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I think that the two issues with blasts are:
1: low BS armies shouldn't be so likely to miss entirely with an explosion - the explosion is the one which is rolling to hit, not the firer!
2: Rolling random numbers of attacks, with caveats, is slow and unreliable, thus swingy.

Here's my suggestion:

Blast weapons have a the profile "Heavy 2, Blast (2/5)", for example. This tells you there are 2 shots, and that you get 2 hits on a miss and 5 hits on a hit with each one. Roll 2 dice, and immediately determine how many hits there are, but with one caveat:
"Blast: an attack from a Blast weapon can never score more hits than there are models in the target unit".

Simple as that. Shooting a unit of 4 guys? Fire 2 shots, get a hit and a miss, so 6 hits total (2 from the miss, 4 from the hit as you cannot get more hits than there are models).

Brings back that element of blast weapons where firing a huge explosive meant you didn't have to be so good at shooting. High BS armies will still hit more so net more hits. Shooting a tank with a blast guarantees one hit every time, like it basically used to.

It would have to be modified for fliers - probably stating that for fliers a miss misses and a hit gets the "miss" profile (so usually 1 hit).

Small blast might be blast (1/4)
large blast might be blast (2/6)

Big apocalypse cannons can have Blast (5/10), or (5/15), to hit hordes. And, most importantly, it speeds up the game - no more "roll for shots, roll to hit, roll to wound". Just straight up "roll for hits, roll to wound".

It's much more scalable than D3 or D6, so you can have various types of blasts - some which reliably net more hits but can never get big hits (Blast 2/3), others which swing wildly (Blast 1/10), and so on, depending on the flavour you need for the weapon.

What do you think?

I like the scalability, but I have a couple concerns:

* Auto-hitting blasts always make me a little nervous. Especially on weapons with good Damage and AP stats. In ye olden days, completely missing with a blast was usually possible. And being able to guarantee you'll hit my stratagem-buffed venom with a volcano cannon seems both really powerful and at risk of being kind of a feelsbad rule.

* Maybe it's just because I'm not used to it yet, but it feels like it might be just barely too complicated to easily wrap one's head around. Having to remember your number of shots, how many hits a miss lands, and how many hits a hit lands. And then having to remember those three values for each different blast weapon in your army. Proooobably not actually a problem.

* How prevalent would blasts with multiple shots be? It feels a little weird to have a rule to prevent blasts from hitting more times than there are models in the unit if you also give lots of blasts multiple shots thus letting them hit multiple times anyway.

Simple as that. Shooting a unit of 4 guys? Fire 2 shots, get a hit and a miss, so 6 hits total (2 from the miss, 4 from the hit as you cannot get more hits than there are models).

Good example right here. The target squad only contains 4 dudes, so your shot that hits can only add 4 to the total. But because the weapon has 2 shots, you still end up hitting 4 guys 6 times. Which feels reasonable for a twin-linked frag missile launcher but weird for a Heavy2 frag missile launcher.

This is similar to what I’ve thought blasts should be. In my version I had it so that misses could be rerolled once to confer a reduced hit value (just half rounded down). I had also toyed with the idea of spillover, where a large enough blast could affect units within say 3” (which could also scale). So a blast 8 shot could drop 5 hits on the target and you could allocate the last 3 hits on the nearby unit. Just some ideas that you may like.

For your version, I would add that 1s to hit confer no hits at all to represent completely whiffing.

Overall I’d be happy to play it your way.

I like the idea of 1's to hit missing entirely. Definitely adding that.

Regarding multiple shots, I was thinking of weapons which have 2 barrels, so fire two distinct rounds which both explode. Though I am considering the repercussions of limiting a weapon to a number of hits, to represent being caught in 2 explosions being no worse than being caught in 1.

So a double-barreled battle-cannon might have heavy 2 Blast 2/6, and shoot a unit of 8 models, get 2 hits, so hit 8 models (max in the unit).

Or it might get a 1 and a hit, getting 6 hits, or two misses, getting 4 hits. The only potential caveat there is that multiple shells slamming into a vehicle should get more hits

So a weapon cannot score more hits than the number of successful "to hit" rolls or the number of models in the target unit, whichever is higher. so if you shoot a unit of 1 model with 3 shots at blast 2/4, and hit with 2, then you get 10 "hits" which reduces to 2 because it's the number of hits you rolled.

It seems a little complex but it should be easy enough to pick up.

Wyldhunt wrote:
I like the scalability, but I have a couple concerns:

* Auto-hitting blasts always make me a little nervous. Especially on weapons with good Damage and AP stats. In ye olden days, completely missing with a blast was usually possible. And being able to guarantee you'll hit my stratagem-buffed venom with a volcano cannon seems both really powerful and at risk of being kind of a feelsbad rule.

I do agree with this. I would avoid making blast auto hit.