In fairness, the fluff is pretty clear that a marine should be able to take on, say, 100 guardsmen with a good chance of winning. But the tabletop wargame was quite a bit out from that. This comes a lot closer. The marines truly are genetically engineered super-humans.
Problem with Bolt Guns "they Suck" Issues with both players and GM's think it
To bluntly say one Astartes can take down 100 Guardsmen before dying himself is a rather risky statement that is why "vs." discussion are always so problematic, they never take circumstance properly into account. You could think up situation in which what you claim is happens, but likewise situation in which some Veteran Guardsman take out Marines with minimal casualties.
Also, there is fluff to support both sides. In some you have Marines (loyal or not), butchering legions of normal humans and aliens and in others a simple Hot-Shot from a well-aimed Long Las takes off a Marine's head.
The problem with this system here is just that even weapons that should clearly and utterly annihilate them, even by the most diverse fluff accounts, barely scratch them, like many Melta-weapons.
I would go so far as to say that the jury is out on exactly what Space Marines are supposed to be able to do, as the fluff on them has seemingly changed so many times over the history of the game.
My main reason for justifying their extreme resilience remains the fact that they're supposed to be meaningful. And when you've got a million marines spread out over an Imperium of a million worlds, with every world on average supplying a million guardsmen (and that's a low estimate), you can have that fact only if they're really powerful.
The alternative would be the Imperial media completely fabricating their heroic and undefeatable image, which is certainly possible, but not what I'd like to see for my 40k universe.
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
Marines are men with several millenia of scientific tampering by the most likely greatest genius of the 40k universe short of a Chaos deity and every scientist at his disposal. Calling them "still men" reminds me strongly of calling someone "only human..."
You don't have to be an unstoppable juggernaut to make a difference in the universe. The imperial guard are cannon fodder; the marines are commandos. (This probably isn't very much in line with the fluff, but meh...) After all, if you go with what logically makes sense pretty much all Dark Heresy warfare should come down to ordnance, shouldn't it? The marines' advantage kicks in when you need a small, elite force, and using ten times as many ordinary soldiers wouldn't be possible.
Perhaps I should have said "only flesh and blood". They have super-tough skin, implausible levels of redundancy in their vital organs and endurance to pain beyond what any normal human could have. But should they still die if they suffer a direct hit from an anti-tank weapon.
The marines' advantage kicks in when you need a small, elite force, and using ten times as many ordinary soldiers wouldn't be possible.
Could you describe, say, five situations where this would happen, replacing "ten times" with "hundred times" and taking into account that a hundred guardsmen would probably still be a lot cheaper for the Imperium? Also consider leaving out the words "collateral damage", because people using full-auto mini-rocket launchers as sidearms do produce some ot that.
I don't believe that Space Marines have *that* much more invulnerability over regular humans as depicted in the DH stats. When I think Space Marine, I think of a big guy that will keep on fighting after he loses an arm or a leg. Note: he still loses the arm or the leg, he isn't invulnerable. The difference between a Space Marine and a Guardsman is that the Guardsman will scream in terror, black-out, and die when he sustains serious damage. The Space Marine gets pissed and takes a roomful of baddies down with him.
The general types of situation I'm thinking of are in dealing with a target that a large number of guardsmen couldn't easily bring their weapons to bear on - for example combat in space-restricted areas (ship-board combat, on a space hulk or tyranid wossname ship, in an imperial palace and so on); also situations where normal human endurance prohibits IG presence, not least in the cold, hard vaccum of space; and against any enemy capable of wreaking mass damage against lightly armoured targets or which is highly resilient to non-armour-piercing weaponry (bearing in mind the standard equipment for a guardsman is a lasgun and flak armour).
I'm not all that convinced that collateral damage is a significant problem. Yes, boltgun rounds will leave significant craters in nearby buildings and if there are civilians in the line of fire they might get killed - but this isn't actually all that worse than what would happen if you deployed a heavy stubber or similar. We aren't talking the sort of collateral damage caused by artillery.
But despite the above, I wouldn't like to try and argue that DH is realistic. Like I say, my strong feeling is that the emphasis on infantry in DH and WH40K is largely born out of a need for interesting characters and shiny minis, respectively - the real far future warfare would be likely to mainly involve large missiles fired from a distance, IMO.
Cardinalsin said:
dvang said:
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.
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*)
Why? I am not sure Unnatural Toughness was meant specifically to allow beings to survive things like a melta-gun. I think it was meant as a way (like Daemonic Toughness) to make the character generally more difficult to injure for normal weapons. Since they did it with Holy, it seems feasible to allow certain high-powered weapons to do a similar thing for the 'normal' version of Toughness. Of course, this is not necessarily the way to go. I also proposed treating the meltagun (and maybe some other 'high powered' weapons) in the book as the civilian version, much like the bolter in the book is not the Astartes version but is a civilian version. It's a smaller, more portable and slightly weaker weapon than its true military counterpart. This would allow the GM to increase the damage for the military version, which would bring it on par with the SM armor/toughness issue. There are also a few other possibilities I'm sure on how to help balance it out. However, it does seem a bit strange that a meltagun in DH as is has trouble even doing damage to a SM, let alone doing enough wounds to kill a SM.
The general types of situation I'm thinking of are in dealing with a target that a large number of guardsmen couldn't easily bring their weapons to bear on - for example combat in space-restricted areas (ship-board combat, on a space hulk or tyranid wossname ship, in an imperial palace and so on); also situations where normal human endurance prohibits IG presence, not least in the cold, hard vaccum of space; and against any enemy capable of wreaking mass damage against lightly armoured targets or which is highly resilient to non-armour-piercing weaponry (bearing in mind the standard equipment for a guardsman is a lasgun and flak armour).
I'll grant you the shipboard combat, assuming that we're talking about a ship that absolutely has to be boarded instead of being blown out of the sky and that its cramped corridors leave enough space for hulking 2,50m monstrosities - though admittedly the ordnance necessary to destroy capital ships may indeed be more ressource-intensive than a team of marines..
The rest?
The imperial palace situation sounds like a defence scenario, which is where marines suck because they can't really force their fighting style upon the enemy but have to react - and that's assuming the enemy doesn't want to slag the place entirely.
Combat in vacuum sounds more like an affair for guncutters and spaceships while other environments can be negated with the proper amount of gear.
And armourpiercing is pretty much why the guard has heavy weapons teams. Against any heavy enemies, the guys with the lasguns are pretty much there only to act as ablative shielding.
I'm not all that convinced that collateral damage is a significant problem. Yes, boltgun rounds will leave significant craters in nearby buildings and if there are civilians in the line of fire they might get killed - but this isn't actually all that worse than what would happen if you deployed a heavy stubber or similar. We aren't talking the sort of collateral damage caused by artillery.
However, we are talking the sort of collateral damage that makes volatile things like laboratories, factories or refineries (and quite a few other things where shelling and later rebuilding them would be too expensive) go boom anyway.
But despite the above, I wouldn't like to try and argue that DH is realistic. Like I say, my strong feeling is that the emphasis on infantry in DH and WH40K is largely born out of a need for interesting characters and shiny minis, respectively - the real far future warfare would be likely to mainly involve large missiles fired from a distance, IMO.
Oh, I'll definitely grant you that, just like space ship combat would certainly not come down to dogfights or broadsides. However, notice that my post didn't once use the word realism. I much prefer "suspense of disbelief", which kinda stops when you sit down and think how few marines there actually are and what they'd have to be like to be this much noticed.
A "civilian" version of the melta gun? Really? The entire idea of having a civilian range of bolt guns is actually quite different from the previously established fluff, and certainly at odds with tabletop stats. Now, I'm not saying that GW doesn't change its fluff a lot, because they do, but when we start breaking every single gun up into civilian/Space Marine versions, things start to look a little silly. Besides, a civilian form of melta gun would just be worse at killing tanks. I can't imagine it being so much more worse that it barely puts a dent into a Space Marine.
Cifer said:
The general types of situation I'm thinking of are in dealing with a target that a large number of guardsmen couldn't easily bring their weapons to bear on - for example combat in space-restricted areas (ship-board combat, on a space hulk or tyranid wossname ship, in an imperial palace and so on); also situations where normal human endurance prohibits IG presence, not least in the cold, hard vaccum of space; and against any enemy capable of wreaking mass damage against lightly armoured targets or which is highly resilient to non-armour-piercing weaponry (bearing in mind the standard equipment for a guardsman is a lasgun and flak armour).
I'll grant you the shipboard combat, assuming that we're talking about a ship that absolutely has to be boarded instead of being blown out of the sky and that its cramped corridors leave enough space for hulking 2,50m monstrosities - though admittedly the ordnance necessary to destroy capital ships may indeed be more ressource-intensive than a team of marines..
The rest?
The imperial palace situation sounds like a defence scenario, which is where marines suck because they can't really force their fighting style upon the enemy but have to react - and that's assuming the enemy doesn't want to slag the place entirely.
Combat in vacuum sounds more like an affair for guncutters and spaceships while other environments can be negated with the proper amount of gear.
And armourpiercing is pretty much why the guard has heavy weapons teams. Against any heavy enemies, the guys with the lasguns are pretty much there only to act as ablative shielding.
I'm not all that convinced that collateral damage is a significant problem. Yes, boltgun rounds will leave significant craters in nearby buildings and if there are civilians in the line of fire they might get killed - but this isn't actually all that worse than what would happen if you deployed a heavy stubber or similar. We aren't talking the sort of collateral damage caused by artillery.
However, we are talking the sort of collateral damage that makes volatile things like laboratories, factories or refineries (and quite a few other things where shelling and later rebuilding them would be too expensive) go boom anyway.
But despite the above, I wouldn't like to try and argue that DH is realistic. Like I say, my strong feeling is that the emphasis on infantry in DH and WH40K is largely born out of a need for interesting characters and shiny minis, respectively - the real far future warfare would be likely to mainly involve large missiles fired from a distance, IMO.
Oh, I'll definitely grant you that, just like space ship combat would certainly not come down to dogfights or broadsides. However, notice that my post didn't once use the word realism. I much prefer "suspense of disbelief", which kinda stops when you sit down and think how few marines there actually are and what they'd have to be like to be this much noticed.
Cifer said:
The imperial palace situation sounds like a defence scenario, which is where marines suck because they can't really force their fighting style upon the enemy but have to react - and that's assuming the enemy doesn't want to slag the place entirely.
Actually I was thinking attack, for some reason. But whatever; indoor attack situations are one of the things you'd expect marines to be good for.
Cifer said:
Combat in vacuum sounds more like an affair for guncutters and spaceships while other environments can be negated with the proper amount of gear.
Not necessarily - planets with low or no atmosphere that "need" (see remarks elsewhere) defending on foot must exist. Mining worlds, principally, one would imagine.
Cifer said:
And armourpiercing is pretty much why the guard has heavy weapons teams. Against any heavy enemies, the guys with the lasguns are pretty much there only to act as ablative shielding.
Well yes, but then you won't get 100 guard heavy weapons teams for every marine.
Cifer said:
However, we are talking the sort of collateral damage that makes volatile things like laboratories, factories or refineries (and quite a few other things where shelling and later rebuilding them would be too expensive) go boom anyway.
Fair point, though I suspect even small arms fire would not be a fantastic idea in some of these locations.
I guess the points I would make are that marines provide high-density firepower, hence their applicability to some of the above situations, as well as presumably being much more flexible to deploy - dropping 100 marines into a situation is far easier than deploying 10,000 guardsmen. Beyond that, the reputation may simply not be justified, to the extent that it paints them as demi-gods; and perhaps in cost:benefit terms they don't justify their price-tag. But whoever said the imperium was efficient?
But to go back to your point about suspension of disbelief, I honestly think you have to be prepared to turn a blind eye to certain aspects of the DH universe if you're going to achieve that. Perhaps one of those is the relative reputation and power level of space marines.
Noooooo!!!! *bangs head repeatedly against t'internet*
@Cardinalsin, off topic again, but when you close...
the quote, I think you need to type...
it out in all caps ;-)
Edit:
Like
See? Even the forum software rejects arguments that support weak marines! 
(And now guess why I usually use italics for quotes...)
Case-sensitive forum tags, whatever will they think of next?
Ok, I'll get it right one day. I shall never give in to italics!
@Cifer, the forum software is also
mentaly challenged, or at the very least,
quite out of it's mind.
With half the random WTF things it
choses to do and support, I honistly can't
support any opinion it might have on
Spess Mahreens.
Case-sensitive forum tags, whatever will they think of next?
1337 Tags!
Now instead of typing you would type
[/Kw073]
I'm just trying to move this to the next page to get
formating back to normal now ;-)
lehesu said:
If you play table-top, it is entirely possible for Imperial Guardsmen, with lasguns, to kill Space Marines in armour.
Over an indeterminate amount of time (a game turn in 40k is not a fixed or defined timescale), and substituting "kill" for "render incapable of fighting", yes...
We do not know how much time passes (and thus how much firepower can be unleashed) in a given turn of 40k. Similarly, due to the abstracted nature of the rules, all situations where a combatant is injured severely enough to render him incapable of continuing to fight with his squad are combined into a single game effect: remove the model from the board.
Because of those two factors, assertions as to the relative effectiveness or capabilities of 40k weaponry/warriors compared to a game system where things are less broadly abstracted - such as Dark Heresy, where a turn is a defined approximate length of time and a single lasgun shot is not an abstraction of potentially several minutes of continuous fire - cannot be accurate.
no1here, I can't read your response because the forum has offset itself. If you would be good enough to repost when we roll to the next page, that would be great.
I'll help some.
We played two days ago, we had no less
than five people "cease to exist in any tangible way"
.
@N0-1_H3r3, I would quote you but (a) I fear for the consequences and (b) I can't actually see the quote tab right now... anyway: You can compare the lethality of lasguns and boltguns, and the survivability of space marines and imperial guard, in WH40K vs DH. I feel confident in saying that Space Marines' comparative survivability is better in DH than it is in WH40K. Not so sure about the comparative lethality of the two weapons; I think the two systems are much more similar on that point.
Are we on the next page yet?
My point was that the comparisons are somewhat squiffy due to the unknown variables. We don't know, for example, how many shots a "shot" in 40k represents for any given weapon (and we have every reason to assume that such a value would be highly variable between weapons - a Shuriken Catapult fires far faster than a shotgun for example, yet both are Assault 2 weapons in 40k), nor do we know exactly how damaged a character would need to be in order to be removed from play in 40k terms (dead being a rather loaded and misleading term in this context). We're also dealing with individual weapons as opposed to abstractions meant to deal with massed squad-vs-squad fire, which does influence things some.
For the latter issue, some jury-rigging and house-ruling is required. Dark Heresy includes a single Space Marine as an "oh my god he's terrifying and unstoppable... but yay he's on our side" guest star... it doesn't support their ilk as standard. TS Luikart, who designed those Space Marine stats (which should be acknowledged to be representative of an extremely capable veteran with enhanced stats and really good equipment like Artificier armour, rather than representative of a typical Space Marine), presented a set of Volley Fire rules to cover groups massing their fire to bring down particularly hard targets. These are quoted below, having been reposted on these forums when they first opened:
Wu Ming said:
T.S. Luikart: Early in the development of Dark Heresy, we actually did have some Red Shirt / Mook rules for NPCs. They were scrapped along the way, but unfortunately a few of their vestiges remain to haunt us, the worst being the "Righteous Fury" bit. There was a time, oh a couple of years ago, when not giving the Minor NPCs the ability to achieve a Righteous Fury made perfect sense - mainly because they worked in a slightly different fashion.
Having finally gotten a look at an "official" representative of the Adeptus Astartes, I know quite a few of you concluded "Oh my god, he can't even be scratched by basic weapons!" or words to that effect. "Context is King" the old phrase goes and I have found that to be a truism in RPGs.
So here, long promised, finally arrived - are some of the rules that I've been using for awhile for Dark Heresy. Hopefully, you GMs will find them useful and Players with an eye towards commanding troops will also like them.
Note that these rules carry with them a set of two assumptions: A) All Heavy & Special Weapons are always subject to Righteous Fury – whether this is due to the fact that any NPC kick ass enough to wield one causes it or the weapon itself is irrelevant.* B) NPCs otherwise cannot achieve Righteous Fury unless they are Major Villains / Antagonists.
Volley Fire
Volley Fire is a Full Round Action that allows a squad of individuals armed with Semi-Auto or Automatic weapons to unleash a hail of fire capable of shredding those foolish enough to not take cover. A round of Volley Fire can only be unleashed by a Squad of 5 or more, less and they must revert to the standard attack rules.
First determine whether the bulk of a Volley Firing Squad is using Automatic or Semi-Auto weapons; it is okay to "mix and match" with the proviso that you get a bonus to Ballistic Skill based on the majority of the weapons being used. Note that any individual armed with a weapon in a completely different class than the rest should always be rolled separately, e.g. a Squad armed with lasguns accompanied by a Ad-Mech gun servitor with a Plasma Cannon - even though the servitor is accompanying the Squad, he..erm "it" rolls its attack separately.
Average the Ballistic Skill Scores of the Squad to get the Squad's "base" Ballistic Skill. The Squad gets the standard +20% if mostly using Automatic weapons and +10% if using Semi-Auto. Volley Fire cannot be "aimed" per se, but other bonuses and penalties may apply at GMs discretion.
Each Degree of Success on that attack roll allows a Squad using Automatic weapons to hit 1 target. With Semi-auto weapons it takes 2 Degrees of Success to hit a target. Any given target can only be hit once per round of combat by any given Volley Fire - "extra" successes are wasted on the surrounding terrain, potentially guilty bystanders, local statuary, etc.
The damage of a Volley Fire round is equal to the base damage of the main weapons being used +2 to damage for a Squad of 5. An additional +1 damage is added for each additional squad member until twice the weapons normal base damage (counting a weapons d10s as having rolled a 10) has been reached.
For example, a Standard Lasgun does 1d10+3 – its maximum damage potential is thus 26 (13x2). This breaks down as follows:
Squad of 5 Volley Fire with a Basic Lasgun = 1d10+5
Squad of 6 = 1d10+6
Squad of 7= 1d10+7 and so forth all the way up to
Squad of 16 = 1d10+16 – since this is capable of achieving a 26, you’ve reached the maximum damage potential for that weapon. Larger squads would be irrelevant.
The various Special Qualities still apply to Volley Fire if enough (more than 50%) of the weapons in a Volley have that Special Quality. The same applies to Penetration values (though you could average across the board if you really feel like it).
Larger groups of combat troops generally tend to break up into different groups and pick different targets to maximize their effectiveness, e.g. If you attack your PCs with 17 cultists armed in the main with autoguns, if they are combat trained, they are more likely to break into 2 Squads of 6 and a Squad of 5 in order to open up in multiple directions. If not combat trained, all of them may just open up at what they can see.
With that in mind, a lone man with a lasgun may be doomed if confronted with a Space Marine... but a squad of Guardsmen will fare somewhat better. Yes, it's houserules, but the rules as written will only reasonably cover the most common situations... clearly, facing Space Marines and those like them was not considered to be a particularly common situation...
As for comparative survivability of the Astartes... the same can be said in Inquisitor, and in the background (depending on your chosen source). It's a commonly-asserted notion that their presence in 40k is somewhat less than what it should be for the purposes of either game balance or selling more models (likely both, if anything). Given what they are when in full battlegear, fundamental immunity to smallarms fire seems quite appropriate, IMO.
Well, it turns out that if you go into reply mode, you can read the previous posts more easily, but we're not quite on the next page yet...
Interesting volley fire rules. Apart from anything else it could speed combat up quite a bit. I'll need to give some thought to questions of balance (and I'm not 100% convinced that this should be usable to make a group able to take down a space marine if individually they wouldn't be able to even scratch him).