I was a little amazed when I saw how vicious the new (human) plasma guns are, compared to those in RT, for example. I dug deeper, however, and saw that Overheat has changed as well.

Apparently, in BC you can not avoid the damage from overheating anymore by dropping the weapon and the damage you take is a full hit , not just damage without penetration.

While I like this change, I am a bit unsure about the wording. In RT (and DW, I think) the rules directly state that "...the wielder suffers Energy damage...", while in BC it is quite clearly called "...suffers a single hit ..." which made me wonder if by the BC rules the (quite immense) damage from an overheat can be "dodged" (effectively you manage to drop it soon enough afterall) like a normal hit.

I like the stronger "High Risk-High Reward" mentality with plasma weapons in BC, however if the damage from an overheat would be absolutetly unavoidable (short of using a Fate Point to re-roll the BS test) I feel they actually become quite unnattractive, if a human character can put himself from full wounds into Critical Damage by suffering an overheat. Not to mention the high attrition of enemies that like to use plasma weapons and end up killing themselves 10% of the time.

What do you think?

Basically, plasma is for those who can afford Best Craftsmanship, and for those who want to equip their expendable minions with some heavy punch.

It definitely illustrates the volatile nature of the weapon on the tabletop. I dig it.

With great power comes great... ouchies?

Saibot said:

you can't dodge during your own turn

Pretty sure you theoretically could, it's just that there are no reasons to during your own turn.

Cynicus said:

Nope. Dodging is a Reaction, and those can be taken only outside of your turn.

Really? That seems kind of odd, though now that I think about it it wouldn't make sense to lable it a reaction when you're the one doing the acting.

Morangias is correct. I looked it up and it says so quite clearly. Interesting, never actually acknowledged that (of course, it never really came up, so...)

Anyway, that answers my question about the Dodge. Thanks!

Don't forget to that the Chaos boys can get plasma ammo that removes overheating.

Interesting about no reactions during your own turn. Makes the counter-attack talent a bit more powerful!

Hygric said:

But none in our group have even bothered to go looking for it, so long may the lulz continue!

We will just give them new nicknames of Fingers McDerp and Slot Machine in anticipation.

You find the 10% chance of self-death to lead to high enemy casualties? Isn't using that many plasma wielding foes a good way to lead to PC casualties, too?

hello

would the force field give protection agains the auto hit of the overheat?

You really don't want to see what happens to Counter-Attack when you disallow reactions during your own turn. A bad guy with counter attack and a nasty weapon that can still parry like a lightning claw will get you into melee and effectively beg you to attack him, knowing that he can avoid your attacks reliably and turn them into a counter attack that annihilate you, you can step back and get swatted for free and be unable to avoid it, you can disengage and waste your whole turn, or you can attempt an acrobatic disengage and might have the ability to do something for that turn if you're Slaaneshi. Suddenly one talent becomes really dickish action denial.

Worse, a player with counter attack who knows that baddies cannot avoid counter attacks will get into melees where he can pin down a much nastier foe in the same fashion as above. I've seen boss fights become tremendously one-sided as a result of this wording. We ended up having to rule that your reaction(s) refresh at the START of your turn, and a pair of melee monster characters would often swing, counter, counter, dodge in a chain during one turn to blow each other's reactions but without breaking the rest of the combat.

As for the Overheats trait, it generally ensures that nobody uses plasma weapons, especially since getting best quality ones is so difficult. A couple players used the purified 'cool burning' plasma from one of the Rogue Trader books (probably Into the Storm) that removed the overheats trait but reduced damage a little bit, since that made more sense than the Black Crusade version that has no drawbacks (why isn't this available to imperials?).

We've also found plasma and melta weapons to be rather rubbish as written and added +1d10 damage to all of them, retroactively added the melta rule to all melta weapons from any book, and retroactively added Maximal mode to the majority of plasma weapons from older books as well (unless it's listed as a civilian model that is incapable or something).

I never understood why a plasma weapon could overheat on the first shot of a combat when it wasn't a poor quality weapon. If firing it builds up heat, that would make sense, but otherwise the term 'overheats' for a weapon that has a 10% chance of blowing up regardless of whether it's been heating up from continuous firing doesn't fit, that sounds more like the trait should be called 'poor containment' or some such. I might rewrite the wording of the Overheats quality to reflect that.

Now, I completely agree that plasma weapons should be less reliable for chaos - the Imperium still has Forge Worlds like Ryza that hold the secrets of holy plasma (even if their knowledge has declined somewhat since the days of 1st edition when plasma weapons didn't overheat at all), but the heretics have to make do with salvage and poorly understood schematics. It's the same reason that heretic power armour has only a portion (3) of the subsystems working, even with a Heretek repairing it for you (5 qualities instead of 3). By this logic, it makes sense that it would be a full hit rather than a 0 Pen hit since the warp plays havoc with delicate systems and venting is often substandard. However, since we're already adding 1d10 to the damage of all plasma weapons at our table, that becomes largely unnecessary.

I would rule that a field would be able to block the damage from a plasma containment failure IF it could normally block melee attacks, since the attack is coming from melee range. I would also allow a player to dodge (fluffed as dropping the weapon) if it overheated to avoid the damage - that's one less reaction to avoid incoming enemy fire.

Edit: Why the hell aren't paragraph breaks working? I spaced that out, but it still posted as a wall of text

Edit #2: Ah, no-script on firefox breaks the posting tools and takes your paragraph breaks out. <sigh>