We have played deathwatch for a while, and we noticed that combat needs a lot of calculation (our devastator has always a sheet of paper beside him to calculate the damege he does with his 10 hits from his heavy bolter. This slows combat down and takes out the drama. This is made worse by the fact that it is almost impossible to miss. With autofire, size, equipment boni etc your average starting marine hits on a result of 80-100. So I proposed the following changes:

- Hordes always do the same damage when they hit (I would suggest the average of their damage roll), but always at least one point.

- You don't get a bonus to hit a horde, but if you hit, you always do max. damage

Full auto:

It`s just to good. you can kill almost anything (including a player character) with a good placed salvo. and you have to do tons and tons of damage rolls. So I suggest the following:

you do not get a bonus for your to hit rolls. Every additional hit adds 2 points to the total of your damage roll. If you place your hits on different enemies each gets his own roll.

Erlan said:

A heavy bolter doesnt just get 10 hits if it succeeds, its 1 hit per degree of success. So if He has 80 bs and rolls a 70 thats only 1 hit. Pg 239 for those rules on Full Auto.

I know that he doesn`t always get the full 10 hits,

But:

our devastator has a BS somewhere around 60 + 20 from autofire + 30 horde/size bonus + 10 from short range. So he almost always hits, and most of the time he scores around 7 hits. I admit 10 hits is an exagerration, but it is still enough to make combat slow and most of the time boring.

Erlan said:

I guess I am missing how it makes combat long. He rolls 7 hits you subtract 7 and move on, next. You could always add some negative conditions against hordes such as rain and fog, snow, ground tremors, blinding reflections ect.

Besides that if he had 100% to hit in order for him to get 7 hits he has to roll a 30 or less, he is rolling 30 or less every time? Doesnt seem likely.

his value is around 120%. To get 7 hits he has to beat the target number by 60. So he has to roll a 60 (6 degrees of the success, + 1 hit for succeeding at the roll).

But that`s not the point: of course I can construct a situation to make a roll more difficult. But that's like saying to someone who bought a new car that does not work: "well, just always drive downward." ;-)

I recommend my rules for visibility and cover. I don't use the RAW cover rules, instead I adjust the horde size modifier depending of how much of a horde is really exposed. So if there was a huge horde in a trench, the size modifier would be +0 at best.

If there was a horde of a rebels along the facade of a row of houses, they would only be visible at the windows and doors and the size modifier might from +40 to +10 - you get the idea.

Not only does this reduce the effective BS of marines, it spares one the calculation of which AP does this cover have and what is the total AP, not to mention that without the cover AP the damage roll can be considered an automatic success in most cases.

My marines usually have these bonuses: +20 full-auto +10 short-range +0 to +30 for size = +30 to +60 total. Which gives an average effective BS value of 80 to 110, may be slightly higher for equipment, bonuses, etc.

If you want to make things more interesting, add bad weather and attack at longer ranges (will cause the hordes to hardly hit though). Or create smaller hordes for smaller size modifiers (will cause the hordes to make less damage though).

Overall remember this: few hordes are meant to be a serious challenge for the kill-team, Tau Fire Warriors being an exception of course. Instead most are designed to whittle the Marines down for the boss fight. The kill-team should be aware that the challenge in most of those cases will be to dispatch the enemy with as little expenses as possible.

Alex

That is exactly the way I see hordes: they are not meant to be a challenge, but a distraction or an obstacle. The thing is that from my point of view, they are not very good in this role. It takes far too long to take a horde down, and because of their rather low stats they are no real challenge for marines. combat should be fast and furious, not 6 rounds of dice rolling and full autofire to whittle down the magnitude.

Maybe I read the Horde rules wrong, but why are you calculating damage for each hit?

From what I saw when reading I thought it was: Roll damage for the first hit, and see if it does at least 1 point of damage to the horde. if yes, reduce the Horde's magnitude by 1 for each hit generated. Reduce by an additional hit if the weapon is explosive.

Then you have things like Unrelenting Devastation which would double the base hits.

Now, factor in the fact that 2D10+5 (for just a regular bolter) with Pen 5 is going to pretty much guarantee 1 point of damage against your average horde creature. Horde damage would just be "How many degrees of success on full auto? Ok, that's 4 hits +1 for explosive. Horde Mag is down 5, next batter"

or, am I way off base?

Delahunt said:

No, that's the way I do it also.

Alex

I'll being doing it that way too,

thanks.

I think technically each hit has to do more than armor and toughness.

But that being said 90% of the enemies I've used in Hordes can't possibly survive a hit from a bolter/heavy bolter so simply calculating damage based off of DoS + Talents + Ammo is typically the way I do it as well. Unless you're up against a horde of something with toughness greater than 7 and armor above 5, in which case you should probably be using individual characters anyhow...

Yea, what are you using Horde rules with that aren't just auto wounded?

Gaunts have TB3 and 6 armor, so even bolters will always wound, even if you rolled all 1's for damage. Heavy bolter will especially always wound.

So in your example, the Heavy Bolter Devastator shoots, lets say he gets 7 hits. Just remove 7 Magnitude, don't even bother rolling damage as they will always wound.

Horde rules are very fast and easy IMHO.

Delahunt said:

Ya thats what I have been trying to explain to him, it really is not as complicated as he is making out.

I know all that, do not worry. Maybe I didn`t explain it very well. I think combat in Deathwatch has two main Problems:

against hordes ist is just boring. of course it is fast and that's good and all, you just calculate your hits, every hit is a point of magnitude. It`s a nice, quick and simple system. The problem is the following: for a horde with a magnitude of 30 you need at least 6 rounds of full auto fire to destroy it. It is almost impossible to miss, so why throw the dice at all? I don`t realy see a lot potential here for interesting fight scenes. most hordes can't really threaten a char (and that's not their purpose), but for simple distractions they are too tough and take too long to put down.

If you fight against more powerfull opponents you have a second problem: you kill almost everything with a single hit because of the ridicolously high bonus for BS and the high damage output of almost all starting weapons. And here comes most of the dice rolling into play. you have to throw tons and tons of damage dice. when you fire a heavy bolter you get 7 hits on average (see above). that means you have to make 7 damage rolls. that is stupid ;-)

Thats why i came up with the changes above. My goal was to to do two things:

streamline the combat by making it faster (less damagerolls, simpler way of calculating damage on hordes) and lower the chances of success, because if I will hit in 95%, why should I roll at all?

Is it now clear what I mean?

and I know that some hordes break before they are fully destroyed. but there are many things that won't: creatures with bload soaked tide, tyranids, demons, creatures with disciplined retreat etc.

Erlan said:

Of course a large horde of hormagaunts is hard to miss. That's purposefully so.

Example 1:

FIghting a charging mag 30 horde of hormagaunts works like this: you focus your fire on them trying to decimate them sufficiently before they reach any member of the kill-team. As such it's a race against time.

Because if it reaches you and has a mag of 20+ PCs will start to burn fate points or die. Each PC in melee will have to face two attacks each round with a damage of 4D10+5 Pen 3. That isn't degrading, it's life threatening.

And as such the degrees of success in ranged combat is relevant, not if you hit. If the players with a Bolter hit only with 1 or 2 bullets, they should be scared. Scared of the hormagaunts reaching them at mag 20+. That's where the tension comes in, especially if you have 2 or 3 hordes charging you.

Example 2:

With Tau Fire Warriors is vice versa: they can shoot a kill-team to death quickly. If a mag 30 horde has Pulse Rifles, you are facing 4 ranged attacks at full auto (4 shots) each with 4D10+2 Pen 4. The kill-team will need good cover and preferably be able to collectively advance under cover to finish them off in close combat.

Example 3:

Now for a lesser threat: Lordsholm Rebel hordes out of Final Sanction. These truly are only meant for degradation: they are not enough of a threat themselves unless in huge humbers (as with Promethium Bridge encounter perhaps). The task of the kill-team is shoot them down or degrade their offensive capabilities so much that they don't present any danger anymore. The danger here is losing Wound Points due to concentrated Heavy Stubber fire or the concentrated fire of a fresh horde. Again, it's advisable to seek cover and put the enemy out.

Calculate it through: a mag 50 horde can sustain some fire and still be 20+ or 30+ in mag. If 30+, then it will be able to make 3 attacks with 3D10+3. That can cost a few Wound Points on a good roll. If they have Heavy Stubbers, I'd rule that 1 of the attacks will be a Heavy Stubber attack (they will try to keep them manned even as they take casualties) - it will be Full-Auto attack at ROF 10 (don't expect though more than 1-3 hits though) with 4D10+4 Pen 2 each.

Please make sure that your kill-team almost always understands the tactical situation; they are very experienced fighters after all.

And to make fights with hordes more interesting you can put mini-games into them - see Final Sanction's turning points.

Erlan said:

If you don't use the RAW Righteous Fury rules you don't kill every opponent with starting weapons on the first shot. A Tyranid Warrior, for example, has 48 Wounds with a Soak of 18 barring Penetration. Even if you do hit with all 4 Boltgun rounds, you can't hope to make much more than, say, 30 points coming through in total unless you have hellfire rounds packed. If you do, you'll have to hope that there aren't more Warriors around than there are kill-team members because in close combat they will outclass the average Marine. Again it will be a race against time before they reach the kill-team and start picking people apart.

And about Master-Class enemies - fights against them are usually of the type: kill-team focusses its fire on the enemy as much as it can, kill-team manages to finish off that enemy with 1 or 2 rounds or else heads will be rolling (literally), karma will be burnt and hearts will be broken.

Alex