After going over the rules, resolving damage against a horde with a full auto gun will really rack up the dice rolls.....thus slowing down the game and making things far less fluid. A couple of my players are new to roleplaying and are looking forward to some serious gun blasting, but I don't want to turn them off with all the crunch.

Is anyone aware of any generic damage calculator out there that can simultaneously resolve the number of hits AND magnitude damage? We still plan on using dice but we don't want to get carpal tunnel from a couple of rounds of sustained Heavy Bolter fire.....

Thanks!

Exoviper said:

For most hordes I don't even roll for damage because it is certain that the PCs will score at least one wound. That makes fighting against hordes even faster than fighting individual enemies. Just roll to see if the PCs hit and calculate how high the magnitude damage is.

Alex

We have just stopped rolling damage against horde altogether, as long as the minimum damage + penetration exceeds the hordes armour. I've written up al lthe horde magnatude damage modifiers, such for blast, flame and power weapons and given a copy to each one of my PC's to speed up the result

Wow, AK, that's actually a really good idea! Thanks. So you are basically ignoring rolling for damage and just tallying the amount of successful hits, applying them to the magnitude AS LONG AS the weapon pen exceeds armor?

What do you do if he Pen value is less than the horde's armor?

Phaedron, for the modifiers you mentioned, what did u mean by that? Magnitude dmg based on blast radius, flame range and such?

Exoviper said:

No, I just compare quickly the minimum damage of the attack+Pen vs Toughness+AP. If the former is higher or the chances of non-penetration are low and/or I feel like speeding up things, I skip the roll, assuming a success.

Other than that, for example with Tau Fire Warriors, you got make that roll. But in such cases it's bound to be a challenging fight anyway and I don't mind the extra roll.

Alex

Phaedron2 said:

Agreed. If the minimum possible damage deals 1 wound against a horde then there is no point rolling further damage as extra damage would do nothing.

If you have enough dice, there is an easy way to speed up your rolls:

- First, calculate what the minimum roll is to damage the horde.

- Get a bunch of d10s equal to the number of hits. Roll them all at once, these all count as the first die for each hit.

- For each one that equals or exceeds the minimum roll, you have a damaging hit.

- For each of the remaining dice, finish up the damage rolls one at a time.

However this is still a problem when you have lots of hits against a single opponent. I'll write up a damage calculator, once you tell me which Righteous Fury rule you want. Some examples:

- (RAW) A single ten on a damage roll needs to confirm RF. Multiple tens make it automatic. This deals the hits full damage again, each damage roll that has one or more tens causes another roll.

- As RAW, except the extra damage is only a single d10.

- Each ten on the initial damage roll needs to be confirmed for RF. Each confirmed ten causes another d10 in damage, further tens cause another automatic d10 of damage.

Thank you, Bil, I would greatly appreciate that! Feel free to use RAW for RF for others in the community who would like to make use of your tool.

I like your method of mass rolling D10's to weed out successful dmg rolls over the horde's damage soak. Very interesting. Heck if you have enough dice of similar colors, why not roll more to resolve all the damage at once (A 2D10+5 weapon hitting 3 times would require 2 red, 2 green and 2 blue dice to isolate each hit...BAM all damage is resolved in one roll).

AK-73, I see. If you're shooting a 2D10+5 weapon (damage range of 7-25) against a horde of cultists with 3 armor and 3 TB (total of 6 damage soak) there's no need to roll to determine if each hit exceeds their defense thus reducing magnitude. Yeah, my brain is slow today....

Thank you kindly. You're comments are very informative!

Exoviper said:

And really, if the horde's soak was 7 or 8, I'd only roll if I'd feel like it.

There's other possibilities: use Shadowrun's chunks of 3. Make one damage roll for 3 or less hits and apply the same result for each.

So if 10 shots hit, make 3 times a damage roll for 3 penetrations each and 1 damage roll to determine if the last shot penetrates. If one of the 3 damage rolls does fail to score a wound all 3 shots fail, etc.

Alex

Exoviper said:

If you are dealing with experienced RPG players, chances are they have played a game using lots of d10s. So it would be reasonable to expect them to have enough dice. Having enough dice in enough different colours is going to be rarer. For example, a heavy bolter could get up to 12 hits on a horde (10 from ROF, +1 from bolter drill, +1 from explosive damage), so it would need 12 colours*, with 3 dice in each colour, for a total of 36 dice.

If you find enough different colours then your method should work.

*You could roll multiple times to reduce the number of colours and dice you need.

I have completed the damage calculator program . I can easily change it to implement various Righteous Fury house rules.

WOW!!! Thank you so much! I think it's so cool you went out of your way to do that. This is a great tool that will be put to good use! Thank you very much!

You all seem to ignore Righteous fury versus hordes. Have I missed something, is RF not rolled vs hordes?

A heavy bolter doing four hits will cause 12 d10 to be rolled, getting an average of 1.2 RFs. For this type of attack you're quite unlikely to not get a RF in the damage roll. This makes it necessary to roll all the damage dice even if the min dam exceeds the soak. Sad but true. I guess you could ignore RF vs hordes but that is actually quite a hit to player power vs hordes.

Since I'm running with the RF house rule (+1d10 per RF rolled, which will usually be pointless since the soak is already breached in most cases) I have instead just stated that each RF rolled vs hordes means one additional hit (after multipliers). Still, a lot of dicerolling is required, my players seemed to be ok with it though. We've also ruled that RF is autoconfirmed vs all opponents with DW training which also reduces the dicerolling.

gruntl said:

You have been misreading the RF rules, I'm afraid. Righteous Fury doesn't mean an additional hit is scored. It just means that the damage of the hit you are resolving gets increased. Which in turn means that once the damage rolled by the PC exceeds the hordes soak, it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter if 1 damage point gets through or 1000. Whether you roll RF or not the magnitude damage to hordes always stays the same.

Alex

Ah of course. That is how we're playing, but with +1d10, already, I somehow got confused when trying to apply it to the horde rules. Thanks for clearing it up for me.

ak-73 said:

It seems to me that the RAW does imply RF is a full extra hit, with all the modifiers and other trappings of that. However, our group instantly found that continuing our old rule from DH of just considering them extra die of damage on the initial hit works much better by giving a better chance to overcome Toughness/armor of big enemies and also has no impact on interations with horde or other mechanics due to having to calculate or figure out where extra hits came from.

Hordes, if run RAW, require an absolutely insane amount of rolling that very rarely will change the outcome. Our group also adopted a number of the suggestions found here through our experiances.

So, to speed up your horde play, here's a few steps detailed in one list on how to fix things:

#1 Work out the minimum damage of your weapon and find out if it will cause a wound to the horde. If so, there is no reason to roll damage at all using the sensable version of RF.

#2 Have blast weapons automatically cause damage equal to their blast rating to the horde. Even the lowly frag grenade will still cause a wound to the toughest hordling in the base book (Tau Fire Warrior) with an AVERAGE roll. If it's the most common outcome, why bother rolling 6 times to see if you hit and then roll 6 damages to see if you cause a wound? This is particularly true since these blast weapons are almost all the sort of thing DESIGNED to kill large groups of fleshy targets that make up the hordes, and yet due to the low to non existant flat bonuses to damage most of them have they end up being the least likely. Makes no sense, so just skip the hassle of rolling to save time AND make the outcome make more sense.

These two simple changes speed things up dramatically, and really do little to change the outcome. The only reasons I can see to not use them are if you're using the RF rules where it grants a full extra hit, which has quite an impact on horde battles, or if your players are absolute sticklers for rolling out the small chance that your explosive weapons don't blow people up. I think after a couple horde fight's they'll change thier stance.

Sorry Assault guys, no new house rules to make melee rock against hordes. But then again, WW1 showed pretty well that machine guns and explosives were the most effective ways of dealing with massed infantry like hordes. One guy with a blade really doesn't do much in that situaition.

Blizzard36 said:

No, if you shoot one bullet and score RF, it still is one bullet. According to RAW though it means that it will hurt as if getting hit by two. Or more.

Alex