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I was talking with a friend after facing Ghaslzskull a d we think the wound cap per to en is a good mechanic.

What other models has it? I know about the C'tan.

 Niiai wrote:
I was talking with a friend after facing Ghaslzskull a d we think the wound cap per to en is a good mechanic.

What other models has it? I know about the C'tan.

Just like other 'artificial' restrictions, it's bad ruleswriting in my opinion: these are in essence 'crutchy' fixes to make certain models 'uber-tough' in a way that your already existing layers of rules like Toughness, Armour Save, Invulnerable Save, Feel no Pain etc. can't. That, in isolation, would not be so bad if it was used with the utmost restraint and was the end of the story, but stuff like that always proliferates, and also leads to an arms race. Soon you get 'uber-killy' stuff that is the exception to the exception, and once that also proliferates you need another cycle of exceptions to the exceptions for the models that are even tougher yet. Just like ignoring mortal wounds and similar skills, stuff like this should basically not exist outside of special characters and extreme edge cases like Titans etc., and even there it's a bad fix to allow for things the underlying system is not really equipped to represent.

 Niiai wrote:
I was talking with a friend after facing Ghaslzskull a d we think the wound cap per to en is a good mechanic.

What other models has it? I know about the C'tan.

It's bad artificial rule writing just designed to compensate for GW making game too killy as GW developers can't figure how to fix it.

Ghaz not dying despite 10 warlord titans shooting at him is just silly. Drop planet busting bomb on him and won't die.

Shouldn't exist but GW designers being bad and lazy not surprising they cop out the easy way.

 Niiai wrote:
I was talking with a friend after facing Ghaslzskull a d we think the wound cap per to en is a good mechanic.

What other models has it? I know about the C'tan.

Hard disagree, it's "good" only because it's the only way to reign in massive lethality. It's a bad mechanic to hide structural problems within the rules.

 Niiai wrote:
I was talking with a friend after facing Ghaslzskull a d we think the wound cap per to en is a good mechanic.

What other models has it? I know about the C'tan.

You can give it to a Bloodthirster.

I really like the rule. It makes for interesting gameplay for different armies. It has great gameplay for other armies. For instance the beatsboss on squigosaur can use ghaz for look out sir.

A high armour save/invoinvunerable, save, -1 damage, feel no pain and look out sir are all need different counterplay in list building and playing.

From a gaming perspective and a reality of what the rest of 9th is perspective then the wound cap units have been interesting to play with and against.

Ghazghkull
Abaddon
C'Tan
Phoenix Lords
Bloodthirster

My phoenix lords have it, and I think it actually works pretty well there.

The PLs aren't big scary monstrosities that call for high strength weapons. They aren't particularly difficult to hurt, nor should they be. But the wounds-per-phase limit means that my legendary warriors don't get smoked in a single volley of shooting or a single round of melee.

Basically, it gives them a dash of plot armor and makes it way more likely that they'll get to do *something* before they die. I feel like that's a better approach than giving them 2+ rerollable invulns with a 3+ FNP that makes them miserable to hurt in the first place.

There has to be a more elegant way to give characters a bit of plot armor than a clunky hard cap on the amount of damage they can take.

Or at least one that's easier to rationalize from a narrative standpoint.

If you have a character that can actively be targeted one can blame lethality, but the reality is that even with reduced lethality you could still squib them with enough focused shooting.

Pseudo-monster-characters need some sort of protection.

Arbitrary limits such as wound caps is a hallmark of poor design.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
If you have a character that can actively be targeted one can blame lethality, but the reality is that even with reduced lethality you could still squib them with enough focused shooting.

Pseudo-monster-characters need some sort of protection.

For a Vashtorr rewrite (who does NOT have a wound cap) I did something that I think works pretty well. Rewrite here.

Basically, he has the following defensive measures:
2+/4++ save.
Half damage.
3+ FNP, but! Any wound he ignores with this goes onto an allied Daemon Engine, and cannot be ignored by them. If he doesn't have any Daemon Engines to shunt it off to, he can't roll the FNP.

It means you CAN target him, and even kill him with enough damage forced his way. But you're better off targeting his minions before turning your guns/swords on the leader.

As has been said already, wound caps have only been implemented to fight the symptom of way to high lethality of the game.

In my opinion it's bad game design in the long run and GW should have been more careful with the proliferation of high AP and dmg weapons from the onset of the edition, but that requires a clear vision and discipline in game design, which they clearly didn't have.

Here's hoping 10th will be better for the first 6 months or so at least before the whole cycle starts again.
Then again maybe they've learned their lesson.

Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.
Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

Tiberias wrote:
As has been said already, wound caps have only been implemented to fight the symptom of way to high lethality of the game.

In my opinion it's bad game design in the long run and GW should have been more careful with the proliferation of high AP and dmg weapons from the onset of the edition, but that requires a clear vision and discipline in game design, which they clearly didn't have.

High lethality is definitely a thing, but I'm not sure it's fair to say GW started spamming high damage weapons right out the gate. Remember how plasma was preferred over melta basically until melta got updated? That was because the damage of meltas wasn't reliably high enough to offset the relatively reliable nature of D2 plasma.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.
Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

Are you sure you want to make it so you can't do anything about the Nightbringer before killing a full unit of lychguard?

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.
Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

Are you sure you want to make it so you can't do anything about the Nightbringer before killing a full unit of lychguard?

I don't see the problem. Anything other than "dies to 48 bolter hits in one phase" is good in my book.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.
Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

Are you sure you want to make it so you can't do anything about the Nightbringer before killing a full unit of lychguard?

yes, its no less annoying than needing to kill a whole deathwing to be allowed to shoot at the talonmaster

oh, and you know how c'tans are character that already don't benefit from look-out-sir? You could always make them unable to ally with units if theyre too OP or whatever

 catbarf wrote:
There has to be a more elegant way to give characters a bit of plot armor than a clunky hard cap on the amount of damage they can take.

What would your solution be?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
There has to be a more elegant way to give characters a bit of plot armor than a clunky hard cap on the amount of damage they can take.

What would your solution be?

Joining units seems a reasonable method for humanoid characters- monstrous characters (eg Nightbringer) ought to be tough enough to stand up to some shooting. If your entire army is able to focus fire on the general and wipe him off the board, there's a fundamental game design problem with targeting. If your entire army can focus fire on the big monster dude and blow him away, there's a problem with targeting and/or lethality.

Beyond that, you could have abilities that more directly represent 'plot armor'. Last-gasp rules to resurrect in your turn with one wound remaining, a stratagem to swap positions with the hapless grunt who was 'mistaken' for the hero, a more abstract resource like LotR's Fate system where heroes can ignore damage to a point.

I mean, I don't particularly love any of those ideas, but I'd take any of them over 'you're only allowed to do four wounds Because Reasons, check back next turn'.

Unfortunately, in an IGOUGO game format, it is very difficult to allow a centerpiece model to not get thrashed by the opposing army without making it too tough. This problem has always existed in 40K. It was a meme that your freshly painted model would be the first one to die, be it a guardsmen or Land Raider back when being a Land Raider made you nearly invulnerable to most shooting.

The best way is to design the game in such a way that you can't shoot half your army at one unit. Lord knows that real combat doesn't consist of 10 guys all pointing their guns at 1 of the 10 enemies in the opposing force.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.

Eh. You're sort of trading problems at that point.

For starters, you have all the little quirks and complications of writing rules that let you join characters to squads. Like, does Jain Zar (T4) joining a squad of banshees (T3) mean that Jain is functionally paying for higher Toughness she'll never use? Do phoenix lords (who don't normally get craftworld traits) benefit from them when joined to units? Does my archon go back to tanking wounds on his 2++ for the squad of incubi he's with? Plus, the appeal of some characters is that they can break off from their squad to go do something the squad itself doesn't want to do. I might send Maugan Ra or Fuegan out to to melee an incoming enemy so that their reapers/dragons can remain safe. Or I might simply want to stick my archon in a raider with some warriors to get him into the battle but not want to be forced to throw those warriros into melee once he gets there.

And if you have characters join pre-game but don't allow them to join new squads, you end up with situations like a necron lord refusing to abandon his lychguard squad that's down to its last body and hide among his warrior blob simply because he wasn't assigned to the blob pre-game. Or, if you do let characters join new squads, you have to figure out the quirks that comes with that.

Joining units isn't a terrible idea, but it's also not a simple fix.

Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

I'm not a huge fan of auras, but that would definitely limit your design space. My Will Be Done is probably fine being a targeted ranged buff, for instance.

It’s just silly on Abbadon since he’s infantry and benefits from character protection too. Really bad rules writing.

 catbarf wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
There has to be a more elegant way to give characters a bit of plot armor than a clunky hard cap on the amount of damage they can take.

What would your solution be?

Joining units seems a reasonable method for humanoid characters- monstrous characters (eg Nightbringer) ought to be tough enough to stand up to some shooting. If your entire army is able to focus fire on the general and wipe him off the board, there's a fundamental game design problem with targeting. If your entire army can focus fire on the big monster dude and blow him away, there's a problem with targeting and/or lethality.

Beyond that, you could have abilities that more directly represent 'plot armor'. Last-gasp rules to resurrect in your turn with one wound remaining, a stratagem to swap positions with the hapless grunt who was 'mistaken' for the hero, a more abstract resource like LotR's Fate system where heroes can ignore damage to a point.

I mean, I don't particularly love any of those ideas, but I'd take any of them over 'you're only allowed to do four wounds Because Reasons, check back next turn'.

Can I just interject and say that this was less of a problem when certain models were smaller? Like, the metal Greater Daemons were "big" models in back in the early days, but they could easily stay out of the line of fire by being behind things. Those same units these days are huuuuge. Keeping Magnus or a Lord of Change out of LOS to lots of the board is no easy feat.

 alextroy wrote:

The best way is to design the game in such a way that you can't shoot half your army at one unit. Lord knows that real combat doesn't consist of 10 guys all pointing their guns at 1 of the 10 enemies in the opposing force.

I definitely don't want a return to the days of needing to pass a leadership test to shoot at the thing you care about, but bringing in some factor to limit target options might be a decent addition to the game. I'm just not sure what that would look like. Impose penalties to units trying to shoot at distant enemies while unengaged enemies are within X"? Treat intervening units as dense terrain? I don't know. But it seems like there could be something there. Something that would make cheap screening units more appealing and reduce the concentrated lethality of gunlines.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

The best way is to design the game in such a way that you can't shoot half your army at one unit. Lord knows that real combat doesn't consist of 10 guys all pointing their guns at 1 of the 10 enemies in the opposing force.

I definitely don't want a return to the days of needing to pass a leadership test to shoot at the thing you care about, but bringing in some factor to limit target options might be a decent addition to the game. I'm just not sure what that would look like. Impose penalties to units trying to shoot at distant enemies while unengaged enemies are within X"? Treat intervening units as dense terrain? I don't know. But it seems like there could be something there. Something that would make cheap screening units more appealing and reduce the concentrated lethality of gunlines.

Is it the binary nature of the old implementation you dislike? The can vs. can't shoot at target, aspect? If the Ld test was just to determine whether you applied a -1 to-hit (or similar modifier), would that work?

I ask because I like the idea of discipline coming in to play.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Drop wound caps, make characters join squad during listbuilding.

Boom, done. Now you can hide your character in a squad to make him harder to kill.
Oh and while were at it, make his abilities only affect the squad he's joined with, boom, you're solving wombo combo buff stacking too.

Characters only affecting the one unit they're attached to was absolutely garbage design.

I've always thought that the issue with Auras was that they were too simplistic in design. The abstraction was too broad, as auras could be the commands someone gives out, a piece of technology, something naturally occuring, or psychic based. Essentially the lack of scaling is always a failing of these rules, so when you got things like "Shuts down auras", it wouldn't make much sense that the same rule shuts down the ability for a leader to command his troops as well as force fields.

This also ties back into the abysmal morale rules we've been stuck with for two editions. GW seems to get how much of a "lose more" mechanic that is, hence this new "battleshock" thing. I suspect that the more "battleshock" a unit suffers the less they'll be able to hold onto objectives. I would hope, especially with the rolling of morale into the command phase, that "shocked" units would also be less able or unable to benefit from command auras.

Of course, if they stratified auras - Command, Technology, Psychic, Un/Natural - then it opens up the design space, especially if they add (X) values.

Imagine:

Rites of Battle (Aura/Command/6) - Friendly units gain -1Ld.
Kustom Force Field (Aura/Technology/8) - Friendly units gain a 5+ Invulnerable save against Ranged attacks.

And so on...

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

The best way is to design the game in such a way that you can't shoot half your army at one unit. Lord knows that real combat doesn't consist of 10 guys all pointing their guns at 1 of the 10 enemies in the opposing force.

I definitely don't want a return to the days of needing to pass a leadership test to shoot at the thing you care about, but bringing in some factor to limit target options might be a decent addition to the game. I'm just not sure what that would look like. Impose penalties to units trying to shoot at distant enemies while unengaged enemies are within X"? Treat intervening units as dense terrain? I don't know. But it seems like there could be something there. Something that would make cheap screening units more appealing and reduce the concentrated lethality of gunlines.

Is it the binary nature of the old implementation you dislike? The can vs. can't shoot at target, aspect? If the Ld test was just to determine whether you applied a -1 to-hit (or similar modifier), would that work?

I ask because I like the idea of discipline coming in to play.

It's the binary nature, yeah. Having the option to shoot a backfielder (at a penalty or whatever) feels much better than simply not being allowed to shoot the backfielder at all while they wail on you. The latter can feel extra bad if you have to put yourself in a risky position or expose a vulnerable unit only to fail a Leadership test that you have no control over and basically waste the unit. Ex: If I move some fire dragons up to a shoot a battlewagon, it would be pretty feels bad to be forced to shoot the boys standing in front of it instead.

Being forced to attack a suboptimal target because ofa leadership roll roll sucks. Whereas involving positioning/the nearness of enemy units, etc. feels like more of an opportunity to reward counter-chargers and make maneuvering matter.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've always thought that the issue with Auras was that they were too simplistic in design. The abstraction was too broad, as auras could be the commands someone gives out, a piece of technology, something naturally occuring, or psychic based. Essentially the lack of scaling is always a failing of these rules, so when you got things like "Shuts down auras", it wouldn't make much sense that the same rule shuts down the ability for a leader to command his troops as well as force fields.

This also ties back into the abysmal morale rules we've been stuck with for two editions. GW seems to get how much of a "lose more" mechanic that is, hence this new "battleshock" thing. I suspect that the more "battleshock" a unit suffers the less they'll be able to hold onto objectives. I would hope, especially with the rolling of morale into the command phase, that "shocked" units would also be less able or unable to benefit from command auras.

Of course, if they stratified auras - Command, Technology, Psychic, Un/Natural - then it opens up the design space, especially if they add (X) values.

Imagine:

Rites of Battle (Aura/Command/6) - Friendly units gain -1Ld.
Kustom Force Field (Aura/Technology/8) - Friendly units gain a 5+ Invulnerable save against Ranged attacks.

And so on...

I think that creates some problems with armies being too good against some factions, I figure Night Lords can spread fear and panic through both minds and technology. Kind of like Drukhari splinter weapons working against Necrons, it's something I've wanted to change for a long time, it could have worked if the faction was designed around the poison/haywire duality or by changing how many units are equipped with splinter weaponry, but just making Necrons immune to poison would turn another army into Knights from a Drukhari perspective so it's not something to do lightly. I made it work when I made a fandex for both factions and changed the fluff of the Drukhari basic Kabalite weapons to something that'd actually thematically hurt a Necron, but I'm afraid that GW would miss that forest for the trees, like they made Imperial Fists much better against Vehicles than Monsters without giving them any way to fight Monsters on level ground, in a way that increased lethality and roulette elements of the game.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

The best way is to design the game in such a way that you can't shoot half your army at one unit. Lord knows that real combat doesn't consist of 10 guys all pointing their guns at 1 of the 10 enemies in the opposing force.

I definitely don't want a return to the days of needing to pass a leadership test to shoot at the thing you care about, but bringing in some factor to limit target options might be a decent addition to the game. I'm just not sure what that would look like. Impose penalties to units trying to shoot at distant enemies while unengaged enemies are within X"? Treat intervening units as dense terrain? I don't know. But it seems like there could be something there. Something that would make cheap screening units more appealing and reduce the concentrated lethality of gunlines.

Is it the binary nature of the old implementation you dislike? The can vs. can't shoot at target, aspect? If the Ld test was just to determine whether you applied a -1 to-hit (or similar modifier), would that work?

I ask because I like the idea of discipline coming in to play.

It's the binary nature, yeah. Having the option to shoot a backfielder (at a penalty or whatever) feels much better than simply not being allowed to shoot the backfielder at all while they wail on you. The latter can feel extra bad if you have to put yourself in a risky position or expose a vulnerable unit only to fail a Leadership test that you have no control over and basically waste the unit. Ex: If I move some fire dragons up to a shoot a battlewagon, it would be pretty feels bad to be forced to shoot the boys standing in front of it instead.

Being forced to attack a suboptimal target because ofa leadership roll roll sucks. Whereas involving positioning/the nearness of enemy units, etc. feels like more of an opportunity to reward counter-chargers and make maneuvering matter.

The problem is that a lot of people like this sort of gameplay, the skill of planning for both eventualities and the effective sort of fog of war that is created by not knowing whether something will work, having the game be an active participant in forging a narrative instead of only being a vehicle for two players to measure their strategies against each other. In my opinion it's best left up to missions, with a casual mission format that has turn-by-turn randomized missions you have to achieve. Suddenly you have to target the unit closer to you instead of the scary thing in the back because you have to soften it up for a melee kill instead of just tying it up in melee as you would prefer absent any missions.