Hail Brothers!

Ok so like the title states I've been playing for about 2 dozen games now and running the whole time but one of my players has decided to give me a break and run for a few weeks. He has been going over the Eratta pretty heavily making sure he knows the changes and the topic came up over supper yesterday about the weapon changes in the eratta. so my questions as a GM and a recent player are these.

do you like the eratta system or the core system better?

Why do you prefer that one over the other?

the loss of rapid fire seems like a pretty significant hit and changes the entire feel of the bolter and all the other bolt weapons as well as reducing +10 from BS for Full auto fire. am i misunderstanding something?

does not having full auto negate the power armor history "Bring Death from Afar"(p.162 DW:CRB)?

I find the weapon errata to be an *excellent* modification to the game.

Please note, for example, bolter damage. 2d10+5=7 min damage. 1d10+9=10 min damage. The core has to roll damage when hurting an ork/tyranid horde. The errata doesn't, because dmg10 pen5 automatically hurts nearly all hordes. Or say you're rolling, for instance, a heavy bolter, against a Horde. That's half a dozen hits that you don't have to roll damage for.

It also drastically reduces the number of righteous furies you're going to get… players are already pretty awesome, I found they don't need the extra d10.

Use the errata, as a GM in particular you'll be happy you did.

The weapon errata plus fixing righteous fury to a single bonus D10 works wonders. It means that the killteam are still dangerous but won't just splatter everything in one or two rounds, and that enemy weapons are a bit less likely to splatter them in one or two rounds if they get unlucky. I heartily recommend their use.

I prefer the Erratta versions, too. The higher minimum damage speeds up the dispatching of faceless grunts, while the lower maximum and reduced chance of RF makes the Boss Monsters the challenge they are supposed to be. When DW first came out, the Forums were full of people bragging about killing Hive Tyrants with a single pull of the trigger- a pretty greivous violation of the established background of the 40Kverse, where it takes heroic effort from a well-coordinated squad (or squads!) of Marines to drop the biggest of the infantry-scale baddies. Also, it makes the use of adversary stats taken from other games in the WH40KRP line more viable, when you want to spice things up with a change of pace from the standard DW adversaries.

What they said, with the side note that not having full-auto does make battles less static, as there's less of a drop in accuracy for firing on the move with semi over full-auto.

About 'Bring death from afar' - since this removes the penalties for moving and shooting with Pistols & Basics, it means semi-auto weapons like bolt & plasma keep their +10 even when moving. Plus, it still works with the HB ofc.

Thank you all very much for the information I think I'll ask the GM to give it a try

I switched over to a hybrid of Errata and porting rules from Black Crusade, most notably combat actions and Zealous Hatred, along with a few popular homebrew ideas from this forum (completely changing Storm and Melta being the big ones).

The errata overall is very good, except regular bolters were nerfed too hard in the RoF category. I left core RoF but transitioned to BC autofire/multiple melee attack rules, where fullauto is at -10 instead of +20 has served to balance out any concerns.

I'l lagree with the above - if you have access to Black Crusade it's worth using hte rules in that. THey are nicely balanced, finer tuned.

I haven't adopted all of them…I plan to port over the changes to Concussive and Toxic while the PCs still aren't using weapons with those rules, just so it's less of a hassle once the AM gets a thunder hammer. And I'll be ignoring the BC errata that prevents Swift Attack on the Charge because I see it as giving a basic tactical option that prevents immediate obviation by Lightning Attack (aside from the weapon restrictions in BC for those two talents).

I like the BC RF a lot more, actually makes status effects fun and reduces the chance of oneshotting PCs as well as high-tier enemies.

The Devastator is not very happy with the heavy bolter + autofire nerfs, but he also had awful rolls last game shooting at Stealth Suits, who just give an even bigger penalty, so I think he'll deal in the end when he gets to waste a drone horde or something.

They did all like that autofire/multiple attack is a half action so they could run around a lot more. And the nerfy changes I made to Storm made the Apothecary and Techmarine very happy too - pretty much done by someone on this forum, who gets all the props for it.

I've got my black crusade books on order from amazon they were out of stock so just waiting in them I will have to go over the combat system in that thoroughly I think i don't like the idea of a too nerfed bolter though; it's my favorite weapon lol

In practice, it isn't 'too nerfed'. It's brought down in power, but in Deathwatch you're getting +30 bonuses to hit due to size alone regularly. Full auto means your marines will ALWAYS be hitting with EVERY shot. Semi-auto actually rewards ballistic skill focus.

If you start using Black Crusade's combat (unnecessary as I see it but your call) then you might want to keep the rate of fire.

A lot of people say they prefer the Zealous Hatred rules over Righteous Fury. I haven't tried the BC rules yet and I'm curious: why is ZH so popular? One of my group's favorite moments in DH and DW is the cheer that goes up around the table when someone rolls a second '10' on RF. Since most of the ZH 1d5 results are Fatigue, that seems a bit anticlimatic to me, compared to the potential massive (sometimes even daemon-killing!) damage from RF. Plus, it seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping for the GM, with lots of Fatigue being accumulated by all of the NPCs. Sell me on it: what am I not getting?

It's really the blowing bits off factor. While the fatigue ones aren't that interesting mechanically speaking, I always make sure I describe it that vital chunks are being blown off, arterial ichor is spraying down the area, secondary weapon limbs are ripped off and sent hurtling away. If you think of Fatigue as "loss of combat efficiency" then think of Barney Stinson's PSA in Starship Troopers, Fatigue can be kinda cool.

"If you remove one limb, the Arachnid is still 87% combat efficient"

Adeptus-B said:

In part, you answered your own question. Having a player roll lucky and one-shot a hive tyrant with a flamer or something might be very satisfying for them but really just "siiiiiiiigh, great, there goes THAT encounter" for you as a GM. Make them fight hard for it, they'll be just as excited and the GM will probably have had some fun with it too. That is the big reason I think ZH was developed - to prevent the anticlimactic Daemon Prince one-shot with a lascannon…or equally likely, pre-errata heavy bolter.

Also for those enemies who can RF, which IIRC by canon is all Master-tier and a number of elites, ZH gives a little…cushion for players. RF makes it that much more likely for the CSM warleader or Ork Boss or whatever to flat-out kill you with extra damage, whereas ZH lets them slug it out a little more, get bloodied up but have a smaller chance of being one-shotted by a lucky roll.

My players want hordes to be able to ZH now, just because they think everyone should be able to get a lucky hit against them. With RF, that's just asking to oneshot a player even more with stacking d10s of damage from horde traits AND RF. With ZH, they can take a licking and ultimately show off and prevail, which keeps them excited, scared of hordes, but not so worried that every fight might kill them,

I don't have BC. Can somebody please tell me if ZH requires a roll to confirm it? I was told that it does not, which is why I did not import it into my game -- as it mucks with Deathwatch Training.

bogi_khaosa said:

ZH does not require confirmation. If the damage roll is a '10', and the damage doesn't overcome armour/Toughness, it deals a minimum of 1 damage; if it does overcome armour/Toughness, it deals normal damage and a 1d5 roll on the Critical chart. And it works the same for PCs and NPCs. The minimum of 1 damage, and working the same for 'heroes' and 'grunts' appeals to me, but I'm worried that all that accumulated Fatigue would bog the game down. I'm going to be GMing a big one-off DH game in the near future, and I plan on trying out the BC combat rules, to see what all of the fuss is about…

bogi_khaosa said:

Hm. Interesting. Didn't notice this. I'd probably just require it to confirm a crit in that case, or for the baseline Zealous Hatred to not require confirmation, but confirmation possibly doing something extra. It's not like mucking with Deathwatch Training is particularly a big deal if the entire mechanics system renders it moot. Deathwatch PCs get it for free after all. Or perhaps DWT could allow ZH to trigger on a 9 or 10 for damage.

Deathwatch Training could also add 1 point of damage to the amount rolled.

SomVone said:

Personally, the way I do it is to give any character that would auto-confirm Righteous Fury the ability to roll two d5 and pick the highest for Zealous Hatred.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

That's a good one! Thanks for sharing!

Keep in mind that, the minimum damage is higher (which is, agreeably, nice), however, the maximum damage is drummed with the nerf bat. I am actually unable to use the errata weapon stats without porting in the unnatural stat nerfs from BC as well (as it stands our party's techpriest will take at most 2 pts of damage without Righteous Fury from the heavy bolter at max damage due to high toughness/armor/etc. standard chaos marines will be unable to actually hurt him without serious special weapons, and many of them).

Errata weapons all the way. They just cut down on RF's so much and stop combat from turning into a cake-walk. The Heavy Bolter stopped dominating every game once the errata stats came into it.

BYE

Same here. Errata weapons stats and a merged rule set from black crusade/deathwatch have made the game much more interesting and balanced.

Naviward said:

That's what I've been running. Has been working so far. No trouble hurting the PCs either.

heh yer lucky, my party has a monster of a Techpriest whom the new version of the bolter can't actually hurt without righteous fury. He's sitting on a 50 TB (machinator array + stat bonuses), and bionics for each limb, chest & head increasing it by a further 2 (giving him a TB after x2 of 12), plus flesh is weak 3, and artificer armor. That's 27 points of damage he soaks up (and the new bolters can turn out a total of 24, old bolters can churn out 30 if lucky). That's only rank 5 (though he is the only person in the party to have died thus far, killed by an ork with a krak missle… heh).

Our party Chaplain is not as monstrously hard to hurt, thankfully, he only has the TB10 and artificer armor, so I can nickle and dime him with the new bolters if I was to go that way… 1 or 2 pts of damage at a time, IF it gets through his Rosarius (thank the god-emperor his luck with that is low and it usually blows out after a round or two of combat).

Our librarian is easiest to hurt… until puts up his tk shield… then I need railguns, but that's been like that forever.

The errata weapon specs SHOULD have come with a port for the unnatural stat nerfs, then they'd be much more solid imo.