Take re-rolls out of 40K

[Brother Glacius]

So I was watching a Battlereport on W+ yesterday and it really struck me how rerolls are kind of ruining the game. Whether its from some unit/character ability to a command point thingy...rerolls just suck the random out of the game. Not sure who at GW decided to add that nonsense to 40K, but it was the worst. It makes me feel like if/when I ever play again, I'm going to have to have house rules out yin-yang just to make the game playable. I'm going to have to go back and look at one-page rules again. maybe that is the way to go.

[Dark Trainer]

44 minutes ago, necrontyr said:

No thank you. CP rerolls are fun and dramatic, characters making things fight better around them is fun, it's just part of 8th/9th now and a lot of people enjoy it. If it's not your cup of tea though, feel free to make house rules with your opponent before hand. No one says you can't have fun with your game the way you like. 

Agreed. This is why Malifaux gained a HUGE following. It changed the face of miniature wargaming because a limited amount of control could be had. Being able to cheat fate a 'little' really made the complete randomness controllable. Per turn you can only CP reroll once, so it's a balanced 'pick' the dice you choose to reroll. It's not really abusable. No one (not even pure casual players) like 100% random.

 

Now, if a unit already allows re-rolls, there were rules to prevent re-rolling re-rolls in the rulebook.

 

So long story short, no one likes that bad night where all you roll is 1's and it just goes sideways. You PAY for that re-roll. Personally my CP's are better used in normal strategies than a re-roll.

[Ish]

Re-rolls, per se, aren’t inherently a bad thing.

What drives me nuts about the way WH40k currently handles re-rolls is that there are a lot of different sources of re-rolls (e.g., stratagems, unit abilities, army-wide abilities, hero auras, magic items, etc.) and that not all the re-rolls are consistent in what they have you re-roll (e.g., re-roll all misses, re-roll all “1’s” to hit, re-roll “1’s” to wound, etc.).

This is, frankly, a real pain in the astartes. 

[Lyraeus]

On 9/3/2021 at 10:10 AM, Brother Glacius said:

So I was watching a Battlereport on W+ yesterday and it really struck me how rerolls are kind of ruining the game. Whether its from some unit/character ability to a command point thingy...rerolls just suck the random out of the game. Not sure who at GW decided to add that nonsense to 40K, but it was the worst. It makes me feel like if/when I ever play again, I'm going to have to have house rules out yin-yang just to make the game playable. I'm going to have to go back and look at one-page rules again. maybe that is the way to go.

The game is not supposed to be random though. There is supposed to be a sense of some reliability. 

GW also removed MOST rerolls. Orks have almost zero rerolling outside of a charge and even then its all dice rolled so still random. Space Marines are just silly because everything gets core. 

Hell, my Thousand Sons only get rerolls from a few sources 

[PumpkinHead]

On 9/4/2021 at 7:55 PM, Lyraeus said:

The game is not supposed to be random though.

In a game of dice, there are averages and probabilities, but random is the name of the game. You can build lists to remove as much randomness as possible. But dice are gonna dice.

[Ish]

I’m familiar with only a handful wargames that don’t have random elements, Diplomacy, Go, Shogi, and Chess. Even then, they are usually played with randomized starting positions… And it’s rather a stretch to call Go or Diplomacy wargames.

I don’t have a problem with the game being decided by the dice or even with special rules that let you manipulate/mitigate the outcomes of those dice. I just don’t like the (for lack of a better word) logistics of how WH40k and WHAOS handle their dice rolls.

Games like Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and Oathmark have really opened my eyes to the notion that the “tables and tables of bonuses and penalties” and “buckets of dice” game design systems that I had always just assumed were the way tabletop games had to work is just… not. 

[PourSpelur]

I believe they use rerolls so heavily to shore up the granularity of the d6.

I really think 40k would be a better game if it was completely redone as a d10 system. There, I said it. Come at me Bro!

😉

[Ish]

2 hours ago, PourSpelur said:

I believe they use rerolls so heavily to shore up the granularity of the d6.

I really think 40k would be a better game if it was completely redone as a d10 system. There, I said it. Come at me Bro!

😉

Pretty much exactly this. Despite multiple editions and rewrites over the decades, both WH40k and AOS are still using the same foundational system designed for WHFB way back when. In that system, dice rolls were based on attributes that ranged from one to six and you usually wanted to roll above or below the value, with a stat of three being considered the baseline “average human,” because it yielded 50/50 odds (you had equal chances of rolling 1,2,3 or 4,5,6).

Orcs and Dwarves were more durable than Humans, so they got Toughness 4; Elves were quicker, so they got Initiative 4; and so forth… Over in the sci-fi spin-off game, Space Marines were superhuman so they had BS, WS, S, T, and I all at the incredibly high 4 and a 3+ Armor Save!

The problems started to creep into this system when the gameplay began to shift away from the baseline being an “average human” and instead the baseline became “basic space marine.”

Instead of 3 being the “middle” value, it was now 4… which began to make the “design space” really cramped if you wanted to have things in the game that were better than Space Marines. But you only had 5 and 6 left on the die.

So you need to start jumping through complicated hoops to (essentially) be able to get the equivalent of a 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 result on the dice.

 

[Torg]

yeah - I would rather see GW go with alternating activations before I would worry about re-rolls.

But back to the OP -  a lot more games exist than 40k... so many - and many IMO better. - maybe 40k just isn't fun for you anymore... because 40k just isn't that fun to begin with? Beyond the Fluff (which changes / gets re-imagined or re-tooled every few years) - that fluff is awesome - the minis are really really nice. But the game system has never been its strong suit lol.

 

 

[Swensos83]

2 hours ago, Torg said:

yeah - I would rather see GW go with alternating activations before I would worry about re-rolls.

But back to the OP -  a lot more games exist than 40k... so many - and many IMO better. - maybe 40k just isn't fun for you anymore... because 40k just isn't that fun to begin with? Beyond the Fluff (which changes / gets re-imagined or re-tooled every few years) - that fluff is awesome - the minis are really really nice. But the game system has never been its strong suit lol.

 

 

I agree. I feel like 40k hasn't been fun for me in a long time, but the models are great. Bolt Action is such an adaptive game, maybe I'll just use my chaos marines against some Russians...

[Ish]

I’m hearing very good things about Grimdark Future, but haven’t tried it yet… But, well, you can’t argue with the price.

[peter c]

On 9/7/2021 at 12:28 PM, Ish said:

 

So you need to start jumping through complicated hoops to (essentially) be able to get the equivalent of a 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 result on the dice.

 

Then maybe a d12-based system would be a more direct path to fixing the old dead horse then the d10 -?

[Ish]

I was intrigued by the sort of hybrid between Epic 40,000 and Warhammer 40,000 that they used in the most recent iteration of Apocalypse. 

Basically, when a unit took damage from smaller weapons they rolled their save on a D12; against bigger weapons they rolled their save on a D6.

Maybe something similar could be done, where instead of re-rolling dice, you just replace a die with a larger one?

So instead of an aura of re-rolling ones, a shooty command character’s aura could make one model in a friendly unit within range replace their D6 to hit with a D12.

Likewise, a super-strong mêlée weapon might roll a D12 to wound rather than re-rolling.

(Of course, the other sacred cow that needs to be slaughtered is the “roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save” trifecta. Back when WH40k was a game much smaller in scope [20-30 models per player] then it was a nice bit of granular distinction between accurate-but-weak weapons, tough-but-poorly-armored troops, and so forth. Nowadays, with the much larger scope of the game, it feels like needless faffing about for no real benefit.)

[Radish Geek]

Well, if you've got the money to collect it, there's always Vor: the Maelstrom.  Or you could just play Force of Arms.  Or homebrew historicals. Or Go.

I agree that the rules of 40k have gotten out of hand, but I doubt seriously that GW is going to resort to polyhedrals to fix it, simply because they have a fat, juicy contract with the DoD to create a game that teaches the fundamentals of battlefield strategy in a friendly, fun, non-intimidating way, and polyhedrals are still seen as geek toys by most Americans.

Besides, the more complex rules have their fun uses. I have a Nurgle Marines army that usually wins vs. armies of similar point values, not because of shooty units, but because of psychic skullduggery.  Of course, all those Plague Marines with heavy weapons don't hurt...

Can anybody explain where the Assault phase went in 9th edition?

[KennyD76]

Rerolls made my Black Templars a top tier army. When vows were taken away I stopped playing. Only recently have I had much interest in the game, I really think I will end up playing Infinity instead this time.