I too for various reasons am not so hot about Toughness bonus reducing Damage. So I have been thinking hard about an easy, quick-to-learn and a bit more deadly alternative.

So far this is the one I came up with: Toughness Bonus does not reduce Damage, instead it is a sort of buffer against Critical Hits (not originally my idea, have been reading so much DH-related stuff in forums that I can't really remember where I nicked this). When a Character reaches 0 Wounds he starts to take Critical Damage. Critical Damage is the amount of Wounds he go would below zero minus his Toughness Bonus.

Example: Zerg the Unflammable has TB of 3 and 3 Wounds remaining. He takes a lasgun hit which deals him 9 points of damage. First three points lower his Wounds to 0 and then he takes a level 3 Critical (9-3 = 6, 6-3 = 3).

This would make the system a bit more deadly and would lessen the probability of Characters being invulnerable to small arms fire.

I am also thinking to make every hit that the Character takes at 0 Wounds deal one level of Fatigue at minimum. Then even if the Character would not take any Critical damage he would take on point of Fatigue.

Also thinking to perhaps up the AP of some or all of the Armours a little. This would be to represent the fact that a Carapace Armour should really be able to stop small arms fire. And perhaps I'll also incorporate some kind of an Armour degradation system while I'm on the roll.


So what do you think about the Toughness bonus change? I probably should mention that my next campaign will contain quite little fighting and probably quite lightly armoured & armed Acolytes and bad guys.

Have a look here; similiar thread in Only War:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/92739-why-is-toughness-bonus-body-armour-should-it-be-changed/

If you want to remove soak from TB you should pershaps also consider adding the value to Wounds total or otherwise rework the Wounds score to make TB useful.

I would not use TB as critical resitance - then you're basically back to the original mechanic, only it now only applies to crits! That's even more clunky than before...or?

In essence, your rule lets Toughness Bonus work as per the standard rules, but only once a character has reached 0 wounds - is this correct?

I suppose this is another way to deal with the issue, and it is less clunky than the Inquisitor -inspired version I had in mind. Your idea makes sure that people get injured easier, whilst then "re-establishing" the classic TB soaks once things get dicey. It's a quick and simple fix.

The increased resilience once characters find themselves could be regarded as a boon (mercy) or a curse (realism). A possible compromise could be to have each succeeding attack that punches through the armour of a critically injured character confer a -1 penalty to TB, even if the remaining damage is neutralised entirely by the character's Toughness. This way, a character will become less and less able to resist incoming damage the more he or she gets hurt.

Personally, I wouldn't touch armour at all, but this is admittedly entirely a matter of fluff interpretation. I'm biased towards the official codices, so in my understanding of the 41st millennium, not even Space Marine armour offers full protection against small arms fire, much less "mere" carapace. But they sure help.

Do you already have a good idea on how to track armour degradation without it becoming "too much", by the way?

And yes, as the Green Knight mentioned, feel free to take a stroll through that other thread.

If I was to ajdust TB rules at all (and truth be told it`s not been keeping me up at night) I`d just allow penetration to negate it like armour.

I already use this tweak for my "generic mook" class of npcs.

That said I also have a preference for lowering weapon`s nonrandom damage component and granting them extra pen instead. this way they more reliably do damage without being death on a stick if I want to throw in some lower grade foes later on.

The simplest solution would be to drop TB soak, and increase Armour soak by 4 points.

To make Toughness still matter, you could make hp = TB*2+d5.

The solution we're going with, is the Inquisitor game's injury mechanics. Making that work is pretty straightforward. The biggest challenge for us was designing new crit tables around the DH2.3 beta's condition mechanics, and there's no reason you have to do the same.

The increased resilience once characters find themselves could be regarded as a boon (mercy) or a curse (realism). A possible compromise could be to have each succeeding attack that punches through the armour of a critically injured character confer a -1 penalty to TB, even if the remaining damage is neutralised entirely by the character's Toughness. This way, a character will become less and less able to resist incoming damage the more he or she gets hurt.

Do you already have a good idea on how to track armour degradation without it becoming "too much", by the way?

And yes, as the Green Knight mentioned, feel free to take a stroll through that other thread.

The -1 TB per hit towards a Critically injured character sounds good, thanks for the idea

What comes to armour degradation I was thinking about something like this: every time the armour is 'breached' (Damage < AP), make a note. Once the armour has notes equal to its AP, it degrades, lowering the AP by one.

Perhaps I'll also replace the d5 roll from the Starting Wounds with TB. Unnatural Toughness will also probably soak Damage as the original Toughness bonus, or maybe I'll just up the Wounds of the Unnaturally Tough critters when needed.

One other thing I have been thinking about is to take track keeping of Acolytes Wounds to myself. Thus only describing the injuries to them in a narrative way and of course telling them when they are going Critical I'll have to consult my players what they think about it but I think they will like it. We (at least I) usually like to play more narratively styled games, where violence is rare, nasty and deadly.

Read the Only War -thread, but it went too much into arguing . Besides, I don't own OW and my BC is somehow misplaced somewhere at the moment...

Thanks for the comments, everyone!