Dear Spikey Bits, it’s your resident loudmouth Op Ed, JStove. Today, I want to tell you about the upcoming rules change that I think is going to save 40k, and I’m going to tell you why.
Now, for the sake of laziness, and not having to google around the internet or scroll through Facebook, I’m going to lay out all the stuff for you right here in this article.
The rule that is going to save 40k next edition is ARMOR SAVE MODIFIERS.
What are armor save modifiers? The answer is that they’re an older, better solution than the AP system, which has always been garbage, and I’ll explain why and give you a history lesson.
If you played the pre-Age of Sigmar editions of Fantasy, you already know what they are. If you got into Warhammer after the world exploded and only know Fantasy as Age of Sigmar, then armor modifiers are the REND stat.
Some weapons have a REND stat that makes their saves against them take a negative modifier, making the save more likely to fail and the damage more likely to stick. It’s that simple.
Anyone who remembers the old Fantasy modifier system remembers that the modifiers were Strength based, but could be boosted by special rules. For example, here’s the chart.
- S4-1
- S5-2
- S6-3
- S7-4
- S8-5
And of course, as I mentioned earlier, some weapons had a bonus. A black powder pistol carried by an Empire engineer was S4-2, so it was even more effective at putting people down.
As you can see, under this system, the strength of an attack becomes a forgone conclusion. A model like a Chaos Knight with an armor save of a bajillion is probably going to laugh off a S4 hit, and completely ignore a S3 hit. But if he gets clocked by a cannon ball, which is S8, his armor save goes straight to Tshirt Tier and he is screwed.
This is actually the system that used to be in SECOND EDITION 40K.
Now let’s have a history lesson, and I’ll explain to you why this system is a good thing, and why it will Make 40k Great Again, by order of President Rowbootay GuilliTrump.
Around 1999, the third edition of 40k was released. It was a massive streamline of the 40k rules intended to make the game more faster and playable. This was pretty much a good thing, because second edition was bloated. It was bloated like 7E was bloated, with extra Nurgle’s Rot. The psychic phase used magic cards, the vehicle damage rules were insane, there were normal dice, sustained fire dice, artillery dice, and the scatter die. Strength D in 7E does not even begin to compare to the level of wacky shenanigans you could get up to in 2nd ed. The game was more like an RPG you played on the tabletop than an actual tabletop wargame.
3E gutted 2E, and put some much needed training wheels on the game. By that I mean it went from being a hot mess to “actually playable.” Did it go a little too far into the shallow end of the pool? Probably. Each edition of the game after 3E tweaked the 3E formula more, progressively moving the rules back, making them more sophisticated and introducing more depth back into the game… Until we get where we are now with 7th, which is the state of critical bloating.
The biggest change from 2E to 3E was the AP system.
This is the system we have all known for almost 2 decades now. You know the one- A heavy bolter is AP4, so scouts go die. A plasma gun is AP2, so terminators go die. It’s very simple, you read the AP number on the gun, if your opponent’s save isn’t better than that number, you tell him to duck or pull models off the table.
It works right?
Here’s the problem.
It didn’t.
It screwed up the game mercilessly, and a lot of players don’t understand that because only the whiniest, gnarliest, most die-hard fans who have been playing long enough to remember Rogue Trader and 2E remember how it was before that.
What the 3E AP system actually did was polarize saving throws to a level where they were no longer fluid, flattening the game, and a lot of models in your collection paid the price.
What am i talking about?
Consider the Terminator. When the AP system hit, he went to crap. Are you going to pay 40+ points for a model that’s too fat to ride in a rhino, and will just get gassed by a dude with a plasma gun when he gets there? No, you aren’t. Because he’s inefficient and ineffective. In a world where plasma guns are 15 points, a forty-fifty point terminator has no place in an army list.
Keep in mind that in original 3E, when all this happened, terminators didn’t have an invulnerable save. The 5+ invulnerable save for terminators was added as errata at a later date because GW realized that terminators had fallen flat on their face and people weren’t buying them or putting them on the table.
But what did terminators used to be like? Under the old system, the terminator HAD A 3+ SAVE AND ROLLED IT ON TWO DICE. He didn’t pick the highest, he added them together. That means that it was effectively impossible to kill him with something like an autopistol, but a weapon like a lascannon or a plasma gun could still melt him… BUT he still had a snowball’s chance if he rolled hot box cars on his saving throw. You can imagine that this made terminator armor a very important choice in list building. It made more sense to sink tons of points into an elite, low model count army that had more effective survival tools.
But not only did Terminators get flattened out by AP, the pendulum swung both ways. For example, power armor became insane.
Under the old rules, power armor was effective, but not impenetrable. Shooting a Marine with a bolter lowered his save to 4+, meaning that it was possible for marines to actually die if you shot them. But under the 3E AP system, if a marine shoots a marine, it statistically takes them 9 shots to kill each other. (9 bolters fire, six bolters hit, 3 bolters wound, pass 2 saves, fail 1.)
Understand that under the 3E AP system, paying points for better armor saves didn’t make sense because high powered weapons killed them automatically, but paying points for strong armor saves escalated in value significantly, because power armor only got better- It still died to high powered weapons that killed it automatically before, but it lost no effectiveness against small arms fire that threatened it previously.
Is that too much math and science to tackle?
I don’t think it is. It’s really pretty simple.
But that’s not the only argument.
Understand this- Ever since the 3E AP system, the game has constantly been struggling to find a balance between survivability and killing power, and it’s one that you as the player were losing, because that’s where rules bloat crept in.
The first thing that happened when we got flat AP was that 2+ saves became garbage, because survivability didn’t scale. So as a way to reintroduce value, GW gave Terminators the 5+ invulnerable.
We also had problems like Instant Death and Eternal Warrior. What happened if you hit a marine with a krak missile? Didn’t he just die because it’s an anti-tank rocket? Well, yes and no. Under AP, a marine could theoretically survive as long as he had better armor than AP3, or if he was an Eternal Warrior, or if he was T5 and had multiple wounds… You get the idea, there’s a lot of asterisks after that krak missile. A lot of different special rules are arguing over whether or not he lives. But under the old system, the krak missile had a huge armor save modifier and did multiple wounds. There didn’t need to be rules like Instant Death and Eternal Warrior because when you hit infantry models with things like krak missiles and melta guns, they actually took D6 wounds and turned into pink mist.
Now if you’re following me, you can name other survival rules that kept getting bolted on to the game over the years to create the huge web of saves and not-saves and extra steps to bog down the game. Things like Terminators that STILL WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH, so we invented Cataphracts, Grey Knight swords, and storm shield invulnerable saves. Rules like Feel No Pain, which was like a saving throw, but isn’t actually a saving throw and only works on wounds that don’t have instant death, and only on Tuesday…
You get the idea.
Under the armor save modifier system, the one that is coming back, saves are mutable. The effectiveness of the weapon dictated the likelihood of it’s killing power. But under the flattened AP system we got with 3E, things became over-simplified, and because they became oversimplified, we bolted on bloated survival rules to artificially provide depth.
The final and most important reason that the new/old/retro save modifier system is so great, is because it brings lethality and combat maneuvering back to the table.
Remember when I brought out the math that said you needed 9 bolter shots to kill 1 marine?
Well, if the bolter knocks power armor down a notch to a 4+ save, that saves you a lot of bullets. That means that small arms fire will actually matter, rapid fire guns will work, fire warriors will go from being “Those guys I need to sit on objectives” to “The most effective unit in the army for killing stuff” and the name of the game will change.
Here’s an example- Right now when you buy a squad of marines, you read through the codex and you ask yourself, “how many of these chumps do I have to buy to get that plasma gun and that missile launcher?” Every 4 Marines is a weapon tax for the fifth Marine that is a specialist, the one that has the effective weapon you care about.
But if armor saves have modifiers, and guns like bolters become effective against armor again, then you actually care about bolter marines, and you actually care about maneuvering the whole squad into firing positions, not just the 4 nameless schmucks who are just bullet sponges for the 1 guy with the plasma gun. Because if you can double tap your bolters and rapid fire your guns on your opponent before he rapid fires you, with that increased killing power, you are more likely to pull models off the table and more likely to create an advantage, and that’s WAY BETTER than just standing on your side of the table pulling triggers nine bolters at a time to drop one marine.
That’s… You know… Actually a strategy game. That thing we want 40k to be
