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 Grey Templar wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
There is no fundamental reason why a robot, a monster or a tank need different mechanics to one another.

They interact with the game in the same way - they shoot, they punch, they move.

The conversation is about scale - large things should be treated differently to small things.

Small things are removed when they take damage because they can't continue fighting whether dead or not. Large things lose capability as they take damage but are not removed.

That's it.

A tank track, robot leg, monster leg, all get damaged all affect mobility.

A tank gun, robot gun, monster gun all get damaged and affect shooting.

Etc.

A tanks fuel gets shot and blows up..instant death.

A monsters brain gets shot. Instant death.

There is nothing unique in the game that requires their rules be separated.

Tell you want. I'll give you infinite 9mm ammunition. Lets see how many shots it takes you to kill the crew of an M2 Bradly. Hint: you and the crew will die of old age before you do anything to it.

your point being? magic scif mega creature is also immune to 9mm ammo. I mean, an ELEPHANT is effectively immune to 9mm bullets.

The carnifex was t8 in 2nd ed, as was the avatar of khaine and the great unclean one. They were totally immune to bolters and lower.

Monsters being immune to small arms is as old as 40k is

 Grey Templar wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Because its fleshy and not made of metal. It'll probably have a lot of wounds, or even maybe more wounds, but in terms of what can actually cause damage it should be much more vulnerable to low strength attacks

Why?
It’s not human fleshy.
Its fists and claws can rend right through terminator, tank, and dreadnought armor.
It’s a bio-engineered device of warfare.

And, if we look at the stats…
Carnifex has a 2+ armor
Repulsor has a 3+ armor
The Carnifex literally has better armor than a tank.

Tanks didn't get armor saves back in the day when AV was a thing. And so does a squishy human who happens to be wearing Artificer armor or something.

But if you can't understand how a living creature is different from an armored vehicle I really can't help you.

I suppose the best way to differentiate it is that a vehicle is something that isn't alive and is piloted by something. A monster is something that is in and of itself alive.

If you lack the imagination to suppose that an alien, 38,000 years in the future and from another galaxy, who's species is capable of FTL travel and psychic attacks, can't have armor equal to or better than a tank's... I can't help you either.

Plus the moment that Dreadnoughts, Battlesuits, Terminators, Centurions, Daemon Engines, and suchlike start appearing, that massively starts to complicate things.

What's the difference between a Defiler and Soul Grinder? What's the difference between a Riptide and a Norn Emissary? What's the difference between a Wraithlord and a Dreadnought?

 Wyldhunt wrote:

I'm earnestly attempting and failing to understand the connection you're making between AV and bolter variants.

It's a question of game design space, which is finite. GW has chosen that this is where it wants to put its effort, in 31 flavors of small arms, each of which has a tweak or some special about it, rather than in differentiating armored vehicles from living creatures.

If you consolidate small arms and use that design space for AV, you introduce new tactical elements to the game because getting flank/rear shots can be decisive. Conversely, if vehicles are monsters on roller skates, no thought to this very real tactical problem need be given.

Instead, the focus becomes on weapon (and by extension army) selection, which frequently results in unsatisfying games because of mismatched forces.

But it doesn't if it is done well; it actually levels them because weapons that would otherwise fail against T can have success on the flank and rear AV Formerly invulnerable vehicles now have to watch their rear quarter.

I think this is more tactically interesting that throwing box lid of dice hoping for a 6.

we have individual unit data sheets

stick a silhouette top down of the vehicle/whatever on the data sheet, clearly showing some reference points

you can now vary toughness and/or save, or apply an AP modifier, or anything you like based on the arc. with a note that anything thats split across the join hits the arc of the model being shot at players choice

all round the same? yup doable, weaker from a narrow rear angle? doable. 180 degree hemispherical arcs? doable

for bonus points you could even have weapon fire arcs, all shown on a diagram thats unit specific - with a rules default that if there is no such diagram its the same toughness, armour saves and fire arcs all round.

sticks with the same system, just adds another layer, which can be used or not used on a case by case basis

Come on people, we need to learn to agree to disagree. Everyone knows the difference between a tank and a dinosaur. Yes, creatures can be thought of as organic machines, but organisms are mostly made of smaller organisms that live and die, whereas machines are just rocks glued together with a water boiler inside.
Resolving vehicle damage separately from creatures may not be strictly necessary but it can be a more interesting and thematic. Maybe Killteam could resolve Necron damage differently too, stunning and dismembering them like in Terminator, but at 40k's scale it's easier to draw the line at vehicles.

Vehicle facings mattering is logical as well since trucks and tanks cannot pivot or twist like beasts and walkers can, to protect their vulnerable points. Again it's not strictly necessary for the game, depending on the scale, but I enjoy the aspect of flanking and protecting your flank.

I think part of the issue here is that monsters are not dinosaurs, or horses or any real life animal.

They are monsters, they are covered in armored plates, they require anti-tank weapons to kill and a lot of them can punch through tanks.

You can kill an elefant with a rifle. You cannot do the same with a Carnifex.

I meant to add that I have no problem with big monsters also being immune to small arms.
However, since vehicles can be balanced by weaker rear armor or planting HE grenades in melee, I'm not sure how big monsters can be balanced similarly besides low enough Toughness.

leopard wrote:
we have individual unit data sheets

stick a silhouette top down of the vehicle/whatever on the data sheet, clearly showing some reference points

you can now vary toughness and/or save, or apply an AP modifier, or anything you like based on the arc. with a note that anything thats split across the join hits the arc of the model being shot at players choice

all round the same? yup doable, weaker from a narrow rear angle? doable. 180 degree hemispherical arcs? doable

for bonus points you could even have weapon fire arcs, all shown on a diagram thats unit specific - with a rules default that if there is no such diagram its the same toughness, armour saves and fire arcs all round.

sticks with the same system, just adds another layer, which can be used or not used on a case by case basis

If we were going to bring back Front/Side/Rear values (as Toughness or as AV), this would probably be the way to do it. The thing is, I rarely felt like arcs were really adding much to the game when they existed. 40k isn't mobile enough, played on a large enough board, or played over the course of enough turns for those values to matter much. It's simply too easy for most vehicles to point their butts at walls or board edges so that their rear armor doesn't really come up, and the majority of vehicles had the same Side armor as they did Front.

I guess maybe bringing back rear armor would encourage people to gunline (cower in their deployment zone) more and be more timid with how they use their tanks. Maybe field transports less often for fear of being one-shotted by a gun to the butt. But it seems like that's the opposite of the behavior most of us want to encourage, right?

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I guess maybe bringing back rear armor would encourage people to gunline (cower in their deployment zone) more and be more timid with how they use their tanks. Maybe field transports less often for fear of being one-shotted by a gun to the butt. But it seems like that's the opposite of the behavior most of us want to encourage, right?

Hiding with one's rear to the table edge doesn't protect the flanks, which can be reached through maneuver and crossfire.

And it is realistic for tanks to go "hull down" (so much as they can in this game) and just provide fire support. It seems silly to take transports and then park them, but everyone has their thing.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I guess maybe bringing back rear armor would encourage people to gunline (cower in their deployment zone) more and be more timid with how they use their tanks. Maybe field transports less often for fear of being one-shotted by a gun to the butt. But it seems like that's the opposite of the behavior most of us want to encourage, right?

Hiding with one's rear to the table edge doesn't protect the flanks, which can be reached through maneuver and crossfire.

And it is realistic for tanks to go "hull down" (so much as they can in this game) and just provide fire support. It seems silly to take transports and then park them, but everyone has their thing.

To clarify, hiding your rear worked in the past because historically, *most* vehicles in 40k had the same Front and Side armor. If you want to go a step beyond just bringing back facings and actively make side armor weaker than it used to be for a lot of vehicles, that's certainly an option, but that would warrant some discussion all on its own.

For instance, a rhino used to be 11/11/10. So do you:
* Make the front armor 12, making it more durable than ever before against front-on attacks?
* Make the side armor 10 and thus make it so that hitting rear armor is no better than hitting side armor? (Also, hitting side armor is usually pretty easy, so this would probably be a significant decrease in the rhino's survivability.)
* Make the side armor 10 and also lower the rear armor to 9, lower than AV normally went back in the day? This would bring us into get-punched-to-death-by-a-guardsman territory if we were using the old AV/Armor Pen system.

Summarizing a few of my thoughts:
A.) If the goal is to reward positioning by making a vehicle weaker from some angles than others, you don't need to reintroduce AV to do that.

B.) Crossfire is more likely to come up than rear armor, and it ihias the advantage of rewarding good positioning against any type of enemy unit; not just vehicles. So the feels-good of proper positioning is still there for the taking regardless of what your opponent's list looks like. Main downside is that you can't "flank" on your own (i.e. get shots against rear armor.) But personally, I'm not sure that's a terrible thing given the game's current level of abstraction.

C.) If you want to reward units for flanking an enemy on their own, the cleanest approach is probably just to give units (vehicles, though this would kind of work with any unit) a "rear" by setting a straight edge against the base/hull of any model in the unit. Any enemy that's on the same side of the straight edge as the unit is *not* flanking. Any unit on the other side of the straight edge *is* flanking and gets <insert benefits of attacking while flanking here>.

D.) Each of the above are possible changes that can be applied to the game individually or in combination. You can have flanking shots or crossfire without AV. So as we discuss options, keep in mind that each of the above doesn't necessarily depend on us *also* implementing one of the others.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
To clarify, hiding your rear worked in the past because historically, *most* vehicles in 40k had the same Front and Side armor. If you want to go a step beyond just bringing back facings and actively make side armor weaker than it used to be for a lot of vehicles, that's certainly an option, but that would warrant some discussion all on its own.

In 2nd, the armor was rated for "front" and "side/rear," which is more realistic. Yes, rear was probably more vulnerable, but not that much more.

The actual mechanism would vary depending one what system one uses, but the core notion is a good one: tanks are built to take frontal hits, and the rules should reflect this, and reward sound tactics.

Some tank in 40k have all-round protection, which reflects energy fields or alien concepts, which is fine. The thing is, by making "standard" tanks more realistic, one also highlights the weirdness of the alien stuff.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
To clarify, hiding your rear worked in the past because historically, *most* vehicles in 40k had the same Front and Side armor. If you want to go a step beyond just bringing back facings and actively make side armor weaker than it used to be for a lot of vehicles, that's certainly an option, but that would warrant some discussion all on its own.

In 2nd, the armor was rated for "front" and "side/rear," which is more realistic. Yes, rear was probably more vulnerable, but not that much more.

The actual mechanism would vary depending one what system one uses, but the core notion is a good one: tanks are built to take frontal hits, and the rules should reflect this, and reward sound tactics.

Some tank in 40k have all-round protection, which reflects energy fields or alien concepts, which is fine. The thing is, by making "standard" tanks more realistic, one also highlights the weirdness of the alien stuff.

I see the appeal, but what does that mean in actionable terms? Using the rhino example from before:

For instance, a rhino used to be 11/11/10. So do you:
* Make the front armor 12, making it more durable than ever before against front-on attacks?
* Make the side armor 10 and thus make it so that hitting rear armor is no better than hitting side armor? (Also, hitting side armor is usually pretty easy, so this would probably be a significant decrease in the rhino's survivability.)
* Make the side armor 10 and also lower the rear armor to 9, lower than AV normally went back in the day? This would bring us into get-punched-to-death-by-a-guardsman territory if we were using the old AV/Armor Pen system.

If we're going the 2nd edition route, then it sounds like you'd prefer to nerf the rhino by making it more vulnerable on 3 of its 4 sides (including the 2 notably larger sides that are easy to get in position to target)?

 Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:
I meant to add that I have no problem with big monsters also being immune to small arms.
However, since vehicles can be balanced by weaker rear armor or planting HE grenades in melee, I'm not sure how big monsters can be balanced similarly besides low enough Toughness.

Monsters should also be vulnerable to being surrounded and attacked on their weak spots.

EDIT:

Also regarding vehicles, wouldn't also make sense to limit vehicle movement? implementing facings is partially undermined if vehicles are allowed to turn as much as they want during their movement which can lead to some weird movements like a tank practically moving sideways.

Obviusly that wouldn't apply to walkers and hovercraft, but treads and wheels aren't known for their freedom of movement.

Also regarding vehicles, wouldn't also make sense to limit vehicle movement? implementing facings is partially undermined if vehicles are allowed to turn as much as they want during their movement which can lead to some weird movements like a tank practically moving sideways.

Obviusly that wouldn't apply to walkers and hovercraft, but treads and wheels aren't known for their freedom of movement.

Simulationism vs gameplay. It would make sense, but is it worth the time and energy to write those rules and then make people execute on those rules on the tabletop? If we were going to expand on vehicle movement, I think I'd be more interested in a return to different vehicle speeds and how they impact your ability to turn or your speed-as-defense. (Ex: Turbo boosting your vehicle moves it far and makes it hard to hit, but you can't necessarily change direction or disembark troops, etc.)

 Wyldhunt wrote:
If we're going the 2nd edition route, then it sounds like you'd prefer to nerf the rhino by making it more vulnerable on 3 of its 4 sides (including the 2 notably larger sides that are easy to get in position to target)?

I prefer 2nd, and wanted to support the notion of side armor in principle. As I've said before, I don't have have a set solution to it, I just think it should represented in the rules.

I also like the concept of AV being different from T because it is. Tanks aren't living things, they're shells built around living things. For expediency, we don't make a roll to penetrate AV and then roll S vs T on the crew (though 2nd did something like that).

I actually like the idea of monster facings (hard carapace vs soft underbelly?), but it would be hard to represent as opposed to vehicles with angles and wheels and things.

Sure as long as it is an Imperial vehicle, it gets harder with Eldar and Tau vehicles.

 Tyran wrote:
Sure as long as it is an Imperial vehicle, it gets harder with Eldar and Tau vehicles.

Not well versed on the Tau, Eldar had fields rather than plate armor, so all-equal armor gives them the appropriate feel.

In my most recent game (sadly some months ago), my Chaos Space Marine commander dusted a Falcon with a haywire grenade thrown from a Disc of Tzeentch. It was epic - and about the only thing that went well for me during the entire battle.

And since no one asked, my Chaos Rhinos got wrecked by flanking fire from Vypers.

And what about Riptides and Wraith units?

This distinction you are making make sense as long as you are only considering a Leman Russ on one side and a Carnifex on the other, but it falls apart if you start bringing Dreadnoughts, Wraithlords, Daemon Engines, etc.

Many of those aren't living stuff but also are not a metal shell with a crew inside.

And of course a metal shell with a living thing inside describes the entirety of the Space Marine faction and everyone else in Power Armour or better.

I still think one of the trade-offs in facings / rear armor is that monsters should not have them. Obviously big beasts aren't nimbly dodging lasers but trucks and tanks cannot pivot or twist like beasts and walkers can to protect their vulnerable points.

Also I agree that vehicles would need their movement limited like before for facings to matter.

Edit: To clarify, any walkers, living or mechanical, should be able to turn, pivot, or twist better than a wheeled or tracked vehicle in order to cover its flank. Hovertanks could have the advantage of strafing or unlimited turning.
Now if the Tau Stormsurge should have a rear facing when anchored, I'm not sure.

I'll add my voice to Wyldhunt's "Crossfire/Flanking mechanics are the better idea."

Cuadrupedal and hexapodal walkers and monsters aren't turning quickly.

And even bipedal ones aren't going to be able to protect their rear if they are flanked from two or more different directions.

If you want to make it so a player doesn't just hide their vehicles on the map edge and gunline it up, the answer to that is scenario design.

Make mobility important so they use those vehicles for more than just a firebase.


Change objectives from just something that happens at the end of the game, but instead something you need to actively interact with each turn.

Change scenarios to where the game doesn't end at a fixed turn, but rather when someone gets to a certain victory point amount. Each turn an objective is held you get a point, so if a gunline just sits back and shoots they're not getting points and could lose within 3 or so turns if they just act passively.

Make tanks want to move around. Bring tank shock back, and make it strong, so vehicles are encouraged to drive around in the middle, leaving them potentially open to getting flanked. Keep the current melee stats so tanks can fight in melee, but say they can just move out of melee if they want to because they're tanks, maybe even doing damage to units they drive through(with the units getting some attacks of opportunity).

You can design the rules in ways that make maneuvering matter, which would open the door for some actual interesting play.

JNAProductions wrote:I'll add my voice to Wyldhunt's "Crossfire/Flanking mechanics are the better idea."

Thanks!

Tyran wrote:
And of course a metal shell with a living thing inside describes the entirety of the Space Marine faction and everyone else in Power Armour or better.

Plus, what is your body but a meat machine being piloted by your brain.

Here's the list of things that were on the vehicle damage chart in the past. I feel like all of them could reasonably be applied to monsters too. I would be curious to know which of these forms of damage people feel would NOT translate well to monsters:
Shaken: The crew is rattled/thrown off their game. For a monster, this would just be the monster flinching/being thrown off rather than the guys inside.
Stunned: Per above, but intense to the point that you sort of freeze up for a moment. For monsters, this is just a concussion or a moment of overwhelming pain.
Weapon Destroyed: Your gun gets broken. Monsters' guns can break.
Immobilized: You can't move around the board any more. Tanks lose treads. Dreadnaughts and wraithlords can lose their legs.
Wrecked: You're rendered inoperable. For a monster, this means being knocked out/killed/damaged so severely you can't move.
Explosion: As wrecked, but you make it everyone else's problem. We already have a monstrous version of this on tyranids.

Grey Templar wrote:If you want to make it so a player doesn't just hide their vehicles on the map edge and gunline it up, the answer to that is scenario design.

Make mobility important so they use those vehicles for more than just a firebase.

Change objectives from just something that happens at the end of the game, but instead something you need to actively interact with each turn.

Typically, other elements in your list move around/forward doing the scoring. You don't generally send a hammerhead forward for the same reason you don't typically have devastators walking forward. Some units are sit-back-and-shoot units, and that should be okay.

Change scenarios to where the game doesn't end at a fixed turn, but rather when someone gets to a certain victory point amount. Each turn an objective is held you get a point, so if a gunline just sits back and shoots they're not getting points and could lose within 3 or so turns if they just act passively.

We're functionally in a similar position to that already. The game still ends when it ends, but *not* fighting for objective control will mean you lose in the end.

Make tanks want to move around. Bring tank shock back, and make it strong, so vehicles are encouraged to drive around in the middle, leaving them potentially open to getting flanked.

To my knowledge, Tank Shock has never really been done very well. Unless someone opted into a Death or Glory, you typically just scooched slightly to the side to no other effect. It was pretty rare someone was even able to get an enemy unit completely off of an objective with it. Alternatively, people sometimes managed to box in an enemy unit with like, 3+ tanks at once, then auto-deleted an enemy unit in a gamey way that always seemed to upset those the tactic was used against.

I'm all ears on an improved battleshock. Just know that you're proposing we do something that has failed in multiple different forms in the past.

Keep the current melee stats so tanks can fight in melee, but say they can just move out of melee if they want to because they're tanks, maybe even doing damage to units they drive through(with the units getting some attacks of opportunity).

I do like the idea of vehicles being able to fall back through other models. I'd even be tempted to say that we should buff tank melee by giving them some really potent attacks on the charge. Although that gets into the weirdness of making every tank in the game double as a melee unit that then has to pay points for a melee ability it doesn't generally want to use.

You can design the rules in ways that make maneuvering matter, which would open the door for some actual interesting play.

Say, perhaps, a crossfire rule. That rewards maneuvering against all targets instead of just vehicles. And doesn't require we bring back AV and all the problems that come with it.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Plus, what is your body but a meat machine being piloted by your brain.

And a vehicle is a machine your body drives, making it far less responsive when tenths of a second count.

Here's the list of things that were on the vehicle damage chart in the past. I feel like all of them could reasonably be applied to monsters too. I would be curious to know which of these forms of damage people feel would NOT translate well to monsters:
Shaken: The crew is rattled/thrown off their game. For a monster, this would just be the monster flinching/being thrown off rather than the guys inside.
Stunned: Per above, but intense to the point that you sort of freeze up for a moment. For monsters, this is just a concussion or a moment of overwhelming pain.
Weapon Destroyed: Your gun gets broken. Monsters' guns can break.
Immobilized: You can't move around the board any more. Tanks lose treads. Dreadnaughts and wraithlords can lose their legs.
Wrecked: You're rendered inoperable. For a monster, this means being knocked out/killed/damaged so severely you can't move.
Explosion: As wrecked, but you make it everyone else's problem. We already have a monstrous version of this on tyranids.

The biggest difference is that monsters are unitary, solitary actors, usually only capable of doing one thing at a time. Because vehicles can have crews, they can do many things at once - moving fast while firing every weapon.

While some of the effects translate, others don't. I've never heard of a Tyranid losing use of a bioweapon or a great demon breaking its sword/claws/whip. Is this a new rule?

Knocking a leg off of a walker is generally disabling, though again, this may have changed. A mobility kill on a tank still leaves the turret able to rotate and hull weapons operable.

A demon exploding is...interesting.

As for maneuver, yes, the focus of the game (and its rules) will determine how much vehicles move around. Third edition reduced them to little more than pillboxes with treads. Tanks were slow, incapable of firing main guns on the move, and really the only vehicular maneuver tactic was the Rhino rush.

Earlier editions featured far more mobility (albeit with some maneuver limitations at high speed) though transports were a bit problematic because certain hits wiped out the crew regardless of their armor. (My updated corrects this, giving all models on board an unmodified armor save, creating fun situations where Terminators cut their way out of the wreck of their Land Raider, which is as it should be.)

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Plus, what is your body but a meat machine being piloted by your brain.

And a vehicle is a machine your body drives, making it far less responsive when tenths of a second count.

Count in what meaningful way though? Are you saying that monsters have better reaction times and thus shouldn't be capable of being shaken or...?

The biggest difference is that monsters are unitary, solitary actors, usually only capable of doing one thing at a time. Because vehicles can have crews, they can do many things at once - moving fast while firing every weapon.

A flyrant seems to have no trouble moving fast while firing every weapon. It will even swoop down and follow up with a multi-limbed melee attack afterwards. My wraith lord can shoot in four different directions while jogging forward and charging the enemy.

While some of the effects translate, others don't. I've never heard of a Tyranid losing use of a bioweapon or a great demon breaking its sword/claws/whip. Is this a new rule?

It isn't a rule that has existed in the past. The point is that you're trying to make a fluff argument for why monsters and vehicles are so different they need distinct rules, and I'm making a fluff argument to counter that. A bioweapon ceasing to function is literally just a lascannon popping the ammo sack or burning through the tubes or barrel of the stranglethorn cannon. A demon loosing its sword is literally just my wraithlord cutting its arm off. Are you trying to make the case that an exocrine's cannon is impossible to damage or something?

Knocking a leg off of a walker is generally disabling, though again, this may have changed. A mobility kill on a tank still leaves the turret able to rotate and hull weapons operable.

And if you blow my wraithlord's leg off at the knee, he'll continue to do his best to sit up or roll around to point his guns at enemies. Just like the turret continuing to rotate.

A demon exploding is...interesting.

Interesting? Sure. But also not hard to picture. Big, important demonic monster dies. Warp energy leaks out as an explosion or a burst of flesh eating flies or everything near it is frozen, etc. It's your standard death of Sauron moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkIoFgFhTlo

(My updated corrects this, giving all models on board an unmodified armor save, creating fun situations where Terminators cut their way out of the wreck of their Land Raider, which is as it should be.)

Sound scool.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Plus, what is your body but a meat machine being piloted by your brain.

And a vehicle is a machine your body drives, making it far less responsive when tenths of a second count.

If we're going to go down this line of questioning, and ignore how this would determine that things like Daemon Engines like Defilers as monsters, and suits like Riptides as vehicles (which neither were, prior to AV being removed), how do we then go about calculating the response times of, say, an Ork boy to an Eldar Striking Scorpion? If these "tenths of a second" count, then there's a greater disparity between infantry units than there is between one lumbering behemoth and another.

Here's the list of things that were on the vehicle damage chart in the past. I feel like all of them could reasonably be applied to monsters too. I would be curious to know which of these forms of damage people feel would NOT translate well to monsters:
Shaken: The crew is rattled/thrown off their game. For a monster, this would just be the monster flinching/being thrown off rather than the guys inside.
Stunned: Per above, but intense to the point that you sort of freeze up for a moment. For monsters, this is just a concussion or a moment of overwhelming pain.
Weapon Destroyed: Your gun gets broken. Monsters' guns can break.
Immobilized: You can't move around the board any more. Tanks lose treads. Dreadnaughts and wraithlords can lose their legs.
Wrecked: You're rendered inoperable. For a monster, this means being knocked out/killed/damaged so severely you can't move.
Explosion: As wrecked, but you make it everyone else's problem. We already have a monstrous version of this on tyranids.

The biggest difference is that monsters are unitary, solitary actors, usually only capable of doing one thing at a time. Because vehicles can have crews, they can do many things at once - moving fast while firing every weapon.

As already stated... no. Flyrants can fly, shoot multiple guns, use psychic powers and charge. Riptides can fly, shoot a myriad of weapons, boost their nova reactor, and charge. "Monsters" are just as capable as "vehicles" in that regard, despite having one pilot - and then bringing in to having one pilot, what about the vehicles that HAVE only one pilot - a Dreadnought, a Stormtalon, a Sabre? Do they suffer because they have only one pilot, as opposed to multiple?

While some of the effects translate, others don't. I've never heard of a Tyranid losing use of a bioweapon or a great demon breaking its sword/claws/whip. Is this a new rule?

Why couldn't it be? If you can blast the limb off a Dreadnought, you should be able to blast it off of a Carnifex. If you can disable the cannon on a Doomsday Ark, you should be able to do it to a Tyrannofex.

Knocking a leg off of a walker is generally disabling, though again, this may have changed. A mobility kill on a tank still leaves the turret able to rotate and hull weapons operable.

Losing a leg doesn't suddenly stop a Riptide from using it's arms. Losing a leg doesn't prevent an Exocrine from firing it's gun (which is more sentient than the entity that carries it!)

A demon exploding is...interesting.

Not really. An implosion of reality from warp energy being destabilised.

There's far too many cases where vehicles and monsters overlap for them to be ignored like this.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:


There's far too many cases where vehicles and monsters overlap for them to be ignored like this.

I guess the point is how YOU want it to feel. Do you want vehicles to feel different from monsters or exactly the same?

I personally think dinosaurs should feel different than tanks, because they are different than tanks. I think living things and machines are fundamentally different, and rules should convey this.

A lot of rules are about fluff, giving the sense of the thing that it is. Thus differentiation is a feature, not a bug.

But if your design objective is to make infantry and super-heavy tanks merely stops on one long continuum, I guess GW has found a system to do that, and vehicles don't have variable armor, just abstract levels of hits, so there's no point in finding weak spots because they don't exist.

I mean, a carnifex might see the flash of artillery and turn to offer its thickest part of carapace, which is something tanks absolutely cannot do. You can't have a tank reflexively do a 90 degree spin to ensure its glacis takes the hit.

But yeah, I guess they both move and kill things, so the rules can be the same if that's what people prefer.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:


There's far too many cases where vehicles and monsters overlap for them to be ignored like this.

I guess the point is how YOU want it to feel. Do you want vehicles to feel different from monsters or exactly the same?

I personally think dinosaurs should feel different than tanks, because they are different than tanks. I think living things and machines are fundamentally different, and rules should convey this feeling, but yes, if you want to draw the level of abstraction back enough, a submarine is functionally an armed whale.

Do you like having a dozen different variations of Bolters?

Because that's an example of LESS abstraction. There's a thousand and one different builds of the ordinary Bolter, from different Forgeworlds, made with different exact materials, in different patterns...
But on the tabletop, they're S4 AP0 D1 24", with either 1 shot and RF1, or 2 shots for those especially good with them (namely Marines and CSM).

A Carnifex and a Dreadnought won't respond identically to different things. EMPs work better on the Dread, Poison on the Fex, but to most weapons, they're not very different. A Bolter struggles to damage either, while a Lascannon doesn't nearly as much.

If you tune in fine enough, there are differences. But are those differences worth modeling in a system of 40k's scope?

 JNAProductions wrote:
Do you like having a dozen different variations of Bolters?

...

If you tune in fine enough, there are differences. But are those differences worth modeling in a system of 40k's scope?

That's a very good point. I do think 40k wastes too much design space on small arms and I'd like to see greater division between living and non-living things.

And obviously I preferred the greater detail of games where tanks could go hull down, leaving only the turret face exposed to incoming fire.

One thing I forgot to address is the difference in response time between an ork and a Striking Scorpion.

In the edition I play, it's a big deal! High initiative allows one to dodge certain weapon attacks, sense hidden units at greater distances and gives one an edge in close combat.

Again, it's all about what people want, what makes the game feel authentic. I like tanks, so I liked rules that made them behave differently than demonic or living things.