The return of templates

[Kaldoth]

So, the CA 2019 thread is currently spiralling out of control with a hot debate about the pros and cons of 40k going back to templates :lol: I figured I'd try to bring the discussion elsewhere to try and attract some more attention to the topic as it seems the community might be pretty divided on the issue.

 

So, what do you all think? The biggest issue most people seem to have had and still hold onto with templates is all the extra time they add to the game. People playing horde armies spacing out their models meticulously, scatter dice rolling and measuring, arguments about how many models are actually under the base, etc. On the pro side for templates, people like how it makes the game more thematic and dislike how the removal of templates has made weapons like flamers, destroyer cannons, and other "mass troop killers" ineffective as you have the possibility of rolling a single hit for a weapon that realistically should always be hitting more than one model.

 

Personally I could see templates coming back if the rules were streamlined a bit more. Failing that, the current rules for weapon types would need an overhaul.

 

On option one, getting rid of scatter dice entirely would be a start. I've got a bit of real world experience as a tank gunner and tank commander under my belt, as well as having worked with mortarmen and artillerymen quite a few times. High explosive ordinance either hits or it doesn't. That's why when we call in artillery fire or close air support we bracket the shots in if they are over, under, left, or right. We're already seeing computer guided mortar and artillery rounds now as well. I'm sure 38,000 years into the future that tech would be much more accurate. So, scatter dice can go out the window regardless of whether or not it's a direct or indirect fire weapon system on the tabletop being shot. Just roll to hit or miss as normal and place the template somewhere on the unit as you see fit. As far as the arguing over how many models are under it and players spacing out their models, there isn't much you can do about that other than just playing with less argumentative people I suppose.

 

Option two would be overhauling weapons. As mentioned before, flamers shouldn't ever be hitting just one model. That's kind of ridiculous. A solution I came up with was adding in new weapon types to the core rules. Using a standard flamer as an example, it's type could be "flamer X," meaning it hits up to X times depending on how many models are in the target unit if the firing unit rolls a hit on the hit die. Say there were only 3 models in the unit being fired at and the X on the profile was higher, it would only score 3 hits. The same could be done with weapons that used to have large and small blast templates. "Anti Personnel X" for a frag missile, etc.

 

Failing that, you've got an entire weapons overhaul for the random numbers rolled for every single faction. Bumping flamers up to D3+3, etc.

 

So, those are my thoughts on the whole thing I guess. Where do you all sit on the topic? And have you thought of any possible solutions?

Edited October 12, 2019 by Kaldoth

[Atrus]

I'm all in favour of templates making a comeback. It is indeed most disheartening when my sisters unleash a torrent from one of their signature weapons and it fizzles into nothing.

It's also cooler to see the template splash over the target squad and you can visualise the template attacks and yes, make fiery whooshy and boomy sounds.

 

The only people I've personally come across complaining about added time from template placement and model placement and who's hit or not, are from more competitive players.

More chilled or casual players I've come across are happy to roll the dice and not make a big deal over the measuring of millimeters and microscopic analysis of base position.

 

My suggestion into the topic, would be to have templates return to the game- but make it as part of the Narrative rules. That way the competitive don't have to worry about extra time. Everyone else who like to have the added cinema of templates and make the whooshy-boom noises can have their fun too. Everyone's happy*

 

* Who we kidding, someone's always unhappy.

[Subtle Discord]

Ummm... I always make the whooshy, boomy, pew-pew, blam-blam, and rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, sounds for all weapons without or without templates.

 

...

 

Oh, that's not the main point that's being discussed here, is it?

 

Never mind.

 

Carry on.

[dice4thedicegod]

As someone who endured endless micromanaging of miniature spacing... big no to templates coming back.

 

If you want realism, there are better games than 40k.

 

There’s enough bloat anyway and so many multishot weapons that the shooting phase already goes on for ages.

[Marshal Loss]

Hmmmmm. I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, I hated that template use would lead to some games where you have that guy taking 14 years per movement phase to make sure every trooper is at the optimal distance from each other. Hated it. Hate, hate, hate. But I suppose there are lots of ways for people to be annoying when you play pickup games in your local store, so yeah.

 

On the other hand..I loved templates, and I loved scatter dice. The satisfaction from landing an epic hit, and the raw chaos when it went horribly wrong - somewhat related, but the imagery/risk of having units dying because they teleported in was just so...40k for me.

 

In terms of solutions: I don't have any. TBH I'd just be in favour of them coming back largely as they were. Their removal has made the game a poorer place for me. But that kind of simplification (Sigmarization?) is a key part of 8th edition - I especially miss things like weapon skill mattering - and I can't see GW rolling these changes back. Your suggestions have some merit though, but I feel like this is a bit of a lost cause.

[Lexington]

I was a big fan of dice replacing templates way back where I first saw it introduced, in the 3rd Edition Cityfight rules. It seemed so much cleaner and nicer and involved less equipment being dragged around to games. Was elated when it became the norm in 8th Edition.

 

A few years into things, though, I'm fairly disillusioned with the idea. This particular implementation puts a big dent in the capacity of these weapons, on the whole, and has encouraged a very static game of clumped, castled gunlines. I don't know that templates returning is necessarily the answer, but it's a lot less complicated than anything I've seen suggested.

[Slave to Darkness]

For the argument against them saying people take ages spacing minis... Use movement trays, then everybodys gonna be consistantly spaced out. You can literally make movement trays out of card so price isnt an excuse. 

 

Templates were better for the game IMHO, and the only arguments I had over scatter dice were from Tourny players or WAAC types, and I dropped out of hyper competitive back in 2005/06, not had to debate a single dice roll since then. The problem isnt/wasnt the rules but the type of people you played against. 

[Marshal Loss]

I completely forgot about the existence of movement trays, good call

 

viva la template

[Captain_Krash]

All former template weapons became better at killing single models...it was a terrible decision to get rid of them...blast weapons are supposed to blast things not snipe which is what they can do now. 

 

Krash

[The Unseen]

You should separate the current version of "blast" weapons being generally poor and wanting templates back. I want blast style weapons to be better than they are, but I don't want templates back. Entirely too fiddly, for various reasons stated before. Movement trays don't play nice with terrain of any kind to be a viable solution.

They just need to do more damage to larger units, like the grav weapon on the Leviathan dread.

Also, if certain weapons that used to be large or bigger blasts had a rule like "Every unit, friendly or enemy, within D6 inches suffers half as many hits, rounding down, to a minimum of one", they'd suddenly start clearing up gunline piles pretty well. And its a lot easier and less fiddly to check to see if *any* model in a unit is within a listed value, than try and measure at a specific angle to then place a template down and see how many models it touches.

 

Though flamer templates weren't usually all that bad, because they didn't scatter of course. So placing them just became "put small end on model firing it, and look"

Torrent ones were stupid though.

[MARK0SIAN]

I love templates and would happily see them come back but I think the chances of that happening are basically nill. Even if you leave aside the arguments for and against templates, it would be introducing an entirely new mechanic to the game and GW have shown they are loathe to introduce any new mechanics as opposed to working with the existing rules. They seem stubbornly wedded to the idea of making the game as easy as possible to pick up, even if that means it’s lacking in some areas.

 

To fix former template weapons we need to look for solutions within the existing rules if we want to have a hope of GW adopting them and as far as I’m concerned the current former blast/template weapons are lacking in 3 areas:

 

1) Area effect - they’re weapons designed to target an area but they’re only allowed to target individual units, there’s no area of effect for them no matter how tightly castled enemy units are.

 

2) number of hits - they don’t seem to get very many hits on horde units, especially for some very large artillery pieces. This has to be artificially limited or it would make them too good at targeting single model units.

 

3) Reliability - having to roll the number of shots, then sometimes the number hits then the number of wounds and sometimes then the amount of damage makes them extremely unreliable in terms of performance.

 

Now I don’t have a solution for all of that but I would propose the following change for all former blast or template weapons:

 

Pick a target model (not unit) within range of the weapon. If the shot hits (assuming it needs to roll to hit) then every model within X inches of the target model is automatically hit. The X inches scaling with the power/size of the weapon.

 

Pros

1)The mechanic has precedence within current rules

2)Gives an area of effect to hurt blobs and aura bubbles but without making it too powerful against any single model

3)More hits against tightly packed horde units.

4)Takes away some of the randomness in terms of shot/hit numbers and brings back a link between range and likely casualties for flamers which doesn’t exist at the moment.

 

Cons

1)Time. Will take more time to resolve against multiple units in an area and possibly lead to people taking more time to spread out models

2)Not all of the unreliability has been removed

 

Like I said, it’s not a solution to everything but I think it would be a significant quality of life improvement for many blast type weapons.

[kombatwombat]

I’m one of the more... vocal proponents on this forum for the return of templates.

 

There’s a large subjective component of the debate around the improved thematic aspects of template vs the increased time associated with them. Nobody’s going to change anybody’s mind on that so I won’t cover that ground again beyond saying I had a crack at the numbers for templates in the Chapter Approved Speculation thread and I argue that realistically the time increase is 10 minutes or less at 2000pts. I’m not impressed by flimsy, unquantified arguments that templates take ‘way longer’.

 

Slightly more objective are the mechanics changes. For me, the advantages templates offer are horde control, a counter to castling tactics, a drawback to auras, a scaling target unit size, and the ability to hit multiple units with the same weapon - particularly for the big stuff (ever used a Titan in 8th Ed?). All of these are things 8th Ed sorely needs. I struggle to come up with disadvantages from a mechanics point of view.

 

I’ve never seen or heard of an argument over templates in all my years of gaming - including currently playing 30k. I think it’s something that mostly exists within the Great Internet Echo Chamber. That :cussing Guy trying to push the scattered template a bit further to get an extra model is still That :cussing Guy when it comes to measuring charge ranges. He’s not suddenly going to become That Top Bloke because templates went away. Toxic people are toxic people.

 

I would prefer templates to simply make a return in their previous form. GW can sell me faction-specific templates to go with their faction-specific dice if they need a monetary reason. That said, I know a lot of people centre their arguments against templates around the scatter die, so I would gladly give up the scatter die if it meant we got templates back. We did have templates without scatter back in 3rd Ed - roll to hit, if you hit, place the template. The downside with this was it made the weapons really swingy.

 

I’ll have a stab at a solution. Templates are used again, with flamer templates working exactly how they used to. For blast templates, place the template, count the number of models under it, and make that many to-hit rolls. This does go back to templates being terrible against single models, so to balance that out a bit, for Large Blast (5”) a model under the centre of the template generates D3 hit rolls rather than 1. 7” Blasts cause D6 hits on the centre model, 10” Blasts cause 2D6. Weapons that fire multiple blasts generate that many hit rolls for each model under the template rather than one.

 

This might be easier explained with an example - a Knight fires its Rapid Fire Battle Cannon at 5 Intercessors and a Captain. The RFBC is Heavy 2, Large Blast. The template is put down, it covers 4 Intercessors and the Captain, with one of the Intercessors under the centre of the template.

 

The Captain is under the template and so generates a hit roll. The RFBC is Heavy 2, so the Knight makes 2 to-hit rolls against him, potentially causing 2 wounds. 3 Intercessors are under the template, plus one under the centre. The Intercessor unit therefore generates 3+D3 to-hit rolls, because the model under the centre counts for D3 rather than 1. Again the RFBC is Heavy 2, so the number of to-hit rolls against the Intercessors is doubled - 6+2D3, potentially causing 12 wounds. Rolls to hit and wound then work out as normal.

 

This shows how the method scales with unit size, gives a downside to auras, counters castling, gives the ability to hit multiple units with the same (big) weapon, and avoids swinginess issues. It isn’t perfect, but it does help out with a lot of the mechanical issues in 8th Ed and gives a bit of the thematic advantages of templates.

Edited October 12, 2019 by kombatwombat

[chapter master 454]

There are better ways of fixing blast than returning templates.

 

Templates introduce a very odd mechanic in that the optimal way of positioning is to make sure you stay at over 1.5" away from any other model in the squad thus making ever blast weapon in the game need to actually scatter to get more than one hit...

 

So lets make that clear, the optimal way of things to happen then is for you to roll a "negative" result.

 

Again, this argument comes from Competitive vs Casual. Competitive it just bloats the game because any horde army will space like mad (when it doesn't make sense, when do orks care?) and even then staying at 1.6" away from your other squad mates just to me feels weird because now all of them are treating each other like they have the plague (of exploding).

Casuals however just don't care and want to play. I get that, respect that but by all accounts templates were in a way fun but ultimately, you ether got large blast or were worthless imo.

 

I agree things like flamers and other heavier duty weapons feel meh right now. Only flamers have it good and even then, can flub it hard. There needs to be a "Floor" mechanic for these weapons that can retain their "Ceiling" ability (and to be fair, most D6 weapons really aren't even that good, they are high Floor, Low Ceiling at best). Quite possibly there needs to be a return of certain keywords, the hard removal of all keywords has hurt. I have made I believe 2-3 variants of how to improve blast weapons in general and to be fair I can make more.

 

"Blast: for every 5 models in the target unit, add 2 to the roll to determine number of shots"

"Large Blast: for every 5 models in the target unit, add 3 to the roll to determine number of shots"

"Spray: for every 2 models within range of this weapon in the target unit, add 1 to the roll to determine the number of shots. These weapons hit automatically"

 

I don't want templates to return because it just creates a game that isn't fun when the best play is to make sure everyone is more than 1.5" apart.

[Triszin]

I like your ideas a lot 454

[Captain_Krash]

Not going to lie...when templates were around still from editions past I don't remember anyone complaining about them etc. I feel now that they are gone and some people want them back. Those that don't want them back come up with excuses as to why they were bad...which weren't the case when they were around. Even during tournament play people would not move each and every model into perfect position to avoid blast weapons(Source: Played in many East Coast GT's and even Gamesday Baltimore 2 times). And if they did they did it quickly. It is not difficult and did not slow down the game. Remember we are playing a wargame here people, not MTG. Are random rolls quicker than using templates? Yes of course. Are the current rules for former template weapons good? Not even close. A flamer is currently one of the best weapons against a flyer is this a joke?

 

I've never personally during competitive play in earlier editions got into a rule argument over blast templates. You know why? Cause you can clearly see what is hit under the template. There really isn't room for arguing and if there is you call the TO he looks at it quickly and makes a judgment call.

 

Krash

Edited October 12, 2019 by Captain_Krash

[Marshal Rohr]

Instead of a scatter dice mechanic, roll to hit, if it hits, use the template to determine how many models are hit. Alter the distance rules so that 25mm base models can only be 1 inch apart to cut down on horde spacing increasing the movement turn time. This would also balance the mathematical advantage horde armies have to hurt smaller armies with the sheer number of dice they have by making them absorb more damage every turn. Get rid of small blasts and keep the Dx mechanic for missile launchers, mortars, etc. Flamers autohit (as they should) and get an additional single D6 of additional hits to the models under the template to represent the way flame weapons don’t just touch you and you burn or don’t burn, but models removed can only come from under the template. As far as I can tell, it was always small blasts that caused the most issues because some units can put out a huge amount of them. If those are the problems, focus on those instead of the flamer and large blasts.

 

40k could really benefit from an ‘advanced’ rule set that adds some depth to the current bubbleball that is 8th Edition. Bringing back templates, making cover mechanics more in depth, and maybe even alternating activation.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Marshal Rohr

[kombatwombat]

Alter the distance rules so that 25mm base models can only be 1 inch apart to cut down on horde spacing increasing the movement turn time.

Holy hell I’d never even thought of changing unit coherency distance for hordes. That’s brilliant.

 

I dislike the ‘roll to hit once, if you hit, every model under the template is hit’ though - I think it’d lead to extremely swingy results, but I’d have to try it thoroughly to know whether or not that’s true.

 

I mostly agree with the rest of what you’re saying, though. Particularly about the need for a 40k Advanced ruleset that brings back the nuances that have gone missing.

[Captain_Krash]

!00% agree with a neat "advance ruleset" That's a great statement that would really put a lot more life into the game IMO.

 

Krash

[Kaldoth]

 

Alter the distance rules so that 25mm base models can only be 1 inch apart to cut down on horde spacing increasing the movement turn time.

Holy hell I’d never even thought of changing unit coherency distance for hordes. That’s brilliant.

There are definitely drawbacks to this, though. As an example, necrons super benefit from the 2 inch spacing when it comes to reanimation protocols. As shooting is so ridiculous this edition, getting RP rolls is really hard to benefit from. Being able to space your models out so that one or two of them get left behind LOS blocking terrain is essential in order to keep your forces on the board. If one unit shoots at your immortals and kills 9 of them, as long as you've got that one model behind a wall so it can't be seen it keeps you from getting a complete unit wipe. That's huge for cron players because our base cost for pretty much everything is higher than it should be because of the RP rule. Also the two inch spacing helps when it comes to screening for deep strikers. I guess that's a pretty specific example, but I'm sure others could be found.

[Triszin]

Instead of a scatter dice mechanic, roll to hit, if it hits, use the template to determine how many models are hit. Alter the distance rules so that 25mm base models can only be 1 inch apart to cut down on horde spacing increasing the movement turn time. This would also balance the mathematical advantage horde armies have to hurt smaller armies with the sheer number of dice they have by making them absorb more damage every turn. Get rid of small blasts and keep the Dx mechanic for missile launchers, mortars, etc. Flamers autohit (as they should) and get an additional single D6 of additional hits to the models under the template to represent the way flame weapons don’t just touch you and you burn or don’t burn, but models removed can only come from under the template. As far as I can tell, it was always small blasts that caused the most issues because some units can put out a huge amount of them. If those are the problems, focus on those instead of the flamer and large blasts.

 

40k could really benefit from an ‘advanced’ rule set that adds some depth to the current bubbleball that is 8th Edition. Bringing back templates, making cover mechanics more in depth, and maybe even alternating activation.

the only thing I would ask is,

 

How can we incorporate these things to increase the pace of the game. As most of my run in's with templates, unfortunately were poor. People taking forever to move, not just mass troops but there own template weapon troops to maximize efficiency. then the added debate of is it in, or if a powergamer holds the tempalate in manner over a model to increase there advantage. This happens even subconsciously.

 

so in what manner can template come back, that would be a drastic improvement over the old manner?

[Marshal Rohr]

@kaldoth, that would be something they’d have to rebalance in the individual codexes. If they are bringing back templates I’m making the assumption they’re going to be reworking armies as well to interact with the templates and cover mechanics.

 

@Triszin, I don’t really know how to cope or mitigate power gamers. I’ve never come up with anything that could reduce the impulse to abuse the game. For me, I’d simply keep flamer troops in the front rank of their squads, where they’d be in real life.

 

@kombatwombat, the roll to hit or don’t could also be done with the scatter dice and a standardized scatter distance. If you get one of the two direct hit markers nothing happens, but if you get one of the four arrows you scatter a standard amount of inches. You could also relate that to ballistic skill to reduce the inches scattered to a minimum of 2 or something. Like the BS4 in 7th or 3+ in 8th reduces it by -1, BS5/2+ -2. BS3/4+ always does the standard scatter, and BS2/5+ adds a single inch. In my mind 4 inches is fair, as that means the crack shots in the game always scatter two inches, and the worst shots always scatter 5inches but 33% or whatever of all individual rolls will be on target.

 

The biggest time issue with templates would occur, for me at least, with elevated and urban terrain, as it’s difficult to check what models on the ground level are hit by a non-indirect fire ordnance weapon if there are intervening floors in between covering the models. I’d wager money that is why they took templates out, not because it was too difficult a mechanic to work. Blasts worked ok in Fantasy without a lot of arguments because it was all open terrain.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Marshal Rohr

[toaae]

The biggest issue most people seem to have had and still hold onto with templates is all the extra time they add to the game. People playing horde armies spacing out their models meticulously...

 

The only people I've personally come across complaining about added time from template placement and model placement and who's hit or not, are from more competitive players.

More chilled or casual players I've come across are happy to roll the dice and not make a big deal over the measuring of millimeters and microscopic analysis of base position.

 

For the argument against them saying people take ages spacing minis... Use movement trays, then everybodys gonna be consistantly spaced out. You can literally make movement trays out of card so price isnt an excuse. 

 

Not going to lie...when templates were around still from editions past I don't remember anyone complaining about them etc. I feel now that they are gone and some people want them back. Those that don't want them back come up with excuses as to why they were bad...which weren't the case when they were around. Even during tournament play people would not move each and every model into perfect position to avoid blast weapons...

 

As an Ork player, let me tell you naysayers that we definitely had to space out mobs against armies with template weapons. It was like playing a different game of 40k. If the opponent had no templates we could just throw our boyz and gretchin down in a basic formation and move. But if there were templates, it became a completely different beast, as choosing to not space the models would result in basically playing down points to your opponent. You were choosing to make their shooting 33-200% more effective. This wasn't about timing, this was about fun.

 

It was no fun spacing models.

 

It was no fun getting blasted for between a third more to twice as many.

 

And that was what templates offered to horde armies. I had to choose how to have less fun. Orks also relied on template weapons to overcome our poor ballistic skill, and losing that wasn't great, but it's a trade almost every Ork player I know happily took for the ability to avoid the spacing decision.

 

Movement trays aren't an answer. I've tried movement trays in 8th edition, but I've given up on them. They aren't flexible and I found I had to abandon them pretty early in a game because I needed to interact with terrain, mostly. Spacing for templates have a similar issue, and I know people feel like this is a "horde edition", and that templates would help counter this, but what do top armies look like? Well, it's a bunch of big vehicles, with Space Marines, Chaos, Aeldari, Knights, and Guard relying on basically as few infantry as they need to achieve basic objectives. What armies are played as hordes? Genestealer Cults, Orks, and Daemons, which is about the fluffiest thing imaginable. And, at least for Orks, the horde nature isn't even what's powerful about the army right now, it's the ample, efficient, cheap shooting the codex offers, because this is a shooting edition.

 

So, when it comes to the discussion of "should templates return?", I say hell no. I don't like True Line of Sight, because this is an edition of abstraction as opposed to simulation, and templates are in the same vein. They are attempting to simulate the way those weapons would hit models as they are exactly placed. Put it in a skirmish game, but as long as vehicle facings and character targeting is the way of the game, templates rightly belong in the dust bin.

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

That said, I do have solutions for making lame, former-template weapons better:

 

I think GW doesn't make use of enough ability modifiers for weapons, like the Executioner's laser doing a minimum of D3. I understand they didn't want to complicate things at the start of the edition with the indices, but especially as of the recent Space Marine codex and its multiple layers of rules, I think that ship has sailed. AoS is the simple but deep game, 40k is the advanced game. I would do stuff like this:

 

 

Flamer: 8" / Assault d3 / S4 / AP0 / D1 / If the target unit has 10 or more models, change this weapons type to "Assault 3+d3". This model may not target units with the Supersonic ability. This weapon automatically hits its target.

 

Frag Missile: 48" / Heavy d3 / S4 / AP0 / D1 / If the target unit has 10 or more models, change this weapons type to "Heavy 2d3".

 

Demolisher Cannon: 24" / Heavy d3 / S10 / AP-3 / Dd6 / If the target unit has between 5 and 9 models, change this weapons type to "Heavy d6". If the target unit has 10 or more models, change this weapons type to "Heavy 2d6".

 

 

I think making use of modifiers based on unit sizes can easily and cleanly adjust weapons for both shooting as single models when that isn't their main purpose, as well as make them more effective against large units, which should be their forte. In addition, I threw in a fix for flamers hitting Flyers, cause I've just always thought that was dumb.

 

These kind of changes are more intuitive than using templates and are no more complicated than most rules in the game.

Edited October 12, 2019 by toaae

[Halandaar]

I stand by my statement from the other thread; templates can stay in the bin. They had negative impacts on multiple phases of the game and constantly led to haggling between players over how many models they hit. The current system is infinitely better in that regard.

 

The problem, and really the entire reason this topic keeps resurfacing, is that the current rules do a poor job of simulating the way the old template weapons used to work and do not distinguish between single or multiple targets. A Flamer under the current rules has the potential to hit a horde of Ork boys once, and a character 6 times. That is nonsense and completely counter to the way they should work. Now, if this problem could be alleviated, then templates would be left alone and we'd stop flogging this particular dead horse.

 

My suggestion; change blast and flamer style weapons so the number of hits is linked to the number of models in the target unit. Example:

 

Flamer: 8" / Assault 1 / S4 / AP0 / D1 - This weapon automatically hits its target a number of times equal to the number of models in the unit, up to a maximum of six times.

 

So the Flamer retains it's current maximum effectiveness of 6 hits, but is now always going to more effective against units than characters or vehicles.

[Noserenda]

Yeah i never realised how bad templates were until they were gone, and we were free from their gamey nonsense because nearly every wargame started with the assumption that you must have templates, no matter how awkward and that nothing else was worth trying. I think there have been some solid ideas to work from on this topic alone but seriously, its stuff like this that makes 7th so unplayable for me even as a hardened Heresy fanatic, i cant arrange my minis dramatically or as things make sense simply because i have to worry about flamers (Or in 7ths case specific models, or character tanking cheapness too) and thats before you get onto the speed issues or in some players cases the absolute bull:cuss they would try and pull with any grey are on things like scatter dice or models covered.

Best gone, not missed but im sure the idea could be iterated further, i really like Halandaars idea to boost hits based on unit size for example.

[Marshal Rohr]

That’s why an advanced rules system could really bring some fun back. If you don’t like templates, play normal 40k. People who prefer the granularity can play advanced. It wouldn’t hurt anything. It’s like with USRs. Instead of a differently named version of the exact same thing on a bunch of different datasheets, you could have a single page of USRs instead.

 

At the end of the day, the way explosive and flame weapons work in 8th isn’t bad. It’s just not good either. You could fix it all kinds of ways. You could have a single to hit roll and fixed amount of damage. You could use a bubble no different than the character aura bubbles to determine the damage. Designate one model in the unit and everyone within 3 to 6 inches depending on the type of thing shooting is able to be hurt. Right now, as pointed out above, it’s not even an ‘abstraction’ that a flamethrower might hit one Ork or a single character six times. That’s just a probability mechanic. It wouldn’t take anything for them to fix either, now that the rules are so short.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Marshal Rohr