Doing Your Thing in 40K

While making terrain for our first club night I was talking with my good friend and long time 40K'er Toby. He mentioned that one of the frustrations he had with the evolution of the rules was that special abilities that were introduced for a particular unit to give them a unique and flavoursome ability where often watered down, given to others widely and, in the example of Chaos Raptors and Hit & Run, removed for that unit but left for others.

With my current Dark Heresy GUMSHOE hack in mind, I started thinking about how often in 40K you don't get to do your 'thing'. By 'thing' I mean that which makes your army unique, that which your character is feared for. It's your shtick. There are so many special abilities across units that there has been a steady increase in the countermeasures to them. Taking pinning for example. I can't remember the last time I ever saw it work, let alone considered a usable tactic, because so many units ignore it, or have enough leadership for it to be a cold day on Nocturne when it kicks in.

GUMSHOE's philosophy of being good at your thing can, and should, translated to war games. You should, unless you plan poorly, be able to do the glorious deeds you're forces are infamous for at least once during the game.

A very simple, and probably ill conceived idea to improve the situation in 40K would be to give each player a Joker card. When played, the Joker means an HQ, and any unit it is attached to can automatically make, or force the failure of a single dice roll. It also removes an immunity to a particularly ability that would resolve normally on that single dice roll. So, for example a Tau HQ leading a unit that has pinning weapons plays it after it's shot at a unit of Space Marines, who are normally immune to the pinning effect. The Joker means that they lose that immunity for that single test and automatically fail. Further examples would be a unit of Warp Talons deep striking with an attached winged Daemon Prince. The player uses the Joker to make the blind test a nearby unit of Devastators makes automatically fail.  A Tiberius, down to his last wound, uses the Joker to avoid making a psychic test, and activates his powers without fear of the warp consuming him. Of course it might mean that an HQ with a squad with a powerfist could remove the Instant Death rule from an opponent and force it to fail an invulnerbilty save. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Possibly it couldn't be used for attacks that have more than one to-hit roll.