Hello

I've recently acquired the book, haven't played yet but I have been reading the book and I've noticed something disturbing.

First of all, the rule for righteous fury is... scary. In the good old days of warhammer frpg (2nd ed), it did an extra 1d10 points of damage. As the toughness and armor had already been bypassed by that point (hopefully!) the extra damage went right into wounds, and it was rather potent. Now if you're adding full damage, including bonuses, it's extremely dangerous.

Second, bolters inflict 2d10+5, but roll the d10 three times (because of tearing), and thus a bolter has a roughly 1/3 chance of inflicting a righteous fury, making them a lot more dangerous than their stats firs suggest.

Lastly, full auto has a chance of inflicting additional hits AND increases your chances to hit. So if you need a 50% to hit on a normal shot and you roll 49% on full auto (ie barely hitting) well blamo, you've just inflicted 3 hits!

All these are pretty potent by themselves, but when combined, it's ungodly. Multiple hits are very frequent, and each one has a substantial chance of triggering righteous fury.

I did a little "test" by having a space marine shot an ordinary bolter at a chaos space marine (who wasn't dodging). I gave this space marine a BS of 50%, which seemed reasonable. I rolled 10 times, hit 7 times (not surprisingly), and of those 7 hits, 4 resulted in the chaos space marine hitting 0 wounds (didn't bother doing the critical damage). And this is just with a normal bolter! Had I been using a heavy bolter or special rounds, I'm sure it would have been even worse.

I can only conclude that a squad of space marines armed with bolters (especially if a devastator marine is along for the ride) will shred anything to bits in a single round if they all fire on the same target - bye bye big bad boss. Alternatively, should a chaos space marine shoot at a PC, (if we give a 50% dodge chance), there is a 1/5 chance that the player will probably have to make a new PC.

This doesn't seem like leading to fun gameplay... Am I reading this all wrong?

thanks,

Ancalagon

You are also forgetting things like Blood Angels have 9-0 chance of fury, and certain squad formations. However the enemies also are very strong and often have the same chances or capabilities that will make mince meat of characters. Often I found playing DH till now is that ye who shoots first, and doesn't miss... lives...

While what Terminus says is true, that's not particular fun to play.

And the RF rule isn't scary, I say it's outright absurd for avoiding stronger terminology. Most people have ditched it.

The two usual solutions:

1. Revert to the DH rule of adding 1D10.

2. For a slightly more heroic feel, add a 1D10 for every 10 rolled. I find this gives a proper balance and allows a player to really hurt even big guys. Through very good damage rolls one of my players brought down a Broodlord (80 Wounds) in 2 rounds with a Boltgun (admittedly only because of his Hellfire rounds though).

If you want to make the game less deadly, revert to the old WFRP rule where Critical Damage doesn't amass. Your wounds go down to 0 and everything in excess turns into a critical. I'm still considering that options... it makes True Grit very powerful though.

Alex

Oh ya I limit RF to just 1d10 also and if it has volatile quality I just give them the +10.

I'm glad to see it wasn't just "in my head"

Limiting the RF to a d10, or some variance thereof, should definitely tone down RF in general and bolters in particular.

So, the auto fire rules giving both increased hits AND bonus to hit (that "getting 3 hits on a roll 1% lower than your normal BS "to hit roll" issue)... is this not really a problem by itself? I would like to hear how it has played out.

When firing on full auto you score one hit per Degree of Success. So if you roll 1% less than needed (in your example 49% when you need a 50%) you are only going to hit the target once, not three times. Was I misunderstanding what you were saying? In order to get 3 hits you are going to have to roll a 30% or less.

Like many of he people here our group has reverted to the old DH rules for Righteous Fury, each die scoring a natural 10 can, if successfully converted, give another d10 of damage. Getting to roll the entire attack damage over again is just too potent, especially when a heavy bolter has the potential of scoring many hits in a single attack.

Edsel62 said:

Ah, I was unclear. Say your space marine has a BS of 50%, and is firing on full auto, and rolls 49%. Because full auto gives you a +20% bonus, you've just scrored 3 hits because of that 20% bonus (59, 69, the modified BS is 70%, so that's 2 degrees of success, so two extra hits).

In terms to rolling 1% lower than your natural BS while on full auto will hit three times, then yes you are correct.

Don't forget that there are usually other modifiers involved as well such as distance, and size of target. Although to be honest that usually just makes it even easier to hit.

Lucrosium Malice said:

It is actually Degrees of Success not percent, so in the example they give on pg 239 the character has 45 bs and has +20 for full auto making it 65, he rolls a 32 so he has 3 Degrees of Success(Basicly 10% think opposite Degree of Difficulty). So he gets 1 hit for the initial roll +3 more hits making it a grand total of 4 hits.

Nimon said:

I understand that, I was commenting on the OPs example of getting 3 hits with a bolt gun for rolling 1% under their natural BS on full auto.