If I understand the rules correctly, weapons with the Toxic quality deal no damage directly, but the result from the "damage roll" modifies a Toughness test to resist the effect of the toxin.

Thus, an Accurate weapon will have a much greater chance of poisoning the target, as he will generally get a bigger penalty to his Toughness test.

Thats all well and good, I suppose, but in general I feel that the straight 1D10 damage is a bit low. The same weapon without the Toxic quality would add 1 or 2 D10s of straight damage from it's Accurate quality, but the max damage potential of a Toxic weapon is 10. You can't even kill a Lvl 1 Mook with that.

Any suggestions on how to make "sniper needlers" on par with their "ordinary" SP brethren? I saw someone post somewhere that rather than have a generic Toxin causing 1D10, you could replace the Toxin with any poison from the GM Kit or elsewhere. Now we're talkin'

Well as for needle weapons, the GM kit describes Tox Jack as being the standard poison used in these weapons. Mainly because the poison is readily available on most worlds (I think they extracted it from coolantagents used in industry or something like that).

But the thing is, that "standard poison" wouldn't be very reliable. It would be like taking a syringe in the real world and fill it up with gasoline or something and injecting it into a victim. Sure it would be severely bad for ones health, and some people might die from it (gasoline was not intended to be in the human bloodstream after all), but there's no guarantee that a person would die from it, mainly because while gasoline might be harmful to humans, it's not a toxic substance produced by the earth's evolution (like snake venom or spider venom is).

Quite simply, if you want to make sure that any victim (regardless of current physical health and constitution) would die, you'd either need a chemical that is EXTREMELY poisonous to human beings or use an organic toxins known to kill even in the smallest doses. Coating a small metal sliver in coolant fluid just would't hope to achieve the same effect as a specialized toxin intended to kill would.

Hence why a needle pistol or needle rifle's standard toxic effects aren't as reliable for a sure kill in just one hit. But then again, there's not much preventing you from filling the target with needles, and that would kill it pretty fast due to sheer volume of the toxic compounds...

Good catch, I hadn't seen that.

The trouble with the "Fill them with needles" approach is that these weapons are Single Shot only (RoF: S/-/-) meaning a Master Sniper Assassin would still need several rounds of shooting to take down one man. But with another Toxin, that changes.

Darth Smeg said:

Yes, but that's the thing about accurate weapons. They don't benefit from bonuses to damage unless fired on single shot. But even a standard aimed needle rifle will hurt in the first shot. The second might even be lethal to most targets.

If the needles are coated in Ars Imperialis Mortua poison, then pretty much anyone would die instantly from just one shot. But that poison has a hefty price per dose, so the ammunition cost would be way steeper than even a bolter with psy cannon bolts.

This might just be a missconception or maybe an old houserule of ours, but I think the Toxic effect means a chance to deal an _extra_ 1d10 damage. Else it would be pretty worthless to coat bladed weapons with toxic.

Mellon said:

No that's the rules as written. The toxic trait have a chance to deal extra damage in addition to the damage dealt during the initial attack.

In addition: as far as I do remember, the TB does not reduce the damage from poison. So, if you manage to hit an unarmoured part (the neck?)...

Gregorius21778 said:

Well, you get TB and Ap against the initial attack, but if the toxic weapon manage to score at least one wound, then the target has to take a Toughness test with a penalty of -5 for each wound caused from the initial attack. If the target fails that Toughness check, then it takes an additional 1d10 wounds outright (with no armour or TB to help guard against it).

It seems a needle rifle is only slightly better average damage than a hunting rifle. Compare:

Hunting rifle: 150m 1t10+3 damage, pen 0. Accurate. This can be altered to pen 3 by manstoppers, or +2 damage with Dum Dum for unarmored targets.

Needle rifle: 180m 1d10 damage, pen 0, Accurate, toxic. The toxic gives a pretty good chance to cause one extra +1d10 damage (not reduced by armor or TB). Most damage would come from the accurate quality, but the toxic adds a certain degree of cetchup effect.

I'd rather have pen 3 and an extra 3p damage, rather than a chance of +1d10 damage and a bit more range. So, arming the needle rifle with particularly nasty poison would be a good way of keeping it the quality sniper weapon that it seems to be in the fluff.

Mellon said:

But your comparison is a bit flawed since you're assuming that the Hunting Rifle will have either Manstoppers or Dum Dum bullets, but the needle rifle in your example doesn't have any modifications or upgrades at all.

By that comparison it's no wonder the Hunting Rifle seem better. It's like comparing a normal sword with a sword with the mono upgrade.

If we level things to equal terms then I'd definetly go with the "vanilla" Needle Rifle rather than the vanilla hunting rifle. The Needle rifle weigh less, has one more round in the clip and longer range. The 1d10+3 combined with accurate doesn't really dramatically improve things, but being able to get an additional d10 for damage that isn't hindered by armour or toughness sure will.

But your comparison is a bit flawed since you're assuming that the Hunting Rifle will have either Manstoppers or Dum Dum bullets, but the needle rifle in your example doesn't have any modifications or upgrades at all.

Admittedly, that's because the needle rifle doesn't have any available modifications or upgrades apart from those that could also be applied to the Hunting Rifle at a generally smaller price.

You have got a point. However I figured that a needle rifle, and the training to use it, would be much harder to come by than manstopper rounds of a proper caliber, a hunting rifle and the training to use that properly. Lets compare:

Exotic (needle rifle) is first available for assassins at lvl 5 for 200xp, and for a few other careers much later on. Armsmaster, available at lvl 4 for a few careers, lvl 2 for techpriests, would be the lesser option. The needler itself has availability Very Rare and costs 1000 thrones plus 20 thrones per Very Rare shot. I think such a precious weapon ought be way more effective than the Basic(solid projectile) hunting rifle and manstoppers that are both Scarce and costs 100 thrones plus 0.8 thrones each shot. As it is, the difference is very small, so I don't understand why anyone would feel the need to spend loads of thrones and training to upgrade to a needle rifle. To be able to load custom toxics makes the needler much more interesting.

Mellon said:

True that. But ... imagine a Needler "blunderbuss", i.e., a Needler with the Scatter quality. A chance for multiple hits with a single shot.

IIRC, the Eldar raiders on Twilight had something like that.

Sister Cat said:

Yup. They're called splinter weapons (Splinter Pistol, Splinter Rifle and Splinter Cannon). They are loaded with a solid, shaped crystal (somtimes a toxic kind) and when fired the weapon desintigrate the crystal into thousands of tiny slivers and propel these along the barrel towards the target. Designed to cause extremely painful injuries (think: getting fibreglass slivers rubbed against your skin but a thousand times worse).

Gotta love them Dark Eldar for thinking of the important little details.

Ah yes. That's right, splinter weapons. Nasty!

I can still see the agony in poor Quint's eyes before he died twitching.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Thank you! That changes things, indeed! I misread the text, focusing on the "no further effect", believing it to mean "no damage". Careful re-reading makes me agree with you: The original damage remains, the Toxic MAY cause ADDITIONAL poison damage.

Darth Smeg said:

Though if you wanted, you could change this into acting a little more like a real world poison. Like saying that instead of the chance of being dealt an additional d10 of damage, you change it to a d5. BUT the effect doesn't stop until either the victim's constitution is able to shrug off the effects, or the victim recieves medical attention and can be administered with an antidote.

So the initial attack deals damage as per the weapon damage, and the victim has to roll a Toughness check modified by the amount of wounds recieved after Armour and TB. If the victim fails, the victim takes 1d5 damage. The next round, the victim will have to test against Toughness again, and that roll in turn is modified by the amount of wounds that the previous d5 caused. This goes on until someone is able to use Medicae on the victim or the victim eventually succeeds his or her Toughness check. If the victim reach -8 wounds the victim dies.

This would make toxic weapons a hell of a lot scarier than the vanilla rules.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Oooohhh! Evil nasty wrongness! ...... I like.

Now let's see what fun we can have with it. Hmmm ... then you could make the weapon double (or triple?) -barreled. Of course, that's only fun if the toxic effects are cumulative.