so. Magnitude on hordes is supposed to be abstract. a mag 50 hoard could be 10 opponents, 50, or 200. Yet when we're firing away at full auto on our bolters that have a full-auto rate of 4, how do you role play the damage/carnage?

Seems to me that the potential "damage" caused to magnitude can sometimes exceed the "realistic" stats of a weapon being used. How do you handle this descrpency when only a few shells could do comparetively more damage to a hoard than what the ammo expenditure would seem to be possible?

Only way I'm thinking of it is to make gun-fire highly cinematic and discard ammo counting alltogether, so the marine can be standing on top of the bodies of the fallen and simply mow down the oncoming hoard. but then that takes a bit away of the "survival horror" aspects of being dropped onto a planet with 2 clips and trying to survive...

*shrug*

Cheers,

J.

Remember that Magnitude is as much a function of moral as group wounds.

When the bolt round you fire turns one person into little more than hamburger, the person(s) behind/ around him are covered in their friends gore and viscera. They may snap mentally and become catatonic, faint, or run. This leads to the next closest members of the horde seeing this mess of a once ally and others breaking and fleeing or saving their sanity by any means necessary, thus reducing the effectiveness of the horde.

Try not to think about a single round into a horde as a single kill. For the most part a single round can be single or multiple kills due to a cascade of fear and terror. Shards of bone shrapnel from exploding bodies could take out those near by or spasms of death could cause a weapon discharge and take out several members of a horde.

If targets are closely packed, a single bullet could also conceivably take out more than one enemy if it fully penetrates the first (few.) I can only imagine the weapons of the 41st millennium are even more effective at this task. Bolters in particular may not be great at penetration, but the rounds are described (in TT) more like RPG rounds that explode on impact, or shortly after. A grazing wound might be enough to set off the timer, causing the shell to explode in mid-air amidst four or five people.

If you're not happy with the magnitude rules, though, I don't think there's any harm in changing them. I think the 40k universe can be run as survival horror or as action/combat, so it's really a question of which you prefer. I agree that reducing or removing ammo limitations will lean it towards action, and counting every shell will lean it towards survival horror. Both ideas are perfectly valid to me, it's just a question of what atmosphere you want.

Look at how the standard bolt round appears to your average enemy. It ignores flak and light carapace entirely. No hit can fail to wound a normal enemy and if they're incredibly lucky they'll still be in one piece afterwards. The standard space marine weapons are rapid fire, armour-piercing grenade launchers. If something like *that* hits the guy two away from you, you're going to be showered in gore if not killed outright. Hits the morale alright!

What trouble I have with the abstract magnitude is exactly oposite what you're describing - hordes with larger magnitude than body count. In such scenario what would a single magnitude hit represent? And why wouldn't a las cannon hit score enough damage to represent a single kill?

Any creative ideas?

A lascannon wouldn't necessarily be hitting and damaging a creature directly in those cases. So in the case of a lascanon It could have just been a glancing hit, or a hit that caused indirect damage (by blowing up something next to the horde, for example).

If the magnitude is greater than the number of creatures then you've made the decision that no matter how much damage is leveled in one hit no creature will be immediately killed. It also bears pointing out that Horde rules are meant for masses of creatures, in other words hordes. The exact number of a horde is not relevant and likely counter to the whole definition, which asks you to treat the group as an individual in itself.

If you use horde rules for groups where the exact numbers are relevant and keeping track of individual creatures is desired then I think you're using the wrong abstraction. You'd probably be best served by using the deadlier hits rule and just kill these creatures when critical damage occurs, something a lascannon will be quite capable of doing. You can mimic the other benefits of being a Horde by just handing out relevant bonuses to the creatures despite not being a per the rules Horde.

In the first game that I ran (this weekend), I used some of the advice given and had magnitude act primarily as a morale tracker. while 4 space marines firing their bolters all on full auto can let loose a grand total of 16 rounds. when faced against a hoard in the "hundreds" only leaving a couple dozen lying dead, though taking the hoard down by more then 60% in magnitude did not seem right.

the marines where shooting objects on the ground and the resultant explosions and shrapenal killed the front ranks, where the next ranks realized the storm they were running into, they broke and fled (for the most part). It seemed to work.

however, RP'ing an attack against a hoard with melee weapons was LIGHT YEARS easier than with ballistic weapons because a sword *can* be much more cinimatically described when no ammo was used

Cheers,

J.