Been playing Resident Evil 4, for old times sakes, and the idea of escort missions in Dark Heresy came up in my mind. This led down a train of thought of how one might best keep their ward alive, and methods of last resort for when they **** hits the fan, and so I'm putting this idea to you guys, to see what comes up.

How would you handle an Acolyte using himself as a form of cover. That is to say, the Acolyte is deliberately placing himself between a shooter and a target, to obscure the target from the shooter's line of sight. Or hell, an Acolyte possibly taking cover behind dead bodies or something as it may apply.

My original thought was basically to treat the Acolyte as ordinary cover. Obviously if he dodges a shot aimed at the person or object he's protecting, it will hit as normal, but if he doesn't, that the shot's damage to the target is reduced by the Acolyte's armor and toughness value. The Acolyte will take the full damage from the shot, the person behind him takes any damage that exceeds his toughness and armor.

The key point to this is to differentiate itself from the alternate dodge rules in the Inquisitor's Handbook. This is not dodging into the way of an attack to take it for a colleague, this is actually deliberately standing in harms way so that they can't shoot your colleague (or at least have a much harder time of it).

I don't see why you'd have the person behind the Acolyte take damage at all.

I get that you're looking at bullets going through more than one body, but that's only relevant for certain types of damage (Ie Solid Projectiles only, as Energy would "burn up" and explosives wouldn't penetrate the same way).

Further, the "soak" value of the first persons AP+TB is just the buffer he has before he takes damage himself: the flesh of the target would add further protection for the person behind him, and then the bullet would have to penetrate the Armour again on the way out. If an attack has already "spent" 15 pts on overcoming soak and damaging flesh, then the stopping power of said attack would be reduced by those 15 pts.

Game-machanics wise, this would let an attack do it's damage twice, something that's ony allowed for Area of Effect attacks as the rules stand. It would lead to snipers wanting to make tricky shots to shoot more than one target with one shot, regardless of the willingness of the targets to get in each others way.

I agree that it might be a bit wonky to say that flak-armoured guardsmen make for better cover than plasteel bunkers, but that's RPGs for you, with the rather incredible surviving power of PCs

I think it would be easier (read: less of a numerical headache) if the defended just used their defender's AP but their own TB. For example, Benjamin has 9 AP while Washington only has 2 AP/2 TB. Though whatever mechanic (Benjamin uses a Reaction, forfeits his Turn, etc.), Washington can benefit from Benjamin's 9 AP rather than using his own 2 AP, but Washington is stuck with his 2 TB. The AP/TB system is just an abstraction anyway, so I wouldn't want to overcomplicate things with having to pass through two people's abstracted defences. If an attack overcomes Benjamin's contributed AP, it just means that the attack slipped past his guard. You can fluff it whatever way is necessary (the bullet whizzed right by Benjamin's ear as it drove into Washington's forehead, Benjamin isn't big enough to fully bodyblock for Washington, etc.), but I don't think taking a bullet for someone should make the target untargetable unless the target is truly covered (Benjamin holds Washington close to his chest rather than just standing in front of him, Benjamin has a massive tower shield to defend the crouching Washington, etc.).

Since projectile has to pierse meatshild's armour twice(once when it enters meatshilds body and once when it exits), isn't it logical to use doubled amount of meatshild's AP?

Since projectile has to pierse meatshild's armour twice(once when it enters meatshilds body and once when it exits), isn't it logical to use doubled amount of meatshild's AP?

And double their TB as well, I suppose. For better or worse, DH treating TB like skin armour makes it wonderfully easy here.

That being said, the idea of "meatshields" actually came up in Ascension already:

During combat, a Crusader may perform the following abilities if he is no more than 4 metres from his Inquisitor's side:

• The Crusader may make a Parry test as a Reaction to block an attack made against the Inquisitor
• Sacrificing his next turn, the Crusader may take all of the damage from one hit just suffered by his Inquisitor.

Now, these are meant to be ascended class special abilities, but I suppose you could still extrapolate and limit it to the 2nd ability only for non-Crusaders, and even then only if they have positioned themselves in-between their charge and the source of the attack before it has actually occurred (with a 90° coverage, so that 4 Acolytes could cover a person from all sides).

Either way, if you use these rules it comes down to simply switching the target of the attack, and the ward not being at risk at all.

If you really do want to increase the threat, however, I'd probably just count the Acolyte's AP+TB once and add it to that of the intended target. It's not as realistic, but ... then again, TB as skin armour is not in any way realistic to begin with, and if you're counting AP+TB twice (even with flak armour the average Acolyte would bump the ward's protection by +6 AP and +6 TB) you'd almost certainly negate the attack entirely for all but the most powerful weapons anyways, so in this case you might just as well not bother counting and use Ascension's abstracted method.