My main concern is the combat. I've been reviewing it recently and I quite don't understand it very well... This is also my first time playing a RPG game like this. I was never into D&D but was always interested in doing something like it. Then I heard about this game when the Space Marine game came out last month. So I bought the first book--and recently got the next 3 after it--and after the Rites of Battle book I had to take a new look at my character sheets already and I got rid of some of the characters I created.

Being my brother and I never have played a Role Play Game like this I decided I'd make a few characters atleast 1 of each class and then let him make a character. He made his Space Wolf Librarian and I focused on making my 3 custom chapters I've created. Only after getting the second book I found more on how to making your own chapters and I'm glad I have that now before I started playing the game. As of right now I only have 1 Librarian, 1 Apothecary, 1 Assault Marine, and 2 Tact Marines one of which is a Kill-Marine.

I wish I could find someone who lived close to mentor off of to learn how to play the game better and become a good GM...

My advice is to make the first combat encounter one where the party is facing oncoming waves of enemies of indeterminant total number, rather than an all-at-once entounter with a fixed number of enemieis; that way, both you and the players can get a sense of how much damage they can soak up and what constitutes a legitimate threat, without risking the initial combat being either an insulting "cakewalk", or a Total Party Kill.

It is a good idea to have a look upon how other gaming groups are playing the game. In my early roleplaying years, it was a huge boost for me and my group to get in contact with a more experienced roleplayer. Maybe you should ask in your local game store if there is an existing group around your area.

Some advice for new roleplayers:

1) Encourage your players to let them speak their characters in direct speech. The atmosphere becomes much more intense when players are really acting and behaving like their characters.

2) For the GM: Don‘t be too restrictive against ideas of your players. Most new gamemasters are doing the mistake to focus too much on the story they had in mind and thus don‘t let any freedoms to their gamers to change the way the story goes.
If your gamers have some ideas that would change the story you had in mind, you should rather say yes than no.

3) For combat encounters: Prevent combat from getting repetetive. Don‘t just throw waves of faceless new enemies against your gamers – combat will soon become boring. Try to make combat encounters unique and to make your enemies remarkable. In most cases, the setting and the „surrounding factors“ of a battle are more important than the enemy your gamers are fighting. A fight upon a collapsing bridge or out of a flying (or crashing down) Thunderhawk will be more stunning than just facing some new enemies.

I've played a lot with Railroad DMs, the ones who have a story that the characters HAVE TO FOLLOW. The players are more like scripted actors than the impromptu group they really ought to be.

That being said, don't be afraid to say "No" when it's appropriate. But do remember, it's their story. I say to my group "It's your story. If you want to ruin it, it's up to you (with a smile)." We have a lot of fun.

DMing is all about juggling things, trying to keep the challenges difficult and exciting, but don't force them to fight smoething that will absolutely destroy them. If they're way outclassed, give them an escape option.

As far as THIS game goes, it's a juggling match of trying to find that narrow window where an opponent threatens them versus totally kills them, because they will all have relatively low hit points and a large amount of absorbtion. And nothing will really tell you what they can handle outside of practice and experimentation.

And yes, I'm a huge fan of "I do this" instead of "My character does this." Conversing, it's always in the characters voice. Practice your voice inflection and accents as a DM to get the feel of characters, and describe how they sound. One example, I have a manipulative and power hungry religious leader the characters are working with to undermine a revolution before the Nids crash a planet and they want him to take over so they have as many fighting men as possible when the fight comes. I imagine him sounding like President Clark in Fallout 3, and EVERYBODY in my group changed their view of him slightly because of that, and I do my best to make him sound like that when talking.

And yes, keeping combat interesting is a great tactic. I havn't hit my players yet, but when they siege the palace estates they'll be fighting the rebel King's Praetorians. These guys are basically geared as stormtroopers, but their armor is an extremely garrish red and gold and purple color, with tall vertical decorations that stand out like mad anywhere. Makes em easy to see outside the palace when they're manning the walls. But when they get inside, the entirety of the palace is decorated in the same colors and shapes, and their armor, especially in the darkened rooms amidst the smoke and combat will make them EXTREMELY difficult to pinpoint because they basically are armored in the same color as the wallpaper. So suddenly the garrish soldiers will turn into well armed stealth ninjas inside the grounds. It'll be fun to see how they handle it.

I like all your guys advice thank you all. Next time I get a chance I'll have to talk to the game store owner about RPG groups. Unfortuantly the closet game store near me is 40 mins away and I have no car.... I know they do card games and Warhammer miniature wargaming there every so often when I get a chance I'll as them about RPG players in the area I could talk to... The gaming store is in a college town I'm in the back water country side of Pennsylvania. Holl-ah.

But again thank you all I hope to hear more advice as time goes on for now I'll take what you guys gave me and apply it. I read over the combat again and it boggled my mind, but I'm starting to understand it a little I hope I can find a experienced GM near by that can help me... I may have to go to my oldest brother who plays D&D with his friends and ask him if he can help me out a little since he'll know the feeling of the game better than I do since he plays RPGs already.

A couple of the best bits of advice I was given by our groups normal GM as I found myself in the same boat.

• Make sure that your encoiunters make sense within the context of your story - You may have a great encounter idea but if it doesn't fit the story or can be removed easily without any impact then you should consider saving it for another time.
• Try to vary things a bit to keep encounters/fights interesting - Throw in items that have an impact, a ranging storm that has no effect is fluff, one that causes bad footing or poor visibility will make the action more unique and memorable
• That said, sometimes a straight fight is needed
• Don't be afraid to give your players a boost. - I tended to subconciously make everything harder for the players with a number of negative modifiers ( I still do from time to time but hopefully more when needed). Giving players an environment that allows positives - raised positions, barridcades, choke points etc - means that those who look around and think will get a nice boost and they'll remember it. As a result they'll moan less when you throw in a -30 or so a couple of actions further down the line.

Other than that, trawl through the GMs forums for the various 40k lines here. I often find little tidbits hidden away in a post that hasn't seen the light of day in a few months.

Ok, while the others have provided very valid points I like to share (IMHO) with our Newbie GM (from a player's perspective):

1) Get used to the rules first. If your group is like mine (all newbies to DW, with one or two more experienced Role-Players)
- Run a Kill-house: Basically design a standard obstacle course and apply rules for combat, night vision, damage, movement (half, full, run, etc). We learnt basic combat with hordes, etc. This is to prevent yourself/ players from the 'we are halfway into the game, suddenly we get stuck due to some unclarified rule' situation).
- Let the map unfurl slowly: might seem stupid but slowly introduce material. If you are not comfortable to have it all at once, you'll be having too much on your hands. Another DM I played with slowly introduced his world from city to city, fleshing out storyline arcs as he went along, which was quite refreshing.
- Don't introduce too much high tech or you may find yourself having to nerf them or something later. Speak to the players and ask them of how they like to progress with their characters. Address any issues you may find along the way. Do not be too generous with EXP or you find your players getting too powerful. We like to make do with what we have. Moments of brilliance come along when people improvise with what they have.

2) It may seem very daunting. Take courage, the players look up to you for advice and decisions. Don't let the players with more RP experience boss you around, accept suggestions graciously. Don't be afraid to reject something that is not feasible.

3) Its everybody's story. Don't let a player spoil too much fun for others. I played in a D&D campaign previously. Team got stuck, and railroaded by three experienced players when they decided to focus on their personal quests. Don't forget the rest of the guys too. Don't let someone be 'boy of destiny' for too long.
- If testosterone start heating up and arguments start to occur, take a breather then come back to the scene later. We're all friends first, gamers later. Give everyone a stake hold (every player wants to feel important too, rotate the spotlight on each character in equal amounts).
-That being said, too many personal quests like a Dark Angel launching his personal investigation take up too much time. Try to space their personal quests and manage them like a good manager if possible. Use the overall plot arc to remind them that there is something pressing going on.

4) Ambiguity. Grey lines often are difficult. If you are unsure of some mechanics, introduce some house rules. Get the consensus of every player and implement it. Ultimately you decide the rules, be decisive. You can't please all the players but you can satisfy them with your game.

5) Take care of yourself. Moving forward too quickly and having too many ideas/sessions at once will burnout players and DMs too. Go at a pace you are comfortable with. We play once fortnightly. This allows us space to breathe in between and also plan ahead.

One thing you can do is run though simple combat encounters with no real story involved, just to get comforable with how combat works.

There's two parts to running a RPG, one is combat, the other is everything else. The everything else part is both the hardest and easiest thing to do. There's no real hard and fast rules to how to do the social part of the game, PC's talking to NPC's, learning things, discovering plots, uncovering modivations, ect...

The players can talk as their characters or talk as themselves...

"I tell the imperial guardsman to move out of my way so I can get to the heavy bolter." Or "Guardsman, it would be best if you fall back and let me deal with this."

Both do the same thing, but in different ways. IMO the 2nd method is best, but not everyone is comfortable with that. The thing is, there's no real wrong way to do it, it's a matter of what you and the others enjoy. Odds are that after playing for a while you'll start doing more of the 2nd way then you do at first. Also most people are not going to be real frustrated with rocky RP'ing at first.

Combat on the other hand, can be rather frustrating if it's constantly being stopped so you can spend 5-10 minutes looking up rules and trying to figure out how they apply to this situation. This is something you can deal with on your own however by running simple combat encounters for a group of PC all run by yourself. It's a bit like playing chest with yourself, you know what both sides are going to do, but the point is to get the mechanics down.

If you do that you'll find that the game goes much more smoothly. It's also not a bad idea to take the players though some combat encounters as well so they know the system.

I'd highly recommend that you download some of the free adventures here on the support site. It should help you get a handle on how to plan and make your own adventures, as well as taking a lot of preasure off of you to make your own at first.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=108&esem=4

VanorDM said:

That's what I did for our first session. After roleplaying the team's initial meeting with the Watch Captain, the newly formed team retired to the training arena to "get to know each other", Astartes-style: by fighting wave after wave of combat servitors!

The idea has evolved during the sessions we've done so far, but I'm using Final Sanction/Oblivion's Edge as the 'get used to the system' missions. Afterwards, the players are getting a packet about the Jericho Reach, Crusade politics, etc. before launching into the next mission which has actual decisions and roleplaying

Captain Ventris said:

So that means less railroading more space for interaction right?

It'll be much easier to have things pop up that matter in a larger sense, because I won't have to explain everything, or arrange everything in a way that explains itself. I can just have an NPC say 'hey, a sub-chamber on the Omega Vault opened" without having to take an aside detailing the importance of the Omega Vault. There's just something better about reading about something and then running into it, as opposed to being told "This is important stuff, trust me". That leaves more room for the campaign-specific important-things, which can be made important through the NPCs in game-terms, instead of a lecture mid-session.

There is alot of good advice here. As a new-ish GM myself (I'm a whole 7 sessions into my campaign), I have a few pieces of advice:

1. Immerse yourself in 40k lore as much as possible. Read some Space Marine books, check out the Lexicanum website, etc.

2. Learn all the combat maneuvers in the Core Rulebook, and when you have your players go up against intelligent enemies, have your enemies use these maneuvers against your players. You'll have more fun running combats this way, and your players will have more fun.

3. Mix up the types of enemies you throw at your players. Don't only use hordes and don't only use elites or masters, mix it up. Have your players attacked by a few elites, backed up by a horde or two. Or a master backed up by a couple elites or a horde or two. If players are always going 1v1 against an elite, or only fighting hordes, they will get bored of combat and so will you.

4. Don't be afraid to modify the monsters in the books. I myself have extensively modified alot of the Tyranids and other baddies that I throw at my players. I add a few wrinkles here and there. For example: I created a special breed of Tyranid Warrior with the Bulging Biceps talent and armed it with a Venom Cannon. In other words, I made a Tyranid version of a Devastator. The Devastator player in my group enjoyed engaging it in a long-range heavy weapons duel.

5. If you are running a published adventure, such as Final Sanction or Shadow of Madness, don't be afraid to modify that adventure. I find it is best not to run published adventures right out of the box, but to personalize them first. Pay particular attention to the combat scenes, I've noticed that many of these adventures tend to have encounters that are way too easy for the typical Kill-Team. Don't be afraid to beef up these encounters a bit.

6. Finally, don't worry too much about the possibility of killing one of the player characters. Space Marine characters are pretty robust, even at Rank 1, and can take a heinous amount of abuse. Don't feel a need to hold back, or take it easy on your players. On the other hand, don't go out of your way to kill them off either. I have found that in my first few sessions, I consistently underestimated both the amount of damage my kill-team can dish out, and the amount of damage they can soak up before going down. The past couple sessions I think I found the measure of what my KT is capable of, and as a result, the battles have become more challenging and fun for my players.

Hehateme said:

Just wanted to respond to this point quickly to save people a little cash.

If you're going to get some of the novels, I can't recommend highly enough to look for the Omnibus versions. You get 3 books for between 12 and 15 bucks. And while the Horus Hersey novels seem to be the most recommended, they may be the least useful if you're looking for background info to help you flesh out your campaing.

Rather I'd recomend things like the Ultramarines Omnibus, or other chapter omnibus' if you can find them.

I find Brothers of the Snake and Angels of Darkness serve well to illustrate varying ends of the Space Marine spectrum.

This is the first time I've been able to get back to the forum... My computer's graphics card decided to break. Still working on getting a replacement I'm using a temp with a quarter of the awesome of my old one...

I've been looking into the combat still and it's still a little confusing I'm starting to understand the basics about the wounds and how to actually injure a marine, but the actual combat gets me... I've tried it once and it blew my mind and we had to stop as none of us could quite figure it out with what we thought was right....

Does anyone have any simple... or like... lameman's way of understanding it just to figure out how to do combat? Once I start to get it I'm sure I'll understand it better...

XeroNecross said:

I recommend taking a single finished character and putting it down on a table and have another character sit a foot away, and have them blast away at each other. Use various combat maneuvers. Do it two or three times.

Then, once you're comfortable with shooting and damage, get a wet or dry erase grid map (available online or at RPG shops) and draw some buildings and terrain on it using appropriate writing tools for the surface. More economically, you could take various books, sheets of colored cloth (or wrapping paper), or whatever you want to use to simulate terrain, place them on a table, and then and use rulers to govern how far you move. Put a couple of characters on the map (or table with cheap terrain) and move them around while they try and hunt each other down. Take advantage of the terrain as much as possible.

Two or three more runs should give you an excellent feel for how the basics of combat and movement work. Enough to move on and do your first arbitration of combat over others: you need to at least look like you understand what is going on while conducting combat.

More than two or three runs a piece would probably bore a person to tears, but if you've never played anything before, I think it would be helpful to do something basic and that is not during any actual game session.

XeroNecross said:

When I have time, if no one beats me too it, I'll try to write up a mock combat between a couple SM's and some Orc's. Maybe if you 'see' it in action it might help.

I warn you this is a big old bunch o' text...

There be some things I’m missing here, I know the system but don’t have it mastered yet myself. I’m also skipping over some things like Squad vs Solo mode because the intent here is to demo basic combat without some extra complications. Below are the stats on the three Marines. They are facing 6 Orks and one Nob, starting off at a range of 20m in an open field. This is very close range to be honest, Bolters have a range of 100m and can actually fire at twice that for only a -10 to BS.

Assault Marine – WS:53 BS:40 S:48 [10] T:48 [8] Ag:45 Wounds: 23
Chainsword - 1d10+3 R Pen:3 Balanced, Tearing

Tactical Marine – WS:43 BS:52 S:46[10] T:52[10] Ag:43 Wounds:21
Bolter Rifle – 1d10+9 X S/3/- Pen:4 Tearing

Devastator Marine – WS:43 BS:58 S:44[10] T:41[8] Ag:43 Wounds:22
Heavy Bolter – 1d10+14 X -/-/6 Pen 5 Tearing

Pre combat

Neither side is surprised so we skip that step.

Next we roll for initiative. Each marine rolls a d10 for initiative, and one d10 for the Orks. I could have rolled for each ork, but that just bogs things down with extra record keeping.

ASM – 7, Tact – 3, Dev – 6. To each value rolled, you add in the Ag modifier, which gives a result of ASM – 11, Tact – 7, Dev – 10. Orks roll a 5 + 3 from Ag for 8. So the order is ASM, Dev, Ork, Tact.

Round 1

Using his jump pack the ASM is able to charge upto 24m, the farthest target is less then that so he charges an ork and attacks with his chainsword. Having charged he gets a +10 to his WS for this attack.

Rolling a d100 he gets a 10, which is 53 points less then his modified WS of 63(53+10 for charge) giving him 5 degrees of success. The ork attempts to parry the blow, and rolls a 31, which is under the WS of 37, which means he would have blocked the attack. However an Ork’s choppa is unbalanced which gives a -10 to WS when used to parry, so the ork’s modified WS is actually 27, so he doesn’t parry.

The ASM then rolls damage. The chainsword has a special effect of tearing, so he gets to roll 2d10 and pick the higher roll. With 5 degrees of Success the lowest he can roll is a 5. He rolls an 8 and a 7, and takes the 8. 8+3 = 11, plus SB of 10 means 21 points of damage to the ork.
Now we decide where the damage goes. The ASM rolled a 10 to hit, you reverse the numbers and consult the chart for hit locations. In this case it’s an 01 or Head, so the ork gets a chainsword right in the face from a charging Angel of Death.

The orc has armor of 2, but that only covers the body so doesn’t matter in this case. Even if it was a body hit the chainsword has a pen of 3 so it would ignore the first 3 points of armor anyway, so the armor wouldn’t matter either way. The orc has 10 wounds, and a toughness bonus of 8. So we subtract the TB (toughness bonus) from the damage leaving (21-8) 13. This is still 3 more damage then the Wounds of the ork so it takes 3 points of critical damage.

There’s two ways of dealing with this for something like Ork Boyz or other Troup rated NPC’s. The first is any critical damage kills anything rated as a Troop type, I think this is the better method to use. The other is to track the critical damage done, for this example I won’t do that but will track it for the Nob as it’s not a Troup rated NPC, so the Ork is dead.

Next is the Dev’s turn, he uses a full round action to fire the heavy bolter in a full auto burst, the Heavy Bolter has a Rate of Fire (RoF) of -/-/6 that means it can’t fire a single shot or a semi-auto burst, but can only fire a full auto burst that uses up 6 rounds of ammo, and can score a max of 6 hits. Full auto bust gives a +20BS for this attack, and an additional hit for each degree of success. The Dev has a BS of 58+20=78. He rolls a 60 for 1 DoS (Degree of Success), this gives him two hits, one for rolling under his BS, and one for each 10 ‘points’ less then his BS. He can either apply both hits to a single target or apply the extra to any target within 2 meters of the target of the attack. Seeing how Boyz don’t last long, he’ll assign one hit to two different orks.

The Orks can try to dodge the attacks, but they don’t have Dodge as a skill, so the best they can do is use half their Ag score. They have an Ag of 30, half is 15 so they’d have to roll 15 or less on a d100, neither of them makes it.

The Dev rolls damage for the first hit, the Heavy Bolter is tearing so it rolls 2d10 and drops the lowest. 2 DoS means the lowest roll will be a 2. He rolls 2d10 getting an 8 and 4, and takes the 8+14=22 damage. His to hit gives a location of head so again armor isn’t a factor. 22-8 (orks TB) = 14. 14-10 wounds means 4 points of crit damage and another dead boy. Rolling damage for the second hit gives a 2 and 10, a 10 would trigger Righteous Furry but that just means more damage which doesn’t help much here, so we’ll ignore it for now. 10+14=24 damage which is more then enough to kill the second boy hit.

On the Boyz turn, they run towards the other two Marines, to get into melee range. They can run a total of 18m, which isn’t quite close enough to get into range.

Lastly the Tact Marine gets his turn and fires a semi-auto burst from his bolter rifle. The Bolter has a RoF of S/3/- that means it can either fire a Single round has a half action or a Semi-auto burst as a full action, using up 3 rounds of ammo and able to score a max of 3 hits. Semi-Auto gives a +10 to BS and 1 hit for each 2 DoS.

Rolling to hit he gets a 14, his modified BS is 62, this gives him 4 DoS (24, 34, 44, 54) for 2 extra hits (1 per 2 DoS), for a total of 3 hits, the max he can get with the bolter rifle. He decides to apply all 3 hits to the charging Nob, since there’s more then one hit you want to look at table 8-2 on page 239, this gives us a hit on the arm, arm, and body. Again the armor doesn’t matter because even for the body hit, the armor is lower then the Pen of the bolter rifle.

Rolling the first hit again with tearing so 2d10 drop the lowest, we get a 10 and a 6. The 10 triggers righteous fury, this means the Tact gets to roll another attack to see if he does even more damage, rolling 1d100 he gets a 89, which is higher then the modified BS of 68, so no extra damage. The first hit does 19 damage 19-10 (TB on the nob)=9 damage. The nob has 30 wounds, so he takes 9 damage off that and now has 21 wounds left. The next roll is 3 and 3, however with 4 DoS the lowest he can roll is a 4, so he does 13 damage, which adds 3 more wounds to the nob, for a total of 18. The last roll is an 8 and 9, giving 18 damage. That’s 8 more wounds bringing the nob down to 10 wounds left.

For the sake of the example I’m going to skip the ASM turn and to hit rolls, so I can show how the critical damage system works.

Lets assume the next turn the Dev gets 2 hits on the Nob, the first doing 21 damage the next doing 17 damage both hits in the body. The first hit would do 11 damage to the nob. 21-10 (TB) = 11, 11-10 wounds = 1 critical damage. The Heavy Bolter does eXplostive damage, and the hit is in the body so we look at table 8-13 (pg254). 1 critical damage is “The target is blown backwards 1d5 metres and takes 1 level of Fatigue per metre travelled. He is Prone when he lands.” To get the 1d5 roll a d10 and divide by 2. So a 1-2 =1, 3-4 = 2, ect…

The second hit does 17 damage, 17-10 (TB) = 7. The nob has 0 wounds, so all 7 damage is critical damage. He’s already taken 1 critical damage, so you add that to the 7 for a total of 8 and again look at the body table for explosive damage. An 8 = “The target’s chest explodes outward, disgorging a river of partially cooked organs onto the ground, killing him instantly.”

If the 2nd hit was to the head or any other body part you would still add any existing critical damage done to the damage done with this attack. So if the 2nd hit was to the arm, you’d look up 8 damage on the table for arms.

I hope that helps, I think it should cover the basics of DW combat and get you going. If you have any questions about it or want more examples let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Wow. That actually did clear things up a little. "Seeing" it in action helped better than reading the book and looking at the examples. I got lost further down I went and drove me mad when I couldn't figure out where to look in what you wrote ot find how and why... I mean I knew for a while but got got a text looked down lost my train of thought of what was going on and I had to re-read from the beginning to get the damage and enemy tough bonus part again... But I think with this in mind I'll have to do what alot of others have suggested so far and throw together a mock battle between a small group of enemies and a "nob" of sorts to get down and dirty and feel the combat better.

Thank you very much for this it has helped alot and I hope for others that are having the problems I've have been see this and read what you all have been saying to help because it's all been good advice and examples and such

I didn't even think of this until my little brother mentioned it cause he's a Librarian... or that is will be once we get this stuff down... Is the psyker powers in the same realm for the combat system or are the psyker powers on another combat system adjacent to that of "normal" warefare?

And we're going to take action tomorrow afternoon like adviced... We're going to grab our two characters or even a few "noblings" and pit them against eachother in semi-close combat or even at a little farther range for a few rounds of combat to see how it all works together.

A Psychic Power, if it's an attack action (it might vary depending on the power, honestly not sure) counts as a normal attack, so you can't Smite and fire your bolt pistol on the same turn, for example.

XeroNecross said:

I did stop being quite so detailed later on, so I could see why the farther you get the less clear it might become, but I was already at like 3 pages of text, so I started cutting back.

If you have questions about a given part of combat I'd be happy to help explain it better.

But as you and others said the best thing to do may just to put 1 SM and 2-3 ork's on a table and run though it a few times.

One of the problems with the DW system is the book isn't very well laid out, so it can be tough to find all the rules and tables because they're not always in the place you'd think of to look.

I threw together a quick match to test out what I've learned and it was going well... I threw together 3 Space Marines

Assault, Tact, Sco(Scout-armor dedicated Tactical Marine referred to as 'Sco' for Scout)

vs

6 Hormogaunts

Straight off the bat my Tact blew away 1 hormogaunt right away with out any troubles. Followed your example pretty much but with the tact and a bolter. Which in the DW rule book says is a 2d10+5 which confused me if they already accounted for the tearing effect, but then I looked at the Chain Sword and said it was a 1d10 with tearing so I figured I was to roll 4 dice and take the best 2 out of it I hope I was correct...

From here thats when I got confused again... The DW book is useless I swear... the gaunts were next to move I did the same as you did and had them all roll under one die and they rolled higher than the other two marines... So they charge jumped into the marines and eachother attacked a marine... Well 4 of them got hits 1 didn't...

Gaunt 2-hit the body-rolled a 8 and he has a +5 to damage the Tact has a AP of 10 and a toughness bonus of 4 there for was able to negate the damage... Oh and yes he failed at parry he sucks... gaunt attack was a 13 tact defended with a 14 BUT then I remembered the penetration... thingy... I went into the rules and said nothing about penetration that I could find... the book is very confusing they should put it in the combat section...

My question there is do I apply the penetration of 3 from the gaunt? if so then my SM would be damaged for 2 bringing his wounds to 21. But the book didn't say anything about when a SM gets hit or even a attack in general that has a total score equal to or less than the TB and AP of a target but then bringing in the PEN effect... They jsut use the TB and AP as a example... So it confused me cause the example they used had a target with no armor so they didn't need to worry about that...

Would I be correct in also figuring in the PEN with the TB and AP when applying damage to a target whether it is a SM or a enemy unit?