Graspar said:

Actually, it is more than once stated in the DH books that there is a difference between Astartes equipment and that of unaugmented humans, though "civilian" was a stupid way of dubbing it, by the developers.

Purge the Unclean supports this, Brother-Sergeant Agammon's Boltpistol does 2d10 X damage.

Graspar said:

Do not forget that Chain Weapons (and Bolt Weapons) are "Tearing". Rolling an extra die for damage and being allowed to pick the higher value can make quite the difference.

Look, I know what the rules are, but are they consistent with the rest of 40K lore? I don't know and don't care, but that could be a reason to complain if that sort of thing is important to you.

And yes, they are tearing, but the minimum damage is the same.

Well, I stated earlier that the question of whether Astartes equipment is different from that of non-Astartes is indeed a hotly-debated one. You will find Codizes and Black Library Novels that support either point. But something had to be ruled by BI/FFG for the purpose of their RPG and so they did.

I can, however, fully understand if a GM or player is not happy with it, but then they have to tweak it.

Oh, and sorry if I came of as lecturing in my last post, it really was not my intention, I am sorry.

None taken, I just wanted to get the point across.

Bolt shells are small rockets. Rockets propel themselves, i.e. it shouldn't be a weapon that has a lot of recoil.

That's correct as long as you have no problem with bolts being somewhat more harmless while they're still accelerating. Otherwise, you'd need an initial charge that works more like a conventional SP weapon - and considering the low distances battles in 40k are often fought in, it's likely that these are implemented.

Gyrojet ammo as far as I know does not have casings, bolt shells do.
So I presume they have an initial bang before the rocket fires...

.75 you say, big recoil....

All valid points.

My main problem with the bolters is with the bolt pistol. It's a self propelling projectile so it should at least beat SP pistols in range.

Here is one rationalization.

Bolt rounds are going to be less accurate than a normal round at long range due to the propellant. As a round goes farther the more the environment acts on the round and it gets nudged off course more because of the rocket engine. It still penetrates more due to the rocket but is prone to greater drift over long range.

Cifer said:

Not just likely. The background specifically says that this is the case in a few places, the first of which that springs to mind at the moment being Imperial Armour 2.

Graspar said:

Isn't range more about precision than about how far the projectile will travel? A bullet from an SP pistol should be able to travel way beyond the maximum range, it's just they aren't accurate beyond that range. There's nothing inherently more accurate about a bolt pistol, hence the same range.

Yes, that works. In fact it makes perfect sense.

Saibot said:

To be more accurate here, a regular 1d10 roll has a mean value of 5.5 with all rolls having an equal chance (10%) to trigger. A tearing 1d10 roll gives you a mean value of 7.15, with the chance of each value ranging from 1% for a 1 to a 19% chance to roll a 10. Since I can't be bothered to add rightous fury into these calculations, I just considser a tearing weapon equlivant to a non-tearing weapon that does ~2 more points of damage.

Since I can't be bothered to add rightous fury into these calculations, I just considser a tearing weapon equlivant to a non-tearing weapon that does ~2 more points of damage.

Tearing comes up a little less than two times as often... 19% of all rolls (before confirmation, obviously).

Cifer said:

Yes. But then you have to factor in the characters BS or WS to see if they get to increase the damage. Then do that again to account for rightous fury hitting twice. Sooner or later your going to want to just approximate it.

Actually, that wasn't a hard equation to get. Take these variables:

mD - The mean damage per hit from the dice rolls only. Missed, parried or dodged attacks are ignored.

D - The average roll of the dice. This is 5.5 for 1d10 rolls, 7.15 for 1d10 tearing, 3 for 1d5

R - The chance for the dice to trigger righteous fury. 0.1 for a 1d10 or 1d5, 0.19 for a 1d10 tearing

A - The chance to hit. Usually the modified WS or BS. Note that this is a decimal so if you have to roll 32 or under, then this is 0.32

C - The constant damage increase of the weapon. For example if we are using an unmodified laspistol, this would be "+2"

Ignoring the constant we start with this equation: mD = D + R*A*mD

You will note that the equation uses its answer as one of its terms. So we will need to fix that:

mD - R*A*mD = D

mD (1 - R*A) = D

mD = D/(1-R*A)

Now we need to add in the constant to get mD = C + D/(1-R*A)

If one compares a Space Marine class bolter against an actual Space Marine, the rules start looking a little fishy. A 2x10 tearing weapon averages to 15.31, barring Righteous Fury. A Space Marine has been officially statted, IIRC, as having Unnatural Toughness, boosting him to TB 10. Strap on Space Marine Armor (which is, what, at least armor 10?), and you have a Space Marine that shrugs off bolter shells with a fair degree of regularity.

Either the Space Marine is wrong, or the bolter is still weak.

If one compares a Space Marine class bolter against an actual Space Marine, the rules start looking a little fishy. A 2x10 tearing weapon averages to 15.31, barring Righteous Fury. A Space Marine has been officially statted, IIRC, as having Unnatural Toughness, boosting him to TB 10. Strap on Space Marine Armor (which is, what, at least armor 10?), and you have a Space Marine that shrugs off bolter shells with a fair degree of regularity.

Er... a Space Marine bolt pistol is 2D10 (generally +2 for the Mighty Shot talent) + Tearing. Marine armour seems to around 10 indeed. Penetration would be around 5 or a little higher, so your average shot deals somewhere around 1 point of damage. On the other hand side, 2D10+Tearing+Space Marine BS has somewhere around 15% chance of fury-ing, perhaps even a little higher, twice per round for a SA burst. And the fury hits are what kills people (no, wait - the fury hits are what kills Space Marines. People are killed by regular hits pretty well).

Well, that works out about the same as a lasgun does against your typical armoured guardsman. That sounds right to me.

Looking at these a hit from a human style bolt gun, on average, is going to roll a crit on an average person in up to 4 points of armour and the tearing quality means that much lower damage is even less likely.

So a tough person is going to be lucky to get out there without a crit and be very much dead if that second round hits.

on top of that it doubles the chance for an RF for some outrageous damage.

All in all I'd say that all sounds about right both for feel and for game balance. It's not a guaranteed kill but they need to be tough hombres or very lucky.

Well, for what it's worth, I consider a TB of 10 for a space marine to be barking mad. That means that a melta-gun - that is, an anti-tank weapon - will on average do about 5 wounds to the marine. Admittedly, there is a 19% chance to get righteous fury, which (if you make the followup roll) will mean an average of about 13 wounds.

So basically, on a highly successful hit with an anti-tank weapon, you would on average do 13 wounds. I know marines are meant to be super-human, but come on!

So yes, I would tend to agree that something is wrong somewhere here. But hey, it's only a game, and designed to favour a certain amount of heroic survival of important characters like marines.

Perhaps the melta/plasma guns in the books are 'civilian' versions of these weapons, just like the bolter is a 'civilian' version. The military-grade versions could be beefier.

Or you could easily house rule that a few special weapons, like the melta-gun, ignore Unnatural Toughness. Kind of like how Holy negates the daemonic toughness of warp entities. This would make these few weapons a bit more robust, and stays pretty well with the rules.

dvang said:

I dunno. Surely the only point of unnatural toughness, in a character who is rarely out of power armour, is to be able to survive things like a melta-gun? After all it ain't like small arms fire is going to have much effect - an auto-gun or similar will be unable to wound without righteous fury and in fact will need to roll a pretty **** good second damage roll to even scratch the marine then.

Personally I feel unnatural toughness is overpowered for a marine. x2 is good for daemons and the like who play with bullets as they run off their warp-riven flesh, but marines are, for all the propaganda, still men. I think maybe there needs to be a x1.5 level or something.

(Then again, on reflection without power armour TB x2 isn't nearly so scary... so maybe it's the combination that is the problem. *shrug*)

dvang said:

That makes sense. It's a lot like the difference between a real world civilian anti-tank guided missle and a military anti-tank guided missle.

The main problem is the Unnatural Characteristic rules set. It absolutely destroys the scaling in the game, which is already in trouble. I've already had this gripe on the Dark Reign forums, along with a few others, but the weapon stats are out of line with scaling of the wounds/toughness bonus at high levels. If you play table-top, it is entirely possible for Imperial Guardsmen, with lasguns, to kill Space Marines in armour. Try that with this system. The craziness of having an anti-tank weapon, which shoots a miniature sun in stream form, barely put a dent in a Space Marine has already been brought up. If you want even more hilarity, try calculating how much damage a Space Marine does just by punching you (Unnatural Characteristics rears its ugly head again) and compare that to existing gun stats and tell me if it makes sense.

lehesu said:

to put it bluntly tho, its not the tabletop game. and personally I like the fact that marines are so tough in this setting. remember your a acolyte tasked with routing out corruption and hersey. let the marines do most of the heavy lifting in the mass battles of the 41 millenium.