BoLS posted up the rumored rules and they look pretty terrible….
First of all, here’s the rumors:
RUMORED 6th Wound Allocation
Wounds inflicted upon a target unit must be applied in order of closest models to the firing unit, with the owning player getting to assign the individual hits as he sees fit within the legal models selected.
Example
If a 5 man unit suffers 3 wounds (say 2 bolters, and a lascannon), the owning player must assign them to the three models closest to the firing unit (get out your tape measures), but you can assign the lascannon hit to any of the three models who were closest.
So, why do they look terrible? Well as Big Red pointed out over at BoLS, it’s amateurish. It creates a great deal of additional measuring and micromanagement that quite simply isn’t needed.
It also opens the door to gamesmanship and sniping. Anyone who remembers 4th ed remembers how stupid the rule worked then. YOu could only hit models in LOS, which meant you could snipe individual models by carefully positioning of your own models to limit your LOS. So now, you can snipe by positioning your models at just the right distance to only hit the models you want. Or, if Tank Shocking still exists (or Lash, Pavane or any such similar means to move your opponents’ models) canny players will soon abuse this system with ease.
Also, who wants to hide their heroic characters in the back of their units? That isn’t either cinematic or fun. What we’ll see if characters hiding in units, then an over emphasis on model placement when you get into combat. Lame.
Bottom line: it’s a a rule that I think will not be fun. Therefore, it’s a bad rule in a game that is meant to be fun.
Wound allocation works fine now. It is a bit of an abstraction sure, but you must accept a certain degree of abstraction in a game if you want it to not drag on with endless book keeping or hyper-complex rules.
The more we hear about these rules, the more we lose heart. I will not pass final judgement until we have played the game several times, but things are looking a bit grim.