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This rule is a change to attack rolls are counted. It works with any edition. Its main goal is to reduce dice rolling as you only need to make one plus any rerolls from effects, and it makes combat more deadlier. It should be noted that it doesn't take official GW codexes in terms of balance into account as the codexes wasn't made with this rule in mind.

When rolling, you only roll to hit. You start with what you need to roll to hit, then you take the target's toughness and armor save and combine them. The armor value is equal to each point of save (so a 5+ would be a 2 for example). The armor save is reduced by AP. If the Strength of the weapon is worse than the T+As, then the hit gets -1. If strength is greater than the toughness by twice as much, the weapon deals an additional 1 damage (Not counting armor). If the weapon has less strength than the T+As but still doubles the T, it will get -1 to hit and deal an additional +1 damage. The weapon gets an additional -1 to hit for each multiple.

For example

S = T+As = 0
S < T+As = -1
Sx2 < T+As = -2
Sx3 < T+As = -3

The hit roll doesn't get a bonus for having a greater value than the toughness plus armor save.

Invulnerable saves can be used as an alternative to an armor save.

Example with 10th edition

A squad of Rubric marines fires at a squad of Cadian Stock Troopers. RM has a BS of 3+, with their Strength being 4. The stock troop has 3 T and 5+(2) armor save, Combined, its 5, but the RM's infernal boltgun has AP -1, reducing the armor save to a 6+(1), combine is now 4. Since Strength and T+As is equal, the marines will hit on a 3+, applying 1 damage as its D value is 1.

Second Example with 10th edition

The same stock troopers shoot back, their BS is 4+, Lasguns has 3 S, the RM has 4 T and 3+(4) As, and the Lasgun has 0 AP. That results to 3 being less than 8(4+4) by x3. This mean that the stock troops gets -2 to hit and will hit on a 6+.

And what happens when you need a 7+ to-hit?
Edit: Or special rules, like Sustained, Lethal, or DevWounds?

Moreover, while I certainly won't say that rolling dice is the main fun of the game, there is some satisfaction in rolling a good handful of dice.

 JNAProductions wrote:
And what happens when you need a 7+ to-hit?
Edit: Or special rules, like Sustained, Lethal, or DevWounds?

Moreover, while I certainly won't say that rolling dice is the main fun of the game, there is some satisfaction in rolling a good handful of dice.

You should always hit on a roll of 6 or critical hit.

As for sustain, I think it should work fine but you could rule out that on a would be 7+, its nulled?

Lethal hits and Dev Wounds can have it for each critical success, another non-critical die can ignore Toughness/Save.

Personally, I love rolling a bunch of dice at once, but its the frequency of dice rolling that I feel bogs down the game.

So at a glance, I don't like it. You're combining a lot of different "levers" together into a single mechanic meaning you have less design space to work with, and you're probably going to end up with a bunch of knock-on balance issues even if we strip out stuff like DW, SH, rerolls, etc.

I think I'd step back and try to pin down exactly what your design goals are here.

If you're trying to remove a step of the attack resolution process, I think that's reasonable. But I'd go about it in a completely different way. What I'd do if that were my goal would be to combine the save roll and the to-wound roll into one, with armor being a key word/special rule that gets negated by armor penetration. And then I'd adjust Damage and Wounds on everything game-wide to compensate.

So you'd hit the same way you do now, and then the to-wound roll would be a Strength vs Toughness roll. Something with decent armor like a marine might have the Armored(2) rule meaning the to-wound roll would normally take a -2. But then something like a rubric marine's inferno bolter would have the AP(1) rule lowering that to just a -1. And then the marine would have X wounds and the inferno weapon would have Damage Y to make the math sit about where we want it.

The end result being that you're rolling fewer pools of dice, you're doing *some* damage more consistently but things have more hit points to balance that out, and you can still have weapons that are better/worse at hitting and wounding without tying hit bonuses, wound bonuses, and damage bonuses all to the same mechanic.

 NivNeos wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
And what happens when you need a 7+ to-hit?
Edit: Or special rules, like Sustained, Lethal, or DevWounds?

Moreover, while I certainly won't say that rolling dice is the main fun of the game, there is some satisfaction in rolling a good handful of dice.

You should always hit on a roll of 6 or critical hit.

As for sustain, I think it should work fine but you could rule out that on a would be 7+, its nulled?

Lethal hits and Dev Wounds can have it for each critical success, another non-critical die can ignore Toughness/Save.

Personally, I love rolling a bunch of dice at once, but its the frequency of dice rolling that I feel bogs down the game.

That Lethal/Dev solution means fast rolling can’t be done.
That’s gonna slow the game way more than the current paradigm.

How does Torrent work?

Also, looking at the numbers...

Shoota Boys normally need 18 shots to do a wound to a Marine, and 54 to do a wound to a Terminator.
Under this change, they'd need a 5+ on die, -2 for Marines and the same for Terminators. Since 6s always hit, that means they'd need 6 shots to do a wound.

A squad of 20 Boys with Shootas has 40 to 60 shots, depending on range.
They go from doing two to three wounds on a squad of MEQ to dealing seven to ten.
For Terminators, they barely average one wound from a full squad in Rapid Fire range right now. Under this change, they deal 10 wounds in the same conditions.

This is, at least in some cases, a huge boost in lethality.

Wyldhunt wrote:So at a glance, I don't like it. You're combining a lot of different "levers" together into a single mechanic meaning you have less design space to work with, and you're probably going to end up with a bunch of knock-on balance issues even if we strip out stuff like DW, SH, rerolls, etc.

I think I'd step back and try to pin down exactly what your design goals are here.

If you're trying to remove a step of the attack resolution process, I think that's reasonable. But I'd go about it in a completely different way. What I'd do if that were my goal would be to combine the save roll and the to-wound roll into one, with armor being a key word/special rule that gets negated by armor penetration. And then I'd adjust Damage and Wounds on everything game-wide to compensate.

So you'd hit the same way you do now, and then the to-wound roll would be a Strength vs Toughness roll. Something with decent armor like a marine might have the Armored(2) rule meaning the to-wound roll would normally take a -2. But then something like a rubric marine's inferno bolter would have the AP(1) rule lowering that to just a -1. And then the marine would have X wounds and the inferno weapon would have Damage Y to make the math sit about where we want it.

The end result being that you're rolling fewer pools of dice, you're doing *some* damage more consistently but things have more hit points to balance that out, and you can still have weapons that are better/worse at hitting and wounding without tying hit bonuses, wound bonuses, and damage bonuses all to the same mechanic.

I stated what my main goals were on the first sentence.

JNAProductions wrote:

 NivNeos wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
And what happens when you need a 7+ to-hit?
Edit: Or special rules, like Sustained, Lethal, or DevWounds?

Moreover, while I certainly won't say that rolling dice is the main fun of the game, there is some satisfaction in rolling a good handful of dice.

You should always hit on a roll of 6 or critical hit.

As for sustain, I think it should work fine but you could rule out that on a would be 7+, its nulled?

Lethal hits and Dev Wounds can have it for each critical success, another non-critical die can ignore Toughness/Save.

Personally, I love rolling a bunch of dice at once, but its the frequency of dice rolling that I feel bogs down the game.

That Lethal/Dev solution means fast rolling can’t be done.
That’s gonna slow the game way more than the current paradigm.

I think you may be interpreting it wrong. You don't roll an extra die, you count another already rolled die to ignore toughness. So if you roll 3d6 with a S5 weapon against a 7/2 T/A, and it was lethal hit, If the result was 6, 4, and 2 and you have BS 4+. You can choose the die that rolled 4 to ignore the 7, so now its 5 against 3 so the die gets no penalty and hits.

So, I ran the numbers on a Chaos Daemons Daemon Prince.

It would take 60 shots from either Ork Boys or Bolter-armed Marines to kill one, under your proposal.
Under the actual system, it takes 720 shots from Bolters at BS 3+ or 2,160 shots from Ork Boys.

Did you intend to make small arms fire 12 to 36 times more effective against Monsters and Vehicles?

 JNAProductions wrote:
So, I ran the numbers on a Chaos Daemons Daemon Prince.

It would take 60 shots from either Ork Boys or Bolter-armed Marines to kill one, under your proposal.
Under the actual system, it takes 720 shots from Bolters at BS 3+ or 2,160 shots from Ork Boys.

Did you intend to make small arms fire 12 to 36 times more effective against Monsters and Vehicles?

Not exactly intended but I know they are more effective against bigger units. This is one of the balance issues. Looking at your math, I'm sure its correct.

I'm not sure if I should have mentioned before because it varies between additions and rulesets but you could have a 7+ or worse would be rolling on 6 then roll again to see if it miss. If so and presuming the Boyz are BS 5+, they would be 7+ against a demon lord which would be 6+ then 2+ to hit. This would be 13.8% success rate with around on average 3 successful shots per 10 boyz. Of course that's an extra roll but that would be 2 rolls vs 4 on the official rules.

For balancing, should vehicles and monsters get extra wounds? I'm not sure because they might have too much health when facing each other and that would make games too long.

A Lascannon on a 3+, right now, averages 1 point of damage to a Land Raider. Now, that's not an actual representation of how much damage it deals, but it does mean you'd need an average of 16 shots to kill a Land Raider.
A Bolter on a 3+, right now, averages 1/54th or .019 damage per shot to a Land Raider.

Changing to your rules, the Bolter averages 1/6th a point of damage (.167) per shot.
A Lascannon (S12, AP-3, against T12 2+) averages 2.25, since it now needs a 4+ to deal 4.5 damage.

That skews things way harder in favor of the Bolter-it goes from less than 2% as effective to nearly 10% as effective.

Especially with the changes needed to USRs (Twin-Linked affects the wound roll, which no longer exists, DevWounds, Lethal, and Sustained all need to be changed, Torrent as-is now would become the most powerful rule in existence) you're talking about rewriting the statlines of everything. At this point, you might as well design a system from the ground-up.

 JNAProductions wrote:
A Lascannon on a 3+, right now, averages 1 point of damage to a Land Raider. Now, that's not an actual representation of how much damage it deals, but it does mean you'd need an average of 16 shots to kill a Land Raider.
A Bolter on a 3+, right now, averages 1/54th or .019 damage per shot to a Land Raider.

Changing to your rules, the Bolter averages 1/6th a point of damage (.167) per shot.
A Lascannon (S12, AP-3, against T12 2+) averages 2.25, since it now needs a 4+ to deal 4.5 damage.

That skews things way harder in favor of the Bolter-it goes from less than 2% as effective to nearly 10% as effective.

Especially with the changes needed to USRs (Twin-Linked affects the wound roll, which no longer exists, DevWounds, Lethal, and Sustained all need to be changed, Torrent as-is now would become the most powerful rule in existence) you're talking about rewriting the statlines of everything. At this point, you might as well design a system from the ground-up.

Wouldn't be the first time, lol.

Like I said in the first post, it doesn't take any current balance in high consideration because of how drastic this change is.

In the first conceptions, you would get a bonus for having greater strength, so a S6 against a 3/1(4) T/As would give +1 to hit, so a 3+ BS would become 2+ BS. The thing was tho it felt off because a positive wound roll would not increase your hit chances, just not reduce them as much.

As JNA said, you'd basically have to design a new system from the ground up to make this work. And if we're going to start from scratch like that, you're probably better off going with an entirely different attack resolution mechanic.

So respectfully, I don't like this proposal because it's impossible to fit into something resembling the current game, and if you create a brand new game to accommodate it, you should probably replace it with something less clunky.