Hello, I have spent some time leading a low-level campaign, but I think that in the near future my PCs may start at least thinking about better quality gear. They are already saving for bolt weapons, sure enough. Maybe the game won't last that long, but if it does - sooner or later they will think about getting something better.

The problem is... okay, maybe my perception is a bit tainted from the TT game and in the fluff (i.e. books), but after bolt weapons things don't look too impressive. Take your average plasma pistol, for example - a weapon supposedly designed to kill space marines or even destroy light vehicles, with an impressive price and some unpleasant drawbacks. Yet with its current stats, it has a very large chance to do NOTHING to a space marine - who gets 2 points of armor carrying over from his power armor, say, has unnatural toughness and T bonus of 5, thus soaks 12 points of damage from a gun with damage of 7-16. Unnatural toughness and T of 50+ makes a plasma pistol/gun pretty much a joke - a plaguebearer will be a serious problem. Heck, a meltagun (damage 6-24) has a notable chance of doing little damage to a marine-level opponents. By TT rules and fluff, this is a gun that wreaks havoc on tanks, Tyranid monstrous creatures, or evaporates CSM champions. Yet it's pretty much worse than an astartes bolter (lower damage, no tearing),.

Is it just me, or would the high-power weapons need a little boost to be effective at higher levels? I'm thinking of giving plasma and melta weapons (except the multi-melta) an extra d10 of damage in order to preserve their position as a cut above the bolt weaponry. Alternatively, I'm thinking of using the Deathwatch stats (never quite understood the whole "astartes bolters are OMGWTF better), again with boosts for non-bolt weaponry. I want to make sure that for players, the moment when they get their hands on a plasma weapon feels... special.

(sorry have been playing BC so my stats are wrong but not changing post. plasma does 1d10+8 pen10[not +6 pen 6] and melta does 2d10+10 pen 12[not 2d10+4 pen12])

most plasma weapons should have the maximal rule adding 1d10 and 2pen(increasing blast by 2 if it already has it) at the cost of 3 time normal ammo consumption and gaining recharge

i feel that they should also gain volitile* so they fury on a 9 and 10

melta doubles pen at short range. nothing has armour 24 but light tanks

2d10+10 damage means 12 to 30+rf going straight onto T reduction so as long as you dont roll snake eyes you can damage the filth marine

wheatiess said:

No, in DH core, the plasma weapons do d10+6 pen 6, They don't have a maximal setting (it appears in the IH weapons and is still generally worse) and are recharge weapons to begin with. Considering what you are supposed to use plasma for - marine-equivalent or harder enemies - the DH plasma weapons are simply no good. The Black crusade stats are somewhat better, but I'd expect all (well-made) plasma weapons to have at least as much damage as the legion-grade plasmas, and yes, a maximum mode and volatile would be appreciated.

Melta pistol/gun is 2d10+4, so 15 on average. That's one of the best weapons in the setting for wasting tanks - and I'd expect it would have the same effect on pretty much anything else. It is notably less powerful than AT weapons weaker than it on the TT, such as krak missiles or Autocannons. Multimeltas are imo the only member of the family that does what it's supposed to - with 4d10+12 it is well able to damage pretty much anything (and it seems to have gotten subsequently nerfed - and yet the lascannon wasn't).. The question is, why are regular meltas and inferno pistols doing less than half the damage? Lower range and clip I can deal with, but I'm expecting at least 70% of the damage capacity. 3d10+6/8 or 4d10+4 is what I'd like to see for them, tbh.

Take a look at Ascension, they have better stats for the plasma weapons.
As for melta weapons, just give them the melta rule which doubles Pen at short range.

Problem solved.

Astartes grade weapons do have better stats than mere mortal weapons - this has been established time and again. If you limit yourself to only the stats in the core book then of course they aren't going to compare. Look at Inquisitors Handbook, Ascension and Rogue Trader for better examples than low-level civilian plasma weapons.

Hi Shaman,

I switched to the RT-rules for Plasma Weapons. In general that means

- their is no "reload" unless the weapons are fired on "overcharge"
- every plasma-weapon can be fire on "overcharge"

This helps a bit.

In regard to the "Toughness Bonus thing" I think that those weapons should be given a weapon trait introduced in BC; the so-called "Felling Quality". A felling 2 weapon would (for example) ignore two points of UNNATURAL Toughness.
Anyway, I think I will switch this "TOUGHNESS", no matter if it is unnatural or not. In BC, they did this to give "mere humans" a chance if they are standing next to CSM... but I do not like it, so I screwed this.

But why do you say that the overcharge-rules makes the Plasmaguns "even worse"?

I totally agree.

Plasma and melta weapons as written are far weaker than they should be when you consider the pre-existing fluff and their strength compared to other weapons in table top. What really bugs me is that not only will a plasma gun often not harm a space marine ... it will, on average, not even take a basic civilian down to critical damage.

What I'd would be to improve them until they compare well to say the autocannon for a plasma-gun and a krak missile for the melta-gun.

I can only speak from my experience with other games I have played, but I often note that weapon damage takes a dive when it becomes apparent that the players could die to easily. Certainly, this is the grim, dark future", and the death of your characters is an absolute possibility, maybe even likely if the game is really challenging, or the players/GM do their variants of being an idiot, but sometime the developers look at things from the perspective of "what works well for the players will also work well ON the players, and the players spent an hour forging this one character, their ideal avatar into the world of 40k, so they'll be pissed if that avatar is scrapped in the first session because the renegade cultists have, of course, already raided the armory, and are toting around plasma weapons, melta weapons, and kill-switch rigged melta-charge bomb vests." In several games, I have seen weapon oomph diminish because the characters were too likely to die.

Look at Star Wars RPG? In Revised, it was rather easy to get the damage of a lightsaber, the iconic weapon of Star Wars that every party should/will have at least one of, up to 5d8+5, with a crit range of 16-20. That would be sick in a game that has hit points, but Revised wanted a bit of realism, and used Vitality/Wounds. In that case, a crit went right to Wounds, and even a base lightsaber (2d8) had a good chance of wreaking havoc on an NPC, or of course a PC, too. Once you work in Wounds (equals Con score, so not likely 20+), you died in one crit, almost certainly, player or not. When Saga Edition came out, they did everything possible to nerf the lightsaber, taking out the auto damage increase mechanic, going back to hit points, and incorporating the threshold system, so that no attack (usually) that didn't do at least so much damage would kill you outright, even at below 0 hp. This was mostly done because an NPC Darth Shaft (think evil Mace Windu), any NPC hero character built right, could anticlimax kill the player in one hit, and it had nothing to do with good or bad choices on the part of the player. As an image to use, in Saga, a low-level hero can, if their physical construction allowed it, hold a thermal detonator in their mouth (yes, that's the rightly feared weapon that would have atomized Jabba, and everyone else in his chambers, in Return of the Jedi; a small, thermonuclear hand grenade), and set it off, with the most noticable damage being limited to an irrational compulsion to, in a Mario-like Italian accent say "oh, that's a spicy meataball." Of course, they would survive it, even at point mouth range. Otherwise, one could never be allowed to have one, and one-shot an entire party.

Now, I can't say that's the case for certain here, but I wouldn't be too surprised if someone said "it'll always be easier for the NPCs to find awesome toys than my players, who have to pay, steal, Influence check, Acquisition check for them, with all the consequences that come along." and nerf the weapons a bit, to keep them alive, and to prolong battles a bit, to maintain the feeling of drama some fights engender. When I made my Shadow Spectre writeup in DW, that was a criticism I got. They specialize in high-mobility, high-stealth tank demolition (blame ForgeWorld, I didn't invent them), and being Eldar Aspect Warriors, their stats are good. That means, if they can pop a tank, they can uber pop a Terminator (which nothing is supposed to be allowed to do), and thus anything below a Terminator would be living on borrowed time, unless there were always enough other vehicles around to keep their attention. Unless the game incorporated a mechanic, similar to that used in 40k computer games, where infantry damage and vehicle damage is different, if it can hurt a vehicle, it WILL kill an infantryman, and that's what all of us are likely playing. Coupled with the difficulty in acquiring cool stuff (refractor fields, for instance), when at low level, it might've been easier to keep the damage low, and the use/presence of vehicles abstract (look how many books they made before official stats for a simple Rhino or Chimaera were printed). I don't know it for sure, but I suspect player survivability has something to d with it. If a plasma pistol could kill a mighty Space Marine in one shot, all to often it would, and the game would loose some appeal. If you were Acolytes, instead, there'd be an even greater chance of splutch, and potentially even less one could do about it, at which point, the effort of making the character is wasted when he dies way to soon, because bad guys can loot, steal, and act like douches more easily than the players, even in the grim, dark future (otherwise, the players would already serve the Ruinous Powers).

In my group we houserule after 1 year of play-experience to upgrade the power of the supposed powerful weapons.

Plasmaweapons got +1D10 damage and +2 pen. Kept recharge and the "might nastyly explode in your face" downsides. This made it a balanced weapon. Before that way to weak for its price, drawbacks and totally unfitting to the fluff-describtion. Even if you worked under the assumption that the stats for basic and Pistol Plasmaweapons in DH were from weak civilian versions.

Same for Melta Pistol and basic, who got +6 damage and double Pen at short range.

BC later implemented changes in the same direction for the non-Legion (aka Astartes) normal-human versions of many weapons.

P.S.

Somewhere in this forums is a Houserule-Thread where many groups told that they made similar changes. i thing that was one of the reasons for the Plasma & Meltaweapon revision when FFG designed BC.

Right now in the campaign I am running all weapons that are in use are using the BC ruleset.

In one extended firefight against rogue imperial guard (Toughness 3, Full flak armor of 4 and 10 wounds) the melta gun hits were instant death, the plasma gun were as well, the plasma pistol only hit once and he rolled terrible damage, I believe the guy was still alive at 1 point but so horribly maimed that he was wandering in shock after the hit.

This week they will be taking on tougher opponents (T 4, Carapace 5, and 15 wounds each, using the Bounty Hunter as template from BC). I imagine much the same will be the result but they will have more wounds than their last fight. Eventuall it will lead up to chaos marines.

My group has 9 players in it, with 1 MG, 1 PG, 2 PP, smattering of bolt guns and hell guns.