Hi All,
What started me thinking about this topic was a set of rumors that recently popped up. I don’t know how valid they are (and given their insanity I am not sure if that makes them more or less likely to be true) so take everything with a grain of salt.
The rumor was that GW would be moving its weapon profiles over to a fixed “To Wound” mechanic like Age of Sigmar. At the same time, certain units and vehicles would still have toughness values. I find this hard to believe as a hybrid system would be a mess. Having to check what type of unit you are shooting first, then having to decide if you need to use Strength and Toughness would make it really hard to get into the hobby. Plus, knowing GW, there would be some weird units who get to use their toughness that shouldn’t and vice versa. Add on the fact that you would need indexes for all armies, which would breed ill will. Maybe, if the game is getting overhauled to reduce stratagems etc. that could work, but it would likely be a big mess.
Regardless of the validity of the rumor, the idea of switching to a fixed “To Wound” mechanic is an interesting one. I want to explore this a bit by thinking of some of its benefits and drawbacks.
Benefits:
One of the biggest benefits to this new system is that it would speed up the game. Having to compare toughness to strength isn’t terribly time consuming but it does force players to memorize another chart. Let’s not forget that removing the Weapon Skill table did speed up the game and make things simpler. This system would also allow for the consolidation of +1 Strength and +1 to wound stratagems, relics, etc. which would allow for another layer of simplification. This system appears to be working well in Age of Sigmar so it could easily make the jump to 40k.
Drawbacks:
Anytime you make decision to simplify the game, you also have to give up a way to differentiate units. As it currently stands, Toughness is a key way to provide durability to units without modifying their saves or wounds. Removing Toughness would force you to make some odd decisions about how to handle certain units. Take Space Marine Bikers for example. These units currently benefit from being T5 as part of their defensive profile. To compensate for the loss of Toughness do you give them an extra wound? Well, that gives them more wounds than terminators, does that make sense? My point is that there are so many units in 40k already that getting rid of this stat will make them more similar and redundant. You cannot simply “add more wounds” as a way to make up for its loss as you strat to just get weird mixes of units with odd numbers of wounds for no real reason. While this system works in Age of Sigmar, it has only a fraction of the number of datasheets as 40k. AoS is also much more focused on melee combat while 40k is more shooting based. 40k already has some issues with spamming a high number of low-quality shots (if anyone remembers the Ad Mech book on release) and this would massively exacerbate the issue. Low toughness armies and units may benefit from the change (especially if the bolter has a 4+ to wound stat) but monsters or knights might feel the pinch.
Perhaps the biggest argument against this change is that GW would need to redesign almost every unit from the ground up. They simply have too many attacks, and shots, to adapt to a fixed wounding system. If they didn’t, people would just spam hurricane bolters on everything and see how many saves their opponent could make.
Conclusion:
I highly doubt GW will make this change as the logistics would simply be impossible. You either rebuild every unit from the ground up or you leave massive gaps in the usefulness of certain units (oh crap they might try this). The only thing worse would be trying some sort of hybrid system which would have none of the advantages and twice the drawbacks of each system.
There are ways to speed up the game, but I think this isn’t one of them. Maybe GW should look at their bloated stratagem rules, or wonky aura combinations as a start instead.
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