Aighty, after comparing the arsenal to the possible TB and armour values, as well as fluff, here's a few changes I hope make sense. This is, incidentially, for the first beta. As some folks are reworking its ruleset for use, I figured I'd post what my round is running with atm.

Comments/Feedback are always welcome of course:

Bolt weapons: Pen increased to 5
Chain weapons: Pen=degrees of success on hit. They gain the armour-destroying trait and the unbalanced trait.
Power weapons: Pen increased to 6
Plasma and melta weapons: Pen increased to 6. Meltas gain the armour-destroying trait.
Autocannon and other heavy weaponry: Gains Concussive (2-3). Autocannons also gain the aforementioned armour-destroying trait.
Other Solid projectile weapons: Pen increased all around by 2

Hot shot las-weapons: Gain the "piercing" quality.
Crossbow: Pen raised to 3
Bow: Pen raised to 2
Swords: Pen raised to 2
Axes: Pen raised to 1

Krak grenades and missiles also gain the armour destroying trait.

Great Weapons lose the unbalanced trait.

Eviscerator RoF increased to 1/3. For penetration purposes, it is a power weapon, but remains unbalanced and armour-destroying like all chain weaponry.

Needle rifle, sniper rifle and long las: RoF = 1.

Armour-destroying:
When rolling a 10 for damage, reduce target armour by 1. Given a cap of 12d10 per round on an autocannon, and agility bonus based chainsword attacks, this should represent the actual in character effect of said weapons quite well.

Alternatively, 2 additional damage dice generated from RoF can be converted to create an armour reduction of 1 point.

Concussive:

Additionally to dazed, on test failure, your character is knocked prone.

Further relevant are perhaps some combat tweaks we houseruled in to keep things fast and easy:

Premise1: Cover types have an armour value assigned to them, which is added to the character's armour in that zone. Punching through cover diminishes that armour value.

Premise2: We don't like rolling lots of dice. All 40k systems require us to roll an atrocious amount

Conclusion:

New default hit location for unaimed shots = highest armour value. Aimed shots get to pick their targets.

For every additional damage dice generated through degrees of success on target, the player may choose to forfeit said dice and do one of the following:

1. Add an additional point of armour penetration to the shot

2. Reduce the armour value of cover by an additional 1 point

3. Add +2 to the wounds table result for the hit.

I strongly disagree with increasing the Penetration of all weapons by that much. If your boltgun has a Penetration of 5, this means that a person wearing Enforcer carapace has exactly the same protection against a bolt round as someone wearing a ratty T-shirt. Yes, a bolt round can penetrate a carapace chest plate, but the armor still provides some protection.

Yeah, no, a bolter is precisely the weapon you should not have used in your counter argument there...

A bolt round is a diamond-tipped AP round designed to punch through power armour and take down space marines. The actual damage, however, comes from the explosive charge behind the tip that detonates the casing like a small shrapnel bomb. Subtracting standard TBs of 3 or 4 from the damage result and going on the rending table leaves one with the approximate effect of a single bolt shell (i.e. a very very ugly injury). Multiple hits are unquestionably lethal. That is what a bolter is supposed to do.

If your acolytes are expecting to shrug off bolter shells like it's nothing (which with a pen of two and a system that allows TBs of 9, ergo effective 12 soak, for humans is entirely possible in the unmodified system), they should have rolled space marines.

Yeah, no, a bolter is precisely the weapon you should not have used in your counter argument there...

A bolt round is a diamond-tipped AP round designed to punch through power armour and take down space marines. The actual damage, however, comes from the explosive charge behind the tip that detonates the casing like a small shrapnel bomb. Subtracting standard TBs of 3 or 4 from the damage result and going on the rending table leaves one with the approximate effect of a single bolt shell (i.e. a very very ugly injury). Multiple hits are unquestionably lethal. That is what a bolter is supposed to do.

If your acolytes are expecting to shrug off bolter shells like it's nothing (which with a pen of two and a system that allows TBs of 9, ergo effective 12 soak, for humans is entirely possible in the unmodified system), they should have rolled space marines.

I think we're looking for very different things from the same system. Your rules suggest that you want to have a game which mimics the 40k fluff as well as possible. This is a perfectly fine goal, and if that's the kind of game you want to run then by all means do so.

I prefer to have a game where armor can protect characters against weapons. This might fly in the face of 40k fluff, but if it makes for better gameplay I'm all for it. And it does make for better gameplay in this case -- if most decent weapons can completely ignore carapace plating , your only reasonable mode of defense is to dodge attacks. The HP-less system of the first beta means that even with high Toughness there is no way a human can survive hits from a boltgun, and I find that worsens the game for everyone who isn't playing a dodge-monkey assassin.

Yeah, some of my players griped about the weapons table, once they actually looked at it, because rules value didn't match what was described in fluff. The common weaponry (las, SP, prim and chain) for the most part, the stuff characters will see on a more regular basis in our campaign, is soaked decently enough by armour for our preferences.

My current ponderings are more along the lines of how we should implement force fields and similar things, and if certain types of armour should grant additional soak vs specific damage types. Reflective plating, f.ex., v.s. las.

I'm also wondering if we hit source exactly there, really.

For a less lethal, bolter shells everywhere game, I'd use the weapon values as per core book, certainly, but that isn't what my group wants (Investigative game, with rare, but very dangerous combat, preferably meaningful in some manner, be it due to mistakes they made or rivals they made). The book weapon values simply do not work well for that premise.

In that case, your rules sound like a good solution for your type of game. My players enjoy combat far too much to play a fully investigative game, so fights break out in about two of every three sessions

Hey all. I do admire your initial post and I believe that every player should play the way they like. My thoughts on this matter are that the weapons are fine the way they are. You also have to remember that the bolt weapons in this game are the ones made for humans. The technology of the astartus bolter is far superior and the caliber is larger. Hence 1D10+9 dmage pen 5 Also bolt weapons are not designed to punch through power armor. There are many cases in the novels were space marines take many hits from bolt weapons and they defelct off there armor When bolt weapons were first made it was unthinkable for space marines to fight space marines as evident in the horus hersey novels. Bolt weapons were never designed to punch through power armor that why they have special ammunition "kraken rounds" to do that. Also the bolter as designed in the game is 1D10+5 pen 4 so a acolyte with a TB of 4 and wearing carapace armor will still always take D10 damage as the round punches through his/her armor. Power armor "might" preven any damage at all. The bolter is also tearing so odds are the damage number will be pretty high. Bolt weapons also have the worse critical table as even a rightouse fury crit can potentially kill a acolyte. You must remember that armor this game isnt like the armor of today. My armour that I wear in the army is no where near as advanced as the flak armour the imperial guard wear. So to me the weapons in the game are fine the way they are lethal enough for characters but strong enough that tough adversaries such as deamon hosts and such have a chance. Also chain weapons should defintly not be pen 0 they are admantium tipped chain weapons they defintly pen armour.

Adamantium tipped? Hrm. I missed that. I originally intended them to be an armour-destroying alternative to normal weaponry so I just radically decreased their pen. Thanks, I'll talk it over with our round's engineer what that would change

As far as bolt weapons go, given the rarity we decided on, we're unlikely to adjust them ourselves, but the key balancing factor in the wounds system is penetration, actually. The damage per se only determines the result on the wounds table, which is why it can stay the same for astartes and other bolt models, but the armour penetration is where one can scale things fairly easily to where they fit with your round's own canon

Yeah the chain weapons in alot of the fiction are described as having adamantium teeth. However on the 40k wiki they are described as having monomolecular teeth. However both terms are probably used interchangeably by authors to convey they the theet are very very sharp compared to a normal sword.

Reviewing some execution moves in fluff, what I see a lot from chain weapons is space marines grabbing enemies, or pinning them, then cutting through their armour like a chainsaw. I am tempted to keep pen at 0, and add something to the chain property that allows a grapple (NOT the DnD grapple, omfg no!) and massively increased armour pen with it.

Thoughts?

Fluffy? Too complicated?

Reviewing some execution moves in fluff, what I see a lot from chain weapons is space marines grabbing enemies, or pinning them, then cutting through their armour like a chainsaw. I am tempted to keep pen at 0, and add something to the chain property that allows a grapple (NOT the DnD grapple, omfg no!) and massively increased armour pen with it.

Thoughts?

Fluffy? Too complicated?

The first beta had the Pen of chain weapons modified by the user's Strength while the damage was the same for all users. For example, the chainsword had a damage of ~1d10+6 Tearing (with no added strength bonus) while its penetration was equal to your SB. You could use that rule as a starting point.

Decided in the end that strength is secondary to -how- the chain weapon hits the target. As such, we've decided that a chain weapon's penetration will equal the degrees of success the hit connects with. In combination with our house rules for chaos , it further underlines the Khornate tendency to favour chain above all.

Crossbow: Pen raised to 3

Bow: Pen raised to 2

While lasguns still have 0 ? Isn't very logical, since bows and crossbows are mostly a primitve weapons, either produced on feral/feudal worlds or jury-rigged from scrap-metal by low-level underhive criminal elements.

This discussion is based off the original beta versions of Dark Heresy 2E, which eventually got scrapped in favor of a rules evolution following from Only War and Black Crusade.

While lasguns still have 0 ? Isn't very logical, since bows and crossbows are mostly a primitve weapons, either produced on feral/feudal worlds or jury-rigged from scrap-metal by low-level underhive criminal elements.

Many of those "primitive" weapons have a better penetration than many modern weapons...so yeah, it's allright.

Many of those "primitive" weapons have a better penetration than many modern weapons

Well, it is commonplace to be badly misguided over the real penetration power for rifle-class bullets (say, 7,62mm NATO). However, such rounds are known to punch about 10-12cm through brick walls when out on 200 meters range from the target.

Second, is the attitude about lasgun and las-weapons. For me, it is the absolute imperative (per my own understanding of Wh40K setting's canon) that lasgun shots are no less lethal than real-life bullets shot from an AK-47 and I absolutely refuse to settle for anything less . So making the lasgun overtly weak against clearly primitive armour isn't fair up to me - such "armour" as chainmail suits or feudal world plate should produce little damage against lasgun's shots as it would be per WH40K's lore.

PS: I know about "flashlight" jokes, however that is not about comparing the lasgun to modern assault-rifle grade weapons, but about comparing the lasgun to more powerful weapons, present in the tabletop game's weargear lists (like comparing it to bolter or plasma gun).

According to these I seem to miss the "primitive armour" rule, that did the thing right.

PS: It will be even more accurate to differentiate altogether armour's effectiveness against different sources of damage. Say, a common flak vest may be able to stop autopistol's bullets but do little to stop las-weapons' discharges, and on the contrary, armour like crystal armour, used by the Vitrian Dragoons Imperial Guard regiments may be very effective against lasgun's shots due to it's semi-reflective outer layer. But that mechanics would surely over-complicate the game, I know.