Anyone know why/speculate why this is? Is it a balance issue or meant to represent 'real world'?

One player in my group uses pistols and says accurate pistols are much more rare and expensive, but a hunting rifle which some characters can get at creation, get the bonus.

Any explanations/thoughts?

I believe that this is a balance issue.

Dual wielding accurate pistols would give an insane damage potential. And let´s not even consider what it would do to dual shot, makes me shiver...

As has been stated, it is probably a balance thing. Although, if you are like my group, balance should never be the primary reason to do anything - feel free to try giving the bonus to pistols as well for a session or two. You may like the result. You may find it to turn dual accurate pistol wielders into walking lascannons. In the end, it is your call.

as far as im aware only single shot basic weapons have this rule. It would seem to me that its a Sniper quality for sniping weapons like the Long Las or Nomad sniper.

The Quality i think reflects that these weapons are meant to fire a single high powered shot capable of killing the intended target with that shot. For pistols i believe you still recieve the aiming bonus but not the dmg increase reflecting the weapons increased accuracy.

just my 2 cents

Bassemandrh said:

And even if not, the description of the Accurate quality states its bonus only applies to aimed single shots, so ...

In my opinion it's more an issue of style and representation than balancing. Like Bassemandrh, I too believe that the "Accurate" quality exists to set especially accurate weapons (that can be used for sniping) apart from more common models of firearms instead of just making them appear slightly more precise (i.e. differences you have between all guns).
But pistols, even when mastercrafted, simply are not sniper weapons to me - the barrel is too short, they usually lack sights and bipods and they are often fired with a single hand. If you make an accurate pistol you simultaneously dilute the border between normal weapons and specialized sniper rifles (and I still feel it was wrong for FFG to make accurate bolt weapons, too). Just my two Thrones on the subject, though.

In terms of balance, I actually find the damage bonus, when applied to all Accurate weaponry, brings balance rather then tips it. When you use an Autopistol, and score two degrees of success, you score three hits. With any Accurate weapon on single shot, you only ever score one. This means that for characters wishing to play the stealthy, one-shot-one-kill assassin must sacrifice combat viability for the sake of their fluff. The Accurate boost changes this, allowing that Long Las to, if not score additional hits, at least deal some extra damage to represent the six degrees of succes he just scored. Likewise with pistols. It doesn't make sense that a Duelling las, even super-charged as it is, should deal dramatically less damage then a silly little las-pistol.

Dual-Wielding autopistols gives you the capacity to deal 12 x 1d10+4 (Hecutors) with Pen 3 (Manstoppers). If that's not insane damage potential, what is? Look at it this way, this rule gives Accurate weaponry a far greater potential for surpassing damage soak, since AP+T are only applied once, while semi-automatic and full auto both give you a far, far higher maximum damage potential against targets with a low soak, given that AP+T are applied to each shot. Combine this with the fact that an Accurate weapon still cannot suppress, nor attack multiple targets per round, and I think that there is no reason for Accurate pistols not to benefit.

BangBangTequila said:

Whether combat viability has been sacrificed depends entirely on the Toughness Bonus and Armour of what is being shot at.

BangBangTequila said:

To avoid redundancy, please read posts in their entirety before replying to avoid redundancy.

"Anyone know why/speculate why this is? Is it a balance issue or meant to represent 'real world'?"

I left the benefits of accurate pistols in the game being able to grant better damage if you aim. Spent a bit of time over christmas mucking around with my brother in law's 9mm and .22 pistols and I have very little doubt that aiming will make **** die a lot better than just hosing off rounds everywhere... for the purposes of experimentation (and cheap ammo) holding two and shooting at the same time is a relatively pointless activity for the purposes of hitting things, maybe I need more XP

Though some years ago I had an associate in the US who did a lot of competitive pistol shooting and did fairly well also came to the same conclusion that shooting two pistols at the same time and expecting to hit much, only really happens in the movies, computer games and RPG's.

I would limit the accurate bonus for pistols to short range. Yes, if you are close enough with a pistol you can carefully aim and hit the head or heart. But you aren't going to be that reliably accurate at 100m like you would with a scoped rifle.

Pistol marksmen may have a better idea what the effective range is, so maybe a skilled character could do so out to medium range. Actually, "Pistol Marksman" might be a nice talent to add to the game.

MKX: Do you mean that any weapon should add bonus damage if you Aim it, then?

No, there are a lot of factors in regards to ballistics which make a weapon accurate- ammunition quality, craftsmanship of the barrel, mechanism and sights.

What you look for in ammunition is consistency in its quality, same burn-time on the propellants, weight of the bullet itself- so when you practice you have a broader median average of your groupings being tighter. Barrels and mechanisms have come a long way with technology in terms of making them smoother, more precise, better rifling and that helps reduce things like recoil, the impact of the feed slaming the cartridge into the barrel and vibration being reduced. Just on personal experience I find sights to be the biggest contributer overall, when you can adjust for range, windage and to some extent offset the particular characteristics of individual weapon that might throw a little to the left/right/up/down etc.

Some time ago, I did make a case that las weapons, which largely eliminate a lot of the above should have a fair amount of accuracy because theres no wind, recoil or bullet drop to take into account, though if they are a light-wave weapon they would suffer break-up of the laser over long distances due to atmospheric conditions and particulate.

If I ever DM, I believe I will be implementing a house rule concerning basic weapons:

Accurate Pistols can have up to +1d10 damage

Accurate Basic guns can have up to +2d10 damage

Accurate Heavy guns can have up to +3d10 damage

I'd probably count the bonus only once when it comes to dual-wielding, for balance.

I can't wait for the PCs to encounter a mile-away sniper with a Heavy, scoped, 40kg Sniper Hellgun of DOOM freaking the PCs out with his hidden microphones and boobytraps.

Unusualsuspect said:

Interesting and close to what I use. For pistols, same, but only up to their base range (usually 30 meters).

For Basic, this is RAW already.

For Heavy... wait there are Accurate heavy weapons? Unless you could the Astartes Accurate boltgun used by a human I don't know of any Accurate heavy weapons. I suppose you could consider a heavy missile launcher one MAYBE, being laser guided.

Allowing some extra damage for pistols makes weapons such as the Needle Pistol not completely useless. I also made a homemade Good Quality Accurate Silenced Compact Pistol (think Walter PPK used by James Bond) which one of my player loved and still use as a low-key discreet weapon.

MKX said:

Ah - yeah, there we disagree. I think the "Accurate" quality is a much bigger deviation from the standard than miniscule differences between individual models, though I have to admit that I maintain this distinction primarily because there is nothing else that would make a true sniper rifle stand out in anything except long range firefights. A matter of interpretation. Though now that I think about it, perhaps it might be interesting to think about different "levels" of the Accuracy quality ...

MKX said:

According to some fluff sources, las weapons actually do have recoil - I believe it was explained by some technobabble about the intense heat resulting in a sudden expansion of air inside and at the front of the barrel, causing the weapon to be pushed back ... and also creating the "cracking" (or "whizzing", if fired on a smaller energy setting) sound that is so often described.

I'm not entirely sure if this was in studio material or just licensee stuff, though. Apart from some BL books I also remember the animations in the DoW game giving recoil to the lasgun.

MKX said:

Shooting a perfectly straight, low-recoil beam of searing light...

I allow a +1d10 bonus on damage if they are accurate, but only with on single shot...(per RAW)

Lynata said:

Yeah, lasers are funny critters, for work I had to brush up on a lot of the theory behind them a few months ago which still makes my head hurt. What it sounds like (literally) if science fiction writers had some fundamentals in science, is that the las gun is an Electrolaser. Basically you have a high output laser which causes the atmosphere in the beam to reach a plasma state, then you ram a huge surge of electricity down the channel to blow the **** out of whatever is at the other end.

They make a nice big "crack", there's probably a few youtube videos showing how they create artificial lightning.

A true laser though wont have any recoil, it'll just melt holes in things, people, dirty xenos... etc

The electrolaser sounds like a viable theory to explain the sound, and possibly even why lasgun shots are described as having an "exploding" effect in the Munitorum Manual! I don't really think the writers spent too much time thinking about puny scientific details (bolt rounds have been described as using "depleted deuterium", to give just one other example), but it can be fun figuring out potential explanations for such lapses ...

And I don't think there's any major sci-fi franchise free of flawed technobabble, anyways.

there is always the simple answer of a noise-maker built into the Las weapon to give an audible queue that makes firing the weapon "familiar" since the noise is expected, like firing any solid projectile.

Just as a note to everyone making house rules limiting range on Pistols gaining a Damage bonus: That's ridiculous. Of course pistols will never be as accurate out to the ranges that Basic wepons can, that's why the standard Pistol weapon range is only around 30m. Further restrictions just make Pistols even less appealing. Likewise, why would you allow some weaponry to deal more damage for aiming then others? That's just silly. A bullet through the eye deal dramatically more damage, regardless of weapon class. Combine this with something like the Carnodon, an Accurate Hand Cannon, which deals more damage with more penetration then a Long Las, and yet it gains far less of a damage bonus for being exceptionally Accurate?

Call me crazy, but I'm of the school of thought that a Pistol, in the Dark heresy setting, should be the equal of Basic weaponry in every sense except range, due to the absurdly huge calibres and insanely high-energy weapons, and the balancing issues have already been solved in the weapons' base damage codes and stats.

BangBangTequila said:

Of course you could now argue that such "bonus damage" should depend solely on the BS roll and every weapon should have the potential to do bonus damage, but this would mean that a true sniper rifle would loose a good deal of what makes it special, because then it will frequently "only" result in ordinary hits and leave "bullets through the eye" entirely up to chance, negating the gun's reputation. Yet, if you increase the BS bonus by more than +10 to counter this effect, you end up with a rifle that simply hits everything, which is kind of crap as well.

In that light, I think the existing rules work fairly well - if you keep in mind it's an abstraction.

BangBangTequila said:

YMMV, of course.

Lynata said:

I'm curious what your rationale for this is. Because they're firing rockets?

bogi_khaosa said:

The flat trajectory of a rocket-propelled projectile could even result in increased accuracy compared to a standard round. But I am referring to the strong recoil that is part of the "core description" of these weapons, and which would have a strong tendency to distort an otherwise perfect shot (at least strong enough that it would negate the effects of the "Accurate" quality as I have interpreted it).

That said, I suppose you could, in theory, build something like a large recoilless rifle for bolt ammunition (iirc a "miniature version" of such a system is already part of bolt weapons to allow them to be fired by people in the first place), or simply use true gyrojet rounds without the initial first-stage-charge that propels a normal bolt round out of the barrel before the rocket motor kicks in (that would come with other drawbacks). I would not call such abominations a bolter, though. It's both a feeling as well as holding on to established concepts, though I know that others are far more open than I am on such matters. Yet, the way I see it, boltguns simply aren't used for sniping - there are other weapons better suited for such a task, negating any need to come up with such a system in the first place.

[edit] As an addendum to the above, I just remembered having read about the Stalker Silenced Shells working similar to the aforementioned gyrojets (i.e. single stage, rocket only), sacrificing muzzle velocity for noise reduction and (though this is not mentioned, but it would be logical) a lower recoil - so whilst I would not give the "Accurate" weapon quality to any bolt weapon per se, I could see it being applied to any bolter via the ammunition !

I am a bit on the fence if this is "enough" to qualify for what I still deem as a very special quality. I suppose it could be when the ammunition is combined with an M40 targeter (which, aside from the special rounds, is the only difference between a "Stalker bolter" and a normal boltgun if you go by the Codex ).

Lynata said:

Aha, that makes sense. You could argue that the Accurate ones are so because they have recoil compensators, or something. Edit: as I see you mentioned.