Is there really a need to delve into the meta-logic behind rules and talents? On a mechanical level, making full-auto the best at hitting AND damage output means there is no point to using a full-auto-capable weapon on semi-auto, which basically means that rule was badly crafted or ill-conceived. The BC/OW balance has actually given semi-auto a valid role. We don't need to consider how exactly Bolter Drill works in-universe to look at the rules and say "this one is never used, that should probably be fixed." In-setting logic doesn't matter there.

bogi_khaosa said:

If Bob the Adpet has a Weapon training skill, he is a trained shooter.

@ Kshatriya - I have always found a valid use for semi-auto, but neither I nor any other GM's I know allow unlimited ammo.

TechVoid said:

ItsUncertainWho said:

If he does not, he still uses the exact same rules.

Azamuki said:

Except the bolter isn't virtually recoilless. If it were most people would be able to use one easily, they would even be able to pick up a Space Marine pattern bolter and fire it, no problem. But they can't, because bolters have pretty obscene recoil, which is only exaggerated when you get a gun that is big enough for a space marine.

DJSunhammer said:

If that were the case any kind of bolter would be useless at point blank range, when they have in fact been known for punching straight through one target that is close by to penetrate and explode inside the next person in line. That is hardly "just enough force". It would have to be at the least as powerful as a common handgun round, and is likely even more powerful than that, even just out of the barrel.

Okay, during my career I've had the chance to fire several types of automatic weapons from submachine gun to heavy machine guns so I can quite confidently talk about how automatic weapons work in real life. The autofire rules used in BC and OW are pretty much as far away from how actual weapons work as anything can be. In a word, they are unrealistic to the point of being ridiculous. However, they DO work nicely if your intention is to balance the different types of fire in game-environment where ammunition is of no concern.

First, a word about real life automatic firearms:

The gun does not have any intelligence and it does not "know" if you are going to pull the trigger once on single shot, pull the trigger several times on single shot, pull the trigger once on burst or go all-out with full auto. Thus, no matter what you are going to do AFTER the first round has ignited the first round in a single shot, the first round in burst or first round in full auto ALWAYS has the exact same chance of hitting. This is because of the simple fact that the first round is only affected by shooters skill, external elements (weather etc.) and the first round itself.

When you CONTINUE to fire second, third and so forth round after the first, the recoil of the first round affects the second round, the recoild of the second affects the third and so on. Usually this means the recoil will slowly start to lift up the barrel, causing the subsequent rounds go higher than your original line of aim was. This means that the subsequent rounds will have increasingly smaller chance of hitting the target than the first round had. They still DO have a chance of hitting the target, though.

Since the subsequent rounds in burst and full auto do not usually hit the point of aiming of the first round they also tend to compensate slightly for mistakes made in aiming of the first round. If you aimed little high, you are obviously going to miss with first and any subsequent rounds (that go even higher), but if you aimed a bit low there is a good chance that first round will miss and second and/or thir will hit. In practice I've actually used this technique several times with all the types of fully automatic weapons and at normal ranges (up to maybe 100 meters with submachinegun or assault rifle, up to 300 meters with machinegun and up to 1000 meters with heavy machinegun) I can quite confidently aim low with a burst, missing with first round and hitting with second and third (with fourth and so on missing again).

Consequently, in real world, the result is following:

- single shot fire has higher chance of hitting per round fired as you can better compensate for recoil than burst fire and burst fire has higher chance of hitting per round fired than full auto. For example: If shooter firing single shot would have 20% chance of hitting per round, he would have maybe 10% chance of hitting per round on burst and 5% chance of hitting per round with full auto.

- A burst of 5 rounds will always have higher chance of hitting than a burst of 3 which will always have a higher chance of hitting than a 1 shot.

- The first round of burst of any lenght will have the exact same probability of hitting than a single shot will.

And, fellow players and gamemasters, this is exactly why human race has invented automatic firearms in the first place: Because automatic fire gives you better chance of actually nailing the target. The disadvanatge is that automatic fire "wastes" bullets since the probability of hitting per round fired goes down at exponential rate.

If you want a quick and realistic autofire rules the very quickest way of doing it is to give single shot +0, give bursts +10 or so and give full auto +20 or so and just make an arbitrary rule that you never hit with more than one round anyway. Thats a really quick way to go about it. The second quickest way is exactly what the DH, RT adn DW original rules were. If you want more realism than that, you need to start rewriting the rules pretty extensively or change the whole rules system.

If you wish to play a game where the ammunition is unlimited (and thus the biggest real world disadvanatge of automatic weapons, the ammunition consumption, is eliminated) AND want to force your players into using single shots, then you can go on and use BC rules or any system you like, but don't call it realistic, because it ain't.

TL;DR Original DW rules were far more realistic than BC rules are.

DJSunhammer said:

In Confrontation (a pre-Necromunda game published in White Dwarf) Boltguns actually did have reduced penetration at short range.

Space Marine bolters may have a larger initial charge, or have the engines ignite in the barrel to have a bigger close range oomph, but of course this would increase recoil. It is one way to explain the increased damage of the weapon.

As far as bolts punching through the targets… someone made their fuses wrong. They should explode inside the target.

What I am trying to say is, boltguns don't fire at low velocity. They fire at normal speed then increase over a short time. The bolts punch through the target at close range because they require a short time to arm, similar to the modern 40mm grenades that get shot from under-slung launchers and the like.

A simple word about recoil.

I'm french and even if my country don't allow weapon sales I knew quite a bit on them. The recoil problem is just a big stupidity. It was true for weapon made for the ww1 and 2, for all the wars of the 20th century but look at youtube and dailymotion, look at the weapon test made actually.

Have you seen the old man firing a full auto shotgun with only one hand and without recoil?

The weapons made today are almost recoil free and the full auto firing mode quite easy to use.

So with that in mind all SP wea^pon should be recoil free execpt for the low level manufacturing weapons.

Recoil on energy weapon like laser rifle? I seriously doubt about it.

But for what is our concern here, and mean SM, witch weapon could have recoil in the hand of a warrior who could lift a car with bare hand? Witch one could still do it when this same guy is wearing a full SM arlmour with synthetic muscle craft and servos guidance?

The answer is none.

That is actual weapons with almost no recoil. So shooting full auto is quite easyer than believed and must give +% something because of the number of bullet flying.

DJSunhammer said:

Grenades have a arming time for safety's sake. If the grenade impacts something too soon coming out of the launcher and explodes it could hurt the firer. Don't need it on a boltgun, the explosives are not that powerful (especially if contained by the innards of a person). Rounds should go off inside the first person they hit.

I like BC/OW better on this regard. Makes Semi-Auto & SS viable vs Auto. Also everything being half action makes combat better than I Full Auto and end my turn.

Polaria said:

Although that doesn't matter as much as game balance, and when I say balance I just mean options. If full auto is by far the best then all semi auto and single shot (except maybe 'accurate' weapons) weapons are pointless even if they are more damaging and even if the fluff or background calls for it.

But for realism sake the main problem with DW rules is more that it overstates HOW MANY hits you would get in burst of auto-fire at any range other than very close IMHO. In real life machine guns were great at huge ranges but that's because you only need to hit with one round to put the guy down and most of your bullets went wide.

Post-errata there are very few full auto weapons in Deathwatch anyway, so this isn't much of an issue. Single shot is needed for Called Shots.

Plus moving and firing full auto really wipes out your accuracy.

Face Eater said:

I would think your real-world example is closer to the suppressive fire attack.

I personally feel one possible fix would be to return to the Full-Auto rule as written in the original version of DH. I believe it was a typo, but having an extra hit on every two degrees of success (like semi auto) means that most shots are wasted, so you have the balance up the bonus to hit (with chance of extra damage) against the fact it takes a full action and the very likely serious waste of ammunition (I will state at this point I totally disagree with the use of the Shot Selector as a way to just carry extra loaded ammo. It is for varient ammo, not more of the same. I never used it that way when playing almost a year of Deathwatch either). It also tones down the sudden damage ramp up experienced by full-auto.

borithan said:

There was a lot of talk about full auto rules in the DH forums. I was involved in some that went on for ever. One of the things I proposed at the time was that both SA and FA had 1 hit per dos at only short range, 1 hit per 2 dos at longer ranges. Could go even further and have 1 hit per dos at only point blank.

The problem with how DW dealt with Full-auto is that it double-dipped.

There's two lines of logic you can go with game design with it comes to a gun that shoots many bullets really fast. You can either have it A) be easier to hit the target because you're covering the area with more bullets or B) have more shots hit the target causing more damage. DW does both at the same time. A Full auto weapon is both more accurate and deals more damage. Now we can argue about how guns work in real life as if the WARHAMMER 40K UNIVERSE, a place where technology is regarded with mysticism and demons can pop out of your coffee cup, works in the same way until the cows come home but the simple fact is we're playing a game. Much like how many people complain that in Dungeons & Dragons a Wizard will steal the spotlight and render the rest of the party useless after some leveling so will a Devastator with a Heavy Bolter. That combination in it's original iteration was more powerful at dishing out damage than any other class with any other weapon (constantly players were maxing out their BS with relatively simple actions). When a Devastator had the option of choosing a different weapon he was absolutely insane to pick such a weapon and if he did it was because of the novelty . Granted the errata fixed the damage of the gun but the basic principle of the double-dip still applied.

You might say "Well double-dipping isn't that bad" but consider how other games handle multiple shots or multiple attacks of anything: some games have you roll for each individual attack and apply a penalty based on how many attacks you're getting or a growing penalty that gets harder with each subsequent attack. Here the worst is that you have a -10 and how well you do will affect how many attacks hit. It's HARDLY a downgrade that makes full-auto weapons obsolete. It just makes room for other players to have some fun. Black Crusade's rules handles it well, they're still powerful but not obscenely so.

People are likely going to argue with me that it wasn't a problem but after playing many DW and BC games it's clear that BC has the more refined rules, realistic or not. I've been playing DW using both BC's combat rules and replacing RF with ZH. I know a lot of folk don't like that latter bit, but it makes fighting NPC's and other dramatic battles feel more intense when you stun the bad guy or make him drop his weapon. If they're fighting unimportant minions sure you can instead roll another d10 or just kill the guy outright but for the sake of the narrative ZH feels better, at least to me.

In short, I advocate to transplant the BC rules to DW. I don't need FFG to make a "2nd Edition" of DH to reflect these rules (but if they DID do it I would most certainly buy it, in a heart beat, as I transplant the BC rules into it as well), and I fully understand the logistical nightmare it would be to upgrade all the books everytime they make a good tweak in a new system, but you can easily play DW with BC's full auto rules. You're not going to play a mission and go "God! Devastators are WORTHLESS now" and flip the table in rage.

Furthermore Bolters and how they fire have been inconsistent through every edition. Basically how a bolter works depends on what story you're reading and what piece of artwork you're looking at. Heavy recoil, no recoil, caseless, tons of empty cases flying out of the gun in brass rain, whatever. It doesn't matter.