Warhammer 40K: The Bad Rule We Should All Agree To Play Wrong
This is one Warhammer 40K rule you are likely playing wrong – and that might be OK.
Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition is still pretty new. A lot of use are still learning all the nuances and getting our heads around the changes. Some of these changes are intuitive and great. Others are a bit twisty and can be hard to grasp. Today let’s take a look at a set of rules I think a lot of people are getting wrong, modifiers, and why maybe we should agree to just play them the wrong way anyway.
Modifying Madness and OC
Modifiers are pretty common in the game and understanding how they work is big. I’ve already touched on one aspect of how they get wonky, and that’s with Battleshock. One of the big things that being battleshocked does is reduce your OC to 0. In fact, in many cases this might be the only thing it does, if the enemy isn’t playing an army that benefits from you being battleshocked and you aren’t planning on using a stratagem on the unit. However, it can actually be fairly easy to mostly ignore this. This is because of how modifiers work. Per the rules, the first thing you do when battleshocked is set your OC to 0. Then you add any modifiers.
So if a unit has one of the banner bearer units that a lot of armies have, you get to sit at OC 1, which might be your default anyway. Guard infantry with a banner and under the right order get to sit at OC 2 even when battleshocked! Playing and building your army right thus can kind of let you ignore one of the big downsides of battleshock. The real important thing to take away from here is that if something sets your value to 0, you can then raise it with other modifiers. That’s going to be a theme as we move forward, and a real issue.
0 Damage Isn’t 0
So there are a few rules out there, such as the Rogal Dorn’s Ablative Plating that reduce the damage of an attack to 0. These are good but normally pretty limited rules. The Dorn’s for instance is once per battle. Now this should be a pretty easy rule to use right? You get attacked, use this kind of rule and take 0 damage. Well, not in 10th Edition. Because again modifiers, like this rule, that set your value to a certain value are applied before other modifiers. But I mean, maybe that isn’t the case with damage?
No in fact the rules commentary specifically reinforces this is how it works for Damage. So lets say you are getting shot with a melta weapon at half range. You use Ablative Plating. This reduces the attack’s damage to 0. You would then add on the melta damage, or any other bonus damage, thus getting some damage through. Suddenly your rule that reduces damage to nothing just reduces it a bit. This isn’t even limited to Melta. It works with anything that adds, modifies your base damage. So for instance the Deathwatch enhancement Thief of Secrets, which buff’s your damage also allows some wounds to go though.
Random Rolling Getting Through
So here is a chance to take this rule even farther and make it sillier. What about weapons with random damage? I mean, surely they can’t just bypass 0 damage rules? Well… maybe they can. See if you are making a roll, lets say your damage is D6 – then that is a dice roll. Now again per the rules commentary, a dice roll can never be modified below 1. So it seems that even with a 0 Damage rule, which again is a modifier, if you apply this rule you’ll be doing 1 damage to your target. Not great but something (on the plus side it means that rules that make you take minus to advancing and charge rolls can’t reduce you to 0). This seems like a really silly application of the rule.
Free Isn’t Free
Ok, one last example. Lets take a look at the Common Space Marine Captain. They’ve got a rule called Rites of Battle which allows a unit to use a Stratagem for 0CP. A lot of units have this rule, most armies have at least. Again this seems pretty simple. Use a stratagem and don’t pay for it.
So what happens when this rule comes up against something like the Callidus Assassin’s Reign of Confusion rule? This is again a not too uncommon type of rule that increases the cost of a Stratagem by 1 CP for the rest of the game. Well… it seems like suddenly your free stratagem isn’t free now. Because you set the CP value of the stratagem to 0 first and then increase it by 1. This means instead of paying 0 CP, you have to pay one. This is a bit silly since it could now mean that using a 2 CP base stratagem costs you 0 CP, but using one that used to be based 1 CP and has gone up by 1- now costs you 1 CP. Even though they both effectively cost 2 CP, one is more expensive for you.
You might be tempted to argue that these changes to CP aren’t modifiers, after all they aren’t effecting a stat or anything. Well GW is pretty clear about this: “Modifiers are rules that change a numerical value from one value to another”. Both of these effects are rules. The CP cost of a stratagem is a numerical value. It is being changed. Therefore it’s pretty clear these are modifiers and need to follow the normal rules.
Should We Just Play These Rules Wrong?
Look, let me be frank. I don’t like the way these rules work. I understand why GW wrote the modifier rules the way they did. They actually work fine for most things, especially rules that buff your stats. However for some things I just don’t think they work, and they are super unintuitive. I mean call me old fashioned but I kind of think when a rule says something is reduced to 0 it should like… be reduced to 0. End of story. I know some of these are corner cases, like random damage weapons getting 1 thought a 0 damage rule, but it still doesn’t feel great. It allows these little tricks to get past stuff in a not fun way. Like I can reduce your 18 damage mega cannon to 0, put your puny meltagun gets 2D though? Why?
I’m guess a lot of people are already getting this set of rules wrong. After all most of us are used to a rule that reduces something to 0, doing exactly that. I kind of think maybe we should all just agree to play it wrong. Or GW can change the rule commentary. But as it stands the way things work is just… awkward and strange and not evenly applied. Let’s hope for a better, more intuitive solution.
Let us what you think about how these rules work, down in the comments!
