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bizarre thread topic, but one thing I always thought would have made warhammer interesting( or maybe unplayable, I havent been in the game for 25 years) is to have monstrous creatures behving more like large shot animals. In that even when you perform a killing shot like a heart/lung shot on large game, the animal doesnt just roll over and die 'once reduced to zero wounds". Shooting moose, buffalo, large bears and particularly elephant, the animal is still quite capable of a few seconds to a minute of running, charging and trampling you to a greasy smear even as it expires from a mortal wound. I always found it sort of dissappointing that tyranids when I first encountered them fall straight down just like fragile humans do. Animals are more like people on PCP, they sometimes dont know they are dead.

Well, if you blew a critter to literal pieces with a missile launcher, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t go tear-assing around the field for a few minutes.

I mean, a lasrifle is comparable to a modern military rifle... but even a bolt gun is like a rapid fire rpg. An auto canon is comparable to being shot with a light tank cannon.

A volcano cannon is like a giant squirt-gun full of lava.

You might be underestimating the sheer destructiveness of the 40k universe.

(PS: Yes, I hunt and fish.)

neanderthal75 wrote:
bizarre thread topic, but one thing I always thought would have made warhammer interesting( or maybe unplayable, I havent been in the game for 25 years) is to have monstrous creatures behving more like large shot animals. In that even when you perform a killing shot like a heart/lung shot on large game, the animal doesnt just roll over and die 'once reduced to zero wounds". Shooting moose, buffalo, large bears and particularly elephant, the animal is still quite capable of a few seconds to a minute of running, charging and trampling you to a greasy smear even as it expires from a mortal wound. I always found it sort of dissappointing that tyranids when I first encountered them fall straight down just like fragile humans do. Animals are more like people on PCP, they sometimes dont know they are dead.

What you're describing is represented by models having more than 1 Wound. A tyranid warrior can potentially survive being hit by multiple krak missiles. A termagaunt might die to a single lasgun, but they do so in the same way that a space marine dies from a "single" lasgun. We can kind of assume that each die of lasgun fire rolled represents several actual shots and that failing a save represents the target's armor (chitin in this case) being worn away until a mortal blow can be landed.

Also, some tyranids even have a "death throes" rule representing them going berzerk in their final moments.

Dearth throes rule, well that covers it then being precisely what we are talking about. Thanks.

Regards the first reply, actually you'll find animals wounded by low and high explosive can still take a long time to expire. Look up whaling, killing them humanely is never assured. They hit them with explosive penthrite harpoons, which at least brings them to the top, then pummel them with small arms over the side of the factory ship( small arms meaning elephant guns) in the hope to get them to expire humanely. Similarly african elephant was hunted with explosive projectiles during the safari era, both blackpowder and fulminate loaded shells( a rudimentary high explosive), and they usuallty ran for a while. Not saying they will run after being shot by a tank no but depending on size they will run from a lot of stuff before bleeding out.

Humans do too. There are many documents stories [the kind of things that get medals] of people who've been shot multiple times just not realizing they should be dead yet and charging/shooting/throwing grenades.

As far as large creatures go, that's why monstrous creature didn't ever need to be a thing. They behave, are equipped, and act like vehicles for all intents and purposes, and it can be assumes that the MC with an arm blown off might bleed out later, but for now it's not any different from a tank that's had a gun or something else destroyed. Introducing things like the Riptide which is actually just a vehicle with MC rules because they were mathematically massively better than being a vehicle just sort of finally illustrates that point.

Also, a model being removed as casualty isn't necessarily it being killed, just wounded or otherwise incapacitated to the point of no longer contributing to the battle.

Well, multiple wounds represents surviving a hit from a damaging attack.

If you’re going to go from disabling a deer, to talking about a whale... that’s kind of like going from a termagaunt up to a super-heavy class critter. No, a whale is not going to die from a single hit from anything. Because it has, I dunno, 30 wounds.

Yeah, a deer / elephant may survive a hit or two from a weapon. That’s the Str vs Tough roll. If I hit a one-wound model with a S3 gun, and it’s got T4, odds are good it will take more than one hit to inflict a wound. Then, how many wounds does it have? 3? We’d be looking at an average of 9 hits to take down an Elephant, for example.

Getting to 0 wounds is the point at which the target can no longer fight back. Not necessarily dead, but unable to mount an attack.

But seriously. If I hit a deer with an anti-tank missile, and it gets blasted into d6 chunks, it’s not getting up and running away. Like, in 4 pieces it probably doesn’t have two legs on a given chunk to be able to run. Or have a brain connected to said legs to operate said chunks to move together in order to run.

So, yeah, a Tyranid that’s no longer structurally sound because it’s no longer in one piece is unlikely to do anything, on account of it being a puddle and not a solid.

 greatbigtree wrote:
...No, a whale is not going to die from a single hit from anything...

Mk.45 torpedo? 11-kiloton low-yield nuclear warhead?

No, not even that. Whales are super-tough, yo.

Crap. Maybe other countries have built a bigger nuclear torpedo.

As to the OPs suggestion its in the game. Some monsters have a rule like vehicles exploding that allows units within a certain distance to take mortal wounds (automatic wounds that cant be saved) when the model reaches 0 wounds. Its called death throws.

So your covered buddy. Its in the game.

Wouldn't matter. Whales are the Chuck Norris of the Seas.

 greatbigtree wrote:
Wouldn't matter. Whales are the Chuck Norris of the Seas.

False equivalence.

Chuck Norris is Chuck Norris. Nothing can be like/of Chuck Norris.

Oh, you dirty pedant.

Fine, Whales are as close as mortally possible for a sea creature, to possess qualities often ascribed to Chuck Norris.

Although they obviously are not, nor could they truly get close to CN levels of amazitude. But they could survive a nuclear blast harpoon. One shot, anyhow. Multiple shots may vary.

There's also rules for Tyranid Monstrous Creatures to do stuff after they've been reduced to 0 wounds, besides exploding.

Nurglitch wrote:
There's also rules for Tyranid Monstrous Creatures to do stuff after they've been reduced to 0 wounds, besides exploding.

It's same mechanic with different flavor text.

No, not just the Death Throes rule. I mean the Death Frenzy strategem.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 greatbigtree wrote:
...No, a whale is not going to die from a single hit from anything...

Mk.45 torpedo? 11-kiloton low-yield nuclear warhead?

Clearly haven't watched Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, too much firepower does not apply to whales, they must be relentlessly hunted and exterminated.

I think the current rules cover things really well, you get different M/BS/A profiles depending on how many wounds you have left. Death-Throes could be written better in terms of being as likely to happen when shot by lasguns and only barely dying vs getting blown to smithereens by an anti-titanic tank gun.

Removed - Rule #1 please

There was actually a case where a dead whale was "dealt with" using dynamite. The whale won.
They are the kung-fu panda of the seas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7kENH-A7s

I believe the incident with the Whale was... there may have been others.