Check out 80s action movie; Die Hard comes to mind; McLain gets shot, cut, punched, thrown, hung, is shoeless all movie long, still keeps going AND wins at the end. Last Man Standing is similar; guy gets beaten royally, but still manages to go back to town and kill every mobsters there is.
At this point, might as well say any action movie with Bruce Willis..
They still show signs of being hit, though - this is what I'm getting at. They get slowed down, thrown to the ground, they stagger. The audience actually has to fear for the hero's life!
Sorry, I just don't get the same vibe from DH.
Actually no, I used no horde rules, no magical damage bonus....the only thing I did modify was the fact that arrows were Imperial made ('Modern' arrows) rather than being your garden variety medieval-age workmanship stock arrows. [...]
Huh - well, thanks for the detailed explanation; it's certainly interesting to see how that encounter came across. I suppose it must have been the Accurate trait which caused those bows to hit with multiple d10s of damage, then.
As to the argument at hand, you still aren't really disproving my point, though. My criticism was based on the combination of Hitpoints + TB + Armour, which your solution merely circumvented by exploiting the fact that my character didn't wear a helmet at the time due to not expecting trouble, and thus removing one of the three layers.
Granted, even with the helmet on, I suppose those attacks would have hurt. But surely throwing packs of snipers with Accurate weapons at the players to make any sort of weapon more dangerous than it would otherwise be can't be the solution here?
This is a little off Lynata. In TT, A plasma gun will automatically penetrate SM armor but you must still roll to wound (Which is analogous to rolling for damage.). The one difference is that with Plasma guns being S7, They will automatically remove any model with T3 or less regardless of wounds. This means that for normal humans, Plasma guns are in fact "Instagib" in TT. That being said, a "Wound" in TT does not necessarily mean a fatality. It just means that the figure is removed from play as a casualty. (It's not the same! In campaign lvl games a character may return in a later scenario.)
You're almost right - I've no idea how my mind managed to conjure up such a flawed rendition. Somehow I must have mixed up the TT's rules with the RPG's. After re-checking the book it turns out that the attacker still has to roll a 2+ on the d6 in order to drop their target.
Although plasma weapons make zero difference between normal humans or Space Marines; it's 2+ for both. There is no weapon that auto-kills; even a Strength 10 attack on a T1 target must still roll 2+.
I interpret the abstraction here that on a to-wound roll of 1, the target receives a heavy wound that just still isn't critical enough to actually drop them, whereas on a 2-6 it is - this is based on even a result of 2 being so horrible that the target goes down. For lesser weapons, a result of 1 might only be a grazing shot or a light wound, and the 2 is the heavy wound, because only 3+ neutralises the target, etc.
One could even expand this into whether the target is merely incapacitated or actually slain (with a result of 6 of course being the worst possible outcome).
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is ... in the TT, plasma = scary. Not so much in the RPG, due to the multiple, stacking layers of resilience. Don't get me wrong: it's still a powerful weapon, but the difference is notable.
Like, how would you "right way" a dead-on plasma cannon shot that only caused a meager 13 points of damage, barely depleting the target's Wounds pool?
No, he does have a point, sort of - in his use of abstraction, even a "dead-on" plasma cannon shot would be described as a grazing wound or something. Like, a ball of plasma whizzing by the target in half a meter distance; far enough not to leave them with critical injuries, but close enough to have them feel the heat from the insane temperature.
However, as I've already mentioned in an earlier post , this approach feels very inconsistent in that people only get this "luck" if they have a full pool of Wounds. You could even relabel Wounds as Luck if you go about it this way, given how it seems a lot more appropriate when - as I understand the implications of his argumentation - he says that in his games, losing 10 Wounds is not worse than losing 1 Wound in terms of describing the effect of an attack. I suspect this is just a matter of how we'd like to see damage being narrated.
As an addendum to my earlier criticism, however, it also feels very unintuitive when a mechanical result of high damage does not translate into the same in the story. At this point you may just as well remove damage rolls entirely and rely solely on the shooter's accuracy, assigning each weapon a fixed value.
Ironically, this would actually be slightly more realistic than what we have now.