I'm sure this has already been brought up, and I did do a search and couldn't find anything. Does a weapon's AP count against toughness bonus? I would think it does, because if it can blast through metal/ceramite then flesh probably wont stand much more of a chance. However, I cant find anything official on the issue. Thanks in advance.

Nope. Pen dose not help with TB.

Toughness is more of an inborn resistance to pain and punishment and less of a physical resistance to harm. Heck, if you want to get down to the brass tacks of it, rounds or weapons that can punch through hard metals and barriers usually cause less physical damage to soft targets anyway ;-)

Thanks for the reply, Graver!

Interesting. That makes those Unnatural Toughness Xenos a tremendous threat. If I recall, Imperial Guard have taken on Orks and given as well as they got. Seems hardly plausible given that IG have Las weapons and Orks have 8 TB not counting armor. Also, considering the highest armor rating i've seen thus far is 8 and some weapons have 10 AP or more, seems kind of silly that it wouldn't affect toughness bonus. I just dont see how flesh can stand up to plasma better than ceramite. Is that the official stance on the issue?

Konphujun said:

Guardsmen bayonet Orks, strangle them with their (Guardsmen's) intestines, and then a Commissar shoots each Greenskin in the head. THATS how they give the Orks some business.

...That and a obscene amount of tanks, heavy weapons, and artillery.

I've ruled that half of whatever AP is left over after blowing through armor is applied to TB. That way an AP 10 weapon against Armor of 5 can blow cleanly through TB of 2 without any problems.

Also note that greenskins have rather inferior armour to go with their toughness. Taken together, they're not that much harder than guardsmen in full flak armour. The real problem is their group psychology - guardsmen often rely on suppressing melee-prone enemies, which doesn't really work against the greenies.

Also, considering the highest armor rating i've seen thus far is 8 and some weapons have 10 AP or more, seems kind of silly that it wouldn't affect toughness bonus. I just dont see how flesh can stand up to plasma better than ceramite. Is that the official stance on the issue?

Well, have you seen a rule in the Penetration section that says anything about applying the leftovers to Toughness?
Further, what would be the point of doing so? You could just forget about penetration and add the value to damage.

However, I've seen some house rules where the heavier weapon classes (melta and plasma) do apply half their leftover pen to toughness since they're rather underpowered compared to their costs right now.

Thanks for the input everyone. I suppose the '1/2 leftover pen applies to TB' is somewhat of a fix. I guess I just cant wrap my mind around the idea of Toughness being a better defense than armor. 'The las bolt tears through your flak armor, but dissipates when it strikes your rippling pectorals!' Oh well, thanks for clarifying for me!

How about, the las bolt strikes your armour and you even feel the heat of the blast through it, but, gritting your teeth, you ignore the pain of the burns (tb in action!) on your arm. You know from experience they aren't life threatening, just bad looking burns that'll blister up, the skin will flake off, but the meat underneath still flexes to the Emperors work. Your armour saved you life and arm yet again for, if you hadn't been wearing it, you know tat burn would have been a lot worse (and it definitly would have if we're talking a las shot ;-) ).

Regarding Pens higher then APs: while personal armour rarely goes above 8, cover certainly dose as dose vehicle armour. Those weapons with insane pen numbers (like the meltas) are anti-tank weapons and are supposed to go through insane amounts of resistance to cook the meat inside.

And while I don't know if pen not removing TB is official or not, it seems like it is. No where in the books dose it ever mention pen removing TB however, in the description of a weapons Pen and what it dose, it mentions armour and armour points again and again. As it explicitly states that the pen of a weapon takes away from ap but never once mentions Tb, it's a safe assumption that pen dose not remove tb. It says it removes AP and that's all it says it dose, therefore, that's all it dose. If it did more, the books would have made mention of it. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from having a weapons pen remove tb as well as ap... several of us seem to run our games that way (the math is a bit easer and things fall a bit quicker).

Regarding the underpowered nature of plasma and melta weapons, many have given them an extra dice of damage. After all, their pen is not meant to represent their flesh destroying capabilities, thats what damage represents which goes trough AP, TB, and wounds too, oh my! Like I stated earlier, the ability to cut through hard resistance has little bearing on the amount of trauma an object can inflict on a soft target... just look at striker saws, ap rounds, or high velocity rounds directed against soft surfaces. I've also heard that plasma weapons have gotten a bit of a boost in RT making them a bit more inline with what they are.

Konphujun said:

Toughness is a better defense than armour. However it is also much harder to get it and the enemies with a high toughness bonus have unnatural toughness or daemonic traits. I don't see a problem.

In real life, bullets with high penetration are likely to go right through an unarmoured target. This means that a significant portion of the energy and momentum of the bullet isn't transferred to the target. Change the shape of the bullet to reduce its penetration ability and it does a lot more damage to flesh, with the same mass and charge (but it has more trouble with body armour). This can make the difference between a small hole going right through the target (only a worry if it hits something vital) and massive damage to internal organs with no exit wound.

Bilateralrope said:

Exactly. Armour-penetrating bullets are designed to focus a lot of kinetic energy into a small area, allowing them to punch a hole. By contrast, flesh is more effectively damaged by something that spreads the kinetic energy out, so as to mash up as much flesh as possible. Concentrated energy = high penetration, dispersed energy = high strength.

Also, in the case of an ork, I envisage that there is a certain amount of redundancy of organs and such. I'm not sure if this is supported by the fluff. But the way I see it, an ork could have fairly large chunks blown out of him but still keep going. This is what is meant by "unnatural toughness" - the ork takes the damage but keeps on going anyway.

According to the old Codizes for Orks they have several back-up organs to keep them on their feet even with heavy injuries. That, and their more sap-like blood, high pain-tolerance and thick bones makes them ideal warriors. To quote an old Eldar-Prophet (Ulthan the Twisted): Because we were looking for answers for questions which to ask an Ork would never bother. We see a race which is strong and deem them barbaric.

As for the topic: i think everything has already been said, i have nothing more to reply.

Aren't the Orks some kind of fungus ?

Bilateralrope said:

Not quite. They're more correctly termed as mammals/fungus hybrids, which cover simplicity and redundancy of major organs, their regenerative capabilities, and their methods of reproduction.

Given that it's possible for a Painboy (Mad Dok) to transplant the head of an injured Ork on to the body of a brain dead Ork in the field with crude tools. I'd say they are pretty tough. Not to mention surviving crude bioniks, swapped limbs, and the greatly feared squig brain transplant. I'd say Orks are pretty dam tough. Given they only have flak worth 2AP on their chests. They aren't much worse than a guardsman in carpace.

Think of Toughness vs Armor this way:

Sometimes, armor penetration isn't just the weapon being so hard/sharp/fast that it punches through steel. A mono-tipped Stilletto is still mostly gettring through armor by finding weak points and exploiting them. The monofiliment just makes the definition of "weak point" a bit wider.

But stabbing a tank with a stilletto, however sharp, isn't going to have much effect. Some things are just too solidly built to be affected by minor amounts of damage. Once you're dealing with Space Marines, Orks, and hideous mutants and/or Death World creatures, even normal gunshots are somewhat too small to really have much effect.

Likewise, by the time most bullets actually make it through the 40k hyper-advanced flak armor he's wearing, they don't really hurt a well-built soldier (TB 3-4) terribly badly. A melta blast, on the other hand, is going to be at least a significant injury if it connects fully.

Once you get into TB around 5, you're looking at a character who is almost supernaturally tough. Interestingly enough, there was a historical example of a viking hero/poet whose skull was able to deflect axe blows. Everyone thought that this was poetic exaggeration, until they dug up his remains and found he had a rare disease that not only thickened the skull enough to make that sort of thing possible, but also explained some of the physical problems his poems discussed him experiencing as he aged.

http://www.viking.ucla.edu/Scientific_American/Egils_Bones.htm

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Mamgus?..Funmal?

The only things I'll add is that when dealing with vehicles the penetration is damage + AP. So in that respect at least there is no such thing as too much penetration value as very high pen weapons are usually anti vehicle weapons.

Kruniac said:

Keep in mind also that a weapon dooing 5d10+10 with a pen of 10(MP Lascannon) will incinerate most characters regardless of their toughness.

Shaving off TB after pen will make most shots fatal, and unless you are playing an all intrigue game where combat is sparse, your characters wont make it past rank 3. The turnover rate in your game must be very high. TB mechanically shaves off damage but represents the ability to withstand pain.