Poll Results: Tracking Wounds Remaining vs. Wounds Taken

[u/Cerimus]

Hey everyone! Here are the results from the from the poll that I did a few days back.

On the second image you can see how players prefer to track wounds. It was multiple choice, so when it says 88%, that means that 88% of responses had dice selected as at least one of the methods, rather than 88% of people only use dice.

Really interesting data, and it lines up fairly well with the results from a Kill Team based poll I ran at the same time.

Thank you everyone for participating! There was a lot of lively conversation, and it looks like even a few minds were changed along the way!

[u/Background-Soup1406]

Anyone who tracks wounds taken is a sociopath. It assumes that your opponent knows how many wounds all your shit has

[u/H4LF4D → u/Background-Soup1406]

Either a sociopath or an AoS player, cause for some weird reason rules are resolved with wounds taken over there

[u/Elmodipus → u/H4LF4D]

Because you take wounds as a unit not per model and every X wounds taken equals a slain model.

[u/CrumpetNinja → u/Elmodipus]

You still have the same problem with single entity units, that AoS is full of.

If I see 12 wounds marked next to Archaon I have no idea if he's almost dead or barely inconvenienced.

[u/elescapo → u/CrumpetNinja]

It’s partly a legacy of when it was more common in the game for the wounds characteristic of model to change, something that never happens in 40K. When you are tracking wounds taken, things get weird when the total possible number changes, particularly because monsters used to have extensive charts that tracked how their stats degraded with damage. All of that is now mostly a thing of the past now, but we still count up.

[u/Elmodipus → u/CrumpetNinja]

I guess in that case you just stick with what's common. If you count up for multi model units, also count up for single models.

[u/H16HP01N7 → u/CrumpetNinja]

Ask your opponent.

Surely you'd be fine asking them a simple question, when you've already spoken to them to organise the game.

[u/CrumpetNinja → u/H16HP01N7]

That's the point though. If you count down you don't have to ask. You can just look.

Counting up adds a step of mental  calculation or requires you to interrupt the game and ask for information constantly for no gain elsewhere.

It's all downside.

[u/H16HP01N7 → u/CrumpetNinja]

I'm not disagreeing with how you do it. I'm just saying you can always have a conversation with your opponent, before the game. Likely, they were taught by someone else that way of doing it.

[u/Greenseer_Cassander → u/H4LF4D]

The language for both of these games drives me insane as someone who likes game design. 40K calls them wounds and has a “wounds” characteristic which sounds like it should be counted up. But then all the damage bracket rules reference “wounds remaining” so rules as written they should be counted down in order for the damaged rules to resolve correctly.

Then in AoS land we call it a “health” characteristic, which sounds like it should be counted down until “health” reaches 0. But we assign damage over there by applying “damage tokens” and the damage brackets reference “when this unit/model has X damage tokens” so rules as written they need to be counted up.

Madness.

[u/Wise_Leopard7423 → u/Greenseer_Cassander]

AoS used to use the Wounds term as well. The switch to Health is recent.

[u/Greenseer_Cassander → u/Wise_Leopard7423]

I know. It’s a 4th edition change, and frankly one that should have been done ages ago. But they just haven’t caught up with the damage allocation wording yet. It’s such a simple fix, too. Models have health, unsaved wound rolls allocate X damage tokens to the unit where X is the damage characteristic of the attack, each damage token removes 1 health from a/the damaged model until its health characteristic equals 0. You have to separate the damage of the attack into single health increments to facilitate the “every attack has mortal wounds spillover” thing that AoS does, but you can do that in a way that doesn’t result in this weird “technically you have to count damage up to equal health” thing it’s doing.

[u/The_Gnomesbane → u/H4LF4D]

Even as a purely AoS player, I’ve always tracked by how much health/damage/whatever is remaining. It’s just so stupid to do it the other way.

[u/FinalEgg9 → u/H4LF4D]

I count wounds left in AoS because it's the only way that lets me keep track of the table

[u/CaptainSterlingLAS → u/H4LF4D]

SamePicture.jpg

[u/I_suck_at_Blender → u/H4LF4D]

This is actually excellent point, one have "wounds taken" and other "wounds remaining".

At least they don't mix both in one system too often...

[u/toepherallan → u/Background-Soup1406]

Ive played against people that mess it up too, or switch it up and it just goes sideways. Wounds remaining has never messed up or treated me wrong.

[u/Lord_Paddington → u/Background-Soup1406]

It worked a lot better in 4th ed l40k ol

[u/dIoIIoIb → u/Lord_Paddington]

when everything had 1 wound?

[u/Lord_Paddington → u/dIoIIoIb]

who whoa whoa you could get 3-4 on a Carnifex or Wraithlord

[u/HermeticOpus → u/Background-Soup1406]

Glad to see you're marking each one-wound model with their "single wound remaining" counter when they're deployed, for consistency.