OHHI!
Here be the list of rules and house errata used in the current campaign. Broadly categorised.
HORDE RULESHordes are going to be a big thing in the campaign. As I suspect it is in many Deathwatch games, judging from the forums. If you read this, keep the magical number
20 in mind. At horde magnitude 20, the horde gets +2D10 damage and extra 2 attacks. So, 2 x Mag20 hordes can make more attacks than a size 40 horde, but obviously the damage output is more fragile. Also, pinning and breaking rules work based on the horde size.
So, extra rules:
Hordes with enough Wounds are tougher: Hordes composed of creatures that have at least 15 Wounds get +1 bonus to their toughness bonus for every full 5 Wounds. The bonus may get multiplied by Unnatural Toughness and other traits. The main reason for this is that some creatures are clearly designed to be Wound-soaks, but in Hordes they lose their party piece.
Hordes can dodge: Hordes magnitute 19 and less can dodge semi-auto and full auto bursts. Horde suffers a penalty to Agility equal to its magnitude. At least 1 round will still hit the horde. The main reason for this is a lot of creatures of Troop strength seem to have a high agility and bonuses to Dodge, but putting them into a Horde makes them lose their party piece.
Hordes can be split: When players shoot the horde with targeted weapons (ie, not Blast weapons), they can pick where the rounds land in a big horde. If they land enough shots to put at least 2m of space between horde members, the horde is split, with all the consequences. So, place your shots
Hordes are cover of the appropriate size: Hordes magnitude 20 and above are solid enough to count as cover. The size of the cover is the size of the creature. Bearing in mind that most critters of Space Marine strength are Hulking size and larger.
Righteous Fury: Getting Righteous Fury on a horde lets you cause additional casualties. Roll 1D10: divide result by 3 rounding up, another 0 means 3 casualties and keep rolling. The main reason for this is the uselessness of Righteous Fury against Hordes: scale of the damage doesn't matter, once inflicted, and you need to be able to inflict damage to get the benefit of Righteous Fury. So... pointless. This means a 0 on a damage roll against a horde results in a higher bodycount.
COMBATCover & Cover Strength: This is more a... makes-more-sense expansion to the rather brief cover rules in Deathwatch core book. Essentially, cover adds extra armour to the concealed location. Which is fine, when you are simply trying to blast through it with a powerful enough weapon. However, taking cover around the corner of a building means 2 things: the wall is on a very acute angle to the projectile (deflecting, rather than absorbing it), and the player/NPC has the entire length of the wall to use for absorption. It makes little sense to afford the same cover as simple blast-through.
So, whenever a target is taking cover behind a sufficiently thick and sturdy object, the shots that hit the covered location automatically do no damage. Think... building, wreckage and corridor corners, the long ends of computer banks, several thick trees, etc...
Disengaging from melee: This is more a clarification. To break from a melee, a 'Move' type action must be used. This means no Semi-Auto or Full-Auto bursts while retreating from a horde... Sorry Brunhilde, but too powerful to be left alone. However, once you mount a suspensor on the Heavy Bolter, you can full auto as a half action anyway.
Shooting into melee: I don't like the shooting into melee simple penalty. It's a leftover from Warhammer Fantasy, which distinctly lacked automatic weapons. The penalty still applies; however when burst or full auto fire is used and multiple hits are scored; some of the rounds may hit a friendly target. The relative sizes and numbers of the creatures are used to allocate hits (with friendly targets last allocated). The sizes count in multiples of 2 as they go up.
Example 1: A Space Marine is engaging a Chaos Space Marine in melee. They are both hulking size. So if multiple hits are scored from burst or full auto fire, the 'good' Space Marine will catch the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc... bullet.
Example 2: A Space Marine is engaging 4 orks in melee. The SM is hulking, while the orks are normal, but there are 4 of them. SM size count: 2; Ork size count: 4. Therefore 3rd, 6th, 9th etc... round will hit the space marine
Example 3: A Space Marine is fighting a Hive Tyrant in Melee. SM is hulking, the Hive Tyrant is Massive. That's a size count of 2 to 8; so a space marine will catch 5th, 10th, etc...
Example 4: Same as 3, except there are 2 friendly SMs. The size count becomes 4 to 8, so every 3rd round will hit one of the friendly marines.
Modified Melee Defenses: One of the biggest issues we discovered during the high-level play is the fact that ranged weapons benefit from ridiculously high skills (Brunhilde's devastator regularly reaches 130 skill rating, resulting in no less than 4 hits scored in a full auto burst), but melee weapons do not (1 attack is 1 attack, even if you have 120 skill). A parry skill rating of over 95 is a regular occurrence, and this essentially means that a Space Marine can parry a greater daemon of Khorne's (or as was our case - an Avatar of the Blood God) attacks with... pretty much complete impunity. It was all-or-nothing: once a hit was parried or dodged, degrees of success or source of the attack did not matter at all. This, in turn, turns melee into 'who has more attacks', rather than the relative skill of the combatants.
So, to turn the all-or-nothing melee combat into something more granular, the melee attack and defense rules are modified, using the steps below:
1) The attacker must have either the unnatural strength (representing sheer power), or the unnatural agility (representing finesse and speed). The attacker rolls and degrees of success on attack are noted.
2) The defender uses either dodge or parry to defend against the attack. No special attributes are needed to defend against the rolls from an attacker with unnatural characteristics. The defender rolls and the degrees of success on the defensive rolls are noted.
3) Compare the degrees of success between attacker and defender. If the defender has more, the attack has been successfully parried/dodged and no damage is done. If the attacker wins by between 1 and 4 degrees of success, the result is a 'glance'. If the attacker wins by more than 5 degrees of success, the result is a 'partial parry/dodge'
On a glance, the attack loses it's penetration, and the damage is reduced by the defenders SB (if parry) or AB (if dodge). The original thought was to have the attacker lose damage based on the attacker's SB, but the math needed to do this was getting messy. It is far easier to have the defender just add their SB to their toughness and armor.
On a partial parry/dodge, the attack retains its penetration, and the damage is reduced by half of the defender's SB (if parry) or AB (if dodge), but ONLY if the defender has that unnatural characteristic. A partial parry is effectively having the attacker get 5 or more degrees of success OVER the defender's. This is a prime example of where all-or-nothing rules result in some ridiculous scenarios.
4) Roll the damage and apply as normal. Any damage reduction from glancing or partial parries are subtracted from the damage (they do not add to TB or Armor, for purposes of other rules).
One goal of these rules was to avoid increasing the melee damage. None of the possible combinations of attackers and defenders DoS will result in attacker getting bonus damage. This is somewhat in contrast to ranged attacks, where additional hits mean more bullets (and additional damage), but this is deliberate for two reasons: 1) the proper defense against ranged attacks is cover, not skill; and 2) the attacker's SB is the major damage factor in melee, compared to ranged, which is usually additional dice. So while the ranged attacks can have more hits, their damage is not as 'guaranteed' as a melee strike.
NEW ACTION: Dive for coverType: Reaction
Subtype: Movement
Dive for cover is a variant of Dodge that may be used against semi-automatic and automatic fire. It works exactly like Dodge, with the following modifications: the character may move up their agility, but only towards cover from the shooter; the character ends prone and automatically pinned; every 2 degrees of success negates an additional hit from the burst (this is on top of the 1 hit per DoS from normal dodge)
[[Notes:]] The main reason I want an action like this is the fact there are a ton of bonuses for the attacker with automatic weapons, but almost none for the defender. This doesn't provide additional bonuses to the roll, but allows a GOOD roll to avoid additional hits; at the cost of prone + pinned, which is quite harsh. This is the last-ditch attempt at self-preservation when a full auto burst is about to wipe a character/NPC out.
SUPPRESSING FIRE: Slightly modifiedOne of the problems I found in our first couple of sessions is the supreme power of suppressing fire from
any weapon capable of full auto fire. It's the
any that's causing the fuss. It's true that personal full-auto weapons were invented to let people provide their own covering/suppressing fire on the run. However, I find the idea that a personal small arm can cover a 45 degree arc full of enemies a little... unlikely. That job should fall to the static and more heavy automatic weapons actually capable of spewing out lead, plasma, las0rs, etc... enough to make a whole army keep its head down.
So. Only Heavy and Mounted weapon types use the description of the Suppressing Fire action in Deathwatch rulebook. Other weapons (Basic, Pistols, Other) use a modified version: their suppressing effect only covers either a 5-meter corridor in a chosen direction, or no more than 3 targets at most 15 meters apart.
MISSION TEMPLATE SUBSTITUTEMission template is awesome... but feels inappropriate for what turned out (at least on the planning paper) to be a pretty random-prone campaign. However, the rules on XP, renown and requisition are based around the mission structure. Most of this has been discussed, but it's worth putting up here for record.
Gear is kept between 'missions': Unlike the standard mission template, gear issued to the Kill/Science Team stays with them as long as they can hold on to it. This means once a player requisitions an item, weapon or wargear it is theirs to use until broken, lost, depleted or returned (see next rule). Everything must be paid for with requisition. The only exception is standard weapon ammo (bolts for bolters, flame cannisters for flamers, charge packs for las weapons, 3 frag and 3 krak grenades), which is free with the weapon purchase and refills any time the players are at an appropriate location (their ship, an armory with suitable items or called a replenishment drop pod). NOTE FOR SPECIAL AMMO: Ammunition in special ammo clips is counted and recorded between missions. These do not replenish.
Requisition is refilled, not set: Rites of Battle has rules for refilling requisition mid-mission. Since the mission structure is gone, those rules become the defacto requisition rewards for the campaign. Essentially, the players' requisition pool is increased for completing objectives (many of which may not be obvious). The requisition rewarded is approximately 1/3 of the mission guidelines. This reduction is the balancing point to the persistent wargear rule above. Requisition may also be filled by returning/recovering wargear at 2/3 of the requisition cost.
XP & Renown: XP and renown are awarded and may be spent/accounted for when the player characters have 'downtime'. This may result in long, multi-session drops lasting without rewards with a big one at the end. So be it.
Leader, Oath & Cohesion: The Kill/Science Team may change leader, oath and reset their cohesion with sufficient downtime (around 4 hours ingame time), to pray, do the rituals, etc... It's especially worth noting that Techmarines can now take the Oath of Knowledge (errata)
PSYCHIC/LIBRARIAN POWWAHSCouple of notes, mostly to do with force weapons. Also, a friendly reminder that you add 5xPR to your willpower when casting, so all those failed Avenger castings in the first session... actually succeeded.
Force Weapon: Just a clarification of the rules + errata. When using a Force weapon in melee for any purpose (including Parry, Manoeuvre, etc...), the force weapon property may either be on or off. If 'off', it is a regular melee weapon. Expensive if broken by a power field. If 'on', a power level must be selected (Fettered, Unfettered or Pushed), and the skill test replaces the Focus Power test to determine psychic phenomena.
For ease of use, if psychic powers are available, it's assumed all parries are done at the Fettered level - there are no bonuses for higher power levels.
Force weapon channeling: When the force weapon damages an opponent, the attacker may take make an opposed Focus Power test, dealing 1D10 per degree of success. Psy rating does not limit the damage potential, however the chosen power level affects the bonus to Willpower on this test. If the recipient is also a psyker, he/she too has to choose a power level to defend against the channelling. In short, psyker v psyker melee combat will likely result in a TON of psychic phenomena. This should also prevent the ridiculous outcome where a low-level psyker can use the channeling to beat up a hive tyrant.
Power Tests & Rerolls/Fatepoints In all cases only the first roll counts for the purposes of Psychic phenomena, which occurs even if the result is rerolled. Eg: Rolling 88 is a failed Focus Power test. Using a fate point rolls 23, which is a success. Psychic phenomena still occurs. Same vice versa.
HEAVY BOLTER CLIPS & SPECIAL AMMOSome errata on this, specifically regarding the special issue ammunition.
Bolter Ammunition Backpack: This thing is actually a large belt (250 round) of heavy bolter ammunition. I've mistakenly used it to hold 4x60round belts. It is only useful for a heavy bolter. Only 1 clip is supplied. If a belt-fed heavy bolter jams, it needs to be cleared and reloaded just like any other weapon, however instead of losing the entire belt, 2d5 x 10 rounds are lost, instead.
Special Ammunition: Special Ammo can be bought as clips (60 rounds) or as a backpack (250 round) at the errata cost of +5 / +15 per clip. The Hellfire ammunition changes the fire rate to single shot only, but gives it a blast quality. It makes little sense to me to either give a single shot (ie, 1 clip = 1 shot) or the full ammo belt (60 shells at single fire). So, the rule is Hellfire clip gives 6 shots, and a backback gives 25 (same as number of bursts of normal bolter ammo).
COHESIONRules that I found to be... missing.
SM dropping out of Squad Mode: If a Space Marine drops out of squad mode for any reason whatsoever, the squad loses a point of Cohesion. No saves, nothing to prevent this. STAY TOGETHER!
More to come as we play, I'm sure.
