Anybody else looking to overhaul their games with Black Crusade rules? The primary ones I like are the Zealous Hatred vs Righteous Fury, most of the talent changes, and alterations to the unnatural stats. Anybody else overhauling their games or have ideas or thoughts?

I like a lot of the changes. I really like that RF will never result in a one shot now, and that melee is more in line with ranged.

Oh yeah, that was another change I liked - furious assault and lighning attack (or whatever the exact names are, I always get them confused). Only thing I dislike is there's no extra attacks when you're using unbalanced or heavy weapons, making them even less desirable than before.

Might be the source of some new house rules. I started taking Unbalanced off of primitive axes and power axes, and I took Unwieldy off of anything that isn't a Thunder Hammer or Power Fist. There are some special uses of Unwieldy still, like using an axe that is normally two handed in one hand, but most weapons that had it now have Unbalanced or are just neutral.

The other rule change is for Swift Attack. You can use it with an unbalanced weapon, but not with an Unwieldy weapon. You still cannot use Lightning attack with Unbalanced weapons.

Has anyone put any actual effort into this ?

My traditional campaign has kind of drifted over to the wayside due to peaks and valleys of players (either only 2 show up or 7 want to play). I'm rebooting the campaign as something that is more GM driven as I got tired of spending an hour or two making up a character with a player that I know from 40k only to have them show up for 1-2 games. Instead, I'm basically redoing the campaign as a convention-style game where I supply the characters and the players simply choose from them. That way, I can guarantee that the necessary wargear and/or skill set will be present for each game (i.e. a forge-world based adventure in which the techmarine player who is the only one trained in tech use can't make it at the last minute...). Since I'm pretty much redoing the experience to make it plug-and-play, I'll be using some of the BC changes.

Specifically, I've cut and pasted the skill section of the BC character sheet onto the DW one as I do like the skill consolidation that they did ala pathfinder vs d&d 3.5. I'll also be using the new rules for single/semi/full auto shooting as well as swift/lightning attack in addition to the DW errata 1.1 weapon damage tables. I'm not sure though about the RF change over. While I do like the lesser chance of one shot-killing an important NPC with a standard weapon, I don't want the pendulum to swing too far towards less powerful. My previous campaign had a problem in that the kraken-round-backpack heavy bolter devastator would pretty much steal the show and kill everything in one burst with slightly better than average rolls (like rolling a 34 to hit but having a BS total of 90+ with mods).

For those using the 1.1 errata damages, how much do they change the likelihood of the above?

Hi Sanguinary Priest,

My DW RP gaming group is currently playing the Lordsholm Final Sanction mission. We actually noticed that the damage dealt in 1.0 was very high. Genestealers and hordes dropped like flies. A righteous fury scored automatically killed just about anything.

After I introduced my DM to 1.1, we actually liked the damage of the new bolter/ heavy bolter. Gave the enemy more fighting chance. Now we need at least 2-3 hits to kill a genestealer.

The next thing we observed was the tearing weapon trait. Hordes still died like flies. So as a house rule, we further nerfed the trait from 'per shot' to 'per round of damage'. So for 3 bolters shots fired, instead of like 2 x 3 shots = 6 magnitude damage, it became 1 x 3+ (1) = 4 magnitude damage.

Black Crusade seems like 1.2 for me. Anyone shares the same view?

Deepstriker said:

I'll be honest, I didn't understand a word of that. I have no idea whatsoever what you're doing with Tearing weapons.

Just replace tearing with "X" and I think you'll get what he means to say; I suspect he mixed up the two weapon terms as he's using the X calculation modifier for horde damage in his example.. X (explosive) weapon types certainly do rip through hordes.

Hordes do drop very quickly to a single good roll. My short stint a a player had me using a tact marine with a heavy bolter (no backpack) and even my character could do 12-14 damage to a horde in a single burst without unrelenting devastation or any special ammo with the original rules. I'll be trying out the new house rules hopefully next weekend so I'll have to get back to you guys.

how does a tac marine do more than 10 with the original rules without special ammo? Explosive as a damage type (to my recollection) doesn't increase horde damage, only having a blast radius does. If I'm incorrect, cite me the page. I'd rather be right the 2nd time than argumentative the 1st.

Autarkis02 said:

Explosive damage type gives you an extra "hit" of horde damage per attack (pg. 359). If you read my post, you'll see that the overpowered scenario I was talking about was using a tact marine with a heavy bolter. If you're attacking a horde full auto at under half range (fairly common), you're routinely getting a +60 (the max) to your ballistic skill (which was 60 for me as a bolter mastery tact marine). Combined with bolter drill talent and death is joy armor ability plus the explosive damage type, I used to be able to squeeze of 13 damage to a horde with a good roll. (11 shots for 11 damage, +1 X, +1 death is joy)

Deepstriker said:

You misunderstand how tearing and horde damage works. Tearing has little to no effect on the damage a horde takes, it adds an extra die to a roll, increasing the average damage of a weapon. Horde damage is always calculated by the number of shots hit and can be added to by blast weapons, the devastating trait and flame weapons. There is no extra magnitude damage dealt by the added dice of tearing, and tearing itself doesn't even add damage, even when used on a single target.

Here is an example: Ted shoots a magnitude 30 horde with his bolter, the horde has a combined armor and toughness value of 7. He gets 3 DoS and 3 total hits. He rolls 2d10 for his damage roll (one additional die for the tearing trait) and gets a 7 and a 5. Since tearing allows him to choose the highest, he takes the 7, totaling 16 (7+9) damage (for the purpose of this example I will just say each shot does the same amount of damage). He deals 3 damage to magnitude of the horde, from a total of 3 shots. If Ted happened to be using Metal Storm ammunition, he would deal 6 magnitude damage to the horde (3 shots, two hits per shot because of the blast[2] quality added).

You are treating the extra dice from tearing as extra damage, which shouldn't be happening.

Since I can't edit my previous post I'll have to amend here.

I had forgotten about explosive damage adding magnitude damage to a horde. In my example total damage dealt to the horde will be 6 with normal bolt rounds, and 9 with Metal Storm. Tearing still doesn't add any damage.

This forum really needs an edit button. Total magnitude damage for my example is 4 and 7.

Deepstriker said:

Now, Unrelenting Devastation, pre-current errata. That was busted with a RoF 10 heavy bolter (as that indeed did double the number of hits). The first errata didn't even solve that. Instead it nerfed missile launchers in a ruling that was meant to fix Metal Storm, which has only been busted because people read the rule wrong in the first place (as the ruling changed nothing). The current version is probably the best so far and I think RoF 6 does work best for the DW rule system.

There is an edit function... its a little link at the top right of your post, alongside the date and stuff.

Unfortunately the edit button disappears after about 20 mintes. So make your fast changes, then you're locked forever.

Oops. Ok. So no additional damage? Alright will clarify with my DM.