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Greetings

Currently I am learning the rules as I have only recently go into 40k.

I have ultramarines at the moment and this question mainly regards heavy intercessors and their heavy bolter and rilfle

So, I understand that if a unit has advanced in the current turn they must subrltract 1 from each hit roll in the shooting phase but also their weapons are 'heavy' so also 1 has to be subtracted from the hits making a total of 2 so if you roll a 3+ as a heavy bolt rifle then its only gojng to equal 1 so i woild have yo roll a 5+ to make a successful hit if i advance and shoot witb a heavy assault weapon?

This seems more ridiculous when within 12" (charge range) of an enemy unit because one would assume the closer you get to your target, the easier it is to hit but it seems space marines get tired quickly .

I would argue it would make more sense to have a hiit roll penalty the further away you are from an enemy unit and thus maybe if you choose to shoot within charge range or maybe half the range of your weapon it negates the penalty for 'heavy' or 'advanced this turn'

What do you think? Or am I being a massive noob

You are wrong.

In 10th edition, Assault lets you Advance and Fire with no penalty.
Heavy gives +1 to-hit if you stand still.

What JNA said, but we could use this as a jumping off point to talk about to-hit penalties for long-ranged shots.

I think there could be something there. We sort of get something functionally similar with rapidfire weapons (lower average and maximum damage output when firing outside of half range), but I guess we could hypothetically impose to-hit penalties for RF or other weapons instead. Though granted, rerolls and such would make the math on that weird in a hurry.

The opposite might also be interesting: short range penalties. Want to shoot your sniper rifle at the guy standing 12" away? You can, but you'll take a -1 to-hit. Want to shoot your artillery at the termies who just teleported onto their doorstep? You can, but you'll land more hits if you go for the enemy hiding over yonder.

Short-range penalties could be a way to make short-ranged and melee units a little more appealing. When you're facing an enemy armed to the teeth with long-range weapons, you can mitigate some of their effectiveness as you close the gap. This, in turn, gives them added reason to consider ceding ground to get back in their optimal range band. For those who like the whole tanks-supported-by-infantry thing, this could be a decent way to do it.

Of course, I guess any kind of to-hit penalty rule runs into the usual weirdness of to-hit modifiers not stacking. Are we still worried about stacking to-hit mods? What are the problem cases if we bring back stacking modifiers?

It makes sense that some weapons are more effective fired from a static position, machine gun nests and artillery platforms for example. Rewriting negatives to bonuses is a common game design tip, even if it was simpler to get -1, +1 when standing still makes sense in that way, I'd personally prefer -1 and BS in the unit profile. Edit: giving bonuses instead of maluses is psychological thing that people prefer, instead of giving people less XP after they've been playing World of Warcraft for 10 hours to get them to eat, sleep and see the sun or even have a life, you get them a 1-hour XP boost every day. The 1-hour XP boosts also gets the fear of missing out parts of brains to activate, I don't like that either and quit Genshin Impact partly because of it.

I think -1 to hit at long range could work, but I don't think it makes sense on small tables with lots of terrain with harsh requirement for needing LOS. TLOS that is obscured by terrain or other models granting -1 to hit and then removing the infinitely tall ruins rule would be neat and sensical in my opinion. But the current rules work with lots of kinds of terrain and I consider more people having the same kind of experience with terrain to be positive because it allows GW to design around what people are playing with instead of unintentionally messing things up for loads of people by assuming things about terrain that aren't true for those people.

Farseer Skyrunners can grant -1 to hit with Stealth from Runes of Battles and -1 to hit with a Stratagem from the Index Detachment, it'd be very hard to shoot them at long range or in melee with vehicles if it stacked with an additional -1. Shroud Runners and Rangers start with Stealth. Astra Militarum can get snipers with good BS now to target such units though, so there aren't many low BS shooting armies left to be concerned with suffering from stacking to hit penalties.

Fair points. FWIW, I'd probably be willing to lose the -1 to-hit strat; it feels weird only being able to take evasive action with one unit per turn.

But yeah, my long-ranged infantry units already have trouble finding decent sight lines this edition. Giving them -1 to-hit on top of that might be a pain.

In my experience to-hit penalties work well when they're all entirely 100% in the core rules, and don't work so well when you succumb to the urge to give individual guys a "-1 to hit this guy!" special rule.

Heathen Slayer wrote:
Greetings

Currently I am learning the rules as I have only recently go into 40k.

I have ultramarines at the moment and this question mainly regards heavy intercessors and their heavy bolter and rilfle

So, I understand that if a unit has advanced in the current turn they must subrltract 1 from each hit roll in the shooting phase but also their weapons are 'heavy' so also 1 has to be subtracted from the hits making a total of 2 so if you roll a 3+ as a heavy bolt rifle then its only gojng to equal 1 so i woild have yo roll a 5+ to make a successful hit if i advance and shoot witb a heavy assault weapon?

This seems more ridiculous when within 12" (charge range) of an enemy unit because one would assume the closer you get to your target, the easier it is to hit but it seems space marines get tired quickly .

I would argue it would make more sense to have a hiit roll penalty the further away you are from an enemy unit and thus maybe if you choose to shoot within charge range or maybe half the range of your weapon it negates the penalty for 'heavy' or 'advanced this turn'

What do you think? Or am I being a massive noob

a) as been mentioned heavy gives plus if you stay stationary. Not penalty if you move
b) your roll can be modified by max +1 or -1. So your guy with 3+ is hitting on 4+ even if he has -2 to hit.

(there's few things that modify characteristic which gets around point b but most of the time -1 is max you will end up with)

 AnomanderRake wrote:
In my experience to-hit penalties work well when they're all entirely 100% in the core rules, and don't work so well when you succumb to the urge to give individual guys a "-1 to hit this guy!" special rule.

Were they ever really a problem in 40k outside of craftworlders? Alaitoc armies had a -1 basically army-wide. Flyers most notoriously had an extra -1 baked in as did a handful of specific units. And then you could give most units an extra -1 via a stratagem or psychic power. I feel like the things that got complained about most in 8th were the flyers whose to-hit penalties weren't technically from the core rules but were common to most aircraft plus the detachment-wide rule. Having the potential to give an autarch an extra -1 or take a shadow spectres unit up to a -3 or -4 didn't seem to be an issue for people nearly as much as the flyers with their flat -2 (and optional -3 if they used a strat.)

-4 on CSM, don't remember others.