The rules for re-rolls says that “re-rolls happen before modifiers (if any) are applied).  This has some curious side effects.

The one I’ve met the most is that if you have a -1 to hit something and you can re-roll rolls of 1 to hit then if you overcharge a Plasma weapon it will explode on a 2 and there’s nothing that you can do about it.

But thinking some more this also happens to wound rolls when you have positive modifiers.  For example consider my melee units.  I’ll often try to manifest Blades of Putrefaction on them giving a +1 to wound and then I can also use the Veterans of the Long War stratagem to give them another +1 for +2 in total.  Now complicate it further, as I often will, by having my Warlord nearby with Arch-Contaminator as his Warlord Trait.  This allows me to re-roll all failed wounds for Plague Weapons.  But I have to do that before I add the +2.

So let’s expand the scenario a bit.  The melee unit mentioned above is a squad of Plague Marines armed with a Plague Knives and they’re attacking a squad of regular Space Marines.  So that’ll be a S4 attack against a T4 Marine, I’ll wound on a 4+.  Normally I’d just say “OK, I’m wounding on 4+ with a +2 so I’m looking for 2+ on the dice rolls.”  But that’s wrong.

What I have to do is to roll my wound dice putting any that are 4+ to one side.  Then I grab everything that is under 4, even the 2s and 3s that would eventually have become a wound, and re-roll them (that’s presuming that I’m fast rolling everything).

This will cause my chances to wound to go down, I’m re-rolling dice that would otherwise have caused a wound and there’s a chance that they will now fail to wound.

On the positive side when I’m in this sort of scenario I’m also looking for wound rolls of 7+ to trigger the mortal wounds that Blades of Putrefaction gives me.  So I now get another chance to get the 5s or 6s that would trigger that when I’ve got that +2.

However the simpler scenario of just having Veterans of the Long War will happen more often.  And I’m going to have to remember to do this right in the future.

 

Thought of the day…

If you use heroic intervention to get into combat rather than charging you can avoid overwatch.  This could be a very good thing.

The downside is that the unit won’t get to fight first as it hasn’t charged, so depending on what other combats are going on you might get clobbered before you can strike back.  You also need to be within 3″ of any enemy unit to pull it off, but for fast units like a Daemon Prince this may not be a problem.

In the situation above Typhus could use Heroic Intervention to get into combat and avoid all that nasty overwatch from the huge machine gun.

Edited to add…

The obvious thing that I missed is that Heroic Intervention happens “after the enemy has completed all of their charge moves”.  So you can’t do it instead of charging on your turn.  Sigh…

The Plague Marines above are happily spreading Nurgle’s love on waste ground, but I think that I’ve been playing barricades incorrectly…

Barricades let you models fight over them if they are within 1″ of the barricade  and within 2″ of an enemy model.  What I’ve been doing up until now is to basically extend the 1″ melee range out to 2″ if there is a barricade in between my model and an enemy.  So you can charge into combat with someone behind a barricade, models in combat across a barricade cannot shoot in the firing phase and they must fall back in order to move.

But that’s now how the rule is actually written…

Continue reading “Through the Barricades” →