Now, this is something I've been thinking about for a while, and this has less to do with the interpretation of the rules of Only War than it has to do with a question of the rules validity or, I guess, right to be a rule.

I know how the rules work, the question is if they should work that way or not.

In Only War (and the entire WH40kRP line) Toughness confers a Toughness Bonus. This Toughness Bonus works much like Armour Points, and is subtracted from damage done.

Why is this? How is this functionally excused, narratively? At least when dealing with regular humans, I cannot wrap my head around it. In a way, it allows certain characters to be virtually immune to small-arms fire or knives based on.. what, exactly? That they are so tough they can just completely shrug it off?

I have never given it much thought until Lynata brought it up in a separate thread, as a personal pet-peeve, and I now realize that it's become a thing that irks me.

I have considered homebrewing a change where Toughness Bonus would simply add to the total Wounds of a Character instead of subtracting from damage received, but I'm unsure what all the functional side-effects of such an action would be.

I would preserve the original functionality of Toughness in the form of a Trait, so it can be assigned to characters where it makes sense (such as Orks or, arguably, Space Marines, and a variety of carapace-clad animals and whatnot).

So I'd like to pitch that homebrew to the lot of you, before I adopt it. Are there any critical flaws with making Toughness Bonus affect the total number of Wounds instead of basically adding to Armour Points? What side-effects can you think of?

I'd love any comments or musings on the subject.

My concern would be that the ~2-5 extra wounds you would get from that change, would last you one round compared to how the system is today.

Would you also be scaling down weapon damage, or would players be expected to roll up more than one character at a time?

In a system that uses different dice, I would agree with you - but since we only have the D10 to Work with in this product line, I'm not really certain it would do much on it's own, other than kill players even faster.

Why is this? How is this functionally excused, narratively? At least when dealing with regular humans, I cannot wrap my head around it. In a way, it allows certain characters to be virtually immune to small-arms fire or knives based on.. what, exactly? That they are so tough they can just completely shrug it off?

Pretty much, yes. The Toughness Bonus represents the character's ability to shrug off damage. However, an average person has their TB 3 negated by the equally average SB 3 in melee and by the +3 part of the 1d10+3 damage possessed by most small arms. So, it's really a non-thing until you get into significantly higher TB.

Therefore, I would say if you really want to do away with TB, you should also remove SB from melee damage and reduce firearms damage by 3. Give Ogryn, Orks, Space Marines and other such creatures the Natural Armor trait to reflect their superhuman toughness. Of course, all this really does is "penalize" those human character who invest in a 40+ Toughness (which they have done to the determent of other traits).

Hmmm...

I absolutely detest TB Soak. I hated it in WFRP1e, and that hatred has grown with every edition since. So yeah, getting rid of TB Soak would definitely make my day.

The problem is that it gets insanely complicated.

One possible way to deal with it, that probably has all sorts of problems of its own, is like this:

• Remove TB Soak.
• Subtract 5 points of Armour Penetration (down to 0) from all weapons.
• Change Damage Dice from d0/d5 to d6/d3.
• Add +1 Damage to all weapons.

My concern would be that the ~2-5 extra wounds you would get from that change, would last you one round compared to how the system is today.

Would you also be scaling down weapon damage, or would players be expected to roll up more than one character at a time?

In a system that uses different dice, I would agree with you - but since we only have the D10 to Work with in this product line, I'm not really certain it would do much on it's own, other than kill players even faster.

Character mortality isn't really an issue; after all, opponents would also die more easily, and it is up to the GM to eyeball encounters accordingly (depending on his whim).

Why is this? How is this functionally excused, narratively? At least when dealing with regular humans, I cannot wrap my head around it. In a way, it allows certain characters to be virtually immune to small-arms fire or knives based on.. what, exactly? That they are so tough they can just completely shrug it off?

Pretty much, yes. The Toughness Bonus represents the character's ability to shrug off damage. However, an average person has their TB 3 negated by the equally average SB 3 in melee and by the +3 part of the 1d10+3 damage possessed by most small arms. So, it's really a non-thing until you get into significantly higher TB.

Therefore, I would say if you really want to do away with TB, you should also remove SB from melee damage and reduce firearms damage by 3. Give Ogryn, Orks, Space Marines and other such creatures the Natural Armor trait to reflect their superhuman toughness. Of course, all this really does is "penalize" those human character who invest in a 40+ Toughness (which they have done to the determent of other traits).

I don't really want to "do away with TB", per see; I would like to readjust it and have it apply to something other than "skin-soak". Whereas Strength Bonus (or, in my homebrew, Agility Bonus for some weapons) makes sense in applying to melee weapons, I just don't see the sense of Toughness Bonus applying to a soaking mechanic.

The TB-Soak vs. SB-Damage counterpoint only makes sense as long as you are dealing with;

• Relatively comparable characters of roughly the same "power-level"; when dealing with player characters and antagonists, the situation where an "average" person fights another "average" person is unlikely to happen, especially over a longer stretch of time. Furthermore, the relevance of this counterpoint is further mitigated by the fact that the greatest impact of the removal of "TB-Soak" is not when Average Joe:s are fighting eachother, but when the differences in Characteristics would be considerable.
• Melee weapons. Ranged weapons doesn't benefit from this extra SB-Damage at all (or anything similar).

I like the Idea of increased wounds instead of damage reduction, it basically preforms the same role but there is more of a threat to the character. My group has a commander with a toughness of 90+, I have begun to shift away from combat to more narrative challenges to balance this out but most of the stuff I send against them cant hurt him very much.

I like the Idea of increased wounds instead of damage reduction, it basically preforms the same role but there is more of a threat to the character. My group has a commander with a toughness of 90+, I have begun to shift away from combat to more narrative challenges to balance this out but most of the stuff I send against them cant hurt him very much.

How the hell did a Commander end up with a Toughness of 90+? o_o

Ranged weapons have damage modifiers too.

Anyway, the problem is that if you don't do something about the damage range, you'll end up with hits frequently doing staggering amounts of damage. Simply removing TB Soak is probably not so very different from giving every possible opponent RF on 8+

PCs aren't going to last long against that sort of thing.

A good Chainsword hit from Mr.Average against a Flak Vest'ed trooper, for example, is 17 Wounds. Enough to send a PC into the Criticals in 1 hit.

[...]

A good Chainsword hit from Mr.Average against a Flak Vest'ed trooper, for example, is 17 Wounds. Enough to send a PC into the Criticals in 1 hit.

Sounds reasonable. You just got hit with a weaponized chainsaw and you were wearing nothing but Flak, after all.

I like the Idea of increased wounds instead of damage reduction, it basically preforms the same role but there is more of a threat to the character. My group has a commander with a toughness of 90+, I have begun to shift away from combat to more narrative challenges to balance this out but most of the stuff I send against them cant hurt him very much.

How the hell did a Commander end up with a Toughness of 90+? o_o

he put almost all his experience into toughness

I don't really want to "do away with TB", per see; I would like to readjust it and have it apply to something other than "skin-soak". Whereas Strength Bonus (or, in my homebrew, Agility Bonus for some weapons) makes sense in applying to melee weapons, I just don't see the sense of Toughness Bonus applying to a soaking mechanic.

Probably because I've played in other systems which used similar mechanics, so I don't have any problem with Toughness applying to soak. To my mind it follows exactly the same logic as Strength (or Agility) applying to damage. If your physical strength influences the amount of damage you can deal out, then why not you physical toughness influence the amount damage you can take.

Why does Toughness Bonus work like 'skin armour'? The short answer is 'tradition'.

Longer answer: FFG doesn't have free reign to do whatever they want with the WH40KRP range. They have to conform to the terms of the liscensing agreement with GW , which states (or so I've read in other threads) that WH40KRP has to maintain clear lineage to the original Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. Hence, percentiles, gory Crit Tables and, yes, 'skin armour'.

TB damage reduction doesn't really bother me, because there is some precedent for it in real life. We've all heard stories of badly wounded soldiers ignoring their injuries and carrying their fallen comrades to safety, and we all know people who act like they are dying when they stump their toe. Different TBs at work...

There is nobody in BC/Only War that can shrug off small-arms fire naked, unless we are talking about very large animals and such like, and even then they will take a wound from Righteous Fury/Zealous hatred.

This is an issue in the previous games that used x2 Unnatural Modifiers and a different Righteous Fury mechanic, not in BC/OW.

In BC, the highest Toughness Bonus that a PC can get by RAW is I think 6 (maximum possiblle starting Toughness) + 4 (Space Marine UN) + 2 (buying Toughness up 20 points) + 1 (Mark of Nurgle) = 13.

I think TB makes perfect sense and I do not understand the issue*

*other than it making it harder for Sororitas to hurt Space Marines than the other way wround, which is the real reason .

[...]

A good Chainsword hit from Mr.Average against a Flak Vest'ed trooper, for example, is 17 Wounds. Enough to send a PC into the Criticals in 1 hit.

Sounds reasonable. You just got hit with a weaponized chainsaw and you were wearing nothing but Flak, after all.

But did you have much of a choice? This is a combat-game; that's what Imperial Guard do. Also, for the most part they wear flak armor; you need to be rather **** important to get the good armor, like Officer/Storm Trooper/Kasrkin important.

Now, of course they might just get a high enough Logistics rating to requisition carapace, but maybe not, and if they aren't Kasrkin (this assumes you allow the use of that regiment), that leaves them lacking some protection.

I agree with the skin-soak, personally. I've seen people take hits from things I couldn't. If I got into an MMA ring with one of those guys who actually attacks (Machida would let me wet myself for a few minutes), they would out me in one shot, but many of them are conditioned to absorb numerous hits, and keep their wits, and they aren't wearing armor. Part of it could be viewed as your ability to deflect hits; they got you, they hurt, but they weren't direct, and how tough you are determines how well you can shrug it off with you.

Do elephants have AP5 skin? No,

Can they get hit by lots and lots of 9mm rounds before dying? Yes.

What's the issue? I really don't understand it. An injury that has been reduced to 0 by TB hasn't "bounced off"; it still drew blood etc.but not enough to matter.

My TB of 2 protects me fully from splinters and cat bites.

I don't really want to "do away with TB", per see; I would like to readjust it and have it apply to something other than "skin-soak". Whereas Strength Bonus (or, in my homebrew, Agility Bonus for some weapons) makes sense in applying to melee weapons, I just don't see the sense of Toughness Bonus applying to a soaking mechanic.

Probably because I've played in other systems which used similar mechanics, so I don't have any problem with Toughness applying to soak. To my mind it follows exactly the same logic as Strength (or Agility) applying to damage. If your physical strength influences the amount of damage you can deal out, then why not you physical toughness influence the amount damage you can take.

I have no idea how you can say that those things share logic.

Do elephants have AP5 skin? No,

Can they get hit by lots and lots of 9mm rounds before dying? Yes.

What's the issue? I really don't understand it. An injury that has been reduced to 0 by TB hasn't "bounced off"; it still drew blood etc.but not enough to matter.

My TB of 2 protects me fully from splinters and cat bites.

Yet no-one of sane mind would argue that Uri Geller and Bear Grylls are just as tough.

Why does Toughness Bonus work like 'skin armour'? The short answer is 'tradition'.

Longer answer: FFG doesn't have free reign to do whatever they want with the WH40KRP range. They have to conform to the terms of the liscensing agreement with GW , which states (or so I've read in other threads) that WH40KRP has to maintain clear lineage to the original Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. Hence, percentiles, gory Crit Tables and, yes, 'skin armour'.

TB damage reduction doesn't really bother me, because there is some precedent for it in real life. We've all heard stories of badly wounded soldiers ignoring their injuries and carrying their fallen comrades to safety, and we all know people who act like they are dying when they stump their toe. Different TBs at work...

I do think that TB-Soak is something that did carry over from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but that it would be due to licensing agreements is ridiculous, if you look at all the other changes they've made to the line. I think it's something they just brought over without thinking it over, when WHFRP became Dark Heresy, and then it stuck.

I like the Idea of increased wounds instead of damage reduction, it basically preforms the same role but there is more of a threat to the character. My group has a commander with a toughness of 90+, I have begun to shift away from combat to more narrative challenges to balance this out but most of the stuff I send against them cant hurt him very much.

How the hell did a Commander end up with a Toughness of 90+? o_o

he put almost all his experience into toughness

And I can't think of a Regiment options combination that results in +15.

It doesn't make it harder for a chainsaw to tear into your flesh. It makes it harder for the damage that the chainsaw does when digging into your flesh to affect you meaningfully, because you are, well, tougher. Your organs are better protected, are healthier, or are simpler bigger. You have muscle mass in the way. Etc. i.e., they can take more damage,

Kind of like how a chainsaw tearing into an elephant is not going to have nearly as big of an effect as it will on me, not because the chainsaw is bouncing off the elephant's diamond-hard skin but because the elephant has a lot more to cut through, and is probably denser to boot..

I simply do not understand what the problem is. There was one in Deathwatch where Marines could become completely immune to knives an d being on fire and suchlike, but that does not exist in BC/OW.

Should I be taking meaningful damage every time I stub my toe or get nicked by a razor?

Because that's what this is implying = all injury is meaningful injury and it all adds up cumulatively. So if I nick myself shaving enough, I will die.

Probably because I've played in other systems which used similar mechanics, so I don't have any problem with Toughness applying to soak. To my mind it follows exactly the same logic as Strength (or Agility) applying to damage. If your physical strength influences the amount of damage you can deal out, then why not you physical toughness influence the amount damage you can take.

Because while Strength allows you to hit harder with a weapon or Agility allows you to place your blows between the chinks in the armour, a persons Toughness or physical Endurance doesn't really make you take less damage from a bullet or make it harder for a chainsaw to tear into your flesh.

I have no idea how you can say that those things share logic.

Whereas I have no idea how you can say they can't. Your strength defines how hard you to hit. You toughness defines your ability to resist injury, disease, poison and illness. It's what toughness is.

Should I be taking meaningful damage every time I stub my toe or get nicked by a razor?

Because that's what this is implying = all injury is meaningful injury and it all adds up cumulatively. So if I nick myself shaving enough, I will die.

The problem with all these analogies is that it isn't how TB Soak works in the system.

Half the kind of damage you're talking about isn't modelled by the system at all, and the other half is modelled via HP.

Your elephant has far more HP than your trooper. TB Soak is flat damage reduction, not the ability to sustain more damage.

An elephant in plate armour, just to stay with the silly examples, and an unarmoured elephant, will take exactly the same damage from an armour penetrating weapon. A particularly fit or fat elephant will take less damage from the armour penetrating weapon than the plate armoured elephant. Because the fit or fat elephant has a higher irreducible Damage Soak value than a less fit/fat elephant in plate armour.

And that's really the heart of the issue: TB Soak is better than any armour tech or force field.

I guess perhaps a third way of dealing with the problem, might be to invent a Toughness Pen value, and shift the first 5 points of Armour Penetration over to Toughness Penetration instead. That would deal with the common cases of Blubber of Invulnerability without significantly impacting lethality. But it wouldn't deal with critters that have insane Toughness values (which I'll quickly define as TB6+).

Your elephant has far more HP than your trooper. TB Soak is flat damage reduction, not the ability to sustain more damage.

But the elephant takes NO appreciable damage from the majority of 9-mm bullet rounds (or arrows, or what have you). Because they ended up buried in fat or redundant muscle tissue, or did not damage an organ enough to matter. That is, they did NO damage to the animal's hit points. They don't matter at all.

If you kill an elephant with arrows, it's not going to be because you hit some critical arrow-damage mass, but because one or more of the arrows got lucky and hit an artery or suchlike and the elephant dies eventually of... hmm, blood loss.

Why shouldn't the tougher elephant take less damage than the armoured, weaker elephant hit by weapons made to ignore armour? That's completely logical. Little old lady in plate armour will, of course, go down faster than huge fit naked guy if shot by weapons that are not blocked by steel plates. I'm not seeing a problem here.

Now I DO think that there is a (minor) problem with the current rules in so far as an unarmoured fist, an arrow, and a bullet have exactly the same chance (10%) of injuring somebody in Terminator armour, but this is totally unrelated.

For purposes of this discussion, I am going to define "toughness bonus high enough to make something impervious to small arms fire" (which it really isn't due to Righteous Fury) as "12," that being the amount that will make you impervious to a standard laspistol shot (that doesn't get RF and isn't fired on overcharge or overload).

In Enemies of the Imperium, the number of such critters is:

3.

The Squiggoth, the Chaos Spawn, and the Daemon Prince

(The Great Knarloc has one of 8! 8!)

Adding the beasties in the Black Crusade core rulebook, we get

6.5

from adding the Great Unclean One, Slaanesh Daemon Prince, and Necron Tomb Stalker. ".5" because the Lord of Change has a TB of 11 and only gets 16 because of Daemonic. (That's right -- a Lord of Change has a TB of 11.)

So I am not seeing the OP's problem of creatures that are ignoring small arms fire that shouldn't be, since one of these is a giant Ork dinosaur, one is a self-healing giant robot, and the rest are either Greater Daemons or Daemon Princes or gibbering huge mountains of warp-infused flesh, all of which should be ignoring laspistols IMO.

EDIT: a quick jaunt through Black Crusade's Tomes series shows that the only Necron creature with a TB higher than 11 is the Canoptek Tomb Spyder. The Keeper of Secrets has a TB of 11 (16 counting Daemonic). Not counting things that would be vehicles if BC had vehicle rules, literally the only things in these books with a TB higher than 11, not counting Daemonic, are the Leviathan (a mile-wide creature), the Canoptek Spyder, the Deskmasque (which is a Chaos Spawn with computer guidance), and the Bloodthirster. FOUR.

In the entire pair of gamelines, there are precisely 10 entries that are impervious to a laspistol fired on standard setting due to Toughness Bonus. Ten. All of which are huge monsters and/or robots.

Humh.

I was toying with the idea of TB as a damage soak between Crit Levels (similar to Inquisitor), but I admit that simply using it as additional Wounds is an interesting idea, too. I would probably apply a x2 multiplier here for a meaningful multiplier. Or, better yet, add +1 Wound for every 5 TB, so that you have a steady climb rather than "jumps".

It also depends on how "deadly" you want combat to be. In theory, you could also do away with Wounds and have a character's hitpoints be based entirely on their TB!

This would also be an opportunity to remove the "Sound Constitution" talent, similar to how I'd remove "Bulging Biceps" and make its effect based solely on a character's actual Strength. No need for talents when you can base everything off the core characteristics!

TB damage reduction doesn't really bother me, because there is some precedent for it in real life. We've all heard stories of badly wounded soldiers ignoring their injuries and carrying their fallen comrades to safety, and we all know people who act like they are dying when they stump their toe. Different TBs at work...

The problem is, TB really does an extremely poor job of representing this. You don't have characters coping better with the injuries they still receive, you don't have them receive the damage in the first place!

For those real world incidents (which are really a better example of how willpower works, actually), the wounded soldiers still remained wounded and had to be treated. They still lost that arm. Or they still died on-location after having managed to silence that MG nest.

In these games, however?

That's why I thought that "Inquisitor" might be a cool alternative. Because it still had people receive injuries, but TB there meant that some people would be better able to cope with them than others - by making their injuries less severe, thus allowing them to get "shot more often".

Yet, shoot them often enough, and they'll die just like the rest.

Should I be taking meaningful damage every time I stub my toe or get nicked by a razor?

Because that's what this is implying = all injury is meaningful injury and it all adds up cumulatively. So if I nick myself shaving enough, I will die.

Technically, yes, that is exactly what should happen. Because every time you nick yourself, you are losing blood - and there's a limited amount of that in your body. It'd take a long time, but eventually you would suffer the consequences of your careless shaving.

I do think that TB-Soak is something that did carry over from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but that it would be due to licensing agreements is ridiculous, if you look at all the other changes they've made to the line. I think it's something they just brought over without thinking it over, when WHFRP became Dark Heresy, and then it stuck.

Yep. Let's keep in mind that the Dark Heresy core rulebook and its rules were still written by the Black Industries team, which had also written the 2nd edition of WHFB. When FFG took over the Dark Heresy license, they of course had to adopt what was already there (the only alternative would've been writing a 2nd edition to DH right then), and when the other games followed they just kept these basics intact.

I have no idea why TB is still around, given the other things that were dropped over the time, though - especially in the DH2 Beta.

*other than it making it harder for Sororitas to hurt Space Marines than the other way wround, which is the real reason .

Oh, I was fine with TB when I first began playing Dark Heresy, because I just didn't see the kind of trouble it would cause later down the road. The more the characters advance, however, the more the increasing resiliance that came with stacking AP+TB opened my eyes.

And it wasn't me who, on the old forums, pointed out that the Space Marine NPC in the "Purge the Unclean" adventure was 100% impossible to harm by the Dark Eldar enemies he was fighting.

Horde rules and the Felling trait are poor band-aids that just do not address the real issue, and make it unnecessarily hard for GMs keeping combat challenging for their "toughness monsters" like that Catachan who managed to get his hands on a suit of carapace. Or that Tech-Priest who took Unnatural Toughness, The Flesh is Weak, and Dermal Armour Plating.

As I pointed out in the preceding post, there are virtually no, zero, creatures in OW or BC that are immune to small-arms fire via toughness. The superman norion is thus a phantasm. No such things exist other than giant monsters and huge robots.

In fact, NONE are, because all will be damaged by Righteous Fury 10% of the time.

Indeed, the Purge the Unclean Space Marine WOUD be injured under the new rules, because one out of 10 hits would do RF which means one out of 10 hits would prompt a Toxic (-20) Test, which he would fail 65% of the time, leading to death statistically (does math in head) after about 50 hits, which would be around 5 rounds of combat vs 10 adversaries assuming an even playing field and people just standing there shooting at each other.

EDIT: The tech-priest problem is not going to happen, because as I mentioned before there is no way for a character in BC to obtain a Toughness Bonus higher than 13 (requiring Mark of Nurgle). 9 for a non-Chaos Space Marine. The maximum possible TB for a tech-priest (Heretek) character in BC is 9, 11 on specific bionic limbs. The maximum possible TB for a player character (Ogryn) in Only War is also 9; for a non-Ogryn it is 6. There IS a problem with Mechanicus Assimilation not have any limits (what the hell) but that is another issue.