what happens when the armour and toughness bonus are overnulled by the penetration of a weapon, say that the entire AP (toughness included) is 5 and the penetration is 6 does the weapon cause one more point of damage?

No, Armour Penetration does exactly that, penertrates armour, so any 'left over' penetration is ignored. Otherwise they might as well just ignore Pen and increase a weapons base damage...

Also, I may be wrong, but it was to my understanding that a persons Toughness Bonuse is not reduced by Penetration...

Ive always played it so, at least all of the GMs ive been under have played it that way

Core rulebook page 127/128:

Pen (Penetration): Reflects how good the weapon is at going through armour. When a shot of blow from this weapon hits a target, reduce the target's Armour Points by the weapon's penetration, with results of less than 0 counting as 0 (i.e. the armour provides no protection at all). Then work out the damage as normal. So for example, if a weapon with a Penetration of 3 hits a target with 5 Armour Points, the target will only count as having 2 Armour Points against any damage the hit causes. Note that Penetration has no effect on fields, but does affect cover

Over penetration does nothing, the toughness bonus isn't mentioned so it isn't effected. Thus a point of toughness bonus is more useful than a point of armour.

So the penetration reducing the toughness bonus must be a house rule. Lets analyse it:

First lets look at its effect on SP weapons. SP weapons have 3 ammos:

- Regular cheap bullets.

- Dumdum which add 2 damage, but AP counts double against them.

- Manstoppers which increase the penetration to 3.

Under the core rules dumdums are the best choice for targets with no armour (think daemons), manstoppers are best for armoured targets. Both can justify their cost.

Under this house rule dumdums would better than manstoppers on unarmored targets with a TB of 1 or less, equal on a TB of 2, inferior everywhere else because the manstoppers get more damage through the TB. So this house rule has made dumdums rather useless and dumbed down the game.

Bilateralrope said:

Meh, I get the feeling folks don't use dum-dum's anyway. They rarely ever come up in conversations, no npc that i can recall is ever outfitted with them, and they seem a bit too specialized for the damage bonus they give. It's a bit much to say a house rule that allows Pen to remove TB as well "dumbed down the game." While it makes a hardly used ammo type a bit less used, it also makes things a hell of a lot easer in the math department as it eliminates a step in damage calculation and speeds combat up. I wouldn't say that's dumbed down, "simplified" would be a better word choice -simple dose not equate to dumb.

Ive always played like that and ive never felt the game "dumbed down" as said above, it helped in math and we explained it like this "though penetration goes through armour, if something can go through flak or carapace armour its gonna have no problem going through flesh and bone IE toughness bonus." feel free to use this rule if you like

Graver said:

Ok, "dumbing down" was a bit harsh. Though I don't see how the math is any eaiser. For the core rules you have two equations:

Effective AP = AP - Penetration

Damage dealt = Total damage - (Effective AP + Toughness Bonus)

With this house rule:

Damage reduction = AP + Toughness Bonus - Penetration.

Damage Dealt = Total damage - Damage reduction.

How is the second set any eaiser than the first ?

Both are simple, one has 3 terms, the other has 2.

Why would any NPC be equipped with dumdums when expecting to fight humans ?

The only time I would want dumdums is when going up against creatures with no armour and high toughness. If they have armour then dumdums will be worse than the cheap bullets, if they have no armour and low toughness then the extra damage won't matter much.

I'd also need something restricting my use of some more expensive weapons (like bolters). But that would also apply to manstoppers.

I've thought about allowing bolters, plasma and melta weapons to use their leftover Penetration against the TB on a 2:1 basis, simply because there are quite a few really tough opponents (DotDG seems to have at least one Unnatural Toughness per chapter) where I'd assume using a bolter or plasma gun should be working better than a simple shotgun.

And then there's the problem that you can't really tell whether a creature would have Unnatural Toughness or Natural Armour because they're rather similar...

By having PEN reduce Toughness as well as armor, you are basically add +X to the weapon damage.

So a weapon that is normally 1d10+1 PEN 3 is now pretty much 1d10+4 for all enemies with a toughness equal to or greater than the PEN (and no armor).

A bolt pistol, normally 1d10+5 PEN 4, is now 1d10+9 vs any opponent with T 4. You are skewing weapon damage up quite a bit, and making Manstopper rounds more powerful, since they both provide 3 PEN but also +3 Damage vs unarmored opponents).

Bilateralrope said:

Well, in my game, I am one of those nutters who has pen act against TB as well as armour and it dose speed things up, both in damage calculation and in damage done so folks drop a bit faster (something I'm all about). For me, I don't do the math in my head the way you wrote it out as some of the equations involve several steps that must be done, etc. Instead, damage calculation gose something like this:

By the RAW

1. Get Pen and Total Damage Rolled
2. Subtract Pen from AP
3. Add remaining AP to TB
4. Subtract TB from Total Damage Rolled
5. Subtract Result from Wounds

By Pen Removes TB

1. Get Pen and Total Damage Rolled
2. Subtract Pen from Soak*
3. Subtract Result from Total Damage Done
4. Subtract Result from Wounds

*Soak is TB plus AP and is calculated and written down when stating NPC's and is already notated for the PC's so I don't have to calculate that one out in the heat of combat even if it is just a simple addition of two small numbers. It makes a difference for me -the fewer numbers I have to worry about and keep in my head or look up while players are shouting things about purging this or that, tossing dice about, shouting numbers out to me, etc, the happier I am and the smoother combat will go.

Either way, that's how damage calculation is done in my head and on paper during combat as that's just how my mind works. So, for me, it's easer and simpler to have one soak number as opposed to two which is what AP and TB separate effectively are. While it dose invalidate dum-dum's to a degree, I don't mind losing an ammo type for faster combat. Also, the fact that it, for the most part, increases the damage of weapons is, in my opinion, a good thing. If I had kept the RAW method of damage calculation in my game, I would have ended up raising weapon damages anyway. Things just don't die fast enough to suit my groups tastes when played strait, but that's just us. We also all suck at quick simple math for some odd reason, and one of my players took trig in college and was in Math Club durring high school but still has to count the pips on 6 sided dice wen rolling more then one to figure out the sum total. Go figure. In the end, the less math we have to deal with, the better off we are and the less chance there is of one of us having a sudden stroke ;-)

Graver said:

You are GRAVEly mistaken mate. (excuse the pun, I just couldn't resist )

In our group every PC's that has ever used Solid Projectile weapons has gotten special ammo in order to adapt to different situations. Also the game balance would be too wierd if Pen took away Toughness Bonus as well. Toughness is not a "thick hide" that can be penetrated, it is the innate toughess of the person or creature. The kind of difference where some people faint by being shot in the leg, while others say: "It's just a flesh wound, I can deal with it".

Varnias Tybalt said:

Well, it was just an observation. Since those darn things are so reliant on the quality of information put before them, they can be quite wrong a lot of times ;-). I just noticed man-stoppers comes up a hell of a lot while dum-dums rarely if ever get mentioned.

As for the rest, I haven't noticed any weird issues. I guess it's all just a matter of what's good for some will be terrible for others and all that.

ThenDoctor said:

For a bullet to penetrate armour it needs to concentrate all of its kinetic energy into as small an area as possible to reduce the energy that the armour absorbs. But that will then leave a small hole in the person inside the armour so, unless it hits a vital organ or a major vein/artery it won't do much damage. A large chunk of the energy will leave the body with the bullet. The more penetration the bullet has, the less energy it loses as it passes through the flesh.

To do a lot of damage to flesh you want a bullet that spreads the energy out over a large area within the body, causing the flesh to have to absorb more energy from the bullet. For example hollow point bullets are designed to mushroom to reduce their penetration so that they deal more damage to flesh.

Bilateralrope said:

That also explains why shotgun blasts do such horrendous damage at close range against unarmoured targets.

Actually I think it's a bit wierd that doing lots of damage in RPG's most often automatically means that you bypass armour as well. If things were more realistic then weapons damage shouldnt really influence the factor of bypassing armour. It should be the penetration value that dictates whether a projectile manages to penetrate a certain value of armour. So even if a projectile has a high damage value it will be completely or mostly ignored if the penetration value can't bypass the armour (if the armour holds damage in the form of bruising or broken bones can still occur depending on how stiff the armour is).

And also consider the fact that if a weapon has a "too high" penetration value, then the damage it induces might be reduced if used against an unarmoured target. For example, being hit in the arm by a high velocity weapon that fires full metal jacket ammunition (which usually have a high penetration ability) can be completely survivable and sometimes even ignored if the shot doesn't hit any bones or major arteries. If you're hit in the arm by a hollow point bullet instead (which usually have a lot lower ability to penetrate than the FMJ) then you might die within seconds because the bullet is likely to shred large portions of your arm (including shattering bone and rupturing arteries and veins).

I wonder if it might be possible to create a more realistic damage/penetration combat system? Rather than simply saying that all armour does is "absorbing" only portions of damage, but the rest of the damage still strikes home for some reason (which isn't particularly realistic because it completely nulls the reason to wear any armour at all).

Now some people might draw the old: "why do you demand realism in a game that features demons, aliens and magic?"-argument and I'll tell you why: The best works of fantasy and science-fiction created are the ones where efforts have been made to make the setting SEEM as realistic as possible, and If you strive to create something good in that regard then you should strive to make the unrealistic seem realistic.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Possibly something along the lines of Weapon Pen+Attacks DoS (to represent being good enough to hit a ***** or weak spot in the armour and help randomize things a bit)-AP. If Pen+DoS is reduced to 0 or below, the weapon doesn't penetrate and no damage is done (though it may do 1 pt of fatigue in certain flexible armours?). Else the attack makes it through the armour and dose it's damage. It may work, though Penetration Values would either need to be increased by a point or so or armour AP would need to be reduced a point or to perhaps...

Just a thought.

Possibly something along the lines of Weapon Pen+Attacks DoS (to represent being good enough to hit a ***** or weak spot in the armour and help randomize things a bit)-AP. If Pen+DoS is reduced to 0 or below, the weapon doesn't penetrate and no damage is done (though it may do 1 pt of fatigue in certain flexible armours?). Else the attack makes it through the armour and dose it's damage. It may work, though Penetration Values would either need to be increased by a point or so or armour AP would need to be reduced a point or to perhaps...

You'd need to change values quite a bit more than that. With that system, you'd need 3 DoS to hit someone in guard flak with a lasgun.

Further, you'd need a lot more complexity to deal with different kinds of damage and armour if realism is any concern at all.

Now some people might draw the old: "why do you demand realism in a game that features demons, aliens and magic?"-argument and I'll tell you why: The best works of fantasy and science-fiction created are the ones where efforts have been made to make the setting SEEM as realistic as possible, and If you strive to create something good in that regard then you should strive to make the unrealistic seem realistic.

Actually, the best works of fantasy and sci-fi are those that are still playable without the aid of a computer (unless of course you want to involve one. In which case, go right ahead!). Once you involve too much realism, it can be easy to say "Ok, why did he stop there? Why didn't he follow that through?" when you obviously couldn't because it would draw the whole thing out too much. Suggesting something with a few metaphorical broad strokes can work better and feel more realistic than painstaking detail.

Cifer said:

Indeed! And don't forget, there's no rule that has ever been nor can ever be written that can model reality quite like simple common sense can. That being the case, it's usually best to sckew for simplicity and let common sense fill in the rest ;-)

The problem with using the "Penetration works against AP and TB" is that Manstopper Rounds make Dumdum Rounds completely null and void.

With a solid projectile weapon against an unarmour opponent, a Manstopper Round would see no armour and there take off up to 3 points of toughness bonus, while a dumdum round (which is intended for use against unarmoured targets) would only deliver 2 points of damage more than a standard bullet. So why ever bother with dumdums?

my entire group (nearly 15 people when you add it all up) has never used dum dums for the simple fact they dont appeal to us not because of our house rule...and hardly any of us use manstoppers we mostly just use regular bullets.

Pen removes toughness makes no logical sense if you think about A. what PEN represents in a weapon and B. what TB represents when it comes to calculating damage.

PEN is easy, the core book already defines that it is the weapons ability to penetrate armor. This is in now way supposed to represent the lethality of the blows it inflicts, just that for whatever reason it tears through armor at x efficiency.

TB is a bit trickier since there is a bit more wiggle room for interpretation. TB is as someone else mentioned the creature’s ability to shrug off the damage as just a flesh wound and not a big deal as apposed to OMG my stomach is hanging out. Let’s take an example of a man with TB 2 and a man with TB 4. Both take a hit for 7 damage that leaves a bullet hole in their shoulder. Man 1 takes 5 damage and man 2 takes 3 damage (assume armor has already been dealt with or is not existent, w/e you like). Now they both took damage and if we assume they have the same wounds, man 1 is hurting a lot more from the same hit then man 2. They both have a bullet hole in their shoulder and the bullet is still in their body, but man 1 was not as physically tough so the same power hit obviously affected him more then man 2 who is twice as physically tough as man 1.

See? it really all make's sense if you think about it because the resistance of flesh is all roughly the same across various creatures. But their physical ability to shrug off damage and minor blows is represented in TB. So why would a round meant to break armor effect a creatures ability to physically shrug of damage when a different round, hitting the same spot is going to inflict just as much damage if it makes it past the armor? There is no reason when you think about it and the game is built upon this type of principle. The entire damage system falls apart if you ignore this rule and many special abilities and powers become worthless. Warp weapons become far less deadly then say a full auto from an autogun firing man-stoppers because warp weapons have little or no PEN because they don't need it. Normal armor doesn't hamper them in the least!

Using PEN to drill through TB also makes demons less of a threat then they are and honestly make people ask, why are they such a threat then? Daemonette, TB4 and Demonic gives it 8 vs most damage. Fire Bomb, PEN 6 1d10 +3. With using this house rule, you just made a Molotov able to seriously hurt a Daemonette , does that seem in any way right to anyone? Average roll of 5 yields 8 damage with 6 PEN vs TB 8. So you just did 6 damage to a creature with 15 wounds, that's over 1/3 it's wounds from 1 hit that should normally do nothing. Using the system this way ONLY prompts higher wounds for creatures to keep them at their proper threat level, it doesn't speed anything up by any real degree. Most people are able to do simple math very very quickly in their head and GM's (including me) are going to be able to keep the game rolling even if it takes 2 more seconds to do this properly.

If you only want PEN to go through TB to because you think it takes to long to do it normally, you are just a lazy, slow person with poor math skills. Take offense if you want but it's the pure truth that apparently, you can't face.

Now if you are doing this because you believe it makes the game better, IE your group enjoys it more or shares the belief that it is more realistic even after these arguments, fine. Have fun with it and glad your enjoying yourself! Just keep an eye out for issues it may cause with rule conflictions because there are some. Changing fundamental rules always has a trickle down effect that makes it impossible to know the full scope of it's influence until long after the decision has been made. But in the end, if you enjoy it do it! Keep playing DH and if you like this because it feels more brutal, cool! Brutal is good in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium! I'm all for that! Fun is the reason we play games so fun is a good enough reason to mod rules all the time!

Just to restate, I am not attacking those of you who think this will be more fun (ex: by increasing the brutality of the game). Please don't make that mistake.

Using PEN to drill through TB also makes demons less of a threat then they are and honestly make people ask, why are they such a threat then? Daemonette, TB4 and Demonic gives it 8 vs most damage. Fire Bomb, PEN 6 1d10 +3. With using this house rule, you just made a Molotov able to seriously hurt a Daemonette , does that seem in any way right to anyone?

The problem here isn't the houserule but the fire bomb, the improvised flame grenade that has more penetration than the vastly more expensive military version.

Cifer said:

Metaphorical broadstrokes are fine, if the system itself is built around it. A gaming system that actually involves PEN values blatantly strives to seem realistic but fail in that regard. If metaphorical broadstrokes were of the essence here then the system wouldn't bother with PEN values, it would stick to damage alone, meaning: "This value represents how much destruction Weapon X causes, this value represents how much destruction a target can soak up and the value can be modified by wearing armour or not."

Now that would be metaphorical. But Dark Heresy isn't. For chrissake you have critical damage tables that explain in painstaking detail exacty how a character dies when reaching -8 wounds through an explosive attack.

I've played many RPG's. Some have been hyper-realistic and extremely detailed (making combat's last for hours sometimes), other's have been more of the narrative and metaphorical kind (making combat fast paced but requires a lot of on-the-fly interpretation from the players and the GM). In my opinion it is best when a game sticks to one or the other rather than trying to combine the two. It often ends up looking quite silly (like the issue with armour and penetration)...

Cifer said:

While the firebomb is an egregious example of this, it applies to any wepaon with penetration. For example, a bolt pistol against the same demon (TB4, so TB 8 with daemonic, and no armor)

Normally 1d10+5 Pen 4. Does (barring successful Fury) 6-15 damage, and subtracts 8 T, giving a range of -2 to 7 actually dealt. This means a damage roll of 1-3 does no damage at all.

With this new rule, the bolt pistol does 6-15 and subtracts 4 (8 T minus the 4 Pen), giving a damage range of 2-11. A bolt pistol will *always* do a mimimum of 2 damage to the demon in this case.

Quite different results. This applies to *any* unarmored foe that has a Toughness equal to or greater than the Pen of the weapon (as well to a smaller extent foes with a combination of armor and Toughness equal to or less than the Pen). You are doing quite a few more wounds, and getting greater chances to guaranteeing successful damage rolls with this method. I don't think this is a good idea, DH is already dangerous enough.

The firebomb I felt was the best way to exemplify my point that it's to overpowering to do it this way. Made my point didn't it? ;D

@Varnias You just sound a slight bit stuck up man with your "A gaming system that actually involves PEN values blatantly strives to seem realistic but fail in that regard. ". I think DH does a good job of being realistic as you really can while still making an interesting and fun system to use. Your just being a bit elitest man. DH is one of the best blends of a fun to play system that still tries to remain realistic that I have ever played or encountered, it gives me fond memories of the modded Fallout system.

Do not forget that high penetration often means a lot of energy concentrated on a really small point to punch through armour. But armour and human flesh have a different ... how do i put it ... consistence, and react very different to the farious kind of forces. Anybody seen the movie ''Eraser' with Arnold Schwarzenegger? The railgun in that movie packs an unbelieveable punch, but it would never work that good against human opponents. A projectile of that speed would punch so fast through the body, that the body wouldn't be able to realise it. The goon would just look down and wonder what made that hole in him, if even noticed it. Bullets (and other projectiles) do not get designed to travel too fast. Sure, there is the Hague Conventions forbidding weapons with a higher velocity than 10.000 m/s (more than triple speed of sound) to prevent hydrostatic shock, but they are not necessary (imo). If it's too fast it does no (not enough) damage, a 'slower' one small enough to still punch through works better (think of the FN P90).