So, in a recent game I was part of, we were investigating the kidnapping of a Bishop. along the way, the party was split, and the level 2 Assassin, and Level 4 Psyker ended up meeting the future big bad of the campaign, a Daemonhost. The Daemon was going to smack them around a bit, and then jet off, because hey, it would be sorta dickish to unleash a Daemonhost on 2 players that were just investigating. The assassin play, on his first ever session is jokingly told by us to Aim and shoot his Hunting rifle at the daemon. He ends up with +40 to hit, and getting both bonus dice, smashes a huge chunk of health out of it. The daemon cackles at them, and grows wings, and leaps out the window to begin his plans. We all jokingly tell the Assassin to shoot it again, so he runs to the window, spend two half actions aiming, and shoots the daemon as its almost 50 meters away. Again, he gets huge bonuses. +20 for short range, +20 for aiming ,and +10 for accurate, and he gets off all bonus dice again. Two are a righteous, and the daemon is crumped in the ass for 37 wounds, killing it instantly.

Now, this seems a bit utterly ridiculous. The Level 2 Feral world assassin, with his starting weapon, can crush the most dangerous enemy in the core book with 2 shots of his starting weapon. I vastly prefer the rules before the errata where it just adds a bonus to aim actions, and I think that the errata benefit should become a talent or something instead for high level players. It works fine in Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch, where monstrously powerful creatures are the norm, and accurate offers a nice counter to powerful full auto weapons. But in Dark Heresy it seems like the man with the Hunting rifle is king. Even in close quarters, as long as he has someone to distract his targets for a moment.

Does anyone house rule this? Or is it considered balanced and I'm just not seeing?

What can I say it seems like he got really lucky, maybe the demonhost should've had "Catch Projectile" as one of his psyker powers to prevent that from happening. And yes Accurate weapons are amazing, so you have to have something that take it on like the catch projectile power, a really good dodge skill, regeneration in play, stuff like that.

What other effects were in play? Did the Acolytes pass any required Fear Checks? The Daemonhost couldn’t Dodge?

Plus Accurate weapons need to be good otherwise they lose out horribly to multi-shot weapons. Why take a Hunting Rifle when I can hit you 5-7 times with an Autogun?

BYE

Agreed with HBMC, I'm not sure why the deamonhost didn't dodge. Not to mention if he didn't want it dying he should have just had the **** thing teleport/fly away via narrative or fudge the amount of wounds it had.

I'll add 2 minor details here, as the most important hints have been covered already. Then I'll ramble a bit

When weapons with multiple dice roll multiple 10s, you still only get 1 additional die for Righteous fury. The more dice, the larger chance to score RF, but you still only confirm once, and add 1 die.

Secondly, if the deamonhost was flying away and taking no other actions then moving, he would be Running (even though he was flying). This would incur a -20 penalty to your assassins shot.

Ramble mode on.

Remember to play your baddies as intelligently as you would your own character. You do not stroll away from armed hostiles, in the open without cover. You Run, you make Tactical Advances (or retreats) by moving from cover to cover, you go for weak spots, you take out the dangers first, etc.

In hindsight (which is always 20/20), once the Daemonhost realized the assassin could really hurt it, he should have taken immediate steps to neutralize him. Weapon Jinx on the rifle, some nasty WP-to-Resist power (Feral Assassins don't have the WP. Go Dominate), etc.

A daemon (or sorceror, or Psycher) with the right powers played smartly can play hell with the party. Don't let them go head-on with the players, they regularly survive the unbelievable (thanks to FPs and PC luck) and dish out atrocious damage (as you have noticed). Here are some ideas.

Let first contact be via a proxy. Let the daemon possess some poor expendable sod to taunt the PCs. Have them blow the poor sod apart only to realize they haven't touched the real deal. Or via holo-comms or something. In fact, rigging the expendable, possessed "ambassador" with lots of explosives, and blowing the acolytes up from afar can be fun

When closer, use powers that hinder the acolytes from shooting. Distort Vision, See Me Not, Catch Projectiles. Then hit the Guard or Assassin with Dominate, and have him fight the party. Nothing causes more joy than the feral guardsman with an Eviscerator who turns on his Psycher-buddy and cuts of his legs.

Oh, and remember that Deamonhosts cause Fear. They have Fear rating 4, in fact, which means that the WP tests to resist are at a -30 penalty. Did you remember to enforce this on your party? Even strong willed characters with a WP in the 50ies and with a suitable Resistance Talent will fail this test 2 out of 3 times!

Felenis said:

In my experiance the nasty mosnter in DH seem to be far tougher and harder to kill than most of the other games when you compare PC strength. Except maybe DW, but that game seems weird.

My Assassin has done really well with his hunting rifle. But once the Arbitrator got a storm bolter it paled into insignificance.

With respect to your big bad, naturally GM fiat allows the BBG to burn a fate point to survive.

Interrogator Z

A lot of responses cover what I intended to write on the subject (mostly about how it's up to the GM to keep his Big Bad Boys alive and relatively intact for them to be able to act as recurring villains), but there's one thing I didn't quite see being mentioned and will help make this "defeat" not look like an accidental overkill. Daemons are eternal, even though their bodies are destroyed, their essence returns to the Immaterium where they lick their wounds and plan further mischief. Thus, even if the daemonhost is killed in the action, it may easily (massive understatement) return later to continue its diabolical plans. Maybe it has a super secret sect out there that makes sure that the daemon always has a dozen hosts ready to receive it. (It's basicly a variant on the whole "GM burns daemonhost's Fate Point to let it survive" scenario.)

Just an example, we have played the IH story and my Tech-Priest managed to be one who successfully banished the Crowfather. So now every once in a while, one of his cultists shows up to take revenge or unsanctioned psyker gets possessed by Crowfather's daemon lackey. (And the saga continues this Sunday, as Magos Seqvirin and his band of delinquents … ahem … acolytes struggle against a Daemonhost of great power and no sense of humour.)

I'll add my voice to those in favor of the revised Accuracy rules. Without them, 'sniping' is not a viable tactic. My party features an Assassin (just turned Rank 7) with a high-end rifle (patterned after the Beast House Beastslaver's rifle from Desciples of the Dark Gods , but without the Explosive trait), lovingly refered to as a 'grox rifle', combined with most of the sniper-focused Talents. With the level of adversaries the party now faces, it still usually takes a couple hits to put down mid-tier baddies. With Righteous Fury, she occasionally drops a main villian quicker than I would have prefered, but those instances are outweighed by the number of instances when the party would likely have been wiped out were it not for her ability to inflict heavy damage.

I have similar issues with the sniper in my game, you just have to tailor your enemies. In fact, Theodosia, from the Joyous Choir adventure gave him something of a complex by consistently dodging his shots.

If you find that the 'big gun' characters are stealing the limelight by becoming unstoppable killing machines:

- remember to use cover, which can add enough AP to negate an attack,

-try adding in the odd force-field, but remember that they're all incredibly rare, and that your players are liable to loot them if you're not careful,

-it's already been said, but high dodge. Opponents can be savvy enough to save them for the sniper. Also, step aside,

-Run. Running imposes a -20 penalty to BS tests against you. Hard target adds another -20.

-Suppressive fire reduces the sniper to half actions per turn. One shot every three rounds is less appealing.

Your Deamon host has no force field from magical origin like PR x 10 rate with no overload?

Can he not "phase" ( really not sure this word exist but like) being just visible but incorporeal? Or any kind of "holo" power making the shooter have his aim on a mere reflect?

Does he not have a regenaration power? To use between the shoots?

Has he not talent making him harder to shoot at?

Does he not have a deamon talent making attack from unholly weapon to do at best 1 damage point?

As said before your player had been resistant to his fear rating and deamon presence?

Really kill a deamon host even as a SM in deathwatch isn't that easy, I've got the feeling you forget to use the NPC talent and skill without speaking about psy powers.

Sry I forget something.

In your example the assassin take a whole turn to aim at the deamon host what have he done during this time?

Nothing?

No spell casting?

No evasive manoeuver making his body disapear into industrial fog?

Quite strange…

If your player are messing with high power being don't be afraid to make them pay for their arrogance and lack of planning.

Because attacking a deamon host with for the weakest of them like a psy rating of 5 is quite dangerous for anybody.

While less limited than in BC onwards [where the extra dice, even though it no longer even causes extra damage, cannot inflict RF, and plenty of "accurate" guns don't get the damage bonus anymore; boooo], there's several holes in weapons depending on their "accurate" bonuses.

First, no matter what, its a single shot. Even if you snipe the guy by 8 DoS, it doesn't matter, he just needs to pass. PCs, and most major NPCs are unlikely to have at least a 40% chance to get out of the way, unless you surprise them.

Forcefields are a stacking defense there too: you only need to block one shot, no matter how good its bonus damage is.

Plus, its not a reliable way to get your damage out. Plenty of weapons will give you comparable damage on a hit as a Long-Las or Reaver would with two degrees of success, often with more penetration [but also often with a bit less range unless you take a heavy weapon]. One party I know passes a Single-Shot/Suspensors Autocannon between the two SP users for sniping duty; its a far, far superior weapon for the job than most, and would remain so even with the DH version of the Accurate damage bonuses. A "Heavy Weapons Guy" will be putting in roughly similar training and acquisitions to get a big rifle of a "different category", and does the sniper role just as well if not much better.

2 Quick Accurate OVERDAMAGE fixes (choose one)

1. To get the accurate damage, you need to use a called shot. The average citizen can try to snipe, but a trained marksman is superior at sniping and has better focus (My favorite)

2. Per Half Action of aiming you get +1d10 to a max of +2d10, given with the 2 DoS as normal. So a sniper firing every turn takes a hit in damage.

Felenis said:

Did you apply the fear test? A Daemonhost has fear 4, so -30 to the fear test. Each Degree of failure adds +10 to the shock table.

In one of my sessions, the players plus 40 armed guards encountered a daemonhost and every npc was reduced to an inactive screaming mess.

As for aim/accurte, it can do a lot of damage, but in my experience our assasin has very high initiative, always goes first and the targets tend to dodge a lot.

Don't forget that raw, a lucky string of Righteous Fury could cause a thrown stone to slay a demonhost. Unlikely, but as long as you keep rolling those 10s it could happen.

Alright, it seems I was wrong to think that Accurate is broken, ha ha

In response to a few queries,

Yeah the assassin failed his test, but he only rolled 21-40 on the shock table and immediately snapped out of it on his turn.

The daemon tried dodging, but was unable too. And I was just a player, so I don't know what the GM had on it, or whether it is really dead. Yeah, it probably should have turned around and turned the Psyker to mush, but it was his first game ever, so I think the GM was being a bit easy. No more after that.

Finally, where does it say that multiple dice attacks can only trigger 1 righteous fury? The rules in the book don't seem to indicate this.

I still think they should be a bit more expensive or hard to obtain though. Why bother with a Lasgun or a Lascarbine when you can have the Glorious Long Las for only a few thrones more? After that little Daemonhost adventure, everyone is now eager to get their hands on an Accurate gun
When I GM I think I'll make em a little harder to get.

Other than on demonic targets (or targets with high toughness values), cheap and easy auto-guns and auto-pistols with semi and full auto are probably going to provide higher damage thresholds and a higher average damage as a result. Not to mention the much more flexible and devastating ammo choices (man stopper, Dum Dum, etc)

I don't know if it's an optional rule or if it's in the book but I thought I remembered reading that if you kill a target and still have additional shots left you can pull them to the near by target (take this with a grain of salt since I can't say for certain)

You can allocate full auto and semi auto shots before doing damage on them to other targets within a certain number of meters from the first target

Felenis said:

You know that for every 10 you fail your Fear test by (which should be a few, considering you're rolling at WP -30), you ADD 10 to the Shock roll, yes?

As for the Righteous fury rule, it states that if ANY of the (multiple) dice come up as a 10, you roll 1 additional die. Not one for each, just 1. IF you confirm the fury with a new BS test. So weapons with multiple dice has a greater chance of causing a damage explosion, but even if 3 dice come up as 10, you will only roll 1 additional die.

This is one of the reasons I prefer the only war version of righteous fury. Instead of adding additional damage you just roll 1d5 on the crit table and apply the effect. Makes for more interesting combats without randomly overpowering the guns.

Droma said:

:: tosses a stone as an improvised weapon :: RIGHTEOUS FURY! roll d5…..5 effect:

"Muscle and bone take a pounding as the attack rips into the arm. The targets's Ws adn Bs are both halved for……. "

:: other teammates look on astonished :: "Get that man more stones!"

looking that over though that does seem like a solid system, though it is hard to resist the allure of watching a fellow acolyte (or yourself) roll damage, and more damage and MOOOORE DAMAGE!

Skeletor said:

Each method has a different feel. While I've played plenty of DH games and had fun continue to roll more and more damage eventually it's just kind of obsurd and makes things more powerful than they really should be. The 1d5 does something cool without out right killing your big bad through sheer luck.

It's a little off-topic but I also like the changes to how primitive weapons work. Your guardsman actually still has something to fear from your average cultist/ganger/mutant now.

For the new RF rules you need to at least inflict 1 wound, otherwise you are not going to roll on the critical hit table, but instead inflict 1 wound. And since BC, I think, the additional dice from Accurate cannot trigger Righteous Fury.