Kage2020 said:

Kage2020 said:

I can tell you how I'm going to fix it: I consider Warhammer 40K 1st Edition rules my main reference. Bolters, flamers, melta and plasma guns should roughly be as deadly to marines (relative to each other!) as they are according to those rules. Whether my DH GM and my RT GM will eventually adopt any of those values is their call. Probably they'll stick to the values in their rulebooks. And why not? It works well enough unless you're trying to integrate it all.

Alex

PS @ Face Eater: I can understand them - to a lightly armored human being plasma guns, melta guns, bolt guns and flamers would be all mostly kill-per-hit weapons which would make them all the same more or less. And you can't leave these weapons out either. Perhaps the choice should have been made to give them proper values right away and introduce on top more non-military grade weaponry. Cheap flamers and many weapons from the IH.

Polaria said:

Black Industries designed Dark Heresy. FFG designed Rogue Trader and Deathwatch.

Actually, I guess we can agree since FFG didn't design Dark Heresy they didn't take into account the weapon vs toughness/ heavy armor thing.

@Polaria

I think we can pretty much agree that FFG didn't really take heavier armor into account much when they designed DH since the weapons only really damage stuff that have only TB bonus.

I think we can pretty much agree that FFG didn't really take anything into account when DH was designed - they didn't make the game then, BI did.

Other than that... well, is it remarkable that military-grade armour actually protects people? The iconic AP4 armour is Imperial Guard Flak, which is supposed to protect people regularly fighting orks, rebels in posession of military hardware, all kinds of other xenos... a large part of DH weaponry is stuff used in underhives where people consider themselves lucky to have non-primitive armour at all, not on battlefields. Once we get to the latter category, things start to hurt people even when armoured - via full auto capability (autoguns), accurate sniping (hunting rifle/long las) or just plain high damage (boltgun, melta&plasma).

I dont think you can compare anything with the TT rules here, you can take guidlines, but most weapons in TT are of the nature of if you get past armour and you wound then you kill.

Few creatures/characters have more than one wound and you dont have to worry about ten levels of criticals and fatigue.

Average character in DH has about 10 wounds and a TB of 3. A lasgun did d10+3 damage. A max damage roll still results in 0 wounds and still standing. Add any armour, even Guard Flak and you are amazingly resilient.

In the table top game you more or less get two saves against damage. The S vs T to wound roll and then the armour save roll. It would be almost like having a second damage roll made if you are wounded. For example. Roll to damage against TB and if damage gets through, roll a second time against armour AP. But that would be massively silly.

Perhaps if TB was added to wounds instead (like in rogue trader, but added one more time). This would still make marines tough (8 additonal wounds) but easier to hurt and thier extra toughness would wear away after several hits.

Overall I like how TB+AP vs DAMAGE works. The final flow is kind of wonky as the game doesnt want a single weapon to do a TPK in one shot. But they want the marines to have a bit of a threat and risk from weapons that exist. But on thier scale that would evaporate a DH character.

I think the simplest fix (for bolt damage) is to do the following: Allow the tearing bonus die to add to damage instead of replacing damage on tearing weapons that have only one die in them (1d5 or 1d10) provided the damage would penetrate AP (not AP+TB) prior to the additional die being added and then apply TB.

For example. A 1D10+5 PEN 5 bolt gun from DH Core Book hits a space marine. The attacker rolls 2D10 (1 tearing) and gets a 9 and a 7. Since the weapon has a PEN of 5, the marines armour counts as a 3 and the lowest damage die (a 7) is higher then the AP and therefore the extra die is added to the damage. So the final damage is 9 (damage die) +7 (tearing die) +5 (damage mod) or 21 and then apply armour (AP-PEN) and TB.

This would represent how deadly a bolt round is to the flesh and muscle if it gets through the armour. It makes the bolter more deadly to normals (which is always was) and more effective against marines as well and the only real change you need is in the language of the description for the tearing weapon quality.

So in short, just alter the definitions of the terms like Melta and Tearing. You could make the melta definations say:

Meltas are highly dangerous and deadly weapons. A target his by a melta but miraculously unharmed takes 1d5 levels of fatigue. While a target who takes 1 or more wound from a melta must make a T test or suffer a further 2D10 damage that ignores TB and AP. A victim must also test to see if they are on fire, much the same as a flamer.

Removing TB as an "invulnerable save" and adding it to Wounds would, on the face of things, make things a little bit less wobbly. You wouldn't have an invulnerable save, for one. As per my previous post, should we really be overtly worried about "TPK," or "insta-death" as I termed it? Sure, it's not fun to be wiped out by a meltagun, but it certainly makes a bit more sense (to me, YMMV) to be instantly killed by meltagun beam (whatever) that you've taken full in the chest than to survive it because you're buffed by invulnerable armour (that isn't actually armour, it's just a "coolness/hero" factor), especially after it carved through the Shadowblade just a few seconds ago.

As an outsider, of course. I readily accept that there are some crunchy ways that you can buff this damage a bit more (Horde of meltagun wielding lunatics ), sniping, or whatever, but it always struck me that the advantages acquired from such activities may possibly be available to powerful weapons as well, not just to address the balance of weaker weapons being used against stronger opponents.

Again, seriously though: YMMV, or even YMWDV (will definitely vary). The game works, people are happy and those that aren't happy (ala this post) are fixing it to a point that they're happy with it. That's all that matters. I'm just agreeing with the point made by peackeeper_b, explaining why I think that it works over the core mechanic, and offering up the caveat that I realise that there are systemic ways to get around some of these problems but I don't think that "balancing" is really one of them.

If you don't want military-grade weaponry being used, then don't use military grade weaponry. Why nerf it to make it survivable because it is "iconic" to the game universe? Want to scare your party as to the horrendous nature of the weapon you've just included on the "big bad boss?" That's what redshirts are for.

Y.M.M.V. Take with a pinch of salt as observation rather than criticism. Peackeeper_b's suggestion is still cinematic...

Incidentally, is not one interpretation of meltaweapons that they are essentially "microwave" weapons? Having the target continue to cook for a few rounds would make it... nasty. Just enough time for that Marine to make a dying act of heroism for awesomeness but they still die...

There's also the idea that all those Wounds don't instantly manifest in your little finger because you've received the Papercut of Doom, but rather are distributed through the body acting as buffers to Criticals (at least for a more complex system).

Kage

I see no issue, but that's my perception.

There are a million, million worlds across the galaxy under the thumb of the Imperium of Man and across that Imperium there are going to be hundreds of different Patterns of those 'same' weapons. Very, very few are going to be using the highest most advanced technology that the Imperium can produce and will be in a very limited number of hands aka the upper ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Astartes, the Assassinorum and the like. Stuff produced at Mars itself. Everything else is a very slippery slope down from there. Tech itself ranges from barely middle ages to barely void-fairing to the Forge Worlds that even there may be producing old patterns or inefficient ones when compared to the best that is out there and will look like nerf-guns when it comes to the top of the pyramid.

Now if you simply wish to have a short and very standard list of weapons cause you don't see the point in dozens or hundreds of pattern variants so be it.

But I like the imagery of a scummer who thinks they have their hands on the height of technology with a 'old plasma pistol' from the DH core book that is made by some Forge World because it needs to be done in a place like that...but is created using local parts and inefficent designwork making it overheat and be a pain...to that scummer in the hive it's the top of the world. Only when you know about things higher in the chain do you start going why the crap do they still produce these things at all? The simple answer: Cause there are a million million worlds and they make a whole bunch of crap. They aren't unified under anything more than the God-Emperor and sometimes not even that.

But I enjoy that aspect of diversity in the 40k universe. My 2 thrones in my can where the worms are free to come and go

Peacekeeper_b said:

I intentionally added the bit about relative weapon strength. I did so because in the tabletop it's not exactly clear whether an attack is a single shot, a series of shots, a whole mag or multiple mags fired at the enemy.

What you can compare though is relative effectiveness of weapons. And very general sense of how dangerous a weapon is.

Besides I have to add that just because T soaks the damage completely it doesn't mean a "wound" hasn't been inflicted. The character might very well have a scratch or a bruise, just nothing bad enough to warrant losing a wound point.

As for the insta-kill that is a non-issue because several heavy weapons are insta-kill even in DH, so one might have made the pg or mg insta-kill too. I suspect one didn't because they wanted them in and not be indistinguishable insta-kill guns.

Alex

Surely that distinction comes in function. If you're using an anti-vehicle weapon against a soft target then you just get so much sizzling flesh. Against a vehicle? That's where the value of damage might become more useful, since penetration alone suffers from equal blandness.

As to the idea that they can all be different patterns of weaponry. Yes, that is indeed one justification for it. The fact that some of them are given different names would give credence to this idea. Seems a little but "pass the buck" in nature, but it's reasonable. One has to wonder what we would see in Dark Heresy: Imperial Guard (or whatever it is called) and how it varies from Deathwatch, a game based upon the military actions of the "uber-elite" whose weaponry is purportedly the best in the Imperium. If that sets the standard, I would be inclined to just take all the weapons and port them back into Dark Heresy as a basis for interpretation.

YMMV.

Kage