Skip to main content

My 2 Carls on the 2+ Re-Rollable



Warning! Competitive gaming topic alert!  Hehe.

There have been a great many ideas posed for dealing with some of the issues with Deathstars in 40k right now.  One of the main culprits of this is the re-rollable save.  This isn't everything that's difficult about competitive playe right now, but it's a big part of it.

As an Ork player, I find the concept of getting rid of Battle Brothers to be rather compelling.  I know that a lot of folks don't like the concecpt of changing the rules of the game so fundamentally, though, and it really does kind of take something away from the game.  I do like the idea of being able to add some HQs to units and help out with psychic powers.

As a thought experiment, let's go the other way and imagine if every army were Battle Brothers instead. What would happen? Well, every army could have a 2+ re-rollable of some variety. Almost every army, no matter the flavor, at the competitive level could be the same. How boring is that? Well, it's the same thing we have now except only a handful of armies get to do it.

I think, in the interest of a diverse field of battle, banning Battle Brothers may really the path of least resistance. Having said that, I really think it would make Daemons extremely popular, more so than they are now.

It also doesn't actually solve the core problem and it reduces player choice, which I do not like doing. People need to be compelled to make whatever fun and fluffy allies choice they want at a tournament and feel good about this choice.




The difficult part is that the real issue lies in the fact that a re-roll to saves is inherently broken by it's very nature. A re-roll on saves is better when you have a better save to begin with. It's an exponential bonus. This makes it an EXTREMELY volatile rule fraught with the danger for abuse. I don't believe the game designers really thought it through. I think they assumed it'd be like re-rolling to-hits. That's not the case. Hitting all the time is nowhere near as powerful or important as saving all the time.

The only real and true way to fix re-rolls on saves is to completely alter how it works on a fundamental level and I'm not sure any T.O. (myself included, even as small-time and local as I am) has the balls to do that.

What about this?

Re-Roll to Saves: Sometimes a special rule grants a unit a re-roll to its saving throw(s). For the purposes of this tournament, instead of re-rolling, improve the save by 2. If the save improves beyond a 2+, consult the chart below.

1+        If a "1" is rolled, re-roll and save on a 6+.
0+        If a "1" is rolled, re-roll and save on a 5+.

This would make the rule linear instead of exponential. It would still improve 5+ saves to 3+ saves, which is good, but 2+ would be a 2+/5+ which is exactly the same as Draigowing used to be with feel no pain and that was completely managable with weight of fire.

I'd be very interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How Did it Come to This? 10,000 Points of Painted Orks

One can only make so many milestone posts before people eventually get soul-crushingly bored of them.  However, I'm going to make an exception here because with my Vengeance Batteries, I've reached a total of 10,000 points painted with my Orks.  These points include reasonable upgrades, but not ridiculous add-ons like Kill Kannons for the Battlewagons.  Let's not be silly . Here's a video of the army.  Unlike the one I did for 7,000, this does not include a running commentary of each unit.  I simply cannot find the time to do that.  However, at the end of the post, please find a complete army list. Please try to view in YouTube instead of this embed because I uploaded it at full resolution and it took me forever.  You won't be disappointed! I started playing this game in 2010 when some friends and I suddenly realized that we finally had grown-up jobs and could actually afford it.  I'd always danced around the idea of collecting Or...

Joke Armies - an Editorial

Ponies and Smurfs and Gundams! Oh my! Sometimes someone posts a joke army they've built and painted on the internet and the internet lashes out against it, sometimes quite vociferously. I have a problem with the strong objections to these armies, with caveats. Please note that, throughout this article, I will refer to armies which break the 4th wall and are incongruous to the 40k fluff as "joke armies".  Of course, I do realize many hobbyists who choose to build their armies in this way do not mean them as a joke and take it very seriously, but I need some kind of general term for the article. Shannon's Smurf Drop Pod Army Hobbyist Reasoning The hobbyists who choose this kind of path for their army express four-ish common reasons for doing so, sometimes citing two or three of them simultaneously. Cost:  Cost can be a big driver towards building this kind of army. A lot of the time, it's quite a bit cheaper to use toys to stand in for 40k models.  An ...

Loopy Paints Unto Others - Space Marines (Brown)

I've completed another commission for Frontline Gaming.  For this one, the customer chose a brown scheme using the Ravenwing iconography for a generic chapter or chapter of his own devising.  This was a LEVEL 1 commission which means just one highlight. This was the first time I'd ever done Edge Highlighting which is the preferred method for doing this level of commission.  I know it may seem strange that someone doing commission work hasn't done edge highlighting, but it's just not my preferred method.  I prefer to wet blend everything or just do blocked highlights over darker colors and washes. The first go-around they looked terrible.  I tried really hard to keep the edge highlights thin and vague, but instead they came out kind of sloppy.  Because of that, I had to spend an additional 4 hours on making the highlight heavier and more pronounced.  The good thing is, I know what I'm doing now and won't make the same mistake again; therefore a...