Bolt Pistols & Point Blank Rules

By player1197498, in Dark Heresy

My understanding of the rules surrounding Bolt Pistols and Point Blank Range is the following:

1. Bolters do 1d10 damage. However, on any successful hit, they also have a chance (roll again to hit) of anything in a 10m radius because of their explosive power

2. Bolt Pistols can be used in close combat like all pistols. Their range is 30m, so at 15m you're in close range of a bolt pistol.

3. The fiction and the tabeltop game allow bolt pistols to be used in hand to hand/close combat.

However, given the above, wouldn't you be blowing yourself up frequently if you used a bolter at 15m or less? This seems wierd because of #3. Bolters would still do damage to space marines with their AP capabilities and such.

So, I think I'm missing something. Thanks in advance for your help.

furashgf said:

My understanding of the rules surrounding Bolt Pistols and Point Blank Range is the following:

1. Bolters do 1d10 damage. However, on any successful hit, they also have a chance (roll again to hit) of anything in a 10m radius because of their explosive power

Where did you get that from? Never heard of it.

If you're referring to the Blast weapon qualitiy, Bolt weapons don't have that.

Maybe I have an older rule book, but in my combat weapons section it has the following line for damage by bolt pistol:

1d10 X

and says that "X" does blast damage. The boltgun has a much larger clip.

I think I misread it. I checked again and it says "X", which means explosive critical damage. If the bolt does more than the victim's wounds, roll on the explosive/critical chart.

Yea, it does "explosive" damage to that particular target (unless firing semi-auto and choosing 2 targets) and has tearing which lets you roll the 1d10 twice and choose the higher of the two rolls for damage. There is no blast radius.

It's confusing because Blast is usually noted (when not part of a weapon profile) as Blast (X)

furashgf said:

I think I misread it. I checked again and it says "X", which means explosive critical damage. If the bolt does more than the victim's wounds, roll on the explosive/critical chart.

And you are totally wrong again. You DO NOT ROLL. You check respective line on chart, accordingly to the amount of critical damage done. And critical damege IS commulative.