Basic Stat Discussion.

[Tyndmyr]

Aright, the conventional stats are as follows:

Weapon Skill -Governs chance of hitting and being hit in melee.
Ballistic Skill -Governs chance of hitting with ranged attacks.
Strength -Chance of wounding in melee.
Toughness -Chance of being wounded via either melee or ranged.
Wounds -How many hits you can take before death.
Initiative -How fast you strike in combat.
Attacks -How many times you hit in melee.
Leadership -How likely you are to run away.

Are we going to keep these the same, or are we going to modify the list?

Also, are we going to add a Skill list? I'd advise it, especially for things such as weapons. A generic BS is sufficient for wargaming, but doesn't allow for weapon specialties and the like. If we use a D20 system, I'd advise skills as a modifier. If D10, as unkept dice added to the appropriate stat.

I'd also suggest a standard starting stats for each race. As a form of "level adjustment", each of them also starts with an additional number of points to spend on special skills, equipment, etc. Thus, the beefier starting races start out with less goodies.

[SolidSamurai]

First off, I'd change 'leadership' to morale, which in itself can be affected by leadership. Makes a little more sense. For large army battles, the GM would roll the general morale of the entire army and then apply the general leadership capability of all of the appointed leaders of said army. Morale can be affected however you wish, although maybe if the enemy is aware they are fighting a target much more powerful then them and that they judge that they cannot defeat said target or that said target provokes a superstition (or any number of other things), their morale will be affected negatively.

Also, there's the matter of skills, and another section I'd suggest including that leadership falls into (the logic being that, leadership is an innate ability, not an actual skill) - maybe call this pool 'soft skills', skills that are a little more dynamic, and general (profession: shoemaker is very specific on the other hand and thus a 'hard skill' that requires ranks as D&D). Soft skills are like class features, your character would get a very limited selection of them (as in quantity, not variety), however soft skills require no investment beyond initially learning them and usually get higher modifiers to their checks over time based on the roll of their class (you can't invest in soft skills beyond initially learning them). Soft skills might play a much greater roll in say, combat than hard skills. The number of soft skills you take on is very limited, but you can learn more by spending XP. Does that sound like a good idea?

Another stat that I was thinking you could include would be willpower or wisdom, which is obviously (according to D&D) the stat for 'will saves' which usually apply versus magic. Willpower would most likely be used to resist having your morale lowered and fighting the urge to run away in general. Or you could make will power a soft skill.

As for initiative, 'how fast you strike in combat' doesn't really make much sense. Initiative usually simply determines who goes first. It has nothing to do with coordination, strength, movement speed or how many hits you can get off precisely in combat (which is mostly likely coordination, ferocity, agility or perception/accuracy/precision if ranged or any other variety of names you could give it other than 'initiative').


Input?

[Spuddly]

Is the game going to try to model both playable guardsmen and playable marines? Cause that would lead to a lot of inflationary values- marines would get 30s in every stat while the guardsmen would have much closer to 10, if using the classic 3d6 based ability score generation. This would only be amplified with the addition of other playable races. If you wanted to be in a mech, you've got a strength score of 50+.

[Solo]

Hm. Perhaps we should see how marines and guardsmen match up against each other in the tabletop game, and reverse engineer from there.

[Spuddly]

What's the priority in game design? I can't figure out how to stick to 40ks GRIMDARK fluff, keep it balanced AND have an elegant system. Getting two of those wouldn't be hard.