ak-73 said:

One thing to remember is that, while WFRP had non-stacking criticals, it also used a random table to determine critical effect based on damage beyond wounds, which shuffled around the odds. If you removed that table, it became very difficult to actually kill anyone, because getting enough damage beyond wounds to reach the fatal criticals was much more difficult.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Yeah but it went to 15 and not 10 iirc and average weapon damages in DW are much higher. Also: explosive crits. Without True Grit, it's no big deal - you just have to have 5 to 8 points penetrating when someone reaches 0 wounds. Also I use multiple exploding d10 on RF still.

But I am not inclined to make such a change that early. First step is adapting weapon damages for the next mission. Rearranging Semi-Auto and Full-Auto as a next step is tricky because 2 of my players GM DH and RT respectively and we'd need a unified ruling. That's also one of the problems with changing RF rules (disregarding any hidden issues it might cause) which would be the third step.

Alex

MILLANDSON said:

Same argument can by applied the other way around - space marines just standing around shooting a massive monster like the hive tyrant to death is pretty dumb too.

If a hive tyrant has to work clever to avoid being killed by a space marine with a heavy bolter, then those marines should have to work hard to avoid being killed by the hive tyrant. A hive tyrant should have far more chance of charging the enemy than a marine.

But that's what happens when unnatural toughness doubles damage reduction and you want soopamarinebolterdeath, ridiculously over the top weapon stats that make anti tank weaponry look stupid.

Hellebore

Because that how the marines are described in fluff. They are less than 1million in all the IOM and are a elite of an ellite force even at level 1, so they are more hive tyrants in an tyranid planetary invasion than there could be marines assigned to the kill team.To be able to justify the expenditure to maintain the marines require must have very perform very well against most foes. In that encounter there could be multiple foes or to close fast,etc.

I also see that there is a strong movement to nerf (humans)marines and their abilities(technology) and **** the abilitiities(and technology) of aliens. Many players seems to hate marines and their background and want to nerf them while they seem to see nothing wrong to giving more and more boosts to aliens.

thor2006 said:

I'm having a little trouble following, so please forgive me if my comment seems off track.

I think the nerfs and boosts come because people want to create a challenge for their player characters and an attractive advancement option. If you can buy a heavy bolter at rank 1 and it beats all the other weapons in the game, what's the point of getting something cooler or learning something new?

Also remember that the marines are the player characters, and the xenos the NPCs and enemies (in most of our games, at least). We're nerfing our players and boosting our enemies, we're not just marine haters and xenos lovers. We're trying to find a sweet spot to challenge our players through combined nerfs, boosts, and tactical strategies for our enemies. Some of us feel more strongly about certain stats, weapons, or the like, but we're all after the same basic goal; a fun and challenging game for our players.

Hellebore said:

I think we got it, you don't like the characteristics or weapon damage. I'm not sure that's why the Hive Tyrant died in one turn, but we get it.

Regarding nerfing Marines (and who is boosting xenos actually?) - the problem I have is this: If Marines who are Rank 1 can dispatch a Hive Tyrant who is very high on the upper end of the Tyranid food chain (or similar for Daemon Princes and Chaos), this means you can mostly challenge the players only with quantity, not quality.

The goal of this balancing act is so that a HT might be too much for Rank 1 kill-team but a fair challenge for a Rank 4 or 5 kill-team. At Ranks 6 to 8, a HT should be doable and you'll need quality and quantity to challenge the players.

That's the kind of thing I'd like to achieve. I am not convinced that DW going by RAW does that.

Also the point isn't in nerfing Marines. I would like you to notice, Thor, that I am suggesting nerfing the Bolter while giving both plasma and melta +1d10. So it's not about making Marines bad. It's about finding a balance, I like.

As for Hellbore, I think he does have a point although I would judge FFG less harshly. I think giving the Bolter slightly too good stats 2 to 3 points, leads to the Storm Bolter being very good. That necessitated that they needed to make the Heavy Bolter even better. Also they apparently were under a good deal of time pressure and I think they didn't have the time to balance the upscaled weapon damages enough to find a proper balance before release.
(And I guess that's how business goes: you rather release something quickly and can then bug-fix it later. The Microsoft principle. You may not like it but it works in the business world.)

Hindsight is always perfect. I wonder if I or Hellbore made the system, Ross would be sitting here and pointing out the flaws in our system, right? To me, I wouldn't consider it a major issue yet, nothing that can't be fixed with a few tweaks. I always tweak systems sooner or later and most systems I have run required more tweaks than 40K RP.

Alex

Im reading this thread but it just doesnt reflect my games at all. We have so many house rules in play that its almost like im not playing the same game.

We have marine bolters at 1d10+7 damage but we have a straight to crits damage system where wounds suffered over your toughness bonus result in a crit result. So a space marine with tb 8 taking 13 wounds after reductions leads to a 5 crit before true grit. Its also reduced based on your total wounds so anyone with 20 wounds takes a crit for every 2 wounds (3 for 30 wounds and 4 for 40 and so on) over his tb which would make this either 1 or 2 depending on whether true grit rounds up or down (I cant remember).

We have changed most of the marine weapon stats, in the case of anything that gets 1d10 over the normal version we have tended to remove that d10 and instead replace it with 2 more to its base damage. We also use the original Dark Heresy version of Righteous Fury where it only adds 1d10 damage regardless of the original weapon making it still powerful but not an auto kill to most things (it also allows damage to increase more smoothly rather than spiking if you roll a 10).

In the case of the Heavy Bolter if I was running it I think it would work out at 2d10+7 damage as ive also upped Heavy bolter damage in Dark Heresy to 2d10+5. I have to admit I tend to gut the weapon rules to make them flow better and fit the background better. I feel that a marines bolts are the same calibre as a normal bolt but would benifit from higher grade of production using higher grade propellents and explosives as well as being slightly longer than a normal bolt shell to make sure that you cant use marine bolts in normal bolters (the overpressure would severely damage the gun plus its illegal). In my game you could put a normal bolt in a marine bolter and get 1d10+5 pen 4 out of it.

How does everyone handle extra ammo for the heavy bolter? I would say that reloading the backpack feed would be totally impractical as it would require you to carry arround a huge box of heavy bolter ammo. If ammo is a consideration then use that to your advantage. Send waves of small enemies to soak up bolt shells, use termagants in hard cover like a building to use up more shots than normal. When they start running out make the enemies bigger so that they cant affoard to hold back the ammo before the big guns show up.

Kaihlik

Charmander said:

These discussions keep cropping up, so I'm not sure people really do. Pages of ways around it when the easiest fix is to change the underlying cause.

This happens in the tabletop rules as well, where a bad rule is patched over rather than actually fixed. Look at the AP problem from 4th ed 40k. It was starting to dominate the game, but instead of fixing the underlying problem, how AP worked, they instead simply increased cover saves to 4+ and gave them out for a wider range of conditions.

The net result was to reduce the effectiveness of AP, but by putting a patch over the top rather than fixing the actual problem..

Personally I just don't like patching rules because you almost always end up with knock on consequences. Increase the resilience of the hive tyrant just to protect it from heavy botlers and everything else finds it even harder to beat. Nerfing the heavy bolter really isn't enough, because of the extra abilities that can stack on top of it. And obviously the heavy bolter needs to be better than a bolter, so you can't just put it down to bolter stats.

To patch to rules nerfing the devestator's bonus abilities, or prevent the other talents that are usable by other marines but also work with heavy weaponry from working with heavy weapons.

it just seems pointless to me to spend ages debating how to patch the problems in the rules when it could be solved by going to the root cause and fixing that instead.

Hellebore

ak-73 said:

Technically you are, you added damage to some of their guns in your conversions.

Hellebore said:

Fair enough

Hellebore said:

As I've said, I like your incremental unnatural system, but I still have to say I'm not in full agreement that it would be this magic bullet, and it would have far reaching impacts. Most of the work arounds I've seen consist of minor tweaks to the weapon damages and perhaps more importantly playing the enemies like they're intelligent adversaries rather than fodder for the boltguns. For me those items have made the game workable without changing the stat line of everyone in the game.

Kaihlik said:

The backpack carries 250 rounds, which is 25 turns of full auto firing. IMHO the grinding for that amount of time just to make a HB run dry wouldn't be that engaging on any sort of regular basis. Then if someone else in the squad is carrying a backup ammo supply for the devestator, you've got another 25 rounds to go through (though it would take several full turns, I'd think at least 3, to swap out backpacks).