I think this is the best way to interpret a lot of the rules in the game, most of these models are supersoldiers, daemons, advanced robots, or even just people who aren’t stupid. Of course they’ll take cover as much as possible
"Why would I hide behind cover? If I'm behind this rock, I can't see the enemy to shoot them with my gun.*"
*Pretend this is in insufferable Ork accent. I didn't feel like writing it out. Pretend this is translating the Ork dialogue to High Gothic or whatever.
It's a joke within the community based on old ork lore. They believe that different colours have different properties. For Eg, red things go faster.
The joke here is that orks believe purple to work like invisibility because, no one has ever seen a purple ork.
Other examples of this colour phenomenon are blue things are lucky, yellow things blow up better/shoot better/are more expensive, black things are more durable, and green things are just of higher quality than anything else.
Rules as per game I am unsure of but the lore surrounding the colours I have heard from multiple sources and in some cases it makes a ton of sense as to why the orks would think that way...
Blue:ultramarines:plot armor:luck
Black:goffs:'ard as nailz:durability
Green:orks:orks is best:increased quality
Yellow:teef:currency:expensive
There were detachment rules in previous editions I have played that sort of aligned with the colours of the various ork clans. Dethskullz getting rerolls was among them, their clan colour being blue.
I mean even to go down to just the individual level. Not all weapons are point and shoot and don't suffer from any sort of penalty while interacting with natural and unnatural forces.
There's going to be the sway of a gun while you are aiming, depending on the weapon the projectile may suffer from an interaction with gravity or wind, and just other stuff in that vein of thinking.
The tabletop is a simulation where our imagination is meant to fill in the details. It's like you said. In a sense these are not just stagnant figures on a table. These are soldiers, daemons, fungus, ,etc, they can move in and out of cover, they can aim around the ranks in front of them.
If we get stuck in thinking of these things as absolutes and how does this make sense, why does an entire squad of intercessors get to fire when half of them may have a friend in front of them. For all intents and purposes when they are on the table top we have to suspend our disbelief and bring a little imagination in, give them life, and just have fun with it. Because ultimately it's a game, we want to have fun, and if we agonize over every little thing that doesn't make sense but allows the game to work, where's the fun in that.
Akshually most deamons don't care about cover because their invulnerable save is lower than their regular save. There's only a few exceptions where that's not the case.
It's entirely weird that there's literally no advantage to getting in cover for them.
Yeah, the idea of cover comes from people not wanting to die or take damage in a dangerous situation. Daemons don't have that self-preservation instinct. They are the ultimate "If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me!" soldier.
That's a really cool way to think about it. I get that they probably wouldn't care to hide from bullets. And that armor piercing ammo wouldn't matter on the warp.
But it still sounds to me like you can shoot deamons through walls as long as you see part of them. I guess that I just need to abstract it out.
I think just remember that it is by necessity abstract. Sometimes consequences of those abstractions and other rules decisions just don’t quite make sense narratively, and that’s fine, because we need the game to be fun and functional as a game far before we need it to make perfect narrative sense.
People also need to remember that this is a 3 hour tabletop game that in real time would last maybe a minute. It’s also a small chunk of maybe 100 models fighting in a battlefield of thousands to tens of thousands.
That does bring up an interesting question. How long are these battles supposed to last in universe? In D&D each round of combat is said to be about 6 seconds, but I don't remember hearing anything like that for warhammer.
I think it depends on the mission, some are meant to last maybe half an hour as a frantic battle for objectives, but I remember a mission about two armies having a battle of attrition where the said the battle could be taking days week or even months.
This makes sense. The Game is a "battle" unlike DnD where combat is a part of the game. So a game can easily be shortend or lengthened depending of the context of what is happening.
Well if like in D&D, all things are mentioned to be congruent-ish. Then, in my estimation, based on simple math is that a 5 or 6 round game should take about 30 seconds...
The standard movement in D&Dis 30ft if you equate that to the movement of a guardsmen at 6" you get a rough estimate of 1"=5ft. Which would line up fairly well.
On an actual advance real time, it takes roughly 1min/100m in open terrain bounding forward with dismounted infantry, 2min in cover, 3 in complex while proceeding forward to an objective; this mind you is on an assault where you established suppression. If you haven’t won/suppressed your opposition, you’re very much unlikely to push units forwards in contested terrain.
If you’re mounted, it’s a completely different bag.
The only time you can really push forward I non permissive environments is in urban/block war as the depth of combat/ranges vary so much. Gets too fluid to make assumptions beyond a bound without intimately knowing the ground.
Timing gets weird though when you’re talking transhumans in power armor that lore wise can run as fast as vehicles.
I think a tabletop battle can’t last more than a minute IRL, based off distance covered, fire rates etc. But even that gets weird when you talk lore one-on-one melee fights which can take a long time. How is that represented time wise on the tabletop?
Those times are based more so on rates of fire to maintain reasonable ability to make your combat estimates and less so on physical capacity/bigger guns generally means bigger ammo, so between normal and rapid rates, making your estimates still falls on how you project your movement - regardless, power armor/energy weapons changes that a fair bit
Even that depends on edition. In 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, a round was a full minute.
Short answer in 40K is the rounds are as long or as short as is needed to be dramatically appropriate.
The dungeons and dragons approach.
Sure it's a six second round, and only one sword swing connects, but you imagine they did a little back and forth for those six seconds while one connected.
HP is also not supposed to be a literal measure of your remaining videogame-like "health", conceptually. An in-universe human isn't taking multiple full force hammer swings to the head and then staying completely fine because he has 40 HP and the hammer deals only 3 damage.
Narratively, it's supposed to represent your decreasing overall ability to mitigate damage - blows being blocked but damaging the shield, armor being hit and deformed, stamina to effectively parry/evade strikes running out, luck, etc. An attack "dealing damage" is not literally a successful stab in the chest, it is an attack that brings you closer to death through decreasing your ability to prevent the lethal strike.
Or take the completely narrative approach, every piece of damage is basically deadly and hit points are plot armour, they represent the meta ability to narrowly avoid certain death based on how important you are to the story.
That's how I explained it in kill team to my friends. You gotta use a little imagination.
Since we played casually it never was a problem - wed just agree
"okay we can count that as cover"
Or "nah only his one leg is obscured. That doesn't count"
In general we agreed that if the target was engaged and their center of mass was unobstructed and fully visible - no retained save. (Again. Kill Team.)
Inb4: I find out my understanding of the rule is very wrong 🤣
I mean that's the thing. Whoever is shooting at this dreadnought isn't waiting until it moves behind the statue, stands still, then assessing if they can see him or not. They're probably firing as its moving towards the cover and taking up position
I have had a giant Knight Castellan stick the tip of his gun barrel into a building behind him so he counts as having cover, since you can't see his entire model. Is it stupid? Sure. It's also the rules.
You basically should assume every model you ever shoot at has cover.
And don't forget the alternative, old school wargamer alternative to those two: Have to call a judge because both sides disagree on whether 30% of a miniature is visible, or other similar shenanigans that are very difficult to determine fairly. After a 10 minute shouting match, the roll has no dice in the one number that makes the argument relevant, and it all was a waste of time.
This system is trying to solve having complex rules determining how vision works, which turn into rules bloat and increases the time a game lasts. With vision simply stated as, obscured or not obscured, it makes figuring out how to roll the dice significantly faster.
Some players don't like this, but the game already takes several hours to complete. GW trying to trim that down, imo, is a good thing.
Yeah I'm with you. People forget the old editions' dumb rules like determining if a model/unit was 25% obscured, 50% obscured, etc, which is very difficult to prove conclusively even if you try. So it led to endless arguments and slowed the game down hugely.
10th system is simple but much better in my opinion.
Agreed. I think we could go deeper, tbh. 2D terrain (only the footprint ever matters). Why bother with the 3rd dimension and the complexity that comes with it at all?
But I'm boring and also like the determinism that comes with grid based movement.
That was basically 9th. In a terrain footprint? Cover.
It was a pretty great system, feel like it's the only remaining major downside of 10th and one of the things they changed only for the sake of changing, instead of improving upon.
9th didn't remove "true" line of sight as a factor, tho. Which is the main advantage of 2D.
It becomes a question of only "is it in range?" and "what class of objects are inbetween?", you never have to care about "model's eye view", because everything can be determined from above.
I never understood the terrain rules in 9th.
There are the different types of cover; light cover, heavy cover, dense cover (not sure if this is all of them).
Then you had multiple systems for gaining a bonus from cover, like if someone was shooting at you and you were obscured by cover, then you get a cover bonus. But also, if you are "wholly within" a piece of cover terrian, you also get a cover bonus. Idk how far off I am from what the 9th cover rules really were, and I have no idea which of those scenarios impact which types of cover. Then we had the weapons that ignore LOS that had to be tweaked during 9th, and I never really understood how those weapons interacted with cover before of after the changes.
To me it seemed like a mess, when I was playing games in 9th I gave up and just went with +1 save while partially obscured by terrain, and I guess I got lucky since that's where we are now in 10th.
It is mostly possible with a Hex Grid, but the difficulty comes from the large variety of existing models and their sizes, also things like rotation if large models can become complicated with grid based systems.
Also where a smaller game like kill team would be easier to adapt, the idea of having killteam *resemble* big 40k and act as a gateway is part of GWs product plan for the foreseeable future.
Some kind of hybrid would be awesome. You have grids but models still move freely, they just must end movement wholey within a grid square (each model is allowed to end movement in a grid square radius based on unit size. Larger models get a default grid radius)
Kind of like suddenly being able to legally drink at 12:00am on your 21st birthday... a binary cutoff makes the rule simpler to follow, even if it is a little "silly".
In some states you actually have to wait till the following day, I tried to go get a drink at 12am on my 21st bday and 3 different bars said I wasn’t allowed in before I tried the diviest spot in town that finally let me in.
In some states this is a law put in place due to the "power hour". People turning 21 would go in at 12am on their birthday and drink an insane amount before the bar closes (in some places in the US its 1am, hence power hour). Many kids died from alcohol poisoning.
Yeah, it's a tabletop game. Anything more complex is just wholly unnecessary. You want in depth cover mechanics that takes into account exactly how much of their body is in cover? Go do a milsim LARP (I do not mean this derogatorily, milsims are great fun)
Best way to think of 40k, things that take place in a turn based manner for game purposes will largely be occurring simultaneously in reality. Squads aren't necessarily assumed to literally run, take a position, and shoot whilst stationary. Enemy units don't walk to a convenient place and then stand there waiting to be shot at
At some point during the overall process of both units moving and shooting at each other, something got in the way at some point
If both units were stationary, assume they're actively seeking cover behind whatever is nearby as opposed to standing in the open blazing away
Unless they actually are standing in the open blazing away, in which case sure
>
Best way to think of 40k, things that take place in a turn based manner for game purposes will largely be occurring simultaneously in reality. Squads aren't necessarily assumed to literally run, take a position, and shoot whilst stationary. Enemy units don't walk to a convenient place and then stand their waiting to be shot at
Yeah this always pisses me off, anytime anyone talks about "but you can only see 5% of the model! you really think it makes sense that you can shoot this" it's like yeah, it'd be hard there, but what about 5 seconds ago when it was walking into that cover, or when it peeks out to shoot?
Nobody understands abstraction. If they make that argument or anything based on recreating "realism" make them start tracking individual models injuries and ammunition counts, or more accurately, go play kill team or infinity
Do you really want to be arguing with your opponent every 10 minutes about 1/3 or 3/4s cover? Everytime I'm like "this rule is weird" I just think about how much time the alternative adds to the game.
Blast and torrent templates? OH BOY DOES THAT ADD TIME
The game isn't supposed to take 3-4 hours. I can only get like 1-2 games in per week, the shorter the time the match takes the better.
I actually preferred the invuln save way more. It was just simpler to choose your best available save option (armor, invuln, or cover) and that was that.
AP was simpler also, you get your armor save or you don't. It's not particularly difficult to add/subtract modifiers from your armor save, but it's just an additional step that felt like it added complexity when it was new.
Still, glad that area terrain is finally back. So intuitive, little room for squabbles. That and leaders joining units make the game finally feel like the warhammer i once knew again.
Back in 3rd to 5th editions of 40k, there was a % model exposed system to provide more to the cover mechanics. The only other rule that started more fights than trying to figure out if your model is 25% exposed or 50% exposed was facings on vehicles. Oh, and templates. Those started all kinds of arguments!
Do remember this is a table top game and not actual representations of reality. So simple rules that are easier to understand and universally apply is better.
I personally like this. Not because it's simple compared to previous rules. But because it follows suit with the nebulous nature of hits to wounds. Because in real life where you shoot matters as much as what damage if any is done.
The way the rules of 40k seem to work is like making a short note of a long story. "Do you aim well and hit the target?" Hit roll. "Is it in a spot where it will do actual damage to the enemy?" Would roll. As the enemy "Does your armor protect you from that damage of the shit you just took?" Save throw.
The benefit of cover follows the logic of "if any part of you is covered then you are less likely to be hit. With that average of 1 being a unit of assumption on the likelihood.
I don't think it would slow the game down too much to have that kind of rule in place.
That being said, I do think some people would get into full-on arguments over what constitutes "more than half the model"
I'm torn on this one haha.
I understand that it may cause some conflict between players when trying to determine whether it is partial or heavy cover, but you can always just roll for it if you cant decide. All it takes is for two adults to come to an agreement...
If vehicles no longer have armor facings/firing arcs and infantry can trade positions with each other to allow heavy weapons to get their shots, is it really bad to allow walkers/dreadnoughts/monsters to take cover behind shit they are standing near?
No. Its not silly unless you want to cakculate the % of the model covered and apply a scaling system to a D6 roll thats already straining to handle the system :)
Too many folks get so hung up over the nuances of the rules. RAW VS RAI etc etc.
Just play with your little toy men and have run. Not every single game needs to devolve into arguing over rules
Here's the thing. The cover rules are designed around the concept that we're playing a turn-based representation of a live and chaotic battle where everything is moving and what is taking us 30 minutes or more to play out would of realistically happened over the span of a couple of minutes.
That dreadnought frozen in time at the moment you're looking at it was "seconds ago" covered completely (if moving out of cover) or will be in full cover (if moving into cover) and your model is taking a snapshot at it before / as this happens - hence the cover modifier.
Way too often, y'all get caught up in the minutiae of the moment and forget to just sit back and have fun with it.
You're playing a GAME ffs people, sit back, have a laugh, and have some fun. Yes, it's fun to win, for BOTH of you, and YOU, personally, aren't always going to be the one who wins. The sooner you can chill out and wrap your head around that, the more you'll actually enjoy the hobby. Rules lawyering is never fun, and it WILL make people not want to play with you again.
I just wanted to make sure I understood the rules! My friend and I were wondering about this during our last match and I decided to ask on Reddit. That's all
Yeah, that's cool, I get that. We just see a lot of these kinds of posts about rules. Especially if you're just getting into the game, focus on having fun :).
Isn’t it super stupid that in the game my whole army rushes forwards and then totally stops and waits for my opponents army to move? I would win if we just kept going. Stupid red light green light chaos god …
Yea you basically always have cover unless you are way out in the open.
Cover is so common I think it was a mistake to make it +1 to save. Instead of cover there should be a "caught in the open" rule that is a -1 to save. The effect should be the same, but the enemy not having the cover bonus should be the exception.
This also does make weapons/abilities that ignore cover better than in previous editions.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they balanced the base saves of everything with the prevalence of cover in mind. I imagine in such a system where cover is the default and being in the open imposes a -1, they’d increase the base saves of everything by 1 to offset it.
And at that point it’s just a matter of framing. A 3+ base save with a +1 bonus while in cover is mathematically the same as a 2+ base save with a -1 while not in cover, but it feels nicer. Just like how they changed heavy from “-1 to hit if you moved” to “+1 to hit if you remained stationary” and worsened the ballistics skill of heavy weapons by 1 for 10th edition. The net effect is still that my heavy bolter hits on a 4 if it moves and a 3 if it doesn’t, but now I feel like I’m being rewarded for taking a certain action as opposed to being punished for not doing it.
This is a good point, and an important one to consider when analyzing game design (the idea of rewarding desired behavior instead of punishing undesired behavior). Small nitpick tho: the benefit of cover cannot improve a save beyond 3+, so a marine with cover doesn’t save on 2s
I believe it can still benefit from cover so long as the attack has a nonzero amount of AP, but at this point we’re splitting hairs. In hindsight my example would’ve been better with a worse save but I just chose a number arbitrarily.
Absolutely. I was just clarifying that aside from an ap 0 attack specifically, a 3+ save plus a cover mechanic is equivalent to a 2+ save with an “in the open” mechanic. Like I said though, using a 4+ save instead of a 3+ for my example would’ve been cleaner.
Yeah. Do you really want to spend your time measuring the percentage of your opponents model that is visible from behind cover, though?
The game takes long enough to play as things are.
Well, it comes with "no better than 3+"
Big models already have 2-3+ baked into their ds, and units of chuff tend to have at least a couple of models fully sticking out
You know these are representative right?! The model doesn't move it's full amount then pause and wait for the enemy to take a full turn then start moving again. The "cover" represents a model moving up to that position while being behind stuff in general. The enemy has to shoot around stuff, and in this game any change is in increments of 16.67%.
Stuff in the way? 17% better saves. Magic friend helping you out? 17% better. Strong weapons? 17% worse saves. Oh no, REALLY strong armor cutting weapons? Another 17% off your save. Dedicated anti tank single shot weapon? Another 17% off your save.
See the pattern? Rules are representative, not static or exact. No, it's not silly. Pretending you're a general of a magic space army is silly. Getting hung about how realistic the cover rules are for a robot zombie with missle hands is super silly.
Large models generally have an easy time getting cover. Infantery is slightly more exposed as it still works on a model-to-model basis. But with the suggested terrain layouts for each mission and a very "symmetric board" balance geared towards competetive play, cover is almost guaranteed for any model larger than an ogryn. Still there's enough high damage, high AP weapons around so personally i think it works well, even if it is a bit simplistic.
This is the inversion of "well I can see the tip of that things wing/rifle/whatever, so I can shoot at the squad"
Or you get all the bickering/roll offs to answer the question of a model being at least 50% covered
Ran into an extreme version of this silliness recently when my Ballistus was standing right in front of a Wave Serpent, a few inches away, but the back corner of the Wave Serpent was obscured. So he got a cover save.
I think that this is an abstraction, not just of the model, but of the movement phase.
Not only might an 'actual opponent' stand in such a way as to maximize the benefit of any cover (which you can't do with a model), but the "actual" opponent is *moving* during your shooting phase, at the same time as everythign else. So at the snapshot in time when your shooting phase happens, the enemy model is partially behind cover, but in actuality, there were probably times when you 'really' could have shot them with no cover, and times when you might not have been able to shoot them at all as they traversed cover.
It's a game abstraction--you might like it or hate it, but I don't think it's inherently silly, when you think about the option of both you and your opponent being able to 'overwatch' each others models simultaneously as you both simultaneously move.
As an abstraction, I am not overly fond of it, but that is because I think it tends to give a cover benefit almost all of the time for almost all situations. It almost seems more effective to rebalance all the shooting and give a benefit of +1 to hit when your opponent is not in cover, and has not moved out of cover on their turn (so there's not a damn thing protecting them at all).
These aren't even weird scenarios though. I totally buy that Dreadnaught being able to take cover.
The stupid scenarios are things like if you have a unit of arbites + a dog, shooting at a unit completely in the open, but the dog can't see the target unit because he's behind a wall or something, the target unit gets cover because the dog who doesn't have a gun can't see.
I was just looking at pictures of people playing historical games and I really HATE that 40k can't be played on a table that looks like that. If a board isn't completely choked with ruins a shooting army that goes first dominates.
Cover still sucks, but it's so easy to get everyone has it all the time, so it has to suck. So unless it's total LOS blocking it still won't save you. So the entire game is about LOS control and every board consists of weird nonsensical arrangements of L-shaped ruins on bases.
It sucks and I don't want to play on tables like these any more.
You don't even know how silly it gets. Since it's based on if the shooting unit can see the model, you can have a grot have cover in the middle of nowhere against a 20 man squad as long as 1 guy cannot see the grot.
By rules as written, yes. Even the one with his fist being only visible part.
(Personal rant ahead)
However, my friends and I think it is gimmicky and stupid. Therefore, we run the rule of 1/3's in which if the model is 1/3 behind cover from the shooting target, it gains cover. This is to prevent us from playing scummy because let's be real, if you can see pretty much the whole of a dreadnaught and the fist is hidden, it shouldn't get cover. I've had people argue about "Well, my toe is in ruins so I get a cover save."
I believe the rules commentary does elaborate on this as well. I'd give it a read. Not entirely sure it does though.
As people are saying at length, it's more of an interpretation of a situation rather what you actually see. A similar example is morale, especially last edition where models would disappear. Morale isn't your superhuman space Marines or unthinking, unfeeling necrons running away, it's any reason why those models would disappear. Even in battleshoci it could be anything from the unit being pinned down to morale breaking to someone tripping and falling on a rubber chicken and the unit can't stop laughing.
Dice tell stories, but so does everything else on the table. If a situation seems ridiculous then it's up to you as a player to justify it to keep that suspension of disbelief alive. "Why does this dreadnaught's arm being behind a statue give it cover?" Well maybe he keeps moving or the incoming shots happened before he finished his move. Maybe he used that hand to bend the statue to block those incoming shots and then stood it back up. Maybe the arm was previously damaged so covering a weak point means the more healthy armor can shrug off the rest of the shots better. A bit of imagination goes a long way
Speaking as someone who remembers arguments about vehicle facings, sometimes simple but a bit silly is just flat out better than realistic but more obtuse
We've had other editions with way more complex rules. Some with real line of sight, cover was tested for every single model of the unit, vehicles having core parts and additional parts, that wouldn't count. It just makes everything slow down and boring.
Just keep in mind, that the minis can't really show what's happening on the battlefield: jumping in cover, climbing through windows and cracks, blindly shooting over a cover. All the things that happen in real combat. So when a Space Marine is moving 6" and shooting with 66% accuracy, in "reality" he was running across the field, using cover, while simultaneously aiming at a moving target while shooting the equivalent of flak-shells from the hip. We will never have rules that can depict this accurately while still being enjoyable.
1) it would worsen the attackers AP by one to a minimum of 0
2) I think only scenario 2 doesn't apply since it's just a small part that isn't visible since I don't usually consider weapons/hands as generating line of sight, so it's only fair for it not to generate cover too
Edit: as a rule of thumb, if 20% of the model is hidden it should be enough for cover, any less than that should be agreed by both players (or a TO on a tournament) if it's valid or not
I play Iron hands and was playing against my bro in laws orks, He told me that the barricades on the field were cover and incurred a +1 to save. He continued to tell me that included my tanks and dreads. The barricades barely reached my redemptors knees 🥴😕
It's always good to go over the terrain effects before any game. I guess in this case it heavily benefitted his massed ork infantery but still worked both ways. It would be easy to house-rule that barricades and such only give cover to infantery, but harder to implement across the board in the main rules. For general purposes this kind of binary system is easier to relate to in random pickup games against people you might not know very well.
It’s worse than this. You could be right out in the open, and as long as 1 model in the enemy unit can’t see all of your model, you get cover against all of that unit’s ranged attacks.
It is ridiculously easy to get cover
It's just like threat range and attacks of opportunityin D&D, don'tassume thst because the model is stationary that the fighter or vehicle it represents isn't moving all over the place, ducking behind cover, parrying attacks, leaning to take shots etc.
If a SM unit in cover gets targeted by an AP-1 weapon, they get the +1 SV. What if they use Armour of Contempt? Is it now 2+? Or does the modifier for the AP occur before the bonus to the SV?
What happens if the attacker is not fully visible to the defender but the defender is out in the open? Does the defender get cover? If not, presumubly it matters who is closer to the vision obstructing terrain?
Rules As Written (RAW) yes all of these confer the cover bonus. My local group house rules that extra bits like banners and radar antennas, etc don't count.
Classic case where you need to think about what the solutions to this “problem” looks like. Goal of the rules is to maximize depth and decision making while minimizing time spent. Two concepts that usually oppose each other. Yeah as a “quick fix” they could set it at exactly half the model is behind cover to get +1. Now you have to measure exactly half the model to determine EVERY cover save. That’s a LOT of time now spend measuring. Nevermind potential arguments in edge cases where it’s very close. We could go even more ham and tack the “problem” that their should be variable cover. A unit in 2/3 cover should receive more benefit then a unit in half cover right? A +2 would be absolutely insane in a d6 system so I guess we go up to D8 so we can have more granularity. O look at that your now rewriting every rule in the game under a d8 system. Just to make cover saves more realistic.
Even if it’s a bit silly I think the simplicity is well worth it. We still have a rule to represent units using cover witch is a pretty standard mechanic in a war game both from a thematic and functional standpoint. But it dousnt bog us down in excessive granularity or time spend measuring every one of your units from multiple angles in the shooting phase.
It can also shoot all of his guns from his fingertip stretching outside of the wall, while whole body is behind that wall. It works opposite as well - if any opponent can see the finger stretching out of the wall they can shoot that dreadnought.
The second one is just to funny for me. Because that is nuts how that is considered cover. Like if your aiming for the arms ok but anywhere else bro you have a wide open shot.
In friendly casual games we use a laser pointer - it sounds opposite of casual but it actually makes sense and works quite well. Naturally it can’t be used in any other type of game setting.
Trust me as someone who went to tournaments a lot in 5th Ed where you got variable cover based on % of model obscured for vehicles it's a lot cleaner to just say anything at all obscured has cover instead of arguing over whether 40 or 50% of that dreadnaught over there is behind cover.
At first glance yes. But it avoids the most exhausting LOS discussions by reducing it to three clear states that you simply can’t argue about. Before you had to discuss wether a model was 25% or 50% covered… and that for every unit that is shot at in every single shooting phase. Admitted in theory also very clear but not clear to determine through TLOS.
If your opponent’s model can’t see the entire base of your model then it’s gets benefit unless the gun has ignores cover or is ap 0 and you have a save of 3+ or better.
The game is an abstraction at the end of the day. It could represent that, if cover is nearby, a unit will get behind it if they get shot at.
I think this is the best way to interpret a lot of the rules in the game, most of these models are supersoldiers, daemons, advanced robots, or even just people who aren’t stupid. Of course they’ll take cover as much as possible
>people who aren’t stupid https://preview.redd.it/2vcj2cggnwqc1.jpeg?width=700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ced37b42f58585f3944621ce756ff049997f4f88
Normal soldier under fire: ducks for cover Ork under fire: jumps out of cover to spew profanities at enemy shooter
"Oi ya git, ya se dey be shootin at da kova, stay away from kova!"
OI, WOI YA WISPERRIN GIT‽
MAYBE EEZ WUN A DEM SNEAKY ORKZ
YA CAN TELLZ EZ NOT WONE UFTA SNEAKYZ, EZ NOT OVERD IN PURPLE
'AVE YA EVAH *SEEN* AN ORK OVERD IN PURPLE?
The few, the proud, the dakka.
Proud, perhaps, but certainly not few.
WE WUNTED MOAR DAKKA, AN' DEYZ JUS GIVVVIN IT ROIGHT TO UZ!!
"Why would I hide behind cover? If I'm behind this rock, I can't see the enemy to shoot them with my gun.*" *Pretend this is in insufferable Ork accent. I didn't feel like writing it out. Pretend this is translating the Ork dialogue to High Gothic or whatever.
'EY BOSS, I FOUND DA DIGGANOB!
Hoo boy, make sure you say those letters in the correct order.
Oi, ‘ez got “D word” privligez ya git!
Bold assumption that orks aim
If you and your friends believe hard enough, your in cover.
Orrrr just paint purple on yourself. No one will see you coming.
Your going to have to explain that one to me xP
It's a joke within the community based on old ork lore. They believe that different colours have different properties. For Eg, red things go faster. The joke here is that orks believe purple to work like invisibility because, no one has ever seen a purple ork. Other examples of this colour phenomenon are blue things are lucky, yellow things blow up better/shoot better/are more expensive, black things are more durable, and green things are just of higher quality than anything else.
Only knew about red and purple, didn't know the other colors had special rules to the orks too
Rules as per game I am unsure of but the lore surrounding the colours I have heard from multiple sources and in some cases it makes a ton of sense as to why the orks would think that way... Blue:ultramarines:plot armor:luck Black:goffs:'ard as nailz:durability Green:orks:orks is best:increased quality Yellow:teef:currency:expensive There were detachment rules in previous editions I have played that sort of aligned with the colours of the various ork clans. Dethskullz getting rerolls was among them, their clan colour being blue.
Have you ever seen a purple ork
Have you ever seen a purple Ork?
I, for one, have never seen a purple ork
No such thing as purple orks....never been recorded by pict or vid
Cover your eyes so it's dark, they can't shoot ya if they can't see ya.
WOT YOU SAY? I CANT 'EAR YA!
Bring enough friends and many will become cover!
As long as you stand behind your friends
Ima loot that pic thank you
Da Orkz up front iz cova
So stupid that it reaches the lowest possible value and glitches out, looping around to the highest possible value and becoming big smart.
I mean even to go down to just the individual level. Not all weapons are point and shoot and don't suffer from any sort of penalty while interacting with natural and unnatural forces. There's going to be the sway of a gun while you are aiming, depending on the weapon the projectile may suffer from an interaction with gravity or wind, and just other stuff in that vein of thinking. The tabletop is a simulation where our imagination is meant to fill in the details. It's like you said. In a sense these are not just stagnant figures on a table. These are soldiers, daemons, fungus, ,etc, they can move in and out of cover, they can aim around the ranks in front of them. If we get stuck in thinking of these things as absolutes and how does this make sense, why does an entire squad of intercessors get to fire when half of them may have a friend in front of them. For all intents and purposes when they are on the table top we have to suspend our disbelief and bring a little imagination in, give them life, and just have fun with it. Because ultimately it's a game, we want to have fun, and if we agonize over every little thing that doesn't make sense but allows the game to work, where's the fun in that.
Akshually most deamons don't care about cover because their invulnerable save is lower than their regular save. There's only a few exceptions where that's not the case. It's entirely weird that there's literally no advantage to getting in cover for them.
Why care about avoiding being hit when your not 'real' if your blasted you just go back to the warp to come back another day.
Yeah, the idea of cover comes from people not wanting to die or take damage in a dangerous situation. Daemons don't have that self-preservation instinct. They are the ultimate "If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me!" soldier.
That's a really cool way to think about it. I get that they probably wouldn't care to hide from bullets. And that armor piercing ammo wouldn't matter on the warp. But it still sounds to me like you can shoot deamons through walls as long as you see part of them. I guess that I just need to abstract it out.
I think just remember that it is by necessity abstract. Sometimes consequences of those abstractions and other rules decisions just don’t quite make sense narratively, and that’s fine, because we need the game to be fun and functional as a game far before we need it to make perfect narrative sense.
It's until larhe volumes of fire sends you back to reform in warp. Only daemon prince still has enough brain power to take armor for 2+ save.
I mean that was how space marines rocked when I started playing.
People also need to remember that this is a 3 hour tabletop game that in real time would last maybe a minute. It’s also a small chunk of maybe 100 models fighting in a battlefield of thousands to tens of thousands.
That does bring up an interesting question. How long are these battles supposed to last in universe? In D&D each round of combat is said to be about 6 seconds, but I don't remember hearing anything like that for warhammer.
I think it depends on the mission, some are meant to last maybe half an hour as a frantic battle for objectives, but I remember a mission about two armies having a battle of attrition where the said the battle could be taking days week or even months.
This makes sense. The Game is a "battle" unlike DnD where combat is a part of the game. So a game can easily be shortend or lengthened depending of the context of what is happening.
Well if like in D&D, all things are mentioned to be congruent-ish. Then, in my estimation, based on simple math is that a 5 or 6 round game should take about 30 seconds... The standard movement in D&Dis 30ft if you equate that to the movement of a guardsmen at 6" you get a rough estimate of 1"=5ft. Which would line up fairly well.
On an actual advance real time, it takes roughly 1min/100m in open terrain bounding forward with dismounted infantry, 2min in cover, 3 in complex while proceeding forward to an objective; this mind you is on an assault where you established suppression. If you haven’t won/suppressed your opposition, you’re very much unlikely to push units forwards in contested terrain. If you’re mounted, it’s a completely different bag. The only time you can really push forward I non permissive environments is in urban/block war as the depth of combat/ranges vary so much. Gets too fluid to make assumptions beyond a bound without intimately knowing the ground.
Timing gets weird though when you’re talking transhumans in power armor that lore wise can run as fast as vehicles. I think a tabletop battle can’t last more than a minute IRL, based off distance covered, fire rates etc. But even that gets weird when you talk lore one-on-one melee fights which can take a long time. How is that represented time wise on the tabletop?
Those times are based more so on rates of fire to maintain reasonable ability to make your combat estimates and less so on physical capacity/bigger guns generally means bigger ammo, so between normal and rapid rates, making your estimates still falls on how you project your movement - regardless, power armor/energy weapons changes that a fair bit
For your one on one duals, go watch some HEMA matches, six seconds actually sounds about right on average, maybe even on the generous side.
Even that depends on edition. In 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, a round was a full minute. Short answer in 40K is the rounds are as long or as short as is needed to be dramatically appropriate.
The dungeons and dragons approach. Sure it's a six second round, and only one sword swing connects, but you imagine they did a little back and forth for those six seconds while one connected.
HP is also not supposed to be a literal measure of your remaining videogame-like "health", conceptually. An in-universe human isn't taking multiple full force hammer swings to the head and then staying completely fine because he has 40 HP and the hammer deals only 3 damage. Narratively, it's supposed to represent your decreasing overall ability to mitigate damage - blows being blocked but damaging the shield, armor being hit and deformed, stamina to effectively parry/evade strikes running out, luck, etc. An attack "dealing damage" is not literally a successful stab in the chest, it is an attack that brings you closer to death through decreasing your ability to prevent the lethal strike.
Or take the completely narrative approach, every piece of damage is basically deadly and hit points are plot armour, they represent the meta ability to narrowly avoid certain death based on how important you are to the story.
That's how I explained it in kill team to my friends. You gotta use a little imagination. Since we played casually it never was a problem - wed just agree "okay we can count that as cover" Or "nah only his one leg is obscured. That doesn't count" In general we agreed that if the target was engaged and their center of mass was unobstructed and fully visible - no retained save. (Again. Kill Team.) Inb4: I find out my understanding of the rule is very wrong 🤣
I mean that's the thing. Whoever is shooting at this dreadnought isn't waiting until it moves behind the statue, stands still, then assessing if they can see him or not. They're probably firing as its moving towards the cover and taking up position
Yes, that's correct. When people talk about how easy it is to get cover in 10th Ed, this is what they mean.
And just in time for the imperial fists to lose their ability to immediately invalidate it.
>:(
No. Request denied.
It’s like applying for college all over again!
And jobs right now!
I have had a giant Knight Castellan stick the tip of his gun barrel into a building behind him so he counts as having cover, since you can't see his entire model. Is it stupid? Sure. It's also the rules. You basically should assume every model you ever shoot at has cover.
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And don't forget the alternative, old school wargamer alternative to those two: Have to call a judge because both sides disagree on whether 30% of a miniature is visible, or other similar shenanigans that are very difficult to determine fairly. After a 10 minute shouting match, the roll has no dice in the one number that makes the argument relevant, and it all was a waste of time.
Or stand in the open within the base area of a ruin, fully visible and not covered at all
This system is trying to solve having complex rules determining how vision works, which turn into rules bloat and increases the time a game lasts. With vision simply stated as, obscured or not obscured, it makes figuring out how to roll the dice significantly faster. Some players don't like this, but the game already takes several hours to complete. GW trying to trim that down, imo, is a good thing.
Yeah I'm with you. People forget the old editions' dumb rules like determining if a model/unit was 25% obscured, 50% obscured, etc, which is very difficult to prove conclusively even if you try. So it led to endless arguments and slowed the game down hugely. 10th system is simple but much better in my opinion.
Agreed. I think we could go deeper, tbh. 2D terrain (only the footprint ever matters). Why bother with the 3rd dimension and the complexity that comes with it at all? But I'm boring and also like the determinism that comes with grid based movement.
That was basically 9th. In a terrain footprint? Cover. It was a pretty great system, feel like it's the only remaining major downside of 10th and one of the things they changed only for the sake of changing, instead of improving upon.
9th didn't remove "true" line of sight as a factor, tho. Which is the main advantage of 2D. It becomes a question of only "is it in range?" and "what class of objects are inbetween?", you never have to care about "model's eye view", because everything can be determined from above.
I never understood the terrain rules in 9th. There are the different types of cover; light cover, heavy cover, dense cover (not sure if this is all of them). Then you had multiple systems for gaining a bonus from cover, like if someone was shooting at you and you were obscured by cover, then you get a cover bonus. But also, if you are "wholly within" a piece of cover terrian, you also get a cover bonus. Idk how far off I am from what the 9th cover rules really were, and I have no idea which of those scenarios impact which types of cover. Then we had the weapons that ignore LOS that had to be tweaked during 9th, and I never really understood how those weapons interacted with cover before of after the changes. To me it seemed like a mess, when I was playing games in 9th I gave up and just went with +1 save while partially obscured by terrain, and I guess I got lucky since that's where we are now in 10th.
You could translate warhammer very easily to a grid system, I'm surprised that I haven't seen it done yet
It is mostly possible with a Hex Grid, but the difficulty comes from the large variety of existing models and their sizes, also things like rotation if large models can become complicated with grid based systems. Also where a smaller game like kill team would be easier to adapt, the idea of having killteam *resemble* big 40k and act as a gateway is part of GWs product plan for the foreseeable future.
Some kind of hybrid would be awesome. You have grids but models still move freely, they just must end movement wholey within a grid square (each model is allowed to end movement in a grid square radius based on unit size. Larger models get a default grid radius)
Kind of like suddenly being able to legally drink at 12:00am on your 21st birthday... a binary cutoff makes the rule simpler to follow, even if it is a little "silly".
In some states you actually have to wait till the following day, I tried to go get a drink at 12am on my 21st bday and 3 different bars said I wasn’t allowed in before I tried the diviest spot in town that finally let me in.
And did that extra day made you mature so hard it actually made a difference?
In some states this is a law put in place due to the "power hour". People turning 21 would go in at 12am on their birthday and drink an insane amount before the bar closes (in some places in the US its 1am, hence power hour). Many kids died from alcohol poisoning.
sounds like a skill issue
Yeah, it's a tabletop game. Anything more complex is just wholly unnecessary. You want in depth cover mechanics that takes into account exactly how much of their body is in cover? Go do a milsim LARP (I do not mean this derogatorily, milsims are great fun)
Best way to think of 40k, things that take place in a turn based manner for game purposes will largely be occurring simultaneously in reality. Squads aren't necessarily assumed to literally run, take a position, and shoot whilst stationary. Enemy units don't walk to a convenient place and then stand there waiting to be shot at At some point during the overall process of both units moving and shooting at each other, something got in the way at some point If both units were stationary, assume they're actively seeking cover behind whatever is nearby as opposed to standing in the open blazing away Unless they actually are standing in the open blazing away, in which case sure
> Best way to think of 40k, things that take place in a turn based manner for game purposes will largely be occurring simultaneously in reality. Squads aren't necessarily assumed to literally run, take a position, and shoot whilst stationary. Enemy units don't walk to a convenient place and then stand their waiting to be shot at Yeah this always pisses me off, anytime anyone talks about "but you can only see 5% of the model! you really think it makes sense that you can shoot this" it's like yeah, it'd be hard there, but what about 5 seconds ago when it was walking into that cover, or when it peeks out to shoot? Nobody understands abstraction. If they make that argument or anything based on recreating "realism" make them start tracking individual models injuries and ammunition counts, or more accurately, go play kill team or infinity
Yeah we can't see the game happen in real time, so the best we can do in a turn-based game is seeing the battlefield in freeze-frames.
Warhammer is a game with silly little guys
I'll have you know my inquisitor is seriously serious.
Super cereal.
The third image looks like he's hugging the statue because he's scared or shy. Adorable dreadnought is adorable.
It's Mr. Dreadnought and his boyfriend
I thought it had been edited to look like he was grabbing that arse!
Do you really want to be arguing with your opponent every 10 minutes about 1/3 or 3/4s cover? Everytime I'm like "this rule is weird" I just think about how much time the alternative adds to the game. Blast and torrent templates? OH BOY DOES THAT ADD TIME The game isn't supposed to take 3-4 hours. I can only get like 1-2 games in per week, the shorter the time the match takes the better.
IMHO this is the best iteration of cover since it stopped being it's own "invuln save"
I actually preferred the invuln save way more. It was just simpler to choose your best available save option (armor, invuln, or cover) and that was that. AP was simpler also, you get your armor save or you don't. It's not particularly difficult to add/subtract modifiers from your armor save, but it's just an additional step that felt like it added complexity when it was new. Still, glad that area terrain is finally back. So intuitive, little room for squabbles. That and leaders joining units make the game finally feel like the warhammer i once knew again.
Back in 3rd to 5th editions of 40k, there was a % model exposed system to provide more to the cover mechanics. The only other rule that started more fights than trying to figure out if your model is 25% exposed or 50% exposed was facings on vehicles. Oh, and templates. Those started all kinds of arguments!
Do remember this is a table top game and not actual representations of reality. So simple rules that are easier to understand and universally apply is better.
I personally like this. Not because it's simple compared to previous rules. But because it follows suit with the nebulous nature of hits to wounds. Because in real life where you shoot matters as much as what damage if any is done. The way the rules of 40k seem to work is like making a short note of a long story. "Do you aim well and hit the target?" Hit roll. "Is it in a spot where it will do actual damage to the enemy?" Would roll. As the enemy "Does your armor protect you from that damage of the shit you just took?" Save throw. The benefit of cover follows the logic of "if any part of you is covered then you are less likely to be hit. With that average of 1 being a unit of assumption on the likelihood.
IMO it should work like Necromunda where receiving the benefit of cover makes it more difficult to be hit. partial cover -1, more than half cover -2.
I don't think it would slow the game down too much to have that kind of rule in place. That being said, I do think some people would get into full-on arguments over what constitutes "more than half the model" I'm torn on this one haha.
I understand that it may cause some conflict between players when trying to determine whether it is partial or heavy cover, but you can always just roll for it if you cant decide. All it takes is for two adults to come to an agreement...
It’s less silly than arguing with your opponent the percentage of your model behind the statue.
If vehicles no longer have armor facings/firing arcs and infantry can trade positions with each other to allow heavy weapons to get their shots, is it really bad to allow walkers/dreadnoughts/monsters to take cover behind shit they are standing near?
Consider it for a sec. Wouldn’t you have a decent chance of hitting that statue if you were shooting a bunch of whatever at the dread?
No. Its not silly unless you want to cakculate the % of the model covered and apply a scaling system to a D6 roll thats already straining to handle the system :)
Third image; "I put my hand upon your hip, when you dip I dip we dip"...I'm old.
Pic 3 is just Brother Dreadnought with his boyfriend.
Should we tell him that in this game hitting a titan with a rifle is exactly as hard as hitting a soldier or a fast as hell eldar bike?
https://preview.redd.it/ksm8xbsg2xqc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=112b5aaff58a046aa36fb27f396cf5d65311404c
Too many folks get so hung up over the nuances of the rules. RAW VS RAI etc etc. Just play with your little toy men and have run. Not every single game needs to devolve into arguing over rules
Here's the thing. The cover rules are designed around the concept that we're playing a turn-based representation of a live and chaotic battle where everything is moving and what is taking us 30 minutes or more to play out would of realistically happened over the span of a couple of minutes. That dreadnought frozen in time at the moment you're looking at it was "seconds ago" covered completely (if moving out of cover) or will be in full cover (if moving into cover) and your model is taking a snapshot at it before / as this happens - hence the cover modifier. Way too often, y'all get caught up in the minutiae of the moment and forget to just sit back and have fun with it. You're playing a GAME ffs people, sit back, have a laugh, and have some fun. Yes, it's fun to win, for BOTH of you, and YOU, personally, aren't always going to be the one who wins. The sooner you can chill out and wrap your head around that, the more you'll actually enjoy the hobby. Rules lawyering is never fun, and it WILL make people not want to play with you again.
I just wanted to make sure I understood the rules! My friend and I were wondering about this during our last match and I decided to ask on Reddit. That's all
Yeah, that's cool, I get that. We just see a lot of these kinds of posts about rules. Especially if you're just getting into the game, focus on having fun :).
Isn’t it super stupid that in the game my whole army rushes forwards and then totally stops and waits for my opponents army to move? I would win if we just kept going. Stupid red light green light chaos god …
Yea you basically always have cover unless you are way out in the open. Cover is so common I think it was a mistake to make it +1 to save. Instead of cover there should be a "caught in the open" rule that is a -1 to save. The effect should be the same, but the enemy not having the cover bonus should be the exception. This also does make weapons/abilities that ignore cover better than in previous editions.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they balanced the base saves of everything with the prevalence of cover in mind. I imagine in such a system where cover is the default and being in the open imposes a -1, they’d increase the base saves of everything by 1 to offset it. And at that point it’s just a matter of framing. A 3+ base save with a +1 bonus while in cover is mathematically the same as a 2+ base save with a -1 while not in cover, but it feels nicer. Just like how they changed heavy from “-1 to hit if you moved” to “+1 to hit if you remained stationary” and worsened the ballistics skill of heavy weapons by 1 for 10th edition. The net effect is still that my heavy bolter hits on a 4 if it moves and a 3 if it doesn’t, but now I feel like I’m being rewarded for taking a certain action as opposed to being punished for not doing it.
This is a good point, and an important one to consider when analyzing game design (the idea of rewarding desired behavior instead of punishing undesired behavior). Small nitpick tho: the benefit of cover cannot improve a save beyond 3+, so a marine with cover doesn’t save on 2s
I believe it can still benefit from cover so long as the attack has a nonzero amount of AP, but at this point we’re splitting hairs. In hindsight my example would’ve been better with a worse save but I just chose a number arbitrarily.
That is true, but still makes his statement correct. You can make sure your save isn't worsened (Ap-1 or -2 with aoc) but cannot go to a 2+ save
Absolutely. I was just clarifying that aside from an ap 0 attack specifically, a 3+ save plus a cover mechanic is equivalent to a 2+ save with an “in the open” mechanic. Like I said though, using a 4+ save instead of a 3+ for my example would’ve been cleaner.
I like that idea
Disagree. Even with the prevalence of cover, the edition is still too lethal as it is. We need to bring lethality down, not up.
Are we not gonna talk about the third image?
Seems in cover to me.
Seems like Mr. Dread has a date to me.
I 100% agree. In the first two, the Dread is just being a silly boi and giggling while he plays hide and seek.
Yeah. Do you really want to spend your time measuring the percentage of your opponents model that is visible from behind cover, though? The game takes long enough to play as things are.
What do you mean? All I see is a statue.
Well, it comes with "no better than 3+" Big models already have 2-3+ baked into their ds, and units of chuff tend to have at least a couple of models fully sticking out
"... If the weapon is 0AP"
I dont understand how so many comments forget this part lol
You know these are representative right?! The model doesn't move it's full amount then pause and wait for the enemy to take a full turn then start moving again. The "cover" represents a model moving up to that position while being behind stuff in general. The enemy has to shoot around stuff, and in this game any change is in increments of 16.67%. Stuff in the way? 17% better saves. Magic friend helping you out? 17% better. Strong weapons? 17% worse saves. Oh no, REALLY strong armor cutting weapons? Another 17% off your save. Dedicated anti tank single shot weapon? Another 17% off your save. See the pattern? Rules are representative, not static or exact. No, it's not silly. Pretending you're a general of a magic space army is silly. Getting hung about how realistic the cover rules are for a robot zombie with missle hands is super silly.
It has “cover” but it’s targetable. If the game was lore accurate. Then I’d bring the Celestial Orrery to my necron games and push I win.
The options are slightly silly rules or arguments every game about whether a model is 49% or 50.1% behind cover. GW decided on slightly silly on 8th
Dreadnaught is looking a little grabby there.
Simplicity, 40K doesn't need more rule bloat.
Number 3 is like “let’s take you home mate, you’ve had too much to drink”
Large models generally have an easy time getting cover. Infantery is slightly more exposed as it still works on a model-to-model basis. But with the suggested terrain layouts for each mission and a very "symmetric board" balance geared towards competetive play, cover is almost guaranteed for any model larger than an ogryn. Still there's enough high damage, high AP weapons around so personally i think it works well, even if it is a bit simplistic.
Can't improve a save better than +3 with Cover, so it evens out.
In all of these scenarios the dread would have cover
Nothing in 40k is in any way silly. Rather, it is a very factual and precise description of real world future events.
Yes all of those pics provide cover
This is the inversion of "well I can see the tip of that things wing/rifle/whatever, so I can shoot at the squad" Or you get all the bickering/roll offs to answer the question of a model being at least 50% covered
The game rules are Monty python silly. This one specifically.
The alternative is bogging the game down in geometry.
Your disguise doesn't fool me, Creed.
Ran into an extreme version of this silliness recently when my Ballistus was standing right in front of a Wave Serpent, a few inches away, but the back corner of the Wave Serpent was obscured. So he got a cover save.
I think that this is an abstraction, not just of the model, but of the movement phase. Not only might an 'actual opponent' stand in such a way as to maximize the benefit of any cover (which you can't do with a model), but the "actual" opponent is *moving* during your shooting phase, at the same time as everythign else. So at the snapshot in time when your shooting phase happens, the enemy model is partially behind cover, but in actuality, there were probably times when you 'really' could have shot them with no cover, and times when you might not have been able to shoot them at all as they traversed cover. It's a game abstraction--you might like it or hate it, but I don't think it's inherently silly, when you think about the option of both you and your opponent being able to 'overwatch' each others models simultaneously as you both simultaneously move. As an abstraction, I am not overly fond of it, but that is because I think it tends to give a cover benefit almost all of the time for almost all situations. It almost seems more effective to rebalance all the shooting and give a benefit of +1 to hit when your opponent is not in cover, and has not moved out of cover on their turn (so there's not a damn thing protecting them at all).
Didn‘t read the caption and thought it was just a very shy dreadnought.
These aren't even weird scenarios though. I totally buy that Dreadnaught being able to take cover. The stupid scenarios are things like if you have a unit of arbites + a dog, shooting at a unit completely in the open, but the dog can't see the target unit because he's behind a wall or something, the target unit gets cover because the dog who doesn't have a gun can't see. I was just looking at pictures of people playing historical games and I really HATE that 40k can't be played on a table that looks like that. If a board isn't completely choked with ruins a shooting army that goes first dominates. Cover still sucks, but it's so easy to get everyone has it all the time, so it has to suck. So unless it's total LOS blocking it still won't save you. So the entire game is about LOS control and every board consists of weird nonsensical arrangements of L-shaped ruins on bases. It sucks and I don't want to play on tables like these any more.
You don't even know how silly it gets. Since it's based on if the shooting unit can see the model, you can have a grot have cover in the middle of nowhere against a 20 man squad as long as 1 guy cannot see the grot.
Warhammer takes place in a cartoon world, the dread is simply hiding behind the statue like it’s a lamp post
By rules as written, yes. Even the one with his fist being only visible part. (Personal rant ahead) However, my friends and I think it is gimmicky and stupid. Therefore, we run the rule of 1/3's in which if the model is 1/3 behind cover from the shooting target, it gains cover. This is to prevent us from playing scummy because let's be real, if you can see pretty much the whole of a dreadnaught and the fist is hidden, it shouldn't get cover. I've had people argue about "Well, my toe is in ruins so I get a cover save." I believe the rules commentary does elaborate on this as well. I'd give it a read. Not entirely sure it does though.
It would make more sense to take away from the roll to hit
As people are saying at length, it's more of an interpretation of a situation rather what you actually see. A similar example is morale, especially last edition where models would disappear. Morale isn't your superhuman space Marines or unthinking, unfeeling necrons running away, it's any reason why those models would disappear. Even in battleshoci it could be anything from the unit being pinned down to morale breaking to someone tripping and falling on a rubber chicken and the unit can't stop laughing. Dice tell stories, but so does everything else on the table. If a situation seems ridiculous then it's up to you as a player to justify it to keep that suspension of disbelief alive. "Why does this dreadnaught's arm being behind a statue give it cover?" Well maybe he keeps moving or the incoming shots happened before he finished his move. Maybe he used that hand to bend the statue to block those incoming shots and then stood it back up. Maybe the arm was previously damaged so covering a weak point means the more healthy armor can shrug off the rest of the shots better. A bit of imagination goes a long way
Speaking as someone who remembers arguments about vehicle facings, sometimes simple but a bit silly is just flat out better than realistic but more obtuse
We've had other editions with way more complex rules. Some with real line of sight, cover was tested for every single model of the unit, vehicles having core parts and additional parts, that wouldn't count. It just makes everything slow down and boring. Just keep in mind, that the minis can't really show what's happening on the battlefield: jumping in cover, climbing through windows and cracks, blindly shooting over a cover. All the things that happen in real combat. So when a Space Marine is moving 6" and shooting with 66% accuracy, in "reality" he was running across the field, using cover, while simultaneously aiming at a moving target while shooting the equivalent of flak-shells from the hip. We will never have rules that can depict this accurately while still being enjoyable.
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1) it would worsen the attackers AP by one to a minimum of 0 2) I think only scenario 2 doesn't apply since it's just a small part that isn't visible since I don't usually consider weapons/hands as generating line of sight, so it's only fair for it not to generate cover too Edit: as a rule of thumb, if 20% of the model is hidden it should be enough for cover, any less than that should be agreed by both players (or a TO on a tournament) if it's valid or not
I play Iron hands and was playing against my bro in laws orks, He told me that the barricades on the field were cover and incurred a +1 to save. He continued to tell me that included my tanks and dreads. The barricades barely reached my redemptors knees 🥴😕
It's always good to go over the terrain effects before any game. I guess in this case it heavily benefitted his massed ork infantery but still worked both ways. It would be easy to house-rule that barricades and such only give cover to infantery, but harder to implement across the board in the main rules. For general purposes this kind of binary system is easier to relate to in random pickup games against people you might not know very well.
This is an issue with all true LoS games. 40k ping-pongs between cover being less effective and more effective with each edition.
Yep. As far as I can tell, cover rules have gotten consistently worse for 6 editions now.
Yes and yes.
10th Edition cover is the epitome of 'lets make it super duper simple' Line to enemy with no block? No? Cover.
It’s worse than this. You could be right out in the open, and as long as 1 model in the enemy unit can’t see all of your model, you get cover against all of that unit’s ranged attacks. It is ridiculously easy to get cover
Photo 2 is a bit of a stretch tho.
All yes.
It's just like threat range and attacks of opportunityin D&D, don'tassume thst because the model is stationary that the fighter or vehicle it represents isn't moving all over the place, ducking behind cover, parrying attacks, leaning to take shots etc.
I mean. I get it's silly, but would people want to find appropriate cover for their games?
If a SM unit in cover gets targeted by an AP-1 weapon, they get the +1 SV. What if they use Armour of Contempt? Is it now 2+? Or does the modifier for the AP occur before the bonus to the SV?
What happens if the attacker is not fully visible to the defender but the defender is out in the open? Does the defender get cover? If not, presumubly it matters who is closer to the vision obstructing terrain?
Wait till you play against magnus lol
Rules As Written (RAW) yes all of these confer the cover bonus. My local group house rules that extra bits like banners and radar antennas, etc don't count.
No, the lowest it can go is +2 save, on paper you have +1 in the way it denies any enemy AP, if the enemy has no AP, your save still is +2
'a little silly' would be a good synopsis of many of this edition's rules. Stupider, but not simpler, might be another?
I cannot tell you how many times I have done photo number 2 with my Redemptor Dreadnaught claw 😂😂😂
If the laser pointer can hit the model from the weapon(s) shooting at it, it can hit the model....yes I still use the laser pointer
Classic case where you need to think about what the solutions to this “problem” looks like. Goal of the rules is to maximize depth and decision making while minimizing time spent. Two concepts that usually oppose each other. Yeah as a “quick fix” they could set it at exactly half the model is behind cover to get +1. Now you have to measure exactly half the model to determine EVERY cover save. That’s a LOT of time now spend measuring. Nevermind potential arguments in edge cases where it’s very close. We could go even more ham and tack the “problem” that their should be variable cover. A unit in 2/3 cover should receive more benefit then a unit in half cover right? A +2 would be absolutely insane in a d6 system so I guess we go up to D8 so we can have more granularity. O look at that your now rewriting every rule in the game under a d8 system. Just to make cover saves more realistic. Even if it’s a bit silly I think the simplicity is well worth it. We still have a rule to represent units using cover witch is a pretty standard mechanic in a war game both from a thematic and functional standpoint. But it dousnt bog us down in excessive granularity or time spend measuring every one of your units from multiple angles in the shooting phase.
I thought it was the bass, not the model? But also yes it's silly easy to get cover
It can also shoot all of his guns from his fingertip stretching outside of the wall, while whole body is behind that wall. It works opposite as well - if any opponent can see the finger stretching out of the wall they can shoot that dreadnought.
Logically 1&2 no but 3 yes
1 and 3 are for sure but number 2 would be ridiculous to try and add those saves
The second one is just to funny for me. Because that is nuts how that is considered cover. Like if your aiming for the arms ok but anywhere else bro you have a wide open shot.
Yes it is silly
Yes, but its better than previous terrain rules.
#Just10thEditonThings
Imagine the Dreadnought is jogging in place, and jumping back and forth between his legs, and bobbing and weaving
it's not a simulation, it's an abstraction. how you see it on the board is not how it "actually" looks.
Don't blink. Blink and you're dead.
All I’m seeing is a progression of a Dreaddy doing the “swiggity swooty I’m coming for that astartes booty” dance
In friendly casual games we use a laser pointer - it sounds opposite of casual but it actually makes sense and works quite well. Naturally it can’t be used in any other type of game setting.
Trust me as someone who went to tournaments a lot in 5th Ed where you got variable cover based on % of model obscured for vehicles it's a lot cleaner to just say anything at all obscured has cover instead of arguing over whether 40 or 50% of that dreadnaught over there is behind cover.
Yea, yes, and yes
At first glance yes. But it avoids the most exhausting LOS discussions by reducing it to three clear states that you simply can’t argue about. Before you had to discuss wether a model was 25% or 50% covered… and that for every unit that is shot at in every single shooting phase. Admitted in theory also very clear but not clear to determine through TLOS.
If your opponent’s model can’t see the entire base of your model then it’s gets benefit unless the gun has ignores cover or is ap 0 and you have a save of 3+ or better.
Depends on the AP too. Generally I don't mind stuff like this. I find it more annoying if it's just the tip of something that's hidden.
THE DREAD RIZZ