hours, depending on how lazy we are being about setting up, chatting, and having dinner. This is basically how long it took me to play a game of 6th ed 40k (the one I played the most as an adult in and out of college) at the same size. 1250 points is my favorite because its enough for fun toys but still feels like the board is spacious enough for maneuvering.

I appreciate the thorough response! Because we've covered so many different topics here, I'm not going to quote and respond to every individual thing. So if I don't comment on something from your previous post, you can safely conclude that I find your decision reasonable (even if not necessarily my preferred direction.)

Hover: Ah. Cool. So this would allow me to, for instance, end my wave serpent's movement over a crater without worrying about wrecking it? I like that a lot.

Advancing: I did mean running (the thing you do in the shooting phase), yeah. It's hard for me to picture two separate sets of picking up models and moving them as being faster than lumping them together, but the extra time involved is probably pretty minor if you're playing 1250 point games. And as someone who really enjoyed 7th edition Battle Focus, I can't really raise a stink about doing lots of run rolls/moves in the shooting phase.

Special Characters - Gotcha. A lot of people dislike special characters for reasons that make me cranky, and I thought this was an attempt to basically soft ban them.

Hit Group Pools - I see what you're going for. It still feels like there's probably a simpler way to do it even if most of the confusion/complexity would be cleared up with visual aids.

Pistol Bonus Attacks Using Pistol Profiles - Gotcha. Makes sense from a fluff perspective. I'll see how I feel about it as I read through the eldar/dark eldar rules.

Counter Offensive - I might be overthinking edge cases, but that feels like it might be overly complex? Would it make more sense to just say that either the charge still just fails as normal or else let a failing charge count as having rolled whatever the minimum number needed is to ensure it gets someone into melee?

Morale tests in combat - It has been a while, but I suspect this is why they ended up moving some of this to the morale phase in later editions.

Im not sure what you mean by pass/fail psychic tests is unfluffy, perhaps you mean that there should not be a 3rd state where you both dont cast the power and dont perils?

I was referring to the way that a psyker can try to do something psychic and then simply fail. Not because the target resisted it in some way, but because he just... failed. To me, it never feels right when a librarian tries to shoot psychic energy blasts, something that he practices doing all the time, and can just... fail to do that. Or how he can fail to create a forcefield. The way psykers are depicted in novels, etc. is that putting up forcefields, flinging fireballs, etc. is strenuous and becomes more prone to something like perils or exhaustion as they continue to push themselves, but I don't think I've ever read a story where someone tried to throw a fireball and simply failed to produce flame at all.

In various places, I've pitched systems where powers always manifest automatically (you can still miss with a hit roll, etc) and the danger/stress of casting powers is instead represented by either
A.) A "stress test" at the start or end of the psyker's turn that is easier to fail the more power they've been throwing around. So you have an incentive to cool your jets and pace yourself.
B.) A chance to suffer damage if and only if you used a more powerful version of a psychic ability. Sort of like how hazardous versions of psychic powers work in 10th.

Basically, I feel like the cool psychic powers should always happen. The danger of using them comes from the consequences afterwards rather than the risk of your Thousand Sons sorcerer suddenly forgetting how to make magic fire happen in the moment.

I think the bookkeeping pays off because it lets me have a system where more powerful powers are costlier and riskier to cast, something I wanted in the game

On paper, I have a mild concern that if a psyker's only/best powers are too difficult to cast, you end up in this situation where you're sort of punished for having good powers. I'll see how I feel once I actually read the eldar rules.

I usually play 1250 point games,

I tend to prefer 1k-1500 point games myself. You have good taste.

I really like the way 30k does psychic stuff.

Basically, a psyker can do a basic thing guaranteed. IE shoot some basic mind bullets, do a small buff, whatever.
Or he can push himself to do more (such as fire twice as many psychic bullets, a bigger buff) but that exposes himself to consequences if he gets a double or fails to boost it.
Some powers can only be cast in a boosted form.

I think it captures the idea that these are seasoned battle psykers well accustomed to doing basic stuff, but also the warp is a fickle place and it's easy to push beyond your limits.

The balance point is "how simple a power can you get for free, how big is the reward for pushing, and how risky is that" are all levers you can push and pull to find a medium

Running Eldar Notes

AncientDoom/BattleFocus
To clarify, the unit gains an Ancient Doom token if they fail morale/pinning checks, and they gain Battle Focus instead if they pass one of those checks? Am I reading that correctly?

Battle Focus Specifically:
A.) +1" is nice, but kind of fiddly. It basically only matters if you happen to be *exactly* 1" out of range to shoot or charge or stand on an objective. 2" might feel better. Or even just +1" to both movement and to Run rolls so that you can potentially get 2" out of it on turns that you run?
Edit: Ah. Eldar already move 7". Fair enough.
B)Sword Wind's Grace: Reroll to-hit? To-wound? Attacker's choice?
C. For me, the ability to move-shoot-move was the bread and butter of 7th edition eldar (ignoring the OP meta units like scatbikes and wraithknights.) I'm writing these notes as I go, but I'm worried that having this only kick in when you've already accumulated a bunch of tokens means that I won't be able to do the guerilla warfare style of play that I loved about battle focus back in the day.

Biting Blade sounds fun to use. I like it in the role of being a multi-wound killer. Does your version of the game have a lot of multi-wound models that are wounded semi-reliably by S5 though?

Laser Lance - Pretty sure this is how they used to be too, but I'll note that Lance on an S6 weapon is *almost* useless. Still, I guess it gives you a chance to tickle a land raider if you're desperate.

Witchblade - Your patch notes said they should be AP5 now instead of AP2, but they still show as AP2 on page 4. I will note that personally I always thought they felt okay at AP0. Wounding non-vehicles on 2+ and still being useful against vehicles but *not* having a ton of attacks or good AP meant they felt powerful without stepping on banshee or scorpion toes.

Distort Weapons - I'm not sure why you gave these things barrage? They aren't particular inaccurate or particularly good at firing around corners.

Sun Rifle - Pinning as a way of representing enemies being blinded probably works. Any particular reason you made it more of a machinegun (Assault 6) and got rid of its better AP? (Used to be Assault 3 AP3 iirc.)

Laserlock on Scatter Lasers - What are you going for with this rule? Guardian platforms have no other guns to benefit from it, serpents and vypers only have their underslung guns, and war walkers and wraith lords would probably be better off just taking a second gun that's more efficient into whatever it is they're going after. The only platform that springs to mind as actually meaningfully benefitting from this would be the falcon. Also, do double scatter lasers on the same platform (ex: 2 scatters on one war walker) grant eachother twin-linked?

Honestly, laser lock was a cool concept, but poorly executed and short lived. I'd be fine just giving the gun stats that make it a better dedicated machinegun than the shuriken cannon (and efficient enough in that role to meaningfully compete with anti-tank and anti-meq options.)

Spinerette Rifle - When shooting at non-vehicle targets, Rending is actually a downgrade, no?

Shadow and Doom Weavers - Upgraded blast sizes are nice, but I miss the debuff/threat of wounds when moving that really sold the fluff of enemies slicing themselves up as they tried to untangle themselves from the webbing. Also, the nightspinner gun used to have a torrent profile.

Prism Cannnon's focused profile made me look at the deepstrike rules. It's probably an overall improvement to let deepstriking units consolidate after they show up. However, clumped up terminators were about the only target ever worth shooting the small blast profile at. Wondering if this profile has a role now. I imagine other small blast weapons probably have a similar issue. If you're meant to kill heavy infantry but only hit about 1 model on average after scatter, then it's going to be hard to do your job.

Prism Rifle - Profiles are fine, but you go to the trouble of mentioning the single beam ghostlight thing and don't include rules for it here. I'll be keeping an eye out for ghostlight rules in the spectre datasheet.

Reaper Launcher - This is the only bad profile the reaper launcher ever had. They really need to be able to pull double-duty as vehicle hunters. The two-shot S5 profile locks them in as *only* being good at killing marines, and half the codex is good at killing marines. Swap this out for the 3rd, 6th, or 7th edition versions.

Shuriken Weapons - These are fine. Making a note that you chose to go with the version of catapults that *don't* do pseudo-rending. This is a fine choice, but I'm curious to see what avengers and guardians end up looking like overall. Giving guardians some extra range was definitely a good choice. Not sure how much it helps avengers.

Shuriken Cannon being S6 with Rend and only 1 fewer attacks than the scatter laser definitely makes me think the scatter laser will never be taken here.

Vibro Cannon - Is fine, but I don't like it. GW has always struggled to figure out what to do with these things. Changing the strength from 7 to 10 on a to-hit roll of 6 isn't a very appealing rule because you have to declare your targets before knowing what your strength is going to be. At S10, it could be very reliable into a vehicle target or wound something with midling Toughness very efficiently. At S7, it's a gamble into vehicles and probably wants to go after heavy infantry or bikes or something. Which means it's somewhere between a good starcannon and a bad bright lance, and only available on a specialized platform that does nothing except shoot this gun.

I think you need to let it do something else entirely. Fun concepts I've seen in the past are to let it draw a line and hit every unit under that line, letting it debuff armor (because it changed frequencies to a tone that makes armor vibrate and become fragile), or just letting people take a bunch of these things and up their strength based on how many of them go after a given target.

Banshee Mask - As an Iybraesil player, these masks are important to get right! Unfortunately, I think you're missing a key ingredient to this version of the mask: they're supposed to be the thing that helps banshees stay alive! Version of the banshee mask that nerfed enemy WS were awesome because in addition to being very fluffy, they simultaneously made the banshees hit more often *and* made the enemy hit them less often in return. I'd gladly trade a morale penalty (fear) for a proper WS debuff.

Eldar Jetbike - Not letting people use two-handed weapons means bikelocks and bikeseers can't wield singing spears. I'd just drop that rule. I don't think there are any other bike-riding models that can wield two-handed weapons?

Ghosthelm - No perils for eldar is nice. Not sure why they can still perils when they deny the witch? Feels weird that you're more likely to get nuked by spooky warp phenomena when trying to shut down powers than when actively trying to use them yourself. It's like being more likely to get hurt trying to throw water on an enemy firework than when trying to light your own fireworks.

Mandiblasters - Interesting take. It makes scorpions less ambush-y (which the fluff says they are) and more of a protracted attrition unit (what they tended to be in practice). Does this force you to slow roll in melee? Theoretically, it only takes like 5 or 6 lucky attacks (I haven't read the exarch profiles yet) to kill a whole squad of scorpions. So if an ork mob has 30 attacks, they'd theoretically want to slow roll so that they potentially kill the scorpions way before making all their attacks and thus have fewer chances to roll 1s to-hit. Also, clarify the timing. I assume the attacker takes wounds after resolving saves from their own attacks? No mandiblastering an ork to death between his hit roll and his wound roll, right?

Meltabombs - Been a while, but isn't this thing supposed to have armorbane and/or AP1? Or are you specifically nerfing them because fire dragons have them squad-wide? As-is, it's basically a worse power fist.

Shimmershield - I like the squad-wide version of this. I'll be keeping an eye out for the Defend exarch power.

Swooping Hawk Grenade Pack - An interesting take, but not a bad one. I think you can simplify this a bit to avoid confusion. Instead of saying the blasts overlap, just say that they use the battery fire rule that you took the time to write down. Don't call them "plasma grenades" because that raises questions about whether they count as "grenades" and thus need to use some of the grenade rules, etc. I'm a big fan of hawks and kind of an anti-fan of small blasts, so not sure how this would feel to use overall.

Warp Jump Generator - Nitpicks: clarify how to choose which spider gets removed on a double 1 (just let the controlling player decide.) Can spiders be overwatched if they begin and end a move out of sight? It makes sense to be able to plink at most units as they move from place to place, but spiders literally aren't in the materium as they move from point A to point B.

Vehicle Equipment all looks good to me.

Guide psychic power is fine as-is, but consider letting it work in melee too? I know it didn't do so in some editions, but that always seemed odd.

Fortune - Honestly fine as-is, but I know that rerollable saves was a big source of most eldar deathstars that existed in the past. Consider making it a feel no pain instead. This both makes things like rerollable invulns or rerollable 3+ saves less of a pain and also helps capture the idea that the farseer is helping models avoid attacks entirely even when the enemy's weapons have decent AP.

Will of Asuryan - Probably fine as-is, but I'm not sure I ever heard of anyone actually using this one unless they had absolutely nothing else to do.

Prescience - Idk. You've already got Guide/Doom/Fortune to reroll hits, wounds, and saves. I don't think I'd ever take this over one of those unless I already had all of those and wanted a backup source of rerolls for a unit that couldn't be guided/doomed/fortuned. Outside of that scenario, you could make this Warp Level 0 for 3 rerolls, and I still might not take it. What am I missing here? Maybe if it was an automatic 6 instead of a reroll?

Hemoplague - Executioner with a changed name? Why the name change? Gives it a nurgle-y/khornate vibe.

Eldritch Storm - Seems useful, and is pleasantly reminiscent of its old version. But the old version was the cute option you took when you'd already loaded up on better powers. I'd be tempted to make this warp level 1 instead of 2. It's certainly less powerful than something like Fortune. Especially in your system where fortune is letting me reroll stackable saves.

Mind War - I assume "delta" means "difference?" I've never seen the word used like that. Letting enemies take cover saves against telepathic mind duels feels very strange and makes me wonder whether or not I'm allowed to take invuln saves against it.

Runes of Battle - Why lock warlocks into always having destructor? I'd be tempted to have these powers be always active and require no psychic test ala their 4th edition version. Going to be keeping an eye out for whether or not warlocks have ghost helms in their datasheet.

The Avatar:
A.) Been a while, but S6 and T6 feel kind of puny with his new model. Are these rules meant to be used with the old model(s) or the new one?
B.) Molten form begs the question of which weapons count as flamer, laser, etc. It gets tricky with xenos weapons that don't use imperial naming conventions. Consider necron "heat rays" for instance.
C.) Looking at the Sweep weapon rule for the first time, it seems extremely not worth it. Going from wounding marines on 2s to wounding them on 4s for a single bonus attack sounds awful. I assume you can't smash and sweep at the same time to end up with a higher number of smash attacks?

Farseer: So generally a farseer will be pretty safe/reliable casting powers. You probably put 3 dice into Doom to be safe (and then rage quit when you fail the power anyway), and then you have 1 die left over to have a reliable chance of casting a level 1 power with. Seems like it probably works out more often than not. Good to see Black Guardians getting a nod.

Warlock Council:
A.) Why limit them to such a small squad size? I know some people really enjoyed their large lock squads, and while the death star thing was a problem, it *did* make them an efficient unit to put buffs into so that they felt like a little jedi squad.
B.) 1 Attacks is going to really, really limit how you use these guys. This is the first unit where I see that the changes to pistols (making their bonus attack use the pistol's profile) is going to really hurt the unit. With a farseer and the max number of warlocks, you're putting out a measley 6 witchblade or spear attacks. Even buffing your WS and AP to make them more reliable, that just feels really lackluster. Especially for 200 points. Like obviously 100 points of that is a farseer who's throwing around some solid buffs, but the rest being warlocks with 1 good melee attack each who are also putting their buffs on a tiny unit that can't make much use of said buffs feels like such a self-limiter. Easy fix is to give these guys 2 attacks and maybe lower their cost when they're taken in a council. A warlock giving bonus AP to 10 shuriken catapults in a guardian squad feels pretty good, but giving bonus AP to 6 witchblade attacks feels extremely meh.
C.) I said it above, but I wouldn't feel great about needing to roll psychic tests for these guys. The council seems so meh on its own that taking away its destructor or any of its buffs with a bad roll feels pretty harsh, and when attached to other squads, they'll be failing to generate successes with 1/3rd of their dice.
D.) Give them ghost helms. I know they didn't have them in every edition; they didn't need them in every edition. Warlocks walking around blowing themselves up with perils every 3rd time they use a power is super unfluffy.

Autarch:
A.) Having him pull double-duty as an exarch at the end feels really weird. Why not just have a dedicated exarch datasheet? Even if it's a one-size-fits all version?
B.) Definitely feeling the nerf from having to use the pistol profile for the bonus attack; especially when he doesn't have a fusion pistol option.
C.) The Paths of War thing is interesting, and I like what you're going for, but I don't like the execution. Just letting him mix & match wargear for X points per wargear option was simple and felt better than nearly doubling your autarch's points cost.
D.) Between breaking the exarch out into its own datasheet (if not multiple datasheets) and swapping Paths of War for a much simpler list of wargear options plus Path of Command rules, I think you end up with a much simpler datasheet that does the job of being an autarch much better.
E.) Don't overthink letting a 3+ save autarch run around with hawks and banshees. It's not that big a deal.
F.) If you do create an exarch datasheet, maybe add a rule saying they can't join a squad that already has an exarch in it? There shouldn't generally be multiple exarchs in one squad.

Fire Dragons:
A.) Be advised that the R-word in your R-words together rule is consider a slur in a lot of places these days. I strongly encourage renaming this.
B.) Recommend charging points for exarch powers and psychic powers. Making them all the same "cost" means that they theoretically all ought to be equally strong/useful. Which puts unnecessary pressure on you to design them a certain way. Points costs means that some powers are just allowed to be stronger/weaker.
C.) Noticing that you included rules for fusion pistols in the wargear section, but neither autarchs nor fire dragon exarchs appear to have the option to take them. Who has access to fusion pistols?


Howling Banshees:
A.) Ahhhh. *There's* the WS debuff they desperately need. Think I might still prefer these be baked into the masks, but I don't mind this.
B.) Shield of Grace: Makes the squad surprisingly good at surviving in melee with something like a carnifex. Is that intentional?
C.) This is definitely another unit that would prefer to be making melee weapon attacks instead of shuriken pistol attacks, but it's a less pronounced difference here than with warlocks or the autarch.

Striking Scorpions:
A.) Stalkers: Does an autarch prevent them from using this rule? Does an exarch? I feel like neither of them should.
B.) Just saw the minimum squad size of 3 for aspect warriors. Unprecedented, but I'm not opposed to it. (Even if there is technically Alaitoc lore that this conflicts with now.)
C. I feel like these exarch powers are pretty well balanced against eachother. Moreso than for dragons or banshees.

Warp Spiders:
A.) Do "pairs" of power weapons (like the power blades) grant bonus attacks?
B.) Ensnare - Love the fluff of it. Not sure how popular model sniping will be with opponents.
C.) Surprise Assault - Isn't that pretty much a guaranteed charge out of reserves? They already get a 3" consolidate coming out of deepstrike, so you're basically giving them a 2d6+3" (average 10" ) charge. If they deepstrike 6.1" away to ensure they don't land on the enemy and scatter directly away from their would be target, that's at most putting them 12.1" away. So chances are very good that they'd end up getting the charge off with limited retaliation from the enemy. Not that spiders are particularly scary in melee, mind you.

Wraithguard:
A.) Smash is neat here.
B.) When does wraithsight get resolved?
C.) The Bulky and Constructs rules contradict. Can wraiths go inside transports or not? If not, that's certainly a big nerf to them if you're not doing the maxed-out death star thing.
D.) No d-scythe option?
E.) I like the idea of a wraith squad with mixed weapons, but I'm pretty sure the wraithcannons are just way better than either of the melee options. Especially given that smash and strength 5 makes them kind of half decent in melee already. For this to work, you probably need to lower the base cost of each wraith guard, give them ghost swords as their default weapon, and then charge +X for the ghost axe/shield (usually considered the better melee option) and +Y for the wraithcannon (probably better than either melee option.)
F.) I think these guys were W3 back in the day? Am I misremembering, or is this nerf intentional?
G.) Noticing you made wraithcannons heavy, but then gave the only(?) unit in the book that can wield them Relentless. Which is fine, but you could have just not given them Heavy in the first place, right? Or is this because it would be weird to make them Assault weapons?

Dire Avengers:
A.) I like the defensive grenades.
B.) Best version of the Bladestorm rule. Good choice!
C.) Battle Focus - Shares a name with the Battle Focus ability under Threads of Fate. Which is confusing and also means they don't have a reason to get excited about getting their third Battle Focus Token. Glad to see the option here because move-shoot-move avengers felt really good in 7th. This rule might accidentally make them faster than banshees though, and that feels odd. Banshees move 9" and can't charge after running. Avengers move 7" + a rerollable (fleet) run move for an average of something like +4" and can then charge.
D.) There's that Defend I was looking for! Good stuff. All three of these exarch powers are bangers. I feel like there could maybe be some sort of tie-in with counter charge if you wanted.
E.) Why a 5 model minimum for these guys instead of 3?

Rangers:
A.) Not a lot of notes. I like them. Pathfinders are an expensive upgrade, but probably worth it thanks to the strength boost you gave their rifles and the various buffs you gave the Sniper rule. Getting through a 4+ save followed by a rerollable cover (frequently at least a 3+) save is going to be miserable for opponents, but as is right and proper these guys are easily countered via melee or flamers.

Guardians:
A.) Looks like you buffed their initiative. I'm fine with that.
B.) I like consolidating stormies and defenders into a single profile. That said, it does feel slightly weird having very short ranged guns in the same squad as a long-ranged gun. My dream take on guardians is something like:
* Min squad size of 5. Max squad size of 10. Jumbo-sized squads invites hyper-efficient wombo-combos with things like Guide and bonus AP from warlocks.
* The first 5 guys can either take a weapon platform OR swap their catapults for up to two special weapons (flamers/fusion guns.)
* If you take 10 guys, you can take either a second weapon platform or a scale shield.

This means that you have a travel-sized troop (other than avengers) that can go in a falcon, you can squeeze in enough special weapons to make the 5-man squad (6 with a warlock) reasonably killy while keeping their point slow, and you still have the option to take a 10-man squad if you want a little more firepower in one place. (10 guys to operate one bright lance was always silly.)
C.) Just want to note that the jumbo-sized squad is less necessary in your rule set since you're already letting people combine squads together.

Guardian Jetbikes: No notes.

Wave Serpent:
A.) No bulky units allowed? You're kind of tripling down on not letting wraithguard hitch a ride, huh?
B.) BS 3 on the eldar vehicles was always kind of rough. It made sense with the guardian crew, but spending 100 points for a single bright lance shot that misses half the time is *rough*. The move to BS4 for vehicles felt like kind of blatant power creep, but it also made the vehicles feel much better to use.

Shadow Spectres:
A.) I see ghostlight! Looks good, but gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to mix the dispersed (blast) profile into the rule. It also doesn't make much sense to me to be able to simultaneously *disperse* your shots and *focus* them into a ghostlight attack. Just don't let the ghostlight rule work with the blast profile. If the squad wants to blast the enemy with a bunch of dispersed shots, just resolve it as normal.
B.) Note that ghostlight probably ends up double-dipping on its own AP boost plus the Overpower rule's AP boost. Not sure that's a problem though.
C.) I'd probably give the prism weapons a ghostlight rule and only let those equipped with ghostlight weapons participate in the attack. This prevents a haywire launcher exarch or fusion gun autarch from contributing or being the base profile.
D.) Shadow of Death: Nitpick, but rephrase from "use the two highest" to "and discard the lowest." Makes it easier to resolve when you have multiple rules telling you to roll extra dice and use the better/worse results.
E.) Cynosure - Is fine as written, but honestly I'd probably rewrite ghostlight to use a single to-hit roll and not get better based on the number of hits. (Just the number of participants.) The idea is that they're all funneling their guns' juice into a single super attack. The rest of the squad isn't really aiming their weapons. To me, this is both more fluffy and less complicated to resolve.

Shining Spears:
A.) Wargear should probably be heavy aspect armor rather than light, right?
B.) Ah. I guess a scatter laser's laser lock could potentially help an exarch's star lance out. I'd still overhaul or drop laser lock.
C.) Looking at vector strike rules for the first time, and it seems weird that units get a cover save against someone stabbing them in the phase/shooting them at point bglank range.
D.) Making a note that these guys are presumably probably overpaying for one of their default guns. Twin catapults and laser lances both seem like they probably cost more than 0 points, but these guys will only ever be shooting one of them.

Swooping Hawks:
A.) I like that these guys have jink, but it feels weird that spears or even most of the infantry and vehicles in the army don't have it. Also, reading the jink rule for the first time, consider having it work for deepstrikers as well. As-written, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
B.) Thematically, it kind of feels like they should be able to skyleap if they're fleeing. If you're fleeing, you're trying to get to safety, and few places are safer than "off the table." May also want to clarify that you're talking about the movement phase. You probably don't want them skyleaping using, say, a run move.
C.) Love having haywire grenades back.
D.) Marksman's Eye - Can this be used with the grenade pack attack?
E. One of my favorite units, and I'm overall pretty happy with this implementation. See above about some of their wargear options.

Shroud Runners: Idk. I don't own these guys, but something feels off. These guys are supposed to be like, support units/scouts. And while they do have the scout rule, they're kind of just baby gunboats.

Vypers:
A.) Vyper not Viper.
B.) Traditionally, these guys have been at risk of feeling like "war walkers but worse." I guess these guys are an option if you've already maxed out your heavy support points, but ehhhh. Consider giving these guys some kind of special rule to help them find their own niche. 10th makes them buff other units that shoot at the same thing they do. 7th(?) gave them some kind of offense bonus if you were fielding three of them together.

War Walkers: The most efficient platform for heavy weapons in the book. More durable than vypers with twice as much gun. Fine as-is.

Dark Reapers:
A.) 20 point sfor the tempest launcher seems pretty high to me, but maybe I'm undervaluing barrage on a BS5 model.
B.) See above about these guys really needing an anti-tank profile for the reaper launcher. The *only* times I've been down on these guys is when they were stuck with only the S5 profile.
C.) Fast Shot feels better than Crackshot to me. Crackshot makes a single attack more reliable and helps out against cover saves, but Fast Shot doubles the maximum potential damage of a weapon that hits on a 2+. So you're *almost* rerolling to-wound/to-pen rolls except that there's a chance you'll wound twice instead of just once.
D.) Overwatch Better: How does this interact with the tempest launcher given that blasts are normally snapshots, etc.?

Wraith Lord:
A.) Sight Stem is an auto-take if you're taking any heavy weapons at all.
B.) How does immune to psychology interact with wraithsight? I assume you're allowed to be shaken! by wraithsight despite being otherwise immune to it?

Falcon: Fine as-is. Consider letting it deepstrike.

Fire Prism: Fine as-is. Noticing that we're okay making these tanks BS4. Seems easy enough to justify making serpents and other vehicles match.

Night Spinner: Was hoping to see a "tangled up in monofilament webbing" rule or torrent profile for the doomweaver here.

Overall, good stuff. I don't have any major gripes; just lots of little nitpicks and personal preferences. That said, I noticed that the army rule (Ancient Doom/Battle Focus) barely got mentioned anywhere in the rest of the codex and seemed slow to charge-up on its own. I'd consider either overhauling the army rule or dropping it entirely. As-is, it's a lot of fiddly bookkeeping for minimal impact until late into the game unless your opponent is just feeding you opportunities to make morale tests every turn.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

>Complex allocation and hitgroups.
When it comes to complex units I think its always going to get, well, a little complex

Take the following example,
* youve got a 10 dudes in power armour and 1 in artificer armour
* get hit by 16 boltgun hits and 1 missile launcher
There are tons of terrible solutions available. For example in hh2.0 you would be allowed to put the single missile hit onto the one dude with a 2+ save blocking it, and then put the bolt guns onto the less important dudes. You could do like 6th edition, where you achieve not as bad but similar ends by positioning the 2+ save in front, and using look-out-sir to shift any ap2 hits off of him. 4th edition would dictate that since the majority save is 3+ thats all you use. 5th ed in this example is the best and closest to mine, dictating that you would evenly distribute the hits per model. With the exception of going off the deep end that wargear mix and matching caused, 5th ed did have the best complex allocation rules. They had the best cover save rules too, except the process for determining cover saves on a per model basis was actually just silly, 6th ed did that better.
But the best way is just always going to boil down to this

* group targets fairly by toughness and saves.
* establish a mechanic to evenly distribute one wave at a time
* resolve the wave, rinse and repeat

And now you have a fast dice system where you never have to worry about rolling dice one at a time, or worrying about spillover.

To speed things up you can even boil down cover saves within an otherwize homogonous hit group to just be a fraction so you dont have to keep track of wounds on a specific model.

>counter offensive
For counter offensive I could probly do with a touchup. But it does work right now so that counts for something.

>no psychic tests
So while I see where you are coming from from a fluff perspective, this is a game that uses dice for all the other mechanics so Ive never felt too bad about the chance to fail a power. I will re-explain how the psychic powers work in case it was not clear, as I think you will find that failing to cast is more rare than you imply.

Warp charge is like your mana pool. Warp level is how much mana you need to spend to cast it. So you get to balance casting more lower level spells or less higher level spells. And because casting higher power rolls more dice at a time you risk perils more.

To cast a power you must spend the warp charge equal to the level, then add one free dice and roll them. Looking at the harness table, see if you harnessed enough charges to cast the power (equal or greater than the power's warp level). A Ld10 psyker harness charges on a 2+, ld9 on a 3+, etc. So to fail a level 1 power, since you at minimum roll 2 dice, is only snakeeyes, 1 in 36 rolls. Compared to rolling a 12 or 11 (3/36) in 4th 5th and 6th edition.

A ld10 psyker like a farseer is going to fail 1 in 36 basic powers, so about 1 every 3 - 4 games give or take. a ld9 psyker like a warlock is going to fail 1 in 12 basic powers, so about 1 every other game. A even crappier ld8 psyker like those crummy human ones, who lets be real should be kept at safe distance at all times by anyone with some smarts is going to be risking it 1 in 4 basic powers.

Chance of perils in any double (1/6) but of that only 1/6 is equivalent with old perils, the other 5/6 let you block it with a leadership test. This is pretty on par with old odds of 2/36. For more complex powers however these odds go up fast.

>Stress test
While this certainly a fine way to handle it, its kind of built in with the system that I have, the more you try the more risk you are taking on.

>more powerful version
I shudder at the idea of having to come up with a way to make every power have a weak and strong version.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Can you direct me to which page the rules are for casting these boosted powers? I detest the chapter layout for hh3.0. There are so little markers of search aids, and this rulebook is so verbose and the language so freakin pedantic it kills me. "Hit tests"; makes me want to die.



p.s. can someone explain how to get lists to work? I seem to have only be able to get single item lists working, which makes a bunch of excess white space between my bullets.

Looking through the Tyranids, you are missing a lot of units.

For what is there, in general it is fine and some of it even great. In particular I like your take on Synapse and Instinctive Behaviour.
Although the Rupture Cannon still being AP4 is annoying. It is a dedicated anti-vehicle weapon on a 250-300 pts platform, just make it AP 1.

On a similar note, the Trygon doesn't have the defensive profile to justify 265 pts.

EDIT: Also when exactly is the Reinforced Carapace supposed to interact with Overpower? is the roll before the saving throws?
TBH feels clunky and maybe just making it +1 Toughness is better.