I've been watching the developments for Deathwatch and have been very excited. I do play the tabletop and have a question. Maybe i'm missing something, but each Space Marine in the pre-generated game has less than a 50% chance to hit a single target with a single shot. Is this intentional or are there going to be modifiers in the full game? In the tabletop, the basic Space Marine has a 66% chance to hit with a single shot. Please, someone shed some light on to this subject for me.

Half action aiming provides +10, full turn aiming provides +20, fate points can provide +10, the size of the target can provide variable bonuses (another marine is +10), a horde is variable based on size (+20 for the demo games), close range provides +10, point blank provides +30.

The 40k RPGs are all about modifiers.

Ahh, I see. But they're not necessarily in the demo. What is considered 'close range'? 1/3 the the range of the weapon?

If I remember correctly (no book in front of me):

1/2 range = short range +10 shot

point blank = within 2 meters +30 shot

Don't forget, Burst Fire +10, Full-Auto Fire +20.

Yup essentially full auto fire from a Bolter has a (4X + 10 + 20 + 20) = 90 - 96 % chance of hitting a horde at 50m.

The devastator marine has a 98% chance of hitting a horde at <75m.

PlasmaBomb said:

Actually he only gets a 95% chance because the weapon will jam on 96 or more.

Bilateralrope said:

It's still 98% for the purposes of working out degrees of success, it's only a roll of 94+ that causes a jam (so that would be a 93% chance of hitting).

I also forgot to take into account the Tactical marines get a +10% bolt mastery bonus, which means that baring jams they are guaranteed to hit at ranges <50m.

PlasmaBomb said:

Do you have a page reference in either Rogue Trader or Dark Heresy for that? We've been playing that the best you can ever have is 93% on full auto, and if you want the full 10 degrees of success you have to get 1-3 and spend a fate point for an extra degree. It would be good to know if I missed that and we've been playing wrong. Also, if you had a modified target greater than 100% would that still apply? It's been alarmingly common for our tactical marine to have 105% on a regular basis against hordes, so it would be good to know if he should be getting the full four hits 12% higher.

Soam said:

Table top he has a 2/3 chance of hitting a dude who is almost in charge range and has no cover with a stream of automatic weapon fire and his armour will only stop a laspistol shot 2/3rds of the time. He's a shmuck and a weakling compared to rpg or background material marines but at least he hasn't been hit as hard with the nerf bat as Greater Daemon or C'tan or the Avatar of Khaine.

Cynical Cat said:

This is quite understandable... otherwise, the Space Marines WOULD walk over every other army with perhaps the exception being the Tyranids (too many).

Soam said:

Fairly easy. The wargame has to be quick, simple, and must conform to results from a d6. RPGs don't have to conform to that.

Basically, the wargame is a greater abstraction of the setting than the RPG is, meaning the RPG is more likely to represent the more accurate "stats" of the setting. Trying to compare the stats and probabilities of the wargame to the RPG is pretty much pointless.

Other than the obvious chicken/egg scenario...

Kage

Unlike the TT which has to be a trimmed down system, where the chances to hit for an SM (or equally trained Human like a SoB or a Stormtrooper) is 4/6 if they are shooting at 2m or 48m (which itself is condensed so that can play on a kitchen table) you can afford to grade it from nearly always at short range to fairly remote at extreme range (which is still significant chance). That bolter training for Tac Marines is huge bonus compared to most things in this system.

Thanks for the info! I guess the confusion came from the puny looking base stats and not taking in to account the multitude of modifiers. Haven't had a chance to check out Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader, so I was just going off of the free Deathwatch PDF.

OXRS said:

The reference page is 239 in the Core Rogue Trader Rule Book (Page 13 in Final Sanction), both state that you get a + 20 to your ballistic test, and that a dice roll of 94-00 results in a jam - the jamming rule does not mention any modifiers to the test, it just specifies what happens on certain rolls therefore the "to hit" number isn't modified.

PS. look at page 105 on the RT book - Best quality ranged items never suffer from Jamming or Overheating. So there will be times, especially later game when a tactical marine can not miss a horde at short range (my arch-militant is already has a ballistic skill of 56). Also see "Command without Doubt" - Oath of the Weapon - A Kill-team which takes this oath may ignore the effects of jams with their personal weaponry. It would be rather unfair for weapons which can't jam to randomly miss.

Example -

Brother Jarold finds himself face to face with a horde of gaunts and unleashes a hail shots from his anointed best quality bolter at point blank range - Mid game marine ~ 55 BS + 30 Point blank + 20 Full auto + 10 Tactical marine = Required roll <115 - Roll 95. Are you going to tell the marine that his best quality bolter somehow misses the entire horde at point blank range...?

PlasmaBomb said:

I know that you can't get above a +60% modifier to any roll, however, you also missed that a Hordes grants a +20% to shoot it; it is considered Enormous in size.

So even if you weren't Point Blank in range, you'd still have a +30% to hit them (+20 from Enormous, +10 for Short Range) -OR- +20% to hit (+20 Enormous).

^ It was included in the first example... **** lack of edit button.

Soam said:

A 50% base chance of hitting with a single shot is very good indeed... in fact unrealistically high. In combat most shots don't hit anything useful. This however can be left aside as 1) it is a science fantasy RPG, not a combat simulator, 2) it deals with small scale combat really and 3) its ******* Space Marines who are just stupidly good.

borithan said:

To be fair, they are firing basically mini rocket launchers. I think modern day soldiers hit percentage would go up quite a bit also if they had those.

Suijin said:

Guys, it's just a game.

borithan said:

Oh yes it does. Taken to the extreme, how close does a nuke have to detonate near you for you to be affected by it?

Explosions, by definition, explode.

DarknessEternal said:

Except when they don't unless they detect that they've hit their target (they only explode after they've penetrated the body of their target).

Bolts are just very painful bullets. That use a propellant to accelerate rather than the standard "minituarized explosion launches the small metal thing at the big fleshy thing" routine guns tend to do. That also explode.

Bolts are large but that doesn't make it any easier to hit a target. You still need to aim. The difference in the standard assault rifle round(The M4A1 fires 5.56x45mm rounds if memory serves) and a bolt is probably not all that large when it comes to the front, "penetrating" end. At least by my understanding, a bolt is the size of a 10 gauge shotgun shell. Really, when put up against a human body(or daemon body, or tank, or ork, or daemon engine, or...) and compared, the difference in size would not be great enough to be able to say that a bolt makes it much easier to hit a target.

Now, if bolts were the size of cannon balls...