I then thanked him kindly, and said that I was going to share this conversation with some forumites. He then added:

I like to stress, however, that a tabletop RPG is a different beast. While I
strive to make everything as clear and well balanced in the setting, the GM
at the table can, and SHOULD, over-ride the rules when they get in the way
of the story. I'd hate to see players using my opinions and clarifications
used as a hammer against their GM! The GM over rides ME, not the other
way around!

To which I simply replied:

Oh I completely agree. That's one of the things I love most about tabletop RPGs... being able to modify everything as one sees fit, and on the fly even.

There you have it. The end =D

So what do you guys think? I really like the options that he suggested, except that I'd probably make hexagrammatical armor work (doubled of course) against Holocaust. In fact, anything that's been blessed in a manner similar to hexagrammatical wards... even walls =Þ

Or alternately, I might let walls actually soak holocaust fire, and interpret the "ignores armor" as "ignores PERSONAL armor" (same way as being on fire ignores armor... the armor becomes hot and burns to the touch).

Or I might even do something completely different, or switch on the fly ... =D ... oh the possibilities...

Very interesting thread.

Here is my take on it based on what Mr. Martin said:

I will allow hexagrammatical armor to count against this power.. it won't matter that much anyway.

Secondly, although it ignores normal armor, and my extension, cover, it will be affected by massive objects like walls, tanks etc. However, the power does damage there as well, and ignores the Cover "hardness" in the process, so any normal tank will probably be burnt/melt and the people within will be in deep doo. Let's say a Rhino has 24 armor (just to pick a number) and 20 wounds - the power would deal damage directly to the vehicle's wounds, and could easily destroy the entire vehicle and everyone within it. It would probably not destroy an entire Titan though - it's just too massive (however the psyker on top could maybe destroy the cockpit and thus kill the controllers).

Walls will be similarily affected, but again Wounds matter more than structural integrity. Thick walls of stone and dirt will hold much better than thin walls of super plasteel. And pretty much every mundane single item will be destroyed - something the Assassin in my group found out after he pissed off a false prophet of the Disciples of Hayte.

As for the Bulkhead: I'm not sure where you find the "armor" for it (I suppose it is cover), and the 24 is meant to be against small arms and other attacks, not attacks that ignore physical armor. So I would assume about half this number be the actual "armor" of the bulkhead itself, while the rest is the need to penetrate the entire wall/door of bulkhead to hit someone behind it. Or in other words, if the purpose is to damage the wall itself and not someone behind it it takes alot less to do so.

Holocaust vs untouchable is the hardest part really, as neither of these has any similarity in real life. The idea that this human is somehow untouchable while every object in the world is not, is hard to fathom. But ok let's say matter can be affected by psi, mr. null can not be affected by psi, but he can be affected by matter. Thus if psi changes matter (say heats it up tremendously), then it is safe to assume that mr. null can be indirectly affected. Holocaust is alot more than making fire though, so it is fairly safe to assume that it will have less effect on mr. null. Now I believe that although this is the "fires of hell" sorta thing, it's enough to make the air and objects burning hot, to set fire to the person's clothes and destroy armor and objects. Thus I would rule that the mr. null would have to make an agility test or catch on fire, in addition to taking 1d10 fire damage (which normally also ignores armor but no TB) per round of exposure.

How does that sound?

Although now that I think of it ... perhaps it WOULD sometimes be better to give a + to dodge Holocaust rather than letting a blessed armor's AP count against it (or both even). A guy wearing a blessed carapace with 6 AP would get 12 AP against it ... which is decent, but not that much compared to the incredible amount of damage that Holocaust can deal O_O ...

I might even even change Holocaust to use Psi Rating to determine damage rather than willpower .... or, since Holocaust is using yourself as a DOOR TO HELL, I might let it always be powerful, but harder to control and more dangerous when you're an inexperienced psyker...

So for example, a psyker with 40 WP would always deal 4d10 damage with Holocaust ... but the damage HE takes from it could be 7d10 minus a number of dice equal to his PR, with a minimum of 1d10 (the current damage to self). So only a rank 6 psyker would get that good at using the power.

OR

Holocaust is actually listed as a SUSTAINED power. How about making it hard to STOP the Holocaust from flowing through you? You are being BURNED ALIVE after all... kinda hard to concentrate enough to close this door to hell that you've opened... so how about... 10% chance per PR to successfully shut it down?

OR BOTH !!! either rule would ensure that Holocaust is more dangerous for an inexperienced psyker.

The number are just something I pulled out of my ass though =Þ they should probably be modified.

@Friend of the Dork.

There's an official resource available for depicting vehicles (although you're of course free to use a homebrew version if you want)...

http://www.4shared.com/get/2PrRwvnq/Dark_Heresy_-_Apocrypha_-_Vehi.html

Kinda hard to scrounge up a link for it these days for some reason. Don't know why FFG doesn't just host it from their official website, just as they do with the Errata.... *shrug*

Oh and btw walls don't have wounds (at least not in the rulebook)... instead " each successful hit against cover that deals Damage in excess of the Armor Points it provides will reduce the cover's Armour Points by 1 " (page 199) ... but personally I like to be more flexible and just wing it how the cover is affected. Sometimes it should be location-based (there's a neat hole in the cover, but the character can avoid it) ... and sometimes it should be universal (a wave of fire softened up a metal sheet, or a bolter round created cracks in a stone wall)

...the same goes for vehicles btw, although every time that vehicle armor gets penetrated you roll to see if any internal parts (or people) get damaged.

Where did I find the AP value for "bulkhead"? Rogue Trader Core Rulebook.

I was re-reading about untouchables (page 38, Radical's Handbook) and personally, my take on it would be the following:

Holocaust fire isn't actually a THING on fire... it is supernatural fire flying through the air. And an untouchable is supposed to be " completely immune to psychic powers, psychic energy and effects directed against them ".

Also, they dampen (though not completely) all psychic effects in a radius around them equal to their WP. So I would simply rule that the untouchable "shuts down" (or deflects) any Holocaust fire that passes into his radius (or maybe half his radius)... sort of like an energy shield. It would look extremely cool to see it happen. This is roughly what I'm talking about, except on an astronomical scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magnetosphere_rendition.jpg

HOWEVER, as soon as something is actually SET ON FIRE, it is no longer "psychic flame", but rather just normal fire, ignited by heat, that consumes fuel and obeys natural laws. So the untouchable would be harmed by that, certainly.

Also, as our fellow forumite pointed out here above, we kinda HAVE to extend an untouchables "field of invulnerability" at least a little bit beyond his own body. Otherwise Push could push against his clothing... and all fire spells could heat up the air that he breathes... etc.

Woah careful there, that's Forbidden Lore: Dark Heresy!

It even comes with a warning! Ty for the link, never heard about this. But as it says it is optional and "out of the scope of Dark Heresy core rules." And while it is better than nothing I think vehicles deserve wounds on their own.

I don't think the core cover rules apply well to vehicle combat (unless targeting a driver etc. in a car), as those are meant to take on a person protected not to destroy a vehicle or object.

I understand that not having wounds could work for vehicles, but then again so could it for creatures if you think about it. If I attack someone and inflict enough damage to hurt it other than a small bruise, the effect could easily be described as a critical. Wounds in Warhammer++ is a abstract buffer mechanic meant to represent minor damage in combat, and to prevent combat from being too deadly. Remove them, and you get a more realistic system (where an attack with a sword is likely to cause serious injury or kill), but it's not FUN. Doing so would mean forcing players to burn Fate Points in almost every combat encounter, and armor+TB become woefully insufficient to ward off all but the most puny attacks. Flak armor will simply not stop most bullets from stub pistols or even a laspistol, which makes it highly dubious as an armor (but reducing the crit will still mean it is essential). Being unarmored would be suicide if such a system would exist.

So I can only assume that the vehicles armor is meant to represent both the actual armor (penetrate or no penetrate)as well as the ability to withstand serious damage (thus a car has more armor than a person, even if RL cars will often not protect it's inhabitants against even 9mm bullets!)

And in RL there is a major difference between just pentrating vehicle armor and actually causing any important damage. Penetrating in the right place can easily kill a crewmember, and if the attack is enough to actually penetrate fully the victim will not take much less damage. For example, a tank penetrated by a HEAT rocket could spray liquidified searing hot metal on the crew. Small arms hits on vehicles seldom does anything except damage crew/passengers or minor damage on a vehicles system (it certainly does not cause the vehicle to fly into the air!), but could render a car engine inoperable.

A better way might be to make at least two seperate tables with "minor catasrophic damage" and "major catastrophic damage" in order to seperate the attacks that penetrate and risk damaging people or components or other "minor" stuff, and the ones that can detonate fuel or ammunition (thus destroying the vehicle) or completely immobilize it. Wether you roll on each table would of course depend on the weapon used, and/or the amount of damage that surpasses the armor. You could even apply special effects, such as explosive and energy weapons dealing extra damage on crits (more likely to ignite unstable materials), while SP and low-caliber kinetic weapons being less likely (maybe half damage on penetration).

But in any case it will still be fairly random - the table as is depends more on lucky d100 roll than the actual damage dealt. Sure if you deal twice the armor value in damage in excess of the vehicle's armor, you will damage everyone quite alot and destroy the vehicle, but if you roll high after just doing a single point of damage in excess of armor you can destroy the vehicle and AUTOMATICALLY kill everyone inside (despite being a Deamon Prince or a Space Marine in Terminator armor). This simply does not make sense, and the booklet itself suggest that it might originally be intended to have more than one "Structural Damage" table.

So how to improve it? This would be houseruling anyway but here is a couple of suggestions nonetheless inspired by other system with vehicle combat:

1. Give em wounds. You would probaby have to reduce armor values overall, maybe by 25% or more to compensate. The good effect is that it will make it more similar to normal combat since creatures have wounds too, and you could have all damage to wounds represent minor damage that misses inhabitants and important components (but make cool marks and holes), while critical damage becomes Structural Damage, and instead of rolling d100 you make the table closer to the other ones, I.E. 01-10 becomes 1 Critial Damage, While 90-100 becomes 10 Critical Damage.

The great benefit here is that it's simple and streamlined to handle in combat. If you really want to go into more detail you can make your own tables (and remove those annoying bullet lifts the vehicle crits), even one per type of damage if you want (Explosives would be best of course).

2. Keep the randomness, but require certain amounts of damage through the armor to apply to a specific simplified Structural Damage (using 2 or more as suggested above. You still roll on a table, but could replace the d100 with d10 rolls instead, with a natural 10 "bumping" up the more dangerous critical table. Not necessarily that much more advanced or detailed than the suggestion above, but it will be less similar and adaptable to the normal combat system in DH.

Whew that became a long and slightly off-topic post.. hope someone will read it!

Dork Wonderer said:

I quite agree about the Structural Damage Table ... I was definately gonna modify that somehow (or just re-roll whenever something FUBAR comes up).

Plus now that I think of it... I might consider giving certain PARTS of the vehicle wounds ... e.g. the engine has wounds ... or just wing it and say that the engine will be "worse for weather" on a minor hit, but disabled on a major hit.

Oh and concerning the "detonation of fuel" (91-94 Engine Explosion on the Structural Damage Table) ... it's actually just in movies that cars blow up.

Now it may of course be that you prefer to use movie-physics in Dark Heresy... but in case you're interested in how it really works, here ya go:

A comparison of a regular car and a car powered by LPG (basically propane gas). As you can see the regular car barely gives the smallest of FARTS when the fuel tank "explodes"... it isn't really "exploding", the tank is just rupturing, and thereby feeding the flames a little bit more. The propane tank gives off a MIGHTY explosion, however.

Even if a regular car was hit straight in the fuel tank with an explosive bullet, it would only cause the fuel to start burning... and quite slowly too, I'll bet, because there is very limited oxygen inside the fuel tank. Even if you set fire to a whole BARREL of gasoline it doesn't matter, only the top layer will burn because it NEEDS oxygen.

(and a regular bullet would just cause a leak, it wouldn't even set the fuel on fire)

Proper explosives however, such as gunpowder and C-4, contain all the oxygen they need... which also explains why a gun will fire IN SPACE =Þ

Dork Wonderer said:

Giving engine Wounds might be ok, if certain damage has certain effects (reducing speed, risk of overheating etc.).

Detonation of fuel is actually real, it just doesen't happen with small arms. Engines itself don't explode any more than other structures do.

However, if a 120mm APDFSDU tank shell hit the fuel of another tank it will most certainly explode into flames and spray burning fuel in the vicinity of the tank, which will cause the few crewmembers still alive to become burning torches before they also die. Even if the vehickle is mostly intact (not hollywood style), causing the vehicle to erupt compltely in flames spells bad luck for anyone caught inside and a very likely chance burning to death. The gas from the gasoline ignites easily and burns intensely, after all napalm is made of gasoline.

Still, ammunition detonation in the case of explosve ammo is a more likely cause of blowing up a combat vehicle.

I agree regular bullets hitting gas tank will just cause a leak, which is why a potential EXPLOSION is so silly when using small arms. I don't think even 12.7mm is enough to cause an explosion, maybe 30mm autocannons with incendiary ammunition would do the trick.