Just want to verify with some of the knowledgeable folks out there: hordes get their armor and toughness value against these types of weapons, correct? Just checking as we played a game the other day wherein a frag grenade (blast 5, p0, meaning 5 hits to the horde) could basically do nothing to a horde of Termagaunts with their TB of 3 and armor 3, which seemed a bit odd as the grenade could do damage to an individual gaunt outside a horde with it's 2d10 damage.

It made me think that possibly the blast and flame weapons are supposed to ignore armor and TB, which in a way makes no sense, but neither does a frag grenade doing nothing!

Thanks for your input.

Ax

I think you roll once for adamge with these weapons, then if it would do damage it does as many hits according to the rules for blast and flame vs. hordes.

So throwing a frag at a termagant horde, you roll the damage. If you get more than six (TB + armour), it damages them and does 5 hits as per the rules for it having blast (5).

Frag grenades do 2D10 damage (2D10+2 with errata'd rules)

Blast 5 means it hits the horde five times, each hit that does more than 6 damage, causes one point of magnitude damage. Since the average of 2D10 is about 11 frag grenades almost always cause damage.

Flamers do the same thing. I'm not really sure what the problem is.

axabrax said:

Do not subtract armour or TB from the horde magnitude damage. Just make a normal damage roll with 2d10 vs 3+3. If even one point penetrates, the horde takes magnitude damage in form of 5 hits (for the blast) + 1 hit (for explosive type damage) = 6 hits. Not too shabby.

Alex

The extra hits you get from the Blast (x) are just that, extra hits. Meaning each extra hit gets its own damage roll. They aren't simply extra guys who die, that would be straight magnitude damage. Also hordes do get armor and toughness bonus against each damage roll, in the case of blast weapons they can also gain cover as long as the center of the blast is on the other side of the cover they are behind.

So if you were to shoot with a blast (4) X weapon that did 1d10 damage you'd roll to hit. You hit, therefore you got your hit from your roll plus 4 extra automatic hits plus one more extra automatic hit from explosive. The horde has armor 2 and toughness bonus 3. To determine how many you kill you have to roll 6 damage dice (1+4+1) any roll above 5 does 1 point of damage to one of the guys in the horde and would deal 1 point of magnatude damage to the horde. Say you roll a 1, 3, 6, 6, 7, and 9. You've just dealt 4 points of magnatude damage (only the 6, 6, 7, and 9 did more damage than armor and TB).

herichimo said:

Sure. If you want to roll 5 damage results with every grenade. Which does slightly defeat the whole rapidity of play concept for horde combats. We use a 'all or nothing' solution, where damage is rolled once and compared with the foe's TB+armour, and either the grenade does 5 horde damage or none. It leads to far faster resolution.

Siranui said:

Based on my experiences on this board, I believe this is the de facto standard way of resolving horde damage.

Alex

ak-73 said:

DItto, otherwise, there would need to be clarification on how damage rolls are handled for say, full auto weapons and storm of iron. Remember all those times people were going on how they had 70+ hits with their metal storm HBs getting max hits with unrelenting devastation? Now imagine rolling all 70+ damage rolls.

Just no point. Its a horde, a speed bump. Just mark off the party resources, come up with a suitably heroic/epic way of wording the effect, and keep moving.

Its not that hard to determine "oh these guys have 12 total damage mitigation from this weapon that does 1d10+8, so roll 6 dice and any 5+'s equal damage."

How hard and time consuming was that? You've still got to determine how much damage you gotta do with your one roll so that didn't take any more time than rolling one dice for all the hits. Now you just pick up and throw a couple more dice... Well I guess the 2-3 seconds extra time to pick up 4 more dice and look at them is super annoying, the 5-10 times you've gotta do that in the night are sure to add up to hours and hours and hours of extra time.

Point still is that these are hordes. Is pinpoint accuracy for something that is already an abstraction actually worth 2-3 seconds? Also, its much longer than that. The actual roll might take 3 seconds, but making sure thats 4 dice, and not 5 dice, actually making sure those 6s aren't 9s, and then having the GM actually have to track things in variable increments from when you say "I potentially have 5 hits, let me roll damage", or "I have 5 hits". I know its nice to think you're that awesome, but sometimes there are other distractions at the table, too many variables. Why add complexity to the rules? Just roll damage once against a horde, and make it an all or nothing affair. Or if you're that annoyed by that, make it all, or half hits, round down.

Do realize that this effectively means that a mag 40 horde will actually require 40 (successful) damage rolls to take down to 0 (of course, they easily could break before that, so lets assume 20 rolls). Thats rolls too, as at most, any amount of damage is still just 1 hit. Its just that alot of attacks open greater possibilities for more hits.

herichimo said:

10 more seconds. Then 10 more seconds per player. A minute a combat round. ten combat round combat = ten wasted minutes. For what? Nothing. It didn't add to the game in any way.

More speed = more things done = more time for GM-narrated cinematics. Combat should never be more about dice rolling than action.

I am not going to argue about it, every group can perfectly decide for themselves. At high ranks I expect it to become unsustainable though.

Alex