Greetings all, if you're like me, a GM, and you have a group of people who love nothing more than combat and would like to change that, well, I have some pointers. After a long thought and a couple test fights I've found a system that works quite well and it's been in effect for over a year.

What it does is simple. Makes combat a horrific thing.

Firstly, I thought the way the default health system in DH was kind of odd. Having that moment where someone takes a burst of autogun shells to the chest, to take them to 1 wound, then the lasgun bolt to the leg completely maims them? I think that's weird. So, new health system it is!

Instead of having a 'wound pool' I've modified it so that each location (Head, body, arms and legs) EACH have wounds equal to the number of your total wounds. So, lets say10. That means your
Head: 10
Arms: 10
Body: 10
Legs: 10
All have 10 wounds. Taking a sound constitution gives you +1 wound to all hit locations. So, when someone gets stabbed in the arm, it reduces wounds on just the arm. So, now someone has '60' wounds, or at least can take 60 wounds. Well, countering that I've also gotten rid of the whole negative wounds as well. Instead instituted a new rule as well. All damage does critical damage!

Upon that, it's not as bad as it sounds. While all damage is critical, it only does half crit damage round down. So, for instance, someone gets shot with a lasgun from a cultist, in the right arm. The cultist rolls a 7, +3 to get a final damage of 10. We'll say our PC is wearing some gang leathers (2ap) and has a toughness bonus of 3, for a total reduction of 5. so 5 damage goes through, subtract 5 wounds from the right arm location and consult the energy critical damage table for arms, half of 5 round down is 2, so they take the effect of the Critical Damage Table; Energy; Arm; 2.

Now, with the critical damage table 8 or more usually result in death, so, with my system that's taking straight 16+ wounds(after armour and toughness), which would outright kill most players who don't spend all their xp on sound constitutions, however. For those who can take 16 damage and still have a positive number of wounds are afforded a toughness test with a +10 per point of positive wounds LEFT ON THAT location. Which covours the instant death from shock. Bleeding out still affects anyone normally.

Now, some talents add additional points of critical damage, Crack shot being the first one thought of which adds +2 to any critical damage done by a ranged weapon. When you have talents like that it simply increases the final critical damage by 1 point. So, our acolyte shoots a cultist in the leg and gets a 12 as his final damage. The cultist is not well armed and only takes off 4 damage receiving a total of 8 damage to his left leg. Normally with this system he'd take the critical effect of 4, however, our acolyte has the crack shot talent, so the critical damage is increased to 5! which is enough to catch the cultist on fire and end his life.

Other points about this system:
Max number of wounds is 20. This is unaugmented, so any sound constitution spent after 20 wounds is a waste of XP, unless the character can offer some legitimate reason as to why they should go over 20. Genebulking allows for a further 5 wounds, simply because some guardsmen become little more than hulking mountains of meat and augmentations.

Plasma Weapons: Since plasma weapons are nothing compared to what they are in fluff they've been retooled as well. Plasma Pistols roll 3D10+6 E damage with a pen of 6, and Plasmaguns roll 4d10+6 with a pen of 6. Also, you CANNOT reduce damage done by plasma by your toughness bonus. I don't care that your toughness is 60, this is a miniature sun! This makes plasma weapons much sought after, and characters will leave on an entirely different tangent story in the quest to achieve one. However, a plasma gun has never been awarded, nor have they ever had to face one.

Another modification is to throwing weapons, such as knives. Since it is a thrown melee weapon you add your strength bonus to it. Simple reasoning, someone whose strength is 40 throwing a knife will harder than someone whose strength is only 20

This system makes combat horrifying,and it is an easy way to track what exactly the attack did to the location in question. like I said before, it's been in place fora little over a year and everyone enjoys the system. It makes boss battles very challenging sometimes as the players just aren't able to do just enough damage to kill him off and he usually ends up maiming one or two of the party members. This leads to the artwork you usually see with 40k, cybernetics to replace damaged bodyparts and generally just an ugly ragtag group fighting heresy in the darkest corners of the imperium.

If you like enforcing the harsh life in the imperium, and the grim dark future it is, this is a great system to try out!