Hello, new to Deathwatch, just picked it up at Warhammer Games Day 2012 and still getting my head around some of the rules. The following I'm afraid has completely stumped me and my friends, it's from the top of page 245 after the heading Attacker Determines Damage: "For all attack rolls, count the Degrees of Success. The number of Degrees of Success is the minimum amount of Damage that the attack will inflict on a single dice. If the attack inflicts more than one dice of Damage, the player may apply the Degree of Success from the attack roll as the minimum result to one dice of his choice."

Help! No idea what that means.

I have one or two other queries but thought it sensible to post them under different comments. Many thanks in advance.

Its an old rule intended to allow for a "well-rolled" attack to not deal minimum damage.

Basically, all d100 rolls have degrees of success (won't go into how to calculate this, if you're having trouble there, you need bigger help than what this thread is asking). This number can be used as a replacement value for one of the damage die.

So if I had a target of 75, and rolled a 01, I got a success with 7 degrees of success (pretty sure I calculated that right, it'd be 8 in BC or OW). The weapon deals 1d10+5 damage. I roll damage, and roll a 1. That's pretty weak, but thanks to this rule, I can replace that 1, with a 7.

It gets more pronounced with higher degrees of success, especially when dealing with target numbers above 100.

Note this can only be done on 1 die, so using the above example, if the weapon was 2d10+5, and I rolled a 1 and 3 on those dice, I would have effectively rolled a 7 and a 3.

EDIT: I should also point out that this cannot cause Righteous Fury, as you did not explicitly roll a "10" as the RF rules require, you replaced a value to "10". Also, this can only be replaced once per attack, not per damage roll. So your 10 DoS heavy bolter burst isn't going to be dealing max damage.

Thanks KommissarK that makes perfect sense now.