Instant Death and wound allocation

[Hackbar]

As often happens while driving to work on a day my books aren't with me, I started pondering various 40k situations and how the different rules interact. This morning, it was a theoretical situation of Powerfists versus Crisis suits, though it works just as well with any other S8+ power weapon and T4 2 wound creature.

 

Assume the target group consists of 2 models with 2 wounds, no invulnerable saves, and no fancy special rules to keep them alive. Armor save is irrelevant because the attacker is using a power fist.

For the purpose of the example, we will assume that the power fist hits and wounds twice. Maybe it's a really lucky day for the sergeant, or maybe it's a really bad day for the terminator squad. Either way, 2 wounds.

 

The process should be something like :

 

Initiative 10-2 don't matter, we're assuming our test group survives

Initiative 1:

power fist marine(s) roll to hit and score 2 hits

Power fist marine(s) roll to wound and score 2 wounds

target group must alloccate 1 wound to each model. no room for allocation tricks here

target group 'fail' their saves since they cannot take armor saves and have no invul.

 

At this point I can think of 2 interpretations of the rules as I remember them.

 

1. since the target group are like models they must remove as many models as possible. 1 powerfist wound is sufficient to kill each, and there are enough power fist wounds to go around, so the target models each take one wound and suffer instant death.

 

2. since the target group are like models they must remove as many models as possible. each model takes 2 wounds to kill, so both wounds must be applied to one model in order to remove it. The Instant death wounds are wasted overkill.

[greatcrusade08]

wound allocation happens as normal for instant death, only when wounds have been taken do you then take off whole models. In this case bith models would have taken an instant kill hit and would both be removed

[Vanor]

The rules cover it, on the bottom of page 26, 2nd to last paragraph.

 

It says that a player must remove one unwounded model for each unsaved wound that causes instant death.

 

So in the above theoretical situation, the Tau player would have to remove both crisis suits, because of the 2 unsaved ID wounds.

[Koremu]

You assign one wounding hit to each model, exactly as normal. Then, for a unit of multi-wound models, you check to see if there is any Instant Death and remove the affected models. Then you "concentrate" wounds suffered by models that are identical in gaming terms onto as few models as possible (obviously you can't stack more wounds than it takes to kill a model), removing any models reduced to zero wounds.

 

It is also worth noting that you have to remove models which are unwounded (if such exist) as a result of Instant Death. No crafty sacrificing of the already wounded model!

[Hackbar]

Wow, that was a quick set of replies. Thanks for the clarification. You've given a lot more justification to the idea I forgot to post in the 'why powerfists?' thread.

[Frosty the Pyro]

This comes up enouph on this forum I made a list

 

Frosty's Wound Allocation Order of Operations

 

1. Enemy Rolls to hit

2. Enemy Rolls to wound (Uses Majority toughness)

3. Apply one wound to each MODEL untill each model has one wound, Then Apply a second, third, and so on untill there are no more wounds to allocate.

4. Seperate wounded models into different identical groups based on wargear and profile (so all marines with just a bolter in one group, ones with a boltpistal/ccw in another, plasmaguns in another, sergents in another and so on)

5. Roll armor saves for each GROUP

6. Within each group apply wounds in such a way to remove the maximum amount of models/wounds posible (for example intant death goes on the ones with the most wounds remaing), extra wounds do NOT carry over into other groups, they are lost.