My question is about "friendly fire".

Player character, Brother X engages his foe in melee attack. Brother Y is trying to hit the same foe with bolter gun.

Here comes my question : Is there any chance that brother X will cross the line of fire and suffer from "friendly fire"?

Help would be greatly appreciated.

in standard rules "no" to keep it simple. shooting into melee combat only imposes a -20 on the to hit test.

However page 248 of the core rules, bottom left hand corner has optional rules for just such an occasion

Of course if said shot into said melee had a blast radius... well you'll hit your brother marine anyways.

So....

Heavy weapons, blast weapons, etc. Just don't do it.

In fact why do it at all, your brother is in melee, why risk his life when you can charge in yourself and help him bring the enemies of the Emperor to heel?

herichimo said:

For example because the brother in melee is an assault marine who got into melee using a jetpack and it would take you several turns to get into melee range on foot?

herichimo said:

Don't ask me .... During last game my friend fired semi-automatic burst into enemy which was engaged in melee combat with my character. Result: my character is nearly dead due to rules of "righteous fury"

Thanks for replies, now it's obvious

herichimo said:

To be fair, the answer here is often "because I'm way better at shooting than I am at melee" and if there *aren't* friendly fire rules (and the rules in Deathwatch are strictly optional) it's a more sensible way to help out.

I think this is one of those things where mileage varies a lot person to person, some people hate games where you can shoot freely into melee combat, some don't mind it. The trick is to make sure you know which sort of game you're playing in.

I of course, was being polite. In my experience all "shooting into melee" wasn't to help out the assault marine, and not really for the "my shooting is better" spiel either. Its greedy players wanting to get the kill on the enemy the person in melee is fighting. Your mileage may vary of course, but I don't think many instances would be to different.

Case and point: My assault marine was fighting an aspiring champion (the 2nd one out of 3 at the time). I had engaged said chaos marine to keep his power weapon from cutting up our tactical marines or apothecary. Now, despite the fact there were still 3 or 4 remaining hordes of nurgle zombies out there, our resident tactical-stator decided he wanted to shoot a krak missile into the combat to kill the champion instead of killing off a horde with a frag.

If your assault marine jumps up ahead of everyone into combat, hopefully he jumped into something he could handle. The best way to support him at this point is to get up there and/or kill any other targets nearby that could make the assault marines day worse and then help him finish off his target if he hasn't done so yet. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to use your jump pack to tie up, confuse, or make yourself a target only to have the other players not use the time you are trying to give them to get closer or into a better position.

herichimo said:

Often it's this. Sometimes it's players just being efficient. After all; if the chips are really down, it stops being about getting the glory of kills in single combat and should be a case of 'kill 'em any way we can, as fast as we can'.

But yeah: Sometimes players just like being jerks to other players and stealing their moment of glory.

The ASM has a pretty limited combat specialty, especially given the general weakness of melee in the game. So I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you, henchimo. Especially if said character has the Toe to Toe Deed from RoB or the Champion class. Melee in general is fairly weak against hordes, and my ASM has always thought it was his job to tie up dangerous melee opponents in order to better protect his Brother Marines and let them do their jobs without hindance.

Then again, we're playing a fairly high-power campaign, and I'm a Blood Angel. It's pretty natural for me to swing for the fences against the larger enemies, if only because I'm so anemic against hordes. I mean, a Rank 1 Tac with Metal Storm does better Horde damage than my (just starting) Rank 4 ASM. I need some moments of awesome, too! And in a game like DW, I'm hard pressed to find enough strict RPing to feel my character shines as an individual without his combat specialization.