To Wound or Mortal Wound?

[Mcthew]

I'm raising this now, because the rules are being tweaked and in the absence of a TGA member providing a persuasive argument, I wouldn't mind if GW address the issue of 'wound rolls' too. Cos, they don't make a great deal of sense to me for some units.

For example, compare a Freeguild Handgunner to  a SCE Prosecutor. I have no doubt that a lead ball to the chest is pretty painful, and can penetrate most flimsy armour, hence the -1 rend, but before that it also has a 4 in 6 chance of causing some damage if it hits (the wound roll). Pretty nasty, then.

But is it more nasty than getting thunked with an electrically charged hammer, flung with Thor-like strength, that should smash most armour into pieces and pulverise bones and flesh, if it doesn't fry you first? I'd have thought logically no, but GW seem to think a Freeguild's lead ball is deadlier than a Prosecutors Celestial Hammer any day of the week. There is only a 3 in 6 chance of wounding if a hammer hits, and it has no effect on the armour, so potentially it'll just bounce of a Khorne BloodReaver's helmet, or those pretty wristbands they wear.

Cinematic, this isn't. It's a little laughable really - like the Prosecutors are hurling Play-doh, not things made of heavy metal.

The variables for hurting someone with a missile weapon are much less than wounding someone in hand to hand combat. In hand to hand, you have the swing of a weapon, and the strength behind it, with the position of the attacker vs the defender, the defender's luck parrying a blow, and if they dodge it etc.  The savageness of a weapon, is represented by the rend characteristic. So that's all fine.

But almost all shooting weapons have a constant strength, only effected in some by range (which isn't reflected in the rules). By having a wound roll for shooting weapons, the assumption is there are more variables than are possible. If you hit someone with a shooting weapon, you will more or less hurt them, and will most definitely wound someone up close dependent on their armour. Yet a Freeguild handgunner who hits a target from 16" away will have a much better chance of wounding someone they hit, than a Prosecutor hurling and hitting someone with lightning hammers at 3". Bonkers.

So I have a plea to GW (as many of us do, and thankfully they listen most of the time) to make unit abilities more logical in the playing, rather than try balancing them by a) reducing the effectiveness of weapons because they want to reflect the points cost, because b) they don't want to bust their business model of the actual price of a model reflecting their points cost on the GHB. I like the rules, but they gotta make sense, otherwise what's the point?

(Happy to be persuaded that this isn't the case though... ?)

[VoodooChileIRL]

The Rend and higher To Wound chance on the Handgun could represent the Handgunner taking aim and firing at the weak points in a target's armour. The Handgunner's To Hit chance is 5+ vs the Prosecutor's 4+ for instance. You're also assuming a lead ball with gunpowder and not some semi-magical metal from Chamon and Aqshy fire powder (think the Iron and Oak Malign Portents story makes reference to something similar), these are the Mortal Realms afterall.

In addition you're comparing a single Handgunner (1 of 10 models) to a single Prosecutor (1 of 3 models) and only looking at their Missile Weapon stats. While a Handgunner's main and almost only role is to shoot, a Prosecutor is a far faster, far tougher model whose missile attack is not it's only selling point.

What you're essentially looking for is the "cinematic Space Marines" which I think White Dwarf put together as a joke years ago. It was basically rules for a 2000 point army that had 3-5 Space Marines in it as their individual rules were more reflective of their fluff (A dozen wounds, ridiculous shooting, basically an army of Guillimans). A fun idea for a one off game but not a great basis for an entire system.

Ultimately this is a game and game balance matters more than being completely faithful to the fluff. In addition nuance is hard when your game is based on a D6, you see this with 40k as well where the Bolter (a rapid firing rocket launcher) is the basic weapon in the universe. 

A good mix of the two, game balance with the right game feel is what I suspect GW  (and all game developers) are aiming for and I don't think that is really going to change anytime soon.

 

[Mcthew]

Thanks, VoodooChileIRL. That makes a little more sense, although I would argue this should effect the hit roll more, but there's all that Mortal Realms stuff about metal composition that I hadn't taken into account.

While the Prosecutor is more than a shooting model, true enough, I still lament his shooting stats aren't a little better in comparison to his mortal peers, as he makes a great skirmisher otherwise. (I'd rather a sacrifice in range for a better wound roll, for example). With new players there's always the look of worry when faced with these imposing celestial avengers, until they let rip with their hammers at range and realise they're no better than some of their basic battle-line in attack and hardly formidable unless massed in more than 3 per unit, and that costs. They're a model that looks great on the battlefield, but aren't worth the points IMHO and not much fun to field with either (as someone once said to me, they're the AoS equivalent of a pop-noodle: looks good, smells good, but pointless in some respects unless you've had plenty of beers).

 However, I love that GW ensures the rules port across all of the different modes of play like Skirmish, Path to Glory etc, without making up a new game - so I guess this is the sacrifice we make (yeah, it's a small one).

Would be fascinated to see what would happen if faith to the fluff took over from balance, though, even if it was a one off like 40k; or the wound roll determined mortal wounds, rather than an extra step towards damage, and the save throw was rolled against the remaining hits. ?

[Ungface]

What about the fact that a bullet is being fired at a very fast velocity out of the rifle, faster than any stormcast could throw a hammer?

 

Considering this a 4/6 vs 3/6 is pretty good.

 

 

[Mcthew]

17 minutes ago, Ungface said:

What about the fact that a bullet is being fired at a very fast velocity out of the rifle, faster than any stormcast could throw a hammer?

 

Considering this a 4/6 vs 3/6 is pretty good.

 

 

Yeah, I did consider this although  the description of the hammers ‘striking with meteoric impact’ in the warscroll feels like hyperbole in comparison. I always imagined the hammers turning into lightning, striking across the field of battle very quickly.

Also if a bullet is flying at such high velocity the range would be further than the celestial hammers, before it lacked strength to wound. 

Either way, celestial hammers don’t roll with a ‘meteoric impact’ to me. 

[robinlvalentine]

I think this is just more granularity than Age Of Sigmar is capable of - ultimately it's a d6 system, everything from a tiny goblin throwing a broken bottle to the all-conquering power of the god of death has to fall within a few 1-6 scales. With how outlandish and fantastical a lot of units are, you really have to handwave a lot of the logic. If you start breaking it down, you get all sorts of weird questions (how do those same musket balls hurt ghosts, for example? Magic ammo? Maybe...). d10 and d20 systems are better equipped to handle this sort of thing, but even there, ultimately the gameplay is going to trump the in-world logic at some point, just to keep things fun.

It's also always been an issue in GW's games. 40k especially has the whole Space Marine problem, now made even more mind-bending by the Primaris (if Space Marines should be more powerful to fit the fluff, does that mean Primaris should be even more powerful than that? Or are their stats representative? Shouldn't they be even taller?!! Aaargh!)  

In AOS' case it also seems like a symptom of old WHFB models co-existing with new AOS models. AOS as a setting is about gleaming demigods with lightning hammers fighting monstrous superhumans invested with demonic power... it just so happens that also this bloke with no shoes on is there. I think if you were building AOS from the ground-up with a totally clean slate, you wouldn't include muskets and stuff in the first place, everything would be on this heroic level, where the weapons are forged from meteors and the armour is protected with Khornate runes or whatever. 

You see it a bit in the fluff these days - there was a Malign Portents story recently about the Freeguild, and the focus is on their huge Cogforts, their incredibly powerful magic cannonballs, etc - they're not the downtrodden, perfectly average men-at-arms of WHFB, they're fantastical in their own right now. So I think you could imagine these days that their muskets are enhanced with the spirit of dragon-fire, they're the best marksmen in all the human lands, they spit ancient curses at their foes as they fire, whatever, as that's in line with how they're portrayed now. 

[Kramer]

Interesting discussion. I think it's mostly based on making it an easy and swift proces and to differentiate between units. An other option would be a d20 percentage roll which includes both to hit and to wound but that would be less cinematic to me. And loose your chance to differentiate between what now is a 4+ 3+ model vs a 5+ 1+ model. A rifleman compared to a gigantic boulder throwing monster  

The other thing is streamlining the game. If you decrease the hitting power based on distance it's that one more thing to take into account. One more thing to measure and thus slowing down the game. For me that's a reasonable sacrifice. 

And yes some description and model give an impression that's not always backed up by the stats! And that's always a shame. 

I personally have more issue with the to hit in combat. I get that an ogor wielding a massive club finds it harder to hit than an elf who wields a light sword he trained with for thousands of years..... but both is based on the opponent moving out of the way  If their opponent is a brick wall they both hit 100% of the time. Gameplaywise it makes a lot of sense how it is arranged now, but that always felt weird to me, haha. 

[offroadfury]

I feel like this type of thinking leads down a pretty dang deep rabbit hole. Yes we could read every line of fluff and base the rules off of them, then we have a game that unplayable, bogged down by specials that can be trumped by the next rule book of rules based on fanciful descriptions for awesome fantasy stuff. Warhammer has always had to toe the line between fluff and rules and it hasnt always worked out. I remember back in the day you always took Empire swordsmen, even though the fluff stated the decree at the time was that every elector count had to create a standing regiment of halbediers. Swords were just straight better than the the other state troops and you took them.

 

Point is we cant just start arbitrarily changing rules because a writer somewhere wrote something that sounded so much cooler than a 4 to hit, and thats ok

[Redmanphill]

On 5/16/2018 at 12:13 PM, VoodooChileIRL said:

You're also assuming a lead ball with gunpowder and not some semi-magical metal from Chamon and Aqshy fire powder (think the Iron and Oak Malign Portents story makes reference to something similar), these are the Mortal Realms afterall.

That’s an eloquent explanation 

[Skabnoze]

Every game system is built upon some level of abstraction.  The less abstractions you have the more you get to an extremely complicated simulator, and the more abstractions you make the less rules & complexity you need.  In the end, GW seems to want the game to be relatively simple and to play quickly - which means that you need to have a fair amount of abstractions.  On top of that, they want armies to be somewhat equal so that playing the game is not always a foregone conclusion from the start and I am sure they also want most of the units they sell to be useful to players.

The result of this is naturally going to be that some unit comparisons are going to be weird if you try to make sense out of them.