My players has wisely spent their cash reward from the last adventure on mesh armour and carapace helmets. For the next adventure im planing to have them chased by a mob of several hundred angry young men armed with knives, staffs and knuckle irons. The problem is that with 4x2 ap and 2 to 3 in tb non of these weapons can hurt them. It feels wrong that they could just ignore several hundred men and calmly walk through them to get to the leader of the mob that is the target.

Are there any rules for finding gaps in armour or tearing it off?

I am fairly sure that an angry mob of hundreds of men with knives will eventually find a way to stab them to death
Just do a GM call for more damage since its alot of guys attacking, maybe due to some strenght bonus, or maybe the armor just comes apart after X amount of damage

There are two options that I know of:

1) Horde Rules from Deathwatch - they allow a huge number of weak opponents to form a single, powerful opponent, capable of overcoming some serious damage soak. This has the advantage of making large numbers of grunts easy to run in combat, but the extra damage they dish out might be too much for non-Astartes PCs. The fact that Armour value is doubled against Primitive weapons will probably mitigate this in your case. Probably…

2) Zealous Hatred from Black Crusade - a variation of Righteous Fury, it works for PCs andNPCs alike: if a damage roll is a 10, and that still isn't enough to damage the target, 1 Wound is automatically inflicted (no Confirmation necessary). This would work well in your scenario (lots of tiny wounding hits rather than a few heavy ones); the drawback vs. using Hordes is that you will have to roll for a buttload of attacks…

-And if you think your characters are heavily armoured now , for Emperor's sake do not let them see the 'Lockshield' in Book of Judgement ! +4 armour to most locations, stacking with existing armour! I have to carefully calculate every single encounter specifically to overcome those damned things! Pain in the ass…

Well, let 25 men of them grapple the PCs, 25 take of their armor (Open the coat) and 25 stab them with random attacks. Another 25 use aimed attacks for weak-points. And several primitve two-handed weapons (Mauls, etc.) can deal some damage too.

don't discount numbers those Clubs & Spears 1D10 I's and 1D10 R's suere add up throw in a few Sledges 1D10+1 I's with strength bonous and a few 20lb Sledges (Great Weapon) 2D10R Pen2 in the hands of big beefe blokes (+3+ Str Bonous). Knives & Brass Knuckles and unless it's a big guy wealding them Improvised Weapons should mean nothing to Mesh & Carapace.

did they rember to cover their limbs? take them down that way if they have forgotten.

A mass of people should be a significant risk to your players. The armour rules are more meant for a 1 on 1 encounter. If they think that their armour will make them immune you can point out the following:

Use the grapple rule. I tired this and it works well no matter how strong/armoured the players are.

If the players really want to stand and fight, you can use the horde rules (players cannot dodge/parry, can take an additional +2D10 damage). The horde rules also cover rules for morale so it is posisble to inflict enough damage on the hordes so that they will break and run away. I tried this as well and found that players (with caprace armour) either took very little damage or lots of damage. As they could not reroll dodge/parry they used fate points to reduce incoming damage.

Use the Only War/Black Crusade rules for Primitive weapons and armour.

Primitive(X) means the weapon cannot cause more damage than (X). Modern armour points arn't doubled, modern armour is just a lot, lot lighter. this does mean that primitive armour isn't halved against modern weapons, but all weapons are now more dangerous.

Clubs are primitive(7) 1D10 + SB IIRC.

I tried it in my last game, it was a way to make average combats more deadly and intense, but make primitive armour and weapons FAR more useful. Until this point, everyone had mono-ed their HtH weapons.

breez said:

I've found Hordes are dangerous to Humans, and can smush characters in mere seconds. There are however in the Black Crusade rules, rules for HUMANS fighting hordes - The humans don't get the size bonus to hit, recieve an attack per magnitude/10 (rounded up) but can dodge/parry and the attacks have no damage boosts. Black crusade, Core Rulebook, page 274-275.

Advice - If you want to use hordes, describe the visceral damage/injuries and keep the numbers of magnitude hidden, otherwise the players are merely 'aiming for a number' to make the horde break.

Not necessary to change anything or use Horde rules either, if you don´t want to…

If you mob is large enough that is, 15 humans without equipment against 4 well equipped PCs should do nothing really and if the game mechanics work that way it should be okay.

Now, if we are talking about each PC being mobbed by 30 human NPCs at the same time that is a different story. Just to make the math easier, I rule that the NPCs have a Strength of 30 and Weapon Skill of 35, you will see why shortly.

Now, your problem is that PCs can reduce 11 damage (4x2 armor + 3 TB average) if I understand. Now, you have 30 guys attacking one PC, they get +30 WS for outnumbering, or more (up to +60) depending on the bonus limits you are using. +30 WS means 2/3 of the NPCs will hit, that would be 20. Assuming that those guys cause 1-10 damage with no Righteous Fury, you can go with the statistics average, and assume 2/20 NPCs would roll 1 damage, another 2/20 would roll 2 damage, and so on until 10. Now 10+3 is 2 points of damage x2 NPCs, plus 10+2 for another 2 guys. That´s like 6 damage on the first round (might drop later depending on the amount of NPCs), and it will take quite a few rounds to kill so many NPCs. Consider players cannot dodge because they have no room to do so… Adjust that math to how much damage you wish to cause them and you are set (my math of 6 damage per round very likely means TPK in just few rounds)…

If you don´t wish to pump WS so high, just don´t limit melee outnumber bonus at +30, or do a different math (the above suggestion was just to use easy to explain numbers).

Maybe have them count as non Primative weapons, no ap, just non Primative to ignore the ap doubling. That was they become more of a threat and less of a benny hill sketch music included.