It`s been talked over elsewhere don to death some might say, the old wound+soak+armour balance, should it be changed ? if it should then how should it be changed?

here a quick summary of my view

TB should be included in initial wound generation making it Homworld + TB + d5 this should be tracked throughout the life of the character so if TB increases so do wounds. This would crank down lethality slightly but hear me out the next part is the big hitter.

TB soak should be only be used against the first hit received to each location that turn. I.e. You can shrug off a single low damage hit but a barrage of them will plink you to death.

Armour values should be left as is, this one took a long time to come to terms with but I arrived there in the end. The simple fact is boosting any of the low value gear would devalue the upper end gear too much.

thoughts?

I (rather famously by this point I think) don't see a problem with the TB mechanic, but I'll pretend that I do for purposes of this discussion.

First I think this will further unbalance autofire.

Second I think you'll have to raise armour values or otherwise things like Carapace won't do what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to be very effective against standard small arms, but as you've phrased things a lucky volley of autopistol shots will kill someone in it without much problem. Same thing for power armo(u)r.

EDIT: Wounds are themselves ablative skin armour.

You can't really change what TB does without drastically affecting the rest of the system. Like bogi says, you're likely to run into problems you didn't see coming one a particularly (un)lucky shot.

• remove Wounds (or rather, only use them on monstrous creatures with unusually high resilience)
  
• remove TB Soak
  
• any damage that passes through AP gets divided by TB and rouded up; the result goes directly into Crits
  

• adding +2 AP to Flak, Carapace and Power Armour; this also slightly expands the range of available AP on the bottom (example: AP 2 leather clothing now more different from proper flak armour)
  
• turning burst and autofire into simple damage bonuses as opposed to rolling for every hit individually, both to save time on the dice-rolling as well as to make high RoF weapons slightly less killy
  

So... every hit that gets through armour gives you a crit? I'm not seeing this.

10-year-old kicks me in the shin + I have no armour = I take critical damage

EDIT: actually.

A TB3 person will suffer the same effect from being shot with a lascannon once in the arm and being punched in the arm 11 times.

That's how it worked in Inquisitor , and if I had to choose between possibly taking too much damage and too little, I'd choose the former, simply because "too lethal" still fits better into my idea of 40k than las weapons and bolters being turned into BB guns, as is the case right now thanks to TB Skin Armour.

Narratively, a kick in the shin with no previous injury won't actually do much if you consult the list. Alternatively, if injury is already present, I'd say it's not too inconceivable it gets worsened by a kick.

(and just how often do your characters get swarmed by hordes of 10 year old kids with no weapons??)

You can't really change what TB does without drastically affecting the rest of the system. Like bogi says, you're likely to run into problems you didn't see coming one a particularly (un)lucky shot.

Yet, aside from added lethality, no-one has been able to provide any examples that this would be true.

In the Only War section, I created a thread specifically asking if anyone could find any cascade effects that would drastically affect the rest of the system. In 7 pages, I don't think there was a single example.

TB-Soak appears to be relatively self-contained, and can be tinkered with rather freely, it seems.

Adeptus Evangelion: Borderline Edition has some interesting ideas with this in their variant rules.

You can't really change what TB does without drastically affecting the rest of the system. Like bogi says, you're likely to run into problems you didn't see coming one a particularly (un)lucky shot.

Yet, aside from added lethality, no-one has been able to provide any examples that this would be true.

In the Only War section, I created a thread specifically asking if anyone could find any cascade effects that would drastically affect the rest of the system. In 7 pages, I don't think there was a single example.

TB-Soak appears to be relatively self-contained, and can be tinkered with rather freely, it seems.

If you do nothing but remove TB as soak, larger creatures like Carnifex and Daemons become sissies. This then requires fiddling with AP or altering how the Daemonic Trait works. Been there, done that, headache.

Well having left this to run a while I`ll address some of your concens.

Autofire only hits the same location twice after hitting a good few times thus the whole argument of this change making autofire super deadly doesn`t really hold much water in practice. If you have taken enough hits to get hit in the same place twice an extra 2-3 damage is the least of your problems.

As a related point: being hit by a barrage of automatic fire is meant to be deadly. Ensuring you kill what you are firing at stone dead is the entire point of shooting a hail of lead into it.

As for armour, if you increase armour values as little as +1 along the range then you get AV 5 flak armour that makes IG grunts impervious to bayonets and AV 11 power armour which when coupled to TB 3 ignores anything less dangerous than a bolter rolling full damage and this means that unless you have plasma, flamer and melta weapons convieniently lying about most acoyltes will be screwed unless they come up with something very creative.

As such unless you overhaul damage armour will be too effective will defeat the point of reducing the "skin armour" effect of toughness in the first place.

See? I told you I`d thought about this

EDIT: actually.

A TB3 person will suffer the same effect from being shot with a lascannon once in the arm and being punched in the arm 11 times.

I believe lascannon has energy type of damage and punching has impact type of damage... and if you punch and punch and punch and punch human hand trying to damage it, you will smash it in some time, don't you?