Order of operation: Look Out Sir!

I noticed in a game last week on the table next to mine that a guy was taking saves on his IC at the front of his unit, and that when he failed a saving throw, he then rolled the Look Out Sir roll, passed it, so the model next to the IC dies, and continues to roll saves on the IC.

I thought Look Out Sir was done before any saving throws are taken.....not after...?

you're right. He was mistaken (or outright cheated)

Yep, the IC actually has to decide whether he's taking the hit before he knows if he's passed his save.

Indeed to all of the above.

I see a lot of people flip the order when the IC has the same save as the unit, and I don't know think it matters in those cases though.

I'd say it does, as you aren't supposed to know if you have passed the save (even if it is the same in the whole group) before you decide whether you choose to let them say Look Out Sir (not completely sure if I understood you right here though...   ).

lessthanjeff wrote:

I see a lot of people flip the order when the IC has the same save as the unit, and I don't know think it matters in those cases though.

As it's the difference between the, presumably important/expensive, IC taking a wound or a grunt taking it, I'd say it does matter.

Mathematically it shouldn't affect anything. For a space marine example: if you take a wound, there's the 1/6 chance to fail passing it off and then 1/3 to fail the wound so he has a 1/18 chance of taking it. It comes out the same if you failed the save first on a 1/3 chance and then fail the 1/6 chance to pass it off to a model behind.

I definitely pay more attention to it when the models have different saves or anything to differentiate between them, but with squad captains and such I often just roll all the saves at once and then when I see wounds are going to start getting applied to the captain I do the look out sirs for however many are left that reach him. It saves having to do 3 saves, then do a few more, then do a few more, then start doing look out sirs from your captain, then do more saves, etc. If you guys think it does affect things in some way I'll be more cautious about it though.

It doesn't affect the chances of making the save if everyone's a 2+ or whatever, obviously.

But you can't wait and see if your expensive dude takes a wound then go "wait - no he didn't! It was this guy all along" like some Scooby Doo lunatic.

Look out Sir! is about calculated risks on what you'd rather lose, an IC wound or a 1W model. Not straight up negating wounds.

From a fluff point of view its easiest to see: the heroic grunt taking the bullet for his boss doesn't get to know if it's going to kill him before he makes the dive.

Ah, exactly what I wanted to get said, thesaltedwound. Thank you  

Once you start talking about multiple wound models, you are bringing in differences within the unit where I said I take more care to differentiate. I pointed out squad captains because they're generally the exact same except for maybe some different weapons which won't affect their odds of survival or any decisions to be made since I'm pretty sure you're going to try to pass them off no matter what. I don't think of it as assigning him a wound and then changing my mind and throwing it to someone else, I think of it as seeing how many unsaved wounds the unit will be taking and then determining who they will be assigned to.

To me, it's really just a way of saving time. If my squad of thousand sons and sorc take 8 wounds, I could roll 2 dice and pass both saves, roll 2 more and pass 1, roll 1 more and pass it, roll 1 more and fail it, then roll 2 look out sirs and pass both, roll 2 last saves and pass 1. Alternatively, I could roll 8 saves all at once, see that I miss 3 total, kill the two closest guys off and when the next one is about to be assigned to the sorc roll one look out sir to see if the last guy killed was the sorc or the son next to him. You go from having to make 6 separate rolls to 2 and end up with the exact same affect (assuming the rolls were identical from one case to the next).

Does playing it out with all the smaller rolls affect any decisions you made or the outcome? I'm not saying it's something that can be done in all cases, but for the op's question who just happened to overhear something from an adjacent game and didn't give many details, I wouldn't think the player was cheating or anything.

But there's also the point about when the decision to attempt a Look Out Sir is made, as has been said before. Regardless of the statistical probability of passing/failing saves, the primary issue at hand here is concerned with 'cherry picking' which wounds your IC does or does not take, which is clearly against the rules. I'll admit that there's less possibility of outright abuse of mis-timed LOS rolls, now that each weapon-type fires separately, but there is still a specific order of operations outlined in the rulebook and it's best we all adhere to that in order to be on the same page, both literally and figuratively.