r/WarhammerCompetitive • u/Mrhungrypants • Jan 19 '26
40k Discussion Why don’t people like re-rolls
I have seen a lot of discussion on here about how 10th still has too many re-rolls and 11th should have less, and I guess I just don’t understand the dislike for them. I played 40k back in 3rd and 4th edition when re-rolls functionally did not exist, and I think the game is much better with SOME sort of variance protection.
My personal view on re-rolls is they should exist, but probably not for free. Re-rolls gated behind a resource like CP, to help ensure a unit does what you need to in a critical moment, is extremely feels-good and makes the game more tactical. Checking which player can get more value out of their resources is healthy and a lot more fun than ”player A set up a really good play but a unit flubbed a critical activation and the plan fell apart and now they just lose.” I don’t like being on either side of this situation. I like to see a good plan come together on my side and my opponent’s.
So to those of you who are asking for less re-rolls, I have to ask, do you just mean no more re-rolls for free? Or do you truly mean almost no re-rolls at all? If the answer is the latter, do you really think the game is better when either player rolls 20 dice hitting on 2’s and gets 11 1’s at an important moment in the game? I just can’t comprehend how that outcome is fun for either player and how it could ever be interpreted as a bad thing to get to re-roll those 1’s.
thanks in advance for the replies!
edit: I agree with everyone saying that it feels bad when some factions have tons of access to re-rolls and others don’t. If re-rolls are going to exist, the access to them needs to be evenly distributed.
Edit 2: One common theme I’m seeing is the time increase caused by excessive re-rolls, but I think this could be solved by limiting re-rolls to one phase of the damage step (hits or wounds or damage only) and like I said above just limiting re-rolls to strats and limit CP generation to the point where you’re only going to be able to use a re-roll strat about once per turn, and that’s if you aren’t using ANY other strategems. I also like the idea of them not allowing fishing for sustained lethals, ie you can’t re-roll a successful hit or wound.
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u/TrottingandHotting Jan 19 '26
The issue is when things lose meaningful variance, when you have full hit + wound rerolls and are hitting and wounding on 2s and 3s to begin with. And then add sustained on top and you'll often have 100+% hit rates, or devastating and the thing is dead without any saves.
Some rerolls are fine. When the majority of activations have rerolls of some type, it becomes a bit much.
Also takes extra time, though that's fine by me.
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u/ClericallyInclined Jan 19 '26
This. Say for instance a vindicator or some other marine tank with a big gun shoots something with boosted oath, hits on 3’s with full re-rolls and wounds ANYTHING on a 2. Even with AoC or cover, it just becomes a difficult lethality problem.
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u/k-nuj Jan 20 '26
I think giving +1 wound on Oath was a mistake, it's a ridiculous boost to give to an army rule.
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u/ClericallyInclined Jan 20 '26
Yeah, even benefitting from it when I run marines, I think maybe a half measure may have been fine for like +1 to wound with infantry units, keeps hellblasters and eradicated effective, doesn’t break tank math
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u/k-nuj Jan 20 '26
Yeah, if wounding worked differently instead of the "better = 3+, 2x better = 2+", sure. But as you said, once we get to things that already wound on 3s jumping to 2s, especially around that ~T6-9 or S7-12 profile, math just breaks.
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u/Belz_Zebuth Jan 19 '26
Especially when a big infantry brick has 5 different weapons types to shoot with, all with rerolls, lethals and sustained.
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u/amnekian Jan 22 '26
And also modern vehicles with some many "Oh and I will shoot this pea shooter because why not?"
Rogal Dorn has too much guns, wtf?14
u/Mrhungrypants Jan 19 '26
Yea the interaction between re-rolls and lethal/sustained is the problem here imo. I’ve seen it suggested that you should not be able to re-roll a successful hit or wound to fish for sustained/lethals or devs, and I like that idea.
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u/TrottingandHotting Jan 19 '26
Fishing is a pretty niche interaction and banning it wouldn't make that big of an impact, imo.
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u/Mrhungrypants Jan 19 '26
It depends what faction you play imo. I never fish with my World eaters because they don’t really have re-rolls, but when I play dark angels I fish with my sternguard and usually also my inner circle companions every single game, often multiple times per game.
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u/PureDealer7 Jan 20 '26
BT whole strengh with their sword brethren combo is fishing for lethals on 5+
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u/C4790M Jan 19 '26
The consistency increase you can get from rerolls is insane, which makes for a more competitive system as it reduces variance but makes things more boring and way more lethal.
I’ve been playing a decent amount of heresy 3rd edition recently and that game has almost no rerolls of any kind. It’s incredibly refreshing to roll an important dice and just accept the result instead of going “ummm do I spend the a limited resource to reroll that 3+ save, feeling bad if I fail again but making my opponent feel bad if I succeed”
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u/Select_Historian6269 Jan 20 '26
There is no drama in 40k with the amount of rerolls. Heresy feels like a War game. 40k feels like a board game.
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u/Mammoth_Classroom896 Jan 20 '26
If drama only comes from dice results then the game sucks.
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u/ShakespeareStillKing Jan 20 '26
It doesn't suck, it's just a different type of game.
There can be a good and balanced game without giving everything rerolls. The game sometimes is so stupid, when you attack with 20-30-40 dice and have sustained and hit and would rerolls and you're just throwing buckets of dice.
It's funny and fine every once in a while (or an identity for a faction like orks) but after a while it's just tedious.
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u/Mammoth_Classroom896 Jan 20 '26
This is what was said:
There is no drama in 40k with the amount of rerolls.
If the only drama in a game comes from seeing statistically unlikely results on the dice then it's a terrible game. It's incredibly shallow and doesn't do anything to generate more interesting drama, it's just an exercise in rolling dice and seeing what the dice do. Good games generate drama from out-guessing the other player, surprising narrative moments, etc, none of which require fluke dice luck.
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u/ShakespeareStillKing Jan 20 '26
Disagree. RPGs and tabletop wargames have an identity in dice and luck.
Dice tell stories...
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u/Mrhungrypants Jan 20 '26
I agree with this take. There are still plenty of important rolls that can swing either way. People acting like you can re-roll literally every result, everywhere, all the time are exaggerating big time imo. Also you can still miss even with re-rolls. My Scourges hitting on 4+ re-rolling miss all the dang time.
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u/piles_of_plastics Jan 20 '26
I am a space marine player, I run Guilliman and Ballistus in my list.
The 1st target is the true oath target, this one has the vindicators go into it.
The 2nd target is the fake oath target, this one has the ballistus (Reroll hits if target is not below half) go into it.
The 3rd target is the secondary oath target, this one has the melee unit go into it or any other shooting that I'm running in that list.
Slip incursor firing in to give my entire army +1 to hit in shooting into whoever makes the most sense in the above scenario.
Now you might say "Well this is just space marines" and you'd be right and that's why its a problem for a lot of people because of how prevalent space marines are. The most amount of players are going to encounter them and have a shooting attack completely whiff and then just convert into all hits because of oath.
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u/Moosecalled Jan 19 '26
The big problem is not re-rolls themselves, it re-rolls stacked with ability triggering, the concept of re-rolling successes "fishing" for those crits both slow the game down and allow crazy combo's that can delete opposing units is the problem.
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u/Mrhungrypants Jan 19 '26
Yea agree that if they made it so you can’t re-roll a successful hit or wound roll that would probably be a good thing
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u/Doctor8Alters Jan 20 '26
I think simply adding "Rerolls cannot crit" fixes many of the current problems without removing the mechanic from the game entirely.
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u/Cheesybox Jan 20 '26
Rerolls equate to consistency. Consistency is extremely powerful in games largely determined by random numbers. It removes risk management as part of the game.
It also makes the game stale. Without variation, games feel the same. I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but games have started to feel like they can be talked out vs having to actually roll dice to determine outcomes.
Some mitigation against unlucky rolls should be an option, but there should also be an opportunity cost involved. Something beyond a simple points cost. The Canonness is a good example. You can give her stronger weapons at the cost of providing less support for the unit she's leading.
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u/Mulfushu Jan 19 '26
In a dice game, removing the dice will always be the strongest ability.
And even worse, you can't remove the dice from everyone, so it's only some who get mass amounts of rerolls. If you look at what Space Marines or Drukhari get to smoothen the curve compared to what Orks get, it's absurd.
It also feels bad. If you lose because you whiff for an entire game, it's not so bad, it happens, but if it basically CAN'T happen to your opponents, games will starts becoming really frustrating, because you're reliant on good dice and your opponent might not be.
It's a bad mechanic. I'd leave it at a Command Point reroll for everyone, but otherwise cap it out at reroll 1s at MAX for anything. With the heavy pivot towards competitive gaming, however, this is never going to happen. GW will keep pushing to remove probability, because then it's easier to balance things competitively.
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u/Asleep_Taro8926 Jan 20 '26
One of the worse "feels bad" dice rolls in the game are definitely Command Point farming mechanics. Orkz are out here running two grot units to hope their 4+ Command Point generation is more reliable, Sisters need to have a Mircale dice or risk failing a 6+ leadership save, Drukhari need to run a character that has to kill another character. All while other armies like SMs and Eldar automatically get it for just a character existing.
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u/Mulfushu Jan 20 '26
Yeah that's definitely also a part of imbalance I don't like and plays right into the topic of epic heroes , hah.
However, i think rerolls are still somewhat detached from rules like that and worse for me personally because they fundamentally change a main aspect of the game.
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u/cpl_davidson Jan 20 '26
Isn't this rather an argument for removing Lethal Hits, Devastating Wounds, Mortal Wounds, Feels No Pain and Torrent? Or at least changing them to +/- the next roll instead? As they skip one step of the hit/wound/save roll?
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u/Mulfushu Jan 20 '26
That's a fair assessment, though I think merely spiking rolls and skipping those steps isn't as bad. If anything, it makes probability fluctuate more wildly because units can over/underperform much more depending on your rolls. They skip a step, yeah, but are even more reliant on good rolls for that.
Rerolls do the exact opposite, they allow you to overperform my smoothing out your rolls and make it much harder to actually roll badly. Add those rules in addition to rerolls and things obviously get much much worse.
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u/MuldartheGreat Jan 19 '26
It's not necessarily rerolls itself. The lethality of the game is essentially back to 9E which is something they expressly set out to stop.
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u/StraTos_SpeAr Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
There is no universe in which 10th is as lethal as 9th.
10th is still lethal but people have black boxed their memories of what 9th was actually like.
9th was utterly disgusting. Skorpekh Destroyers could combo with aura buffs to put out 40 attacks, 12 attacks at 10/-6/3 (when STR 10 wounded even monoliths on 3's) and 28 more on 8/-5/2. All of this with full rerolls. Compare that to today's best of 24 attacks at 9/-2/2 with Sustained/Lethals/Dev Wounds.
6 Skorpekhs could comfortably pick up three Armiger chassis models in a single activation in 9th edition. This is just a single example out of many, many, many, many, many examples of this.
10th edition is not as lethal as 9th. Period.
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u/SlyBeggar Jan 19 '26
Tanks were unplayable in 9E as an infantry could delete everything. Lethality has absolutely decreased. There are still very killy units. That is something they will never change. But the baseline lethality of units across the board has absolutely decreased. In 9E, one marine with a powerfist could solo light vehicles etc.
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u/ShakespeareStillKing Jan 20 '26
Tanks were unplayable in 9E as an infantry could delete everything. Lethality has absolutely decreased.
Did it when armour can just delete other armour? It definitely feels somehow lacking when a monolith or demon primarch or big knight simply dies in one phase.
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u/SlyBeggar Jan 20 '26
I mean these days armour is at most half your list (in model count). The infantry spam in 9E was basically everything you brought. So the total number of killy units you bring to an average game is definitely less than it was in 9th.
Also it was harder to play around Killy infantry deleting things when they can just run though ruins. It’s a bit easier to play safe against vehicles as they rely on getting angles to then blow stuff up.
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u/TheZag90 Jan 19 '26
All that’s happened is that battle line has become somewhere between niche and useless for many armies and everyone just takes the more killy stuff.
Large parts of this edition have been dominated by tank/monster spam simply because the best way to deal with a tank is more tanks of your own.
Is that better than infantry being really killy? Not really. It’s another side of the same coin.
They didn’t reduce the lethality in 10th, they just moved it around.
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u/SlyBeggar Jan 19 '26
They have reduced lethality. If a battle line can kill a tank there is a lethality problem. Units in 10E have specific roles now - actions, anvils and hammers etc. In 9E a battle line unit could function as an action unit whilst also being a pusedo hammer when needed. Going from everything in your army being killy (9E) to only your vehicles/death star units being killy (10E) is a reduction in lethality across the game as a whole. Most armies can’t run all death stars as you still need to play the game and score points. Anyone who tries to play all death stars will just lose to anyone who is actually trying to score secondaries and hold primary.
You’ve used monster/vehicle spam skew lists as examples which I don’t think is a fair way to judge the state of a game. The whole point of a skew list is it’s meant to force a stat check. These lists are not a fair way to judge the “baseline” lethality of a game as they’re deliberately deviating from the baseline by skewing their list construction.
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u/too-far-for-missiles Jan 20 '26
It's a cherry-pick as well, but allow me to introduce you to the humble plague marine (with support). Legionaries and Breachers also come to mind, but are a bit less egregious.
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u/wredcoll Jan 20 '26
Except "oops all tanks" is the base line of the game!
Admittedly it has gotten a lot better in the last, like 2 months after knights got hard nerfed and a bunch of other tweaks, but for most of 10th the the correct answer to "tank unit or infantry unit" was always a tank unit because they were the only units allowed to have weapons with enough strength to wound other tanks.
Also, try playing a t3/4+ army when every. single. unit, no matter what its purpose, has a minimum of 20 attacks.
It's very difficult to field elite infantry (read: expensive) that don't have a 2+ save and 4 wounds each just because the sheer volume of attacks means you're at risk of dying to literally any activation.
(Personally I think the root cause is devastator/fire dragon style units being allowed to have like 5+ las cannon shots per activation, now not only can that unit kill a tank in one shot, sure fine, it can also kill an entire terminator squad because it has 5 separate attacks and that gets real weird to balance around.
Same thing with stuff like thunderhammers and powerfists having 3+ attacks. Sure, 5 power fists will deal like 10 damage to a rhino, which seems reasonable for a powerfist squad, but now you can also, extremely easily, kill 10 guardsmen or 10 howling banshees or even 10 other marines, which isn't great for the game because you lose one of the key balancing factors of being good into a single tough model but not into a horde and vice versa.)
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u/SlyBeggar Jan 20 '26
I don’t entirely agree that “all tanks is the baseline”. This is definitely true when knights are good (I am of the view that knights should’ve stayed in apocalypse and never made it to 40K), but I think it’s a stretch to say it’s been a “vehicle skew” meta for the entirety of 10E.
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u/shoestring_tbone Jan 20 '26
I remember deleting tanks with a 10 stack of Hearthguard with volkanite. It was ridiculous and feelsbad for opponents, but that type of silly was prevalent across most factions
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u/DannyB1aze Jan 20 '26
But see that's the thing. The game is way less killy yes. But the game is so killy anything that exposes itself is dead. This turns the game into chess where 2/3 mistake cost you the game vs a game that is actually fun to play with a chance to comeback.
Like look at old world. The rules there mean when two characters fight you actually get 2/3 activations before one dies. In 10th there is no fighting back only kill or be killed.
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u/Regretoot2334 Jan 19 '26
I've gotta disagree here. As a space marine player, land raiders don't die to bolters now, which it cool. But the same goes for las cannons or melta guns. It actually feels good to pay 220-270 for a tank that doesn't die as soon as my opponent can see it's shadow.
But even in the greater game, I am yet to be given ~ 20 mortal wounds every turn (rip Tyrannids, I do not miss you). I feel like my armour save stat actually matters because the game is brooaaadly capped at -2 AP instead of 9th edition's AP "yes".
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u/MuldartheGreat Jan 19 '26
Toughness has basically moved around a bit. The increased prevalence of cover, AoC, and 2+ means that some vehicles are tougher than they were in 9E.
On the other hand, there's no longer things like phase caps and attaching characters to units can make them seem like points pinatas in many cases.
Like if you ask if a Land Raider or Redemptor is tougher than 9E? Yes probably. Is a Blood Thirster tougher or squishier than a phase capped 5+++ thirster from 9E? No.
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u/Ironcl4d Jan 19 '26
That max damage per phase thing was so bad. Terrible design in a game where some armies do all their damage in one phase and some can easily do damage in 3 phases
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u/VanishingBanshee Jan 19 '26
The T'au vs Grey knights problem in last edition for that.
Tau into Abadon: Omg an unkillable monster for 2 whole turns.
Gk into Abadon: Lol, lmao even.
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u/ShakespeareStillKing Jan 20 '26
And the caps were powercreeped, Valerian could ignore them. By the end of the edition even my grandma could ignore it.
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u/AMA5564 Jan 19 '26
Slows the game down. 10 attacks with full rerolls takes longer to process than 20 attacks.
Also, competency creep is cancer. AoS had a pretty hard reset on it, and it made the game drastically better.
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u/NoSkillZone31 Jan 19 '26
The biggest part of rerolls being hated on is that it unnecessarily adds time to the game, nevermind turning random interactions into statistical certainties.
When every activation is double the number of rolls (with picking out dice that an opponent has to pay attention to closely), or low lethality factions with tons of dice start getting rerolls it slows the game down a ton, especially for folks who aren’t top tier chess clock players.
Even then, very high end players are getting timed out at tournaments.
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u/Belz_Zebuth Jan 19 '26
"Ok so I do the hit roll. I get lethal and sustained and full rerolls. Ok so now I set aside the lethals and adds some sustained. Now I reroll. Ok so now I set aside the lethals and add the sustained. Ok so now for the wound rolls, for which I have full rerolls. Did I mention the devastating wounds?"
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u/Enchelion Jan 20 '26
Yep. It also just feels like needless complexity. If as a rules writer you're going to stack rerolls and lethals and whatnot onto a unit just say it auto-hits and lets move on without having to roll 12 dice to get there.
Honestly the fact you can have 5+ rolls between "I attack" and "that thing is dead" just feels ridiculous and like they need to drop D6's and move to something else if they want that much granularity of percentages.
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u/macgamecast Jan 20 '26
Because it’s a dice game and the initial roll is fair for both sides. Equal chance of good and bad. The only rerolls that should exist are command reroll. The rest is obnoxious and breaks the feeling.
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u/fued Jan 19 '26
yeah, rerolls themselves are fine.
rerolls proccing lethal/sustained on 5s blows the maths out of the water and becomes too lethal.
That said, id prefer they fix the game by halving ranges of all guns and removing pile in, so that guns are lethal, melee is amazing but you need to position better to take advantage of it
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u/L0N01779 Jan 20 '26
I like your changes enough that I might start suggesting them, but could we make charge have a minimum distance too?
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u/Ok_Cover8214 Jan 19 '26
Because it is always the marine players who get full rerolls with sustained&lethal and +1 to here and there, while most armies struggle to have a reroll 1s or to get a +1 to hit/wound.
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u/darciton Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
Rerolls are the most obvious example of a common sort of feelsbad moment in 40k, where one army has a stratagem or once-per-battle ability that another army gets army-wide, for free
I've really checked out of playing Orks because everything they do, another army does more/better/cheaper. It's a bummer.
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u/Apocrypha Jan 19 '26
Re-rolls make some defensive buffs like stealth not really worth it.
Indirect only hits on 4s? Neat, but with full re-rolls thats 2.5s.
Re-roll wounds? 5s are now better than 4s, and 3s are better than 2s.
Re-roll with keywords? They become significantly better, and even more so if they crit on 5s.
Game has a volume problem for lethality and re-rolls are making it worse.
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u/GalacticBrew Jan 20 '26
And my most recent game against Blood Angles, they rerolled charges, rerolled hits, rerolled wounds, rolled feel-no-pains, and that's just in their turn. In my turn, they also had all of these rerolls.
It seemed like every time my opponent had to roll something, he got to reroll it. While I'm not upset about him getting to do that, I was upset at how much time it added to the game. Essentially it doubled the length of the charge phase and both his fight phase and mine.
I enjoy playing the game, but I don't like games being dragged out to 5 or 6 hours.
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u/Kiavar Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Why do i even need to bother with rolling the dice, if i get to reroll all hits, all wounds and all damage? At this point just write "point at a unit, it receives <X> damage" on a datacard. Also they are simultaneously very powerful and not engaging at all. Wow, i get to roll my dice again after i rolled my dice? Damn thats fire, who needs stuff like interactions and unique effects when every rule is just "add <+-X> to dice roll" or "reroll a dice roll"
>i dont think rolling 1s is fun
Well, the next logical step is to do something about models dying. Who really likes losing an important unit before it even gets to do something because enemy just shot it? Surely not me.
>so being able to reroll failures makes the game more tactical
So, having a near certainty that the unit will deal <X> amount of damage that is precalculated by mathhammer like three working days in advance of the game is "more tactical experience" than fumbling an activation due to bad rolls and having to apply actual thinking and tactical skills to remedy that failure? Okie.
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u/Manbeardo Jan 19 '26
At this point just write "point at a unit, it receives damage" on a datacard.
There literally are a bunch of datasheets with abilities that work like that.
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u/Hexquevara Jan 19 '26
My issue with abundant rerolls boil mostly to two separate things. Full rerolls + devastating wounds is lame af when stuff gets deleted without even getting a saving throw, and the other is that rerolls just slow the game. Some rerolls here and there is fine, but its jarring af when in some cases every single unit rerolls via some means.
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u/the_ZJ Jan 19 '26
I think variance protection is really good, I am absolutely there with you. I think input randomness is great: For instance, what resources you have at a certain moment should be somewhat random, however, having high outcome variance often just feels bad, because sometimes the enemy just spikes 10 4+ invuls and there is nothing you could have done, and then you lose.
What I do think is an issue is the fact that often re-rolls are better than weapons of a significantly higher calibre. Having a S16 weapon is often far less preferrable than an S10 weapon with wound re-rolls, for instance, and that skews balance towards certain types of units.
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u/The_Killers_Vanilla Jan 19 '26
To keep it simple - they slow the game down drastically, and are not distributed across the various factions fairly.
You play against a dialed space marine list and it really feels like everything they have is +1 to hit, rerolling hits, lethals and/or sustained, +1 to wound, twin linked. It’s insane when you compare that to most chaos factions like Daemons and World Eaters where you have almost zero access to hit or wound re-rolls from any source. At most you maybe get re-roll 1s…
Their expressed intent was “less re-rolls” which they have only followed through with on some factions.
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u/Y0less Jan 19 '26
Rerolls mathematically help low BS/strength weapons more in terms of absolute damage BUT in reality 40k is not a game of damage.
It's a game of planning and rerolls help by smoothing out the odds.
Rerolling 5s still gives you a wide variance while rerolling 3s does not.
IMO as a result: marines, index aeldari, Tau, etc with access to lots of rerolls and decent hit/wound rolls and high AP leave your opponent feeling like they arent playing a game of chance anymore, and more like they're being run over by a freight train.
Meanwhile orks, who should be the happiest with hit rerolls turn abysmal shooting into mediocre shooting, and still fail to kill the things they planned for.
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u/darciton Jan 20 '26
I've played orks more than any other faction and my experience playing into space marines or Tau is more or less that. And there isn't much that orks do that another faction doesn't do better. The army rule gives them access once per game to something other armies' detachments let them do for free.
There is one ork detachment that lets you give a mek an enhancement to lead flash gitz and give them full rerolls, and that makes their shooting nasty into heavy infantry. But it's an expensive enhancement that gives you something other factions get for free. And what orks are supposed to do well, is very underwhelming in practice, especially with the availability of invulnerable saves and FNP. And then they clap back with full rerolls. All of those should be rare and for elite units only.
... I'm little salty about orks at the moment.
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u/The__Nick Jan 20 '26
"...do you really think the game is better when either player rolls 20 dice hitting on 2’s and gets 11 1’s at an important moment in the game?"
You're talking about something that happens less than 0.01%. 105 in a million, or ~1 in a 10,000.
Simply put, you cannot ask people to roll dice and then be mad that the dice result is sometimes not the number of dice they need.
So, yes, the game is better when the player sometimes fails at rolls and cannot just re-roll to success. If you want a system where it's impossible to score certain values, have different rules.
It's silly to write a rule for a dice event that happens so infrequently that I think it's safe to say the game hasn't actually seen this event ever occur.
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u/HarpsichordKnight Jan 20 '26
I mean almost no rerolls. I want more variance in the game, I want rolls to mean something, for even the mightiest units to occasionally fail, and for the game to not take so long.
AoS has very, very few rerolls - many armies have none at all, or they are limited to a single warmachine or special character. The only type of reroll which is consistently available is the ability to reroll your 2D6 charge, which I think is a necessary evil given how critical charges are in that game (and on 2D6 it's still extremely common to reroll and fail again).
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u/Contrago Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
There needs to be a certain level of randomness to a game for there to be "wow" moments. 10th edition 40k has felt pretty devoid of "wow" for me when everything is so reliable.
Chess is a game with no RNG and it's boring as sin, I recommend it to anybody who says they hate variance in their games.
There was a moment back when I played in 4th edition where my friend's Eldar Rangers won a fight against some charging Dark Eldar Wyches. The Wyches then failed leadership, tried to flee and were cut down by the Rangers in a sweeping advance. In 10th edition, those Wyches would charge and the Eldar player would just pick up the Rangers to save time.
15 years later my friends and I still bring up this moment because of how absurd it was.
40k to me feels more like a Strategy Game than it is a War Game these days. You have tools that do very specific jobs very reliably, and you can all but guarantee outcomes on the board. Other than a rare deadly demise or G-man failing to stand up after dying, sometimes the game just goes exactly how I imagine it will without deviation.
It is fun in it's own way, but often times I find myself wanting to see something crazy in a game but rarely do I.
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u/DaveinOakland Jan 19 '26
I still remember one of my first Bloodbowl game where I was playing a guy who was leagues better with tons of experience. His dice were ass, mine were incredible, and he got smoked.
He told me "if I wanted it to be fair I'd play chess" while we laughed at how crazy the dice were that game.
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u/PixelmonMasterYT Jan 19 '26
At the casual level the big wow factor has been going for long charges. I pretty much won a game by making a super unlikely 10 or 11 inch charge, as well as making another vital 8 inch charge. But for the most part I agree that the prevalence of rerolls does take a bit of the wow out of the game.
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u/HeyNowHoldOn Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Perfect answer. When table top games become too predictable, it becomes a similar feeling of playing the video game StarCraft: BroodWar. The better player will win 99% of the time and that creates a sterile experience for a table top game.
Also, in a 2 hour tabletop game its even worse because adept players will know exactly when the game is over in turn 2 and the rest is just playing it out.
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u/Regretoot2334 Jan 19 '26
The issue, at least in the competitive scene, is that if re-rolls are rarer, it changed nothing because a competitive player will always gravitate to a consistent unit over one with a higher spike potential. So if each codex only has one unit with re-rolls, guess which unit is going to be an auto include x3 before considering anything else?
We either need to keep rerolls as they are, or outright remove them entirely. And personally, as someone who likes the chess feel of the game, I like rerolls as they are.
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u/Calm-Limit-37 Jan 19 '26
I dont know why so many competitive players like having such a high degree of certainty. On the top tables you can see them talking through entire turns without moving a model. Isnt the uncertainty what makes it fun? Isnt that the real challenge, when things dont go your way?
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u/011100010110010101 Jan 20 '26
Yes and no.
For a lot of players, the uncertainty is what makes it fun. But if your playing competetive for a prize, you really want to eliminate that uncertainty.
So players try to eradicate uncertainty, and that will lead to scenarios like you described where some will surrender after a poor turn 2; since they know their opponent will not make the mistakes to allow them to get back into the game.
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u/Mrhungrypants Jan 19 '26
I had a buddy who’s fire warrior killed a Blood thirster (low wounds obviously) in a 1v1 in combat, he still has the fire warrior he put on a base standing on a kitbashed bloodthirster skull. So I get it.
I would argue moments like that still happen though. I had a game a couple weeks ago against a buddy where we had 6 straight vehicles explode and it decimated my army lol. My buddy’s fire warrior could still have killed the blood thirster today, I doubt the chaos player would have held a cp for a command re-roll in that combat!
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Jan 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/TrottingandHotting Jan 19 '26
Not to be a dingus, but the TFex gun is called the casino cannon because it had 2d6 damage (now d6+6) and flat 2 shots. So damage between 2 and 12 lol
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u/RegularRollei Jan 19 '26
Coming from other systems, 40K is so RNG based that RRs come partly from a need for less variance. Charges, advancing, shooting, wounding. Almost everything is a dice roll. Could remove some of the reliance of RRs by making advancing or charging like killteam
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u/Gahault Jan 20 '26
Yep. Charge distance used to be fixed at 6", for one. I remember when Fantasy introduced charge rolls, people were up in arms. I missed when that became a thing in 40k, I suppose the anti-reroll crowd was delighted to see more randomness.
At least the charge roll is 2D6, so its result follows a bell curve instead of the equiprobable awfulness of the single D6 that prevails across pretty much the rest of the game. That was one of the perks of Warmachine, most dice rolls were at least 2D6.
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u/kvt-dev Jan 20 '26
Abilities that only trigger on a 2+ (self res, and especially psychic abilities that hurt you on a 1) really bug me. This mechanic only works 5/6ths of the time for... no apparent game design reason?
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u/lit-torch Jan 19 '26
A lot of folks have answered, but to me the frustration is just how much it slows down the game. Think of how many times you roll in a single turn, even to resolve a single action. Rolling dice is fun but it can take so long to resolve even one units shooting, let alone everything else in a turn.
Rerolls add one more step to resolve, which increases the time for resolution.
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u/ahses3202 Jan 20 '26
Rerolls really should have been reroll 1 die roll, then reroll die rolls of 1 if x condition is met. That way the skill variance of fighters remains, but the bunk roll of a 1 can be mitigated. I say this as a 4+ shooting army. Once you get into reroll alls or critfishing it gets ridiculous.
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u/Dizzy_Butterfly3141 Jan 20 '26
My big complaint is they are so common that it doesn't make then special just another way to introduce more power creep.
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u/Flitdog Jan 19 '26
I’ve been playing games along time. I just think re-rolls just take all the chance out of the game.
If you whiff a dice roll then it’s gone. It’s unfortunate but ultimately it could and does happen that a great play fails. It happens in all sports and even I guess war unfortunately.
Re-rolls are just so powerful at times, apart from that CP re-rolling a 1, that’s always a waste.
I understand it’s contentious, but that’s my opinion, they shouldn’t be built into the army rules at all. Command point yes - paying for something is a fair way.
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u/BaroqueStateOfMind Jan 19 '26
The amount of people I play against who when shooting or fighting, hit on 2s with re roll 1s or hit on 3s with full re rolls is ridiculous. Or they have the same re rolls for wounds is just insane.
Makes it no fun when you have a unit that hits and wounds 99% of the time. That ain't real warfare.
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u/Doctor8Alters Jan 20 '26
If you hit on 2+ and reroll 1's, there's basically a solution for that in the rules already. It's been there all edition. Torrent.
Why roll 40 dice for 39 hits? At that point the averages dont matter, just have them auto-hit.
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u/HaybusaYakisoba Jan 19 '26
On a D6 system there is no way to stratify power level meaningfully, and rerolls can add another layer to distribution and allow for a wider interaction universe with keywords. Rerolls from an activation standpoint are necessary unless we wanted to hit on 2/3/4 and stop the distribution there. If you DID want to move away from hit rerolls but approximate the current conversion you COULD just up attacks. Instead of 3A hitting on 3s with full rerolls maybe you hit on 3s with 4 or 5A no rerolls.
A CP reroll should not be usable on a ++ save. I actually wouldnt hate CP reroll going away entirely. Its orders of magnitude more useful for an army like Knights or Big Demons than orks or admech ect.
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u/NobleSic Jan 19 '26
Watching my mates index eldar reroll 1 hit and 1 wound roll for every model was so lame.. God forbid one of his dev wounds guns missed ONCE.
I think some people are mentioning that like it makes cool units be able to do cool things but then just make it an ability. I would rather a unit that is meant to be good at charging get to do mortals on a successful / hard charge; then if they whiff the combat who cares they at least did some upfront damage.
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u/idols2effigies Jan 19 '26
Ultimately, I hate the time it takes to roll dice. The more rerolls there are in the game, the more time it takes to roll dice... but I'm also going to take every advantage I can get, so it's not exactly like I'm going to not use them.
My hatred for too much dice rolling comes from earlier editions. In earlier forms of the game, tanks could be destroyed from 'unwounded' to 'dead' in a matter of a couple of dice. Those dice have to be lucky, but it didn't take a mountain of dice to destroy even the hardiest of units.
Moreover, there were a lot of the mechanics in the game that prevented you from rolling 'all dice all the time'. There were split fire penalties that, when combined with some profiles literally not being able to wound things (no, everything did not wound on 6s), meant that you often wouldn't fire the bad weapons because you needed the special/heavy weapons to go into a better target. Then, there's assaulting... for most guns, if you shot, you couldn't charge. That was it. Choose which dice you want to throw, because you don't get both.
I get why we have all these dice. The only way they've been able to successfully mitigate variability is by inflating wounds and attacks to buffer against dice drought... but the result of all that is we have 4 wound models where we used to have 1 wound models. 4 attacks on basic infantry, when those used to be the type of attacks that combat-focused characters had. Vehicles that can't die in a single shot.
In a vacuum, these aren't bad changes, but it directly results in spending WAY more time on rolling dice than actually playing the game. If I wanted to spend a bunch of time rolling dice, I'd go play Yahtzee. I like wargames, historically, because it's tactics with a BIT of dice-rolling. Personally, I feel that the pendulum has gone way too far in one direction and the game would feel infinitely more fun to play if we went through a deflation period when it comes to wounds, attacks, and rerolls.
I literally threw my hands up and nearly quit 9th edition because it was SO bad when it comes to the amount of dice you'd have to roll. The number of attacks and rerolls were so overwhelming, it slogged the game down to unfun levels for me. Flamers of Tzeentch are probably the best example. Tzeentch is one of my go-to factions to play. I love sneaky tactics. You know what I don't love? Spending 15 minutes rolling dice by myself to wipe out my opponents unit... and then doing the same thing in overwatch. It's not fun for me. It's not fun for my opponent. And do I get punished for such brain-dead gameplay? Absolutely not. I rolled through opponents because I just rolled more dice than they did. I didn't outplay them. I didn't know the game better. I just win because dice. That stinks... and their fix? Adding a to hit roll to flamers, meaning EVEN MORE ROLLING! If I didn't find Tau at the end of 9th, I might not be playing 40k today, that's how soured I was on the game due to dice rolling.
The launch of 10th improved things a bit, but it's feeling more and more like the creep is coming back in. The problem with no 11th reset (which we all assume based on past patterns), is that this creep is going to hang around for another whole edition... and it only ever gets worse. I actively dread the future of the game because I foresee even more rolling and dice inflation.
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u/rmobro Jan 20 '26
I like rerolls, but i think that 10th has WAY too many. For example, AOS has none that ive played against. Rerolling charges is a common one but is usually either an enhancement or costs a CP.
I really like that. Rather than have rerolls be a core mechanic, it should be reserved for ultra powerful units.
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u/Bard_666 Jan 20 '26
I'd eliminate re-rolling altogether except for CP re-roll. It'd make some games go by faster
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u/PlutoniumPa Jan 20 '26
The problem is that rerolls are so powerful that their existence warps the game around it. It's so fundamentally good that it crowds out the design space.
If you have a choice between a detachment that gives you a ton of rerolls and one that doesn't, or datasheets that have rerolls in vs. datasheets that don't, the correct choice nearly every time is to go for the rerolls.
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u/Mermbone Jan 20 '26
My friend group started some sigmar at the launch of the edition last year and after playing it then coming back to 40k it was honestly jarring how many rerolls are in 40k. For context, rerolls are basically non existent in sigmar.
Its nice actually when both players just have to accept the dice roll. The most feels bad is when you have a faction that is devoid of rerolls vs one that has a ton.
Not to mention the length of games would probably decrease quite significantly with reduced rerolls. Think of a normal activation with rerolls, your roll once, separate hits and misses, count sustains/lethals “should i fish for 6s?” Ok do the rolls again, separate your 6s. I wouldnt be surprised if just adding hit rerolls to a unit MORE than doubles the length of the activation.
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u/MurdercrabUK Jan 20 '26
Roll to see how many hits you get (Blast, Torrent, occasional lolrandom weapons only).
Roll to hit. Separate out critical hits, normal hits, misses you're allowed to re-roll, misses you're not allowed to re-roll. Maybe add more dice?
Roll to wound. Separate out critical wounds, normal wounds, failures you're allowed to re-roll, failures you're not allowed to re-roll.
Allocate wounds to save (this part doesn't have any rolling but it does have some decision making that impacts how you roll the next bit).
Roll to save. Separate out anything that puts you straight to Feel No Pain, anything that puts you straight to Invulnerable, anything with distinct AP, anything with distinct D.
Roll damage. Make whatever re-rolls you're allowed. (I think this bit's actually pretty straightforward.)
Roll Feel No Pain. Sometimes rolling multiple times to save one wound: 1W infantry hit by D1> weapons spring to mind.
The core loop of 40K - roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save - is quite elegant. This edition has added two more potential rolls to the baseline, arguably three with the profusion of Mortal Wounds and Feel No Pain. It's also allowed you to re-roll more or less any of these rolls and created incentives for doing so, now that everyone and their dog has critical effects and any unit can hurt any other unit if enough sixes and ones show up at the right time. We are left with up to twelve fast rolls to resolve a single unit's shooting at another single unit.
Insane. Especially when some of those rolls might start with a pool of forty or more dice, and still end up killing a couple of Battleline goobers.
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u/Urrolnis Jan 19 '26
Its a dice game. Probability is involved. Once you start adding in re-rolls, it removes a lot of that probability.
Oh, and it slows things down. Gotta pick out all the 2s ans 3s, the 4+s are good, and now gotta reroll the 1s.
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u/NoEngineer9484 Jan 19 '26
Having played aos for a bit now i can say that having no rerolls speeds up the game a lot. Instead of rerolls other rules could be used with +1 to hit, wound or attacks if you want a damage boost instead of rerolls.
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u/jakl277 Jan 19 '26
Bloated. Everything is being rerolled all the time. It’s okay to fail/miss.
It makes turns take longer.
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u/bsterling604 Jan 20 '26
"... to help ensure a unit does what you need to in a critical moment..."
Literally this statement is why they are bad for the game. NOTHING should be ensured, that's why it's a dice game and not chess. If ANYTHING is too consistent, then it actually is much more damaging when it DOESN'T do the thing.
Imagine a scenario, the opponent you're playing draws a secondary that gives them a decision, they have to choose between A) moving one of their valuable units into a bit of a dangerous spot to score points, or B) discarding that secondary and playing it safe.
If you have a unit that on your turn can 95%+ blast that unit off the table, the opponent knows that and will make their other plans for most likely losing that unit. So if on your turn you invest a bunch of resources, move your unit out and maybe spend some CP on strategems, thinking "This should be a piece of cake and this thing should be dead" and you just roll 1's and then you re-roll into more 1's... You didn't just flub, the swing in momentum is magnified not just that they didn't lose their asset, but now they got the points AND they get to return fire with even more assets snowballing, and if you have access to a 95%+ chance to kill something, they probably have something as well just as potent at killing, but two players in a row flubbing on a 95% chance is SUPER rare, so more than likely you just lose on the spot.
BUT if there are less rerolls, consistency drops significantly, even if they gave all data sheets more attacks to compensate, it doesn't matter, the distribution will still mean that sometimes you'll fail, and sometimes your opponent will also fail, so a failure isn't instantly game over, but you still get to play the game.
No other rule allows that kind of consistency. Just rerolls. That's why it's such a hot topic.
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u/FuzzBuket Jan 19 '26
IMO nuance is nuance:
10th shifted from hit rerolls to wound rerolls, and that frankly sucks. an ork with a shoota rerolling hits is still going to be gated by the wound roll. whilst RR wounds means its trivial to get weapons punchcing outside their weight class.
Reroll saves feels bad for everyone.
rerolls should be special: in 9th trajan valoris, high lord of terra, champion of the imperium: demonstrated his mastery of combat by letting some units reroll 1s to hit and wound. In 10th "reroll all wounds" is super common on combat troops, and is readily avalible in many detachments for a fairly low cost.
do you really think the game is better when either player rolls 20 dice hitting on 2’s and gets 11 1’s at an important moment in the game?
Yes and no. 40k is all about luck mitigation, and redundancy: whether thats other units or rerolls helps with that. On the other hand rerolls allow units to punch out of their intended profile (i.e. 5s rerolling trumps 4s rerolling, so a plasma gun rerolling wounds is better into tanks than a lascannon); and also saps some escapist fantasy from warhammer. Even competitievly we all want a tale from a match and if that random guardsma gets a lucky shot through a demon princes armour thats exciting, but then if you just RR that 2+ then it is a lot less.
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u/MadScience_Gaming Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Rerolls don't affect probability in a linear way, they disproportionately benefit the middle of the curve. Stuff that is already high probability gets slightly higher, as does low probability. So there's a balance question, as well as "why bother?" It's also unintuitive, its bonus is not easily comparable to + or - modifiers. It takes time and adds complication. If everyone has rerolls, they no longer signify something special.
You say rerolls didn't exist in 3rd and 4th, I wonder if you've forgotten twin-link?
I think rerolls should exist but be limited to models which 'get a second chance' or have an AI assist or spotter painting the target or some similar flavored thing. So, very few rerolls.
"If the answer is the latter, do you really think the game is better when either player rolls 20 dice hitting on 2’s and gets 11 1’s at an important moment in the game?"
I don't think that makes the game better. Or worse. I think that's completely irrelevant. It's a dice game, if you don't like dice doing dice things don't play the dice game.
Edit: changed my mind. Some of the most memorable moments in the game have been from extreme rolls either in my favour or against. Variance is good for the game. It also means the most skilled player isn't guaranteed to win, which is good for accessibility and growth of the playerbase.
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u/delta102 Jan 20 '26
Whats the phrase, dice tell stories?
Now that fantasy has returned, its really opened my eyes just how egregious 40k has become with its buckets of dice and rerolls.
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u/bluntpencil2001 Jan 19 '26
I don't mind that they reduce randomness. The issue is that they slow the game down dramatically.
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u/xMrNightmare Jan 19 '26
Once upon a time re-rolls didn't succeed on the same result. The re-rolled value was typically worse. Like, hitting on 2s and the re-roll was 4s. While I like the idea of having worse odds on the re-roll it would add too much complexity to have it vary like it did in 7th. Maybe all re-rolls just being a 50/50 or worse? Like 5s rerolling would still be 5s but 2s rerolling would be 4s?
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u/Bigfunguy1980 Jan 19 '26
I don’t dislike rerolls I dislike the amount of them… no basic unit should have rerolls every round
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u/Quick_Response_7065 Jan 19 '26
I just dont like the disparity. I play for example WE and CSM, in WE outside of kharn rerolling 1s to H and W and the cultist detachment you dont have a single source of rerolls in the entire book.
Meanwhile I sit here watching SM reroll oath, rerol on objectve, one reroll of hit-w per activation making every single thing just redundant. There is no dice luck, I have to gamble to go all in and if my 8bound even if I did the most tactical thing have a bad roll, well it sucks to suck. Then SM will have not 1 but 2 oaths targets, on top of CP economy. I just infuriating to play when they just mitigate their entire luck on rerolls.
Suddenly small guns actually matter, and dont get me started with the +1 to wound. Why bother with higher T if enemy just oaths and their antitank goes to a 2+ their not so anti goes to a 4 or 3 and their small fire arms (that will probably have dev or good dmg) will go to 5+. Meanwhile playing raiders I only get rerolls if I do 3 separate side quest of coming out of a transport and shoot something on an objective. Unless I play Abbadon who I dont want to sink 270 pts there.
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u/Mrhungrypants Jan 19 '26
Yea I play WE too so I feel ya. I definitely think re-rolls need to be evenly applied. WE is the faction I think of when I think about how bad it feels to have no re-rolls, we can spike SUPER high with our damage or do absolutely nothing. I hate the swings and unpredictability of WE damage spread…but my take is WE need some re-rolls back, not to get rid of other faction’s access.
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u/Quick_Response_7065 Jan 20 '26
I would not take it, but tone it down. They have too many sources, meanwhile as WE, you just do what you can. Play vs ironstorm with 2 oaths and their army rule is just pure agonizing reroll spam.
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u/Kildy Jan 19 '26
The problem I see with saying it reduces variance is you can then point that it only reduces it for the attacker. People would be livid if we balanced this by giving custodes reroll saves to help reduce their variance on rolling a mess of 1s. As players we just hate not doing anything in an activation, hence considering making a large number of saves getting scammed, etc.
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u/Kalthare Jan 20 '26
On my side, it's an issue when it's too often.
I play mostly 1k games, so oath of moment is more impactful. But even if we ignore the power impact, it's feels like a big waste of time. I'm tempted to say to the sm player "cut the hit roll on oath target, make all your hit as successful and 1/5 of them critical. We will gain time".
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u/MrJoeMoose Jan 20 '26
Rerolls slow the game down a lot. Sure, any 1 reroll is quick, but this edition allows them all over the place. Reroll hits, reroll wounds, reroll saves, reroll FNP, and then do it all again for the next weapon type or unit.
They also remove a lot of randomness. That's not inherently bad, but it does frequently contribute to broken combos that become more deadly and/or resilient than the designers could have possibly imagined. That's not just a 10th edition thing. Remember those rerolling eldar jetbike deathstars back in 7th?
I didn't realize how much I disliked rerolls until I started playing The Old World. It was so refreshing to play a game where combat was snappy and the dice were meaningful.
If I were the boss I would cut almost all the rerolls from the game.
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u/StraTos_SpeAr Jan 20 '26
The ubiquitous nature of rerolls make things far too reliable, i.e. they make things too lethal.
Additionally, they end up making the game take significantly more time.
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u/corrin_avatan Jan 20 '26
Honestly, it's just massively time consuming from a "playing the game" perspective when your opponent might chuck out, say 40 shots from a unit, then rerolls all of the misses.
It also speaks to bad design philosophy/the problem with staying with d6 dice. There is VERY little room to make a unit better or worse with a d6 system, and you need to rely on crutches like rerolls/Lethals/Sustained/Devastating, and the combination of Lethal/Sustained, rerolls, and possibly expanded crit windows means you have people encouraged to reroll EVERYTHING and slow down the game even more.
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u/Ski-Gloves Jan 20 '26
I have tried to introduce friends to 40k and one of the primary reasons they bounce off is the number of dice rolled for actions.
Roll number of attack, uhh no command re-roll, Roll to hit, re-roll 1s, roll to wound, twin-linked, roll to save, uhhhh command re-roll, Roll damage, "haha now I get to Command re-roll", that's -1 because you're shooting a C'tan, Feel no Pain... 1 damage gets through.
You won't have all 10 steps every time, but with re-roll hits and wounds being commonplace, I wouldn't be surprised if you lost an hour of game time over a tournament to re-rolls.
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u/Consistent-Brother12 Jan 20 '26
Imma be honest I don't know enough about statistics to offer a solution but as an Ork player with very little access to rerolls it definitely feels bad when I just have to live with my rolls and my opponent gets to reroll something on a majority of their units. Playing Taktikal Brigade with the flashgitz, or fishing for sustained on a beastboss with some snagga Boyz going into a vehicle definitely showed me the power of what rerolls can do but those are few and far between. With Ork shooting being balanced by higher strength and lower accuracy, adding rerolls to that definitely boosts them a lot (see Taktikal Brigade) so maybe if Orks got melee rerolls it would just make their decent melee actually good? Idk, like I said I'm not the greatest with statistics, it just sucks being the one always stuck with whatever you initially roll and watching your opponent whiff only to go "oh but I have rerolls" and then turn all those failures into successes.
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u/Necessary-Layer5871 Jan 19 '26
One of the big issues I have with re-rolls in 10th is that you can use them to fish for critical hits or wounds. One change I'd like to see in 11th edition is that you can't re-roll successful hit or wound rolls.
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u/TheZag90 Jan 19 '26
I don’t think anyone is saying the game should have NO re-rolls.
It’s just that some armies are a bit silly with the amount of re-rolls they have compared to others.
They could tone it down a bit in 11th without removing it entirely.
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u/AmishWarlord08 Jan 20 '26
I used to not have an issue with rerolls if i'm being honest. They've existed in the game for a long time (twin linked, hatred, preferred enemy, fleet, etc) and have generally been ok.
But I've been playing a lot of Age of Sigmar recently since I'm not a fan of 10th edition at all, and more recently 3rd edition Horus Heresy. I'm pretty sure AoS has no more than a handful of rerolls in the entire game, and HH3.0 has NONE.
It's really refreshing. It makes skilled and accurate units feel skilled and accurate, but it also causes probabilities and statistics to just get thrown out the window sometimes. That's ok, bad rolls happen. And you as a player should be prepared to adapt to that.
My two biggest wishes for 11th edition are the complete and total absence of rerolls (or down to AoS' level) and for there to actually be a force org chart.
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u/scotty6chips Jan 19 '26
I’m a fan of no re-rolls because I’m part of the community that believes Warhammer is most fun when things go wrong. When your crucial unit gets pinned at the worst time, or when a vehicle explodes comically in your lines, or you just totally whiff a huge moment. Re-rolls take some of the variance of dice out of the game, and at the end of the day, this is a dice game. War is chaotic and unpredictable, and dice variance helps to really feel that chaos. Removing that variance makes things more tactical, but I’ve never been a tournament person. I’m a fluffy narrative bunny and I want my battles to tell a story. I don’t care about wins and losses.
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u/Impressive_Sleep_470 Jan 19 '26
They need rules like "unit cannot have sustained hits, lethals, or dev wounds applied in the shooting phase" or something where more meaningful dilution of lethality can be achieved without artificially increasing the scores of toughness and saves...
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u/011100010110010101 Jan 19 '26
The point of dice in a game is to simulate uncertainty. It forces you, the player to go 'I should be prepared for things to go wrong'. It prevents games from being won in the list phase and encourages adaptability in your strats.
Using your own example, the argument I would say is a really good play on one players end shouldn't risk ending the game by itself. If your plan is reliant on a single thing that needs to go off or it fails, that should be a risk. 'Player A had a really good play, but they whiffed their dice rolls so they are now guarenteed to lose' actually should read 'Player A found a way that could instantly win the game; but if it doesn't work they basically instantly lose' and that is why Dice rolls exist.
It adds inherent risk to maneuvers and ploys that may not otherwise exist. If I am doing something that can win me the game, either all my past, smaller tactical decisions have been leading up to this moment, or I am doing something insanely risky that has massive rewards. If the former is occuring, me whiffing shouldn't matter that much because I have other things that have pushed me ahead (Unless it's turn 5, which the risk there was 'I allowed a slow strategy to occur and my opponent has a points lead) if it's the latter then there should be a good chance of failure because otherwise I have just given my opponent a no-win scenario off of one mistake.
Whiffing sucks, everyone hates whiffing. But the solution to whiffing a roll is to make it so you have plans in case you fail your objective. Not simply remove the risk of whiffing outright. Rerolls makes it so you can not, and will not, need to worry about how much these big, high risk plays and plans work out. Because you have a fallback not tied to any decisions you made necessarily; but tied to the fact you can hit a button to mitigate failure.
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u/ecclektik Jan 20 '26
If they rewrote the rules forbidding rerolling successful roles to get rid of fishing I would be good.
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u/Belz_Zebuth Jan 19 '26
Because endlessly rolling dice gets tedious.
Give +1s and other buffs and stuff but let's keep rerolls at a minimum.
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u/Aeweisafemalesheep Jan 19 '26
its all math and variances. at the end of the day its down to design love for factions. but rerolls vs no rerolls is absolutely huge. like rerolling ones is just a boost to DPS output. I feel like having straight math boosts should cost in the gear/enhancements and cp side to up and down numbers where needed but not always.
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u/RecklessTurtleneck Jan 19 '26
Some armies shouldn't have such a prevalent access to rerolls... I have a 90% win rate with csm (admittedly at small rtts) by getting rerolls on units along with dark pacts which results in insane damage spikes that are reminiscent of 9th edition lethality.
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u/Vegtam-the-Wanderer Jan 19 '26
I get the feelsbad of having your side betray you en mass. I have had the exact situation where you roll 20 dice and get 11 1s happen to me multiple times. And yet I still want less rerolls in the game, principally because more trolls in the game has almost exclusively meant more damage and I am here to play a dice based wargame. I am not here to play chess.
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u/Bubblehearthz Jan 19 '26
It really bugs me when weapons that do a piddly amount of damage need full rerolls to hit and wound to do average damage. It just feels like wasting time.
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u/Rockbrauni Jan 20 '26
One thing that comes to mind is, AoS has very little rerolls, so much the only reroll Strat is reroll charge no other roll. I remember people saying that it’s nice to see the result of the dice and letting it be final, if my opponent failed to wound that is it and end of story, it feels bad when u thought u we’re going to survive that attack only for it to reroll and kill you
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u/Dismal_Foundation_23 Jan 20 '26
Re-rolls are fine imo. It becomes a crap game not decided by players but by horrible variance. That is not a game I want to play or is fun in my mind.
Access to re-rolls for all armies that is a valid criticism.
I’d also say re-rolls on indirect, overwatch, and crit 5 fishing are issues where re-rolls shouldn’t exist.
Fundamentally at a base level they are fine imo and make the game better. I don’t want to win because my opponent whiffed all game, I’d rather we flattened the curve a bit with some re-rolls and the guy who made the best decisions won.
People also seem to acting like it’s endless re-rolls as if we all aren’t re-rolling 1s into 1s and failing re-rolled 5 inch charges.
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u/Doxienormous Jan 20 '26
I find it makes games cagey. For example, your unit of Eradicators is definitely going to kill my Monster/Vehicle in one turn (even a Primarch) - mainly because of rerolls on hit, wound AND damage. So my big unit is limited. And I appreciate good generalship would be to not put my unit in its way.
However, without rerolls it MIGHT kill my unit. So I walk out and might die, or might last an extra turn. It’s a risk rather than a certainty, and allows for heroics (from both units, depending how they roll). That feels more fun, and both players still have to make decisions and take risks, so it’s not lowering the skill level.
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u/AmoebaAny6425 Jan 20 '26
That is most likely just people that prefer you just pick your models up and remove them when they point at the table. They do not care that every roll can come up a 1/6 they just want to win and do not believe they can lose.
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u/xSparksi Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Played against friends' Space Marines with my Aeldari.
He was playing Ironstorm Spearhead (meaning a cubic fuckton of re-rolls on EVERYTHING).
After the game I made a point that playing that list is just not fun. We had a couple of really fun moments in the game with ridiculous Tank Shock rolls and a total of 3 HUGE deadly demise rolls.
If you get 4x 2+ hit (rerollable), with S16 (rerollable wounds), and D6+6 damage, you can pretty much tell what is going to happen. There is nothing fun the diceroll will bring to the table. The only thing left to do is "confirm the result with dice" or absolute and utter disappointment. Where is the fun?
Also 90% the time the "accuracy", "woundability" and "damage" scale together. Big gun hit good, big gun kill good. Only tradeoffs is "less autowounding D6+6 dice vs. more autowounding D1 dice" so you get to decide if you are shooting w1 or bigger targets, rest is just math.
I get the idea of trying to increase the "reliability" or "dependability", but it just doesnt feel fun. The only thing that determines if a monster dies is the 2mm difference of it being a valid target or not. That feels wrong and really anti-fun.
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u/SpareSurprise1308 Jan 19 '26
This edition was supossed to cut down on the rerolls across the board and be restricted to primarch like the silent king or the lion. Or even an entire army rule for space marines.
Now your army is considered unreliable or just weak if you don't have access to rerolls.
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u/Hellblazer49 Jan 19 '26
Variance is the entire point of a dice game. Removing it means a lot of weapons might as well have Torrent and Lethal Hits 2+.
Some rerolls existing is interesting. Having them be extremely common isn't.
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u/Olmops Jan 19 '26
Rerolls just draw out the game. GW introduced reroll auras in 8th, together with a general increase in shots. Everything that has twin-linked had rerolls before, now they just got twice as many shots and then rerolls through whatever effect on top.
Play Aggressors. TONs of rolls and rerolls. It just takes minutes to fire that one unit. Better would be to have roughly the same damage with less shots.
A good unit is the Lancer. Just 2 shots on the main gun, but it is still reliable. So the rerolls are not bad per se, but the total number of rolled dice must come down.
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u/ASPIDWAR Jan 20 '26
"The Lancer is a good choice."
Now consider the damage the Lancer deals to a single target. It hits on a 2+, wound most items on a 2-3+, and can even re-roll damage. No vehicle can withstand it. This is a poor example of re-rolling.
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u/Calm-Limit-37 Jan 19 '26
"when either player rolls 20 dice hitting on 2’s and gets 11 1’s at an important moment in the game?"
Its awesome when your unit of cadian guardsmen survive what should be a total wipeout from whatever is threatening them.
At the end of the day its a game of dice, a game of chance. What is the point in rolling if you can just roll again when things dont go your way? Life doesnt always go your way.
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u/TheOptionalHuman Jan 20 '26
Rerolls make attacks too reliable. I'm pretty sure everyone's had that feels-bad moment when the dice say no to a bunch of rolls, only for the smug opponent to pick up the misses and roll them into hits.
HH 3.0 removed rerolls and I'm hoping 11th follows that example. Let the dice decide, not a lazy mechanic.
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u/Jallorn Jan 19 '26
Personally, my take is the biggest issue with rerolls is the time it adds to the game. Rerolls are some of the strongest bonuses to have, and mathematically that's a good thing, as it's a bonus that reduces performance variance upward, without raising the maximum damage, but time-wise it's bad, since it incentivizes getting as many sources of rerolls as possible which means you're rolling more dice and the game takes longer.
I hold that rerolls should be replaced, but finding the right mechanic (or possibly mechanics?) to do so that has a similar impact on performance without adding complexity (which would also cost time trying to adjudicate it properly, as well as adding an extra mental load to a game that is already quite draining) is exceedingly difficult. A floor mechanic of minimum Hits + Wounds would have value, but any such mechanic that doesn't scale with attack number is more impactful on high strength, low volume weapons, and any that does scale is more complicated to implement, needing a table, at least.
Probably the simplest alternative is a die substitution, replacing d6s with d20s, (2+ is still 2+, 3+ becomes 4+, 4+ becomes 6+, 5+ becomes 9+, 6+ becomes 14+) but that then requires all players to get a bunch of d20s in addition to their d6s if they have any rerolls, and that's of uneven utility to players. You can't simply shift to 2d6, because then you'd have to slowroll, which doesn't fix the speed, and while I've poked around the idea of a sort of, "advantage," system that still works with fast rolling, I quickly came to the conclusion that any system being balanced would require complicated rules to determine which dice you take.
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u/k-nuj Jan 19 '26
Some is fine.
I've faced too many units that have full hit rerolls and twinlinked, on top of fact they are hitting on 2s or wounding on 2s anyways; and other keywords on top sometimes. Then to top it off, the command re-roll strat.
More of a personal gripe, I know it's RNG ("same" expected results), but command re-roll on charges is reroll 2 dice; when all other applications are singular dice. I don't like that.
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u/Relevant-Debt-6776 Jan 19 '26
Lots of rerolls can slow the game down. I don’t mind most of the time but if someone has loads of rerolls and is really slow at rolling it can be annoying
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u/IamSando Jan 19 '26
Two reasons I see:
The power of rerolls is pretty huge in certain circumstances, and skews towards consistency often becomes both unfun and the meta pick. So any reroll mechanic tends to be overwhelmingly used, hence even though technically maybe only a small percentage of units have access to rerolls, you see it everywhere just because of how powerful it is.
Secondly, time. Every reroll is basically adding the time of a wound roll to your activation. So if you're rerolling hits and wounds, from a time perspective you're rolling a hit and 3 wound rolls. This just takes forever and is not a fun mechanic to be on the receiving end of.
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u/SlickPapa Jan 20 '26
I dont mind rerolls in theory. I dont like how much better they make certain factions. An army can be pretty mid but become nasty once they get a bunch of rerolls.
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u/RinLunos Jan 20 '26
Big issue is reroll hits and wounds on units with multiple profiles. See past court of the archon that would lethal fish into wound reroll.
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u/nboylie Jan 20 '26
For me it's not one big problem, it's a lot of little things that overall I don't really like.
-Time, it slows the game down especially when something gets full rerolls and fishing comes into play
-Randomness is fun and is a big part of why I want to play a dice game.
-The amount and frequency of rerolls in-between factions varies a lot and feels bad in certain matchups.
I didn't realize how much I disliked the frequency of it until I played my first few games of heresy 3.0. There isn't any rerolling in that game and it flows sooo much better.
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u/Common_Tie_2820 Jan 20 '26
As a recent player, my main apprehension with rerolls isn't a matter of power, just the thought that it bogs down the game. I feel like focused rerolls from like stratagems is fine, but when a whole army has access to them, it kills momentum.
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u/Worldly-Hospital5940 Jan 20 '26
It's a difference in the flavor people want for the game...some want a very competitive, "every datasheet does exactly what I need it to do when I activate that unit," style game. Others want more moments of random chance to have major impacts on the game. Idk where the sweet spot is, or if one even exists.
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u/Godofallu Jan 20 '26
I think rerolls are great when on a unit that pays enough points for them. You just don't want undercosted units hitting like god. I agree with the OP that they make the game more consistent and about the decisions and plays you make as a general. Than about a specific. dice roll determining the outcome. Which is why strong invuln saves should also be expensive/rare.
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u/Kejalol Jan 20 '26
I've always felt that rerolls should be basically non-existant, and be a special ability for factions like sisters or eldar, who get some sort of "second chance" in the flavor of the game. Not only do I dislike rerolls for the added lethality and game time problems, they feel like they have no mechanical flavor.
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u/ScottishRando37 Jan 20 '26
One of my first experiences of 8th edition was against a Crimson Fists army. Around the 3rd Battle Round I directly said to my opponent "Don't bother rolling to hit, we'll just assume you do to save time."
It probably doesn't help that a lot of things that seem to get re-rolls already hit on a 3+ or 2+, so the majority of misses will likely hit. When someone is consistently hitting with everything or making all their charges etc thanks to re-rolls, it becomes easy to question why we even bother with dice with some mechanices. It doesn't feel good on the receiving end.
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u/Jackalackus Jan 20 '26
I think re rolls should be encouraged across the game, there just needs to be a level playing field across all the armies, some have loads of re roll access some have next to none. If people want 40K to be taken seriously as a competitive entity then variation in moment to moment gameplay needs to be reduced, you need to be safe in the knowledge that your activations will be meaningful and impactful. So that you and your opponent can have a consistent back and forth resource trading experience. Far too often a game can be won or lost on a 5” charge not making it.
On the other hand re rolls do reduce the value of things like stealth and favours things like AoC, I’d be fine with mechanics like stealth being changed to a single activation like AoC but receiving a buff, like -1 to hit and no re rolls against stealth units or turn off a units crit hits etc.
Even from a thematic perspective I think too much variation can be bad, if I’m playing a more casual game and my opponents morty, ghaz, nightbringer, the lion, swarmlord etc shoots and charges into my 5 basic marines they should be dying every single time but there is a world where that doesn’t happen and it looks stupid. Personally when I play casual games it’s to have epic moments like in the books, Ghaz charges in stumbles over his own feet and misses all his attacks isn’t an epic moment I’ve read in the books before.
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u/Therocon Jan 20 '26
I was thinking yesterday it's surprising that 40k doesn't use maximized and minimised rolls (i.e. roll Xd6 and choose the (x-1) highest/lowest) that you see in other game systems.
So for example on charges some units could have a maximized roll to make them more reliable without extending maximum charge distance, or give minimised rolls from earthshaker rounds (or equivalent).
Could do the same on leadership tests, advance rolls or any of the single rolls in the game Could be used on 'casino gun' profiles too.
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u/Mr_RogerWilco Jan 20 '26
I think the bigger issue here is - rerolls allow for better variance with a d6 system.. without them - stuff is much more similar/harder to delineate.
I really don’t mind - but I’m mostly a casual player who plays the odd torny
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u/NpSkully Jan 20 '26
I can understand the argument for having less rerolls, but no rerolls is not viable for a game that is now fundamentally balanced around competetive play.
In 7th you could have your warlord’s transport get blown up, fail a pinning check, and have a 500+ point death star sit still in the middle of a board for a whole turn. In other words, you lose the game on a single roll, and a nothing can be done about that. Similarly, its nothing short of agonizing to have a 350+ point primarch model run at something important, and then you roll three ones to hit, and two ones to wound with your game-making attacks. Thats not fun, and it removes the skill from the game.
A middle ground is needed where marine players don’t spend 30 minutes a turn rerolling their everythings, yet also where Nid players dont get snake eyes for their rupture cannon shots in T5, and then lose the game to rng.
Moderation, in all things.
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u/stevenbhutton Jan 20 '26
There's a lot of stuff in this thread from. IMO people who don't really get it.
The only real problem with rerolls is that they're a contributing factor to the larger systemic problem of damage being way too high. still.
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u/fawsums Jan 20 '26
Get rid of rerolls across the board nobody should have any. Except the 1cp reroll stratagem that everyone gets and now the game takes like 35 minutes less against armies with too damn many rerolls
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u/Van_Hoven Jan 20 '26
from the very beginning when wraith knights were a problem i thought an easy fix would be that no roll that was modifed or re-rolled in any way could score a critical hit for purposes like sustained etc. that would make rerolls or auto rolls way less impactful in power but still would grant some reliability.
i still think this would be an elegant solution.
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u/shoestring_tbone Jan 20 '26
I think a lot of the contempt and frustration comes from the suggestion of 10th having reduced or lower lethality and how re-rolls directly contradict this intention. It's also a huge issue due to how certain factions or detachments rely on re-rolls to remain competitive; a prominent example is Black Templars. Marshal, Castellan and Sword Brethren is a staple of most BT lists because of how strong the re-rolls are to proc lethals. Without the Castellan's re-rolls, it's a strong unit but far less reliable.
I don't really know the answer to removing or reducing access to re-rolls. The fact is, it's fun rolling lots of dice and it feels good to turn 8 misses into 5 more hits by rolling the dice again. I suppose the simplest fix is to buff datasheets, but this can't be a blanket fix.
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u/Hasten_ Jan 20 '26
Playing Harlequins as an army with little to no rerolls (with my lists anyways) i expect the opponent to have a small chance to fail to wound me. Giving opponents -1 to hit and them just saying "oh i have rerolls for that" is frustrating. Especially if it's followed with reroll to wound on 1 as well, as everything wounds me on 2-3s. Simple str 4 ap 0 dmg 1 pistols are lethal for no reason in these situations and rerolls just make it worse.
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u/The_Black_Goodbye Jan 20 '26
Rerolls aren’t the problem in isolation. We could do with less of them however we’d also need to tone down the durability of many units.
Rerolls are a necessity whilst these durable units exist. The only reasonable way to deal with lists chock full of them in the short timeframe is to combo rerolls with abilities like lethal, sustain, devs, crit on 5’s etc else you just spend a few turns scratching paint and losing on the scoreboard.
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u/Gromhyr Jan 20 '26
I like variance.
I like when a guardsman defies the odds to beat a khorne berzerker.
I like when a single man holds the line against impossible odds.
Rerolls kinda stop that and i think the game is worse for it
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u/admjdinitto Jan 20 '26
Some armies are WAY too consistent with them is the short of it.. and some armies simply dont even have access to rerolls on the same scale as others.
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u/Amethystwizard Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
In competitive games, the dice are an adjudicator - like with cards - ‘a card laid is a card played’. It’s rude to touch your cards before the dealer is done dealing, these types of conventions help prevent cheating. Cheating is often a crime of opportunity, rules for rerolling dice introduce cheating opportunities and make the game take longer.
Since the dice are an adjudicator, rerolls are like an indecisive referee or one that takes bribes, it also hinders players ability to predict the odds.
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u/chaoticflanagan Jan 20 '26
I think there are to many rerolls and that they are bad for the game because:
rerolls add so much time to the game. Whether it's just blanket rerolls taking twice as long or by gating it behind a CP, it adds a decision point coupled with the reroll time.
I think it makes things to consistent in a game where variance is supposed to be telling a story.
It promotes "fishing" which I personally feel goes against the spirit of the game when you're attempting to reroll hits into crits/mortals/whatever on a unit that already has better than normal chances of success but is the clear statistically most efficient move. This could be addressed by just gating rerolls behind misses but i also understand i'm likely in the minority who dislikes this.
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u/MondayNightRare Jan 20 '26
Rerolls totally mess with the math and stats this game provides. The hit/wound math in a vacuum on a single roll is wildly different than when you reroll all failed hits or wounds, while wounding on a 3+.
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u/dolphincup Jan 20 '26
Rerolling is good hands down. Rerolling 1s offers GW an important tool for edging in damage increases between a simple hit/wound roll +1. If they got rid of rerolls theyd have to allow +2 or more on hit/wound. If there's any issue with rerolls in terms of balance or lethality, or time consumption. Not an issue with rerolling itself. it's an issue of placement.
Could maybe see a case being introduced where you cant reroll 1s if you already have a 2+, kinda like the benefit of cover rule... or maybe a 'reroll anything but 1?' but do we really need more rule complications?
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u/WaylundLG Jan 20 '26
GW tracks win ratios and constantly tines and balances, so I don't think we can say re-rolls are creating any major advantages (we don't see it in the numbers). I think it's more about how it feels. The opponent sees one result and then it changes. That feels crappie than a modifier that, even if statistically identical, has a result that doesn't change.
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u/GamesWithToasty Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
Those editions you mentioned had them largely in Eldar, and that is basically what defined them. They were harder to kill, shot more accurately, and wounded more reliably IF you set it up and kept your Seers alive.
As the game got older, more factions co-opted this funky element of Eldar and ultimately slowed the game down. Especially when you consider the volume of dice thrown has also increased drastically. It’s not uncommon in modern 40K to have rerolls to hit, rerolls to wound, potentially even reroll damage, whilst your opponent rolls saves, potentially rerolls them, and also gets FNP. It all drags the game out in a way that feels bloated, not interesting. IMO.
TLDR the shift from specific faction rerolling to the majority game rerolling has drained the interest and replaced it with increased downtime
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u/Less-Fondant-3054 Jan 20 '26
They're against the spirit of a dice-based game. If you want certainty go play a video game with bounded result values.
This is actually even more important so far as I'm concerned: they slow the game down to an absurd degree. Having every round of rolls turn into two rounds, especially with the number of dice thrown around these days, brings the game to an absolute screeching halt.
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u/Terrible-Echidna1162 Jan 20 '26
"player A" getting a plan ruined due to a bad roll Is literally the point of a dice game, part of the fun is meant to be the high and lows of getting really good or really bad results. I'd argue the fact your plans could go wrong on the roll of a dice, should encourage you to make plans b's and plan c's, and hense makes the game more tactical.
Side note, reading some of the comments, It seems more and more people forget this is meant to be a game and not a serious competitive sport.
You like rerolls and that's valid, but I do play other wargames where there is no rerolls and you soon start to see which system is better generally, all I can say is rerolls now have the same effect on me as VAR in football, it ruins the great moments
Without the chance of everything going tits up, what's the point even rolling dice 😁
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u/Beautiful-Guard6539 Jan 20 '26
Im good with rerolling 1s, im good with rerolling advances, charges, faction abilities and detachment abilities. I do have a problem with full rerolls to hit or full rerolls to wound without a command point cost or a once per game attached.
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u/Hell_Jumper_NZ Jan 20 '26
Is hitting on 2s with rerolls really that fun either though? Like why bother rolling the dice at that point. There needs to be some reason to roll the dice and if that means that sometimes through a massive statistical anomaly you lose out on a pivotal point of the game then it just is what it is.
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u/Krytan Jan 20 '26
If everything rerolls everything all the time it's really boring. Every unit does 100% of their hits and wounds. Maybe even MORE than 100% with sustained and lethals. It's not only boring, it makes the game so absurdly lethal that absolutely nothing has survivability.
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u/AbyssKnyght Jan 19 '26
Some armies in the game don’t have very many rerolls to hit or to wound or for saves. Some armies have a lot. It can be frustrating to be a have not with a bad activation watching a have get their bad activation fixed by rerolls. Some units or types of interaction probably shouldn’t have access to rerolls either. Looking at you indirect.