I recently ran a Vile Secrets of Vulcoth campaign for 2 friends new to playing Warhammer 40,000 on the tabletop. I run highly narrative wargames, so I decided to run the game as a skirmish game. Besides that, I figured learning the game would be simplified for my players with just a few miniature and miniature profiles to manage. I set out an assortment of named characters for each player to choose from, and when they arrived they each picked out 3 miniatures to play. I had the usual game master mix of emotions: I wanted to punish their miniatures within just a Wound of being removed from the board, but ultimately I hoped my players would be victorious. What actually happened was that the player characters slaughtered every unit of enemies I threw at them. I had accidentally constructed a game of "hero hammer."
The concept of hero hammer has been around for a while, and it's usually meant as a pejorative about the design of Warhammer. It an implication that Games Workshop sometimes produces a miniature (it's implied that it's an extra-expensive model) that's so over-powered that it becomes the army. You buy the hero model, maybe add a few units around it as meat-shields, and with basically just a single hero you wipe out a whole army of your foes. It's not generally considered good design because it reduces a wargame that's supposed to be about army tactics and makes it about an improbably powerful individual.
I never had reason to believe it actually existed. I've played for years with character miniatures, and I've seen them fall to hordes of Tyranids, zombies, orks, and more. Sure, they have 3 or 4 Wounds but that only gets you so far in 10th and 11th edition Warhammer 40,000. I sometimes have trouble keeping a character model alive even when it's surrounded by a unit of support troops, so I thought it would be dangerously perilous for my players with just 3 characters each.
It's the Save value, that's what makes a character model in 40k so strong. Now that I've seen it happen 20 times for 4 game nights, it's obvious. A character can have 3 Toughness but save on 2+ or 3+ and walk away without a scratch.
I used to think of Toughness as shorthand for a miniature's durability on the battlefield. I'm not wrong. Toughness does give you a good idea of how much punishment a miniature can take, but it's not just Toughness. Obviously the Toughness value only determines the target number for the To Wound roll. Whether that Wound actually gets through is down to the Save value.
As a game master providing all the miniatures and the mission and an introduction to the game, I like to understand what variables I have to work with. Toughness and Save values are 2 important values to keep in mind. In the future, I'll likely divide character models on offer into tiers, so a player might take only a single over-powered character, and then maybe 2 weaker characters as support. Or maybe it'll just be a character and a support unit. Still deciding.
The other controls a game master has are Armour Piercing (AP) and, as ever, strength in numbers.
A weapon's Armour Piercing (AP) value modifies a miniature's Save value. A character model with a 3+ Save must roll a 4+ against AP -1, or a 5+ against AP -2. That's a big change. If you want to threaten a hero, grab enemies with AP.
There's also always the option of throwing more enemies at the players. Doing this is the worst option, in general, because it slows the game down, and it also tends to feel pretty transparent. Whether they've played as a game master or not, players aren't entirely unaware of all the mystical arts of the game master role. When you fail to deal damage with one unit of orks and then go dig in your closet for another unit and add that to the table, the players intuitively understand that the additional orks only exist in the game world because the game master is feeling inadequately threatening.
Basically, to my mind, strength in numbers is a clumsy and unexciting way to add threat to the battlefield unless the scenario is about the number of enemies in the first place. I prefer to hit the players hard with an intelligent choice of enemies. But sometimes I get the predictions wrong, and I haven't made an intelligent choice for enemies. One thing I always do, and have always done even in D&D, is play only from the stash of miniatures I brought to the game session. A game scenario needs to feel planned, and the threats need to feel natural to the scenario. If an enemy didn't exist within the confines of the battlefield in my mind before the game starts, then it doesn't get added to the battlefield during the game. I try to represent that for my players by having a box of miniatures I use for that game. There's never a threat that I'll pull a miniature rummage around in my closet and declare that suddenly a dragon has appeared and has killed all the character miniatures.
The thing about hero hammer is that it can create endurable characters, and that's frankly a really good thing, especially for roleplay. It's hard to have a narrative wargame when every unit of soldiers you sent into a building gets wiped out by a turret or a landmine. You need a character model who can take a beating and still get through the narrative.
In other words, wounding a hero model within an inch of removal isn't actually the problem. A game master's real goal is to challenge the player. Challenges, even in a wargame, doesn't have to be the threat of damage.
In a good narrative wargame mission, enemies are the barrier to a clean scenario. Players don't generally even care why their characters have the objective, all they care about is whether their characters can achieve it. In Vile Secrets of Vulcoth, the first objective is to get into the factory without setting off the alarm. That might mean killing all the enemy troops, or it might mean disabling the alarms, or just sneaking past the front gate, or distracting the guards, or something else entirely. From experience, I know that players can easily spend 5 rounds over 2 hours trying to get the board into the optimal state for their character models to achieve the arbitrary goal I've given them.
That's what a game is, after all: An arbitrary goal plus arbitrary restrictions on how you can achieve it.
I didn't exactly set out to play hero hammer. What I wanted to do, and what I should have done, was play Kill Team or maybe Boarding Actions, but I honestly just didn't think about it. What I ended up doing was learning about how to use surprisingly powerful characters in small games of 40k, and how to appropriately create a challenging game experience.
For my purposes, hero hammer is a functional method of gameplay. I want a powerful hero who can get through a scenario without dying half way through and bringing the narrative to an unceremonious halt. I can adapt for that, should it happen even with a character model, but I want my players to have a fighting chance. It seems that a few character models can provide that gaming experience.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.