Droma said:

Apologies for the sidetracking, though. I have nothing more to add to the original topic, anyways.

Kiton said:

The fact that they're all supposed to be .75 caliber.

Its the same ammunition, and the weapon shunts the round out with the initial propulsion charge before its rocket actually ignites. Pretty much every description of the bolter, explains this part, really.

But what that means is that you've got the same round with the same charge exiting with roughly the same velocity. The fact that one barrel is hooked up to a larger magazine and a fatter handle won't actually change how much force the rounds fired impact with.

Kiton said:

Both a Desert Eagle and a Barret "Light Fifty" use .50 caliber ammunition, but they're miles away in terms of power, range and penetration, so the fact that both have the same caliber proves little.

 I'm a bit late to the Inquisitor party but man, like No1 I'm floored by the claim Space Marines are less powerful in Inquisitor than they are in an FFG title.

First off, as much as I loved and played it to death, Inquisitor was such a half-baked game. It was much like Rackham's game Cadwallon in that it had novel ideas but left out critical pieces. It really was just slapping some elements from WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay into the Tabletop game. Man I still have my book somewhere, now I want to find it.

That said Space Marines were SO BAD that they could obliterate an entire team singlehandedly, didn't matter how lopsided a battle was as long as the player wasn't a complete moron he could massacre everything. On the one hand, this makes sense fluff wise (and don't tell me that codex fluff doesn't feature Movie-Marines, that has always been a disconnect between the fluff and the rules that were a couple pages afterward.), but on the other hand they were completely unplayable to the point the only solution was ramming a power breacher to the face simply to exploit the breacher's rule of always crippling an area, and that often required a flagellant hopped up on an entire scenario's worth of stimms just to get past the Marine's many many superior abilities and defenses.

I mean it says something when practically every issue of Exterminatus, the trade magazine for the game, had a discussion about how overpowered Space Marines were and tons of proposals to fix it. They sent more breath on trying to fix the Space Marine than trying to fix the game.

/rant I still loved Inquisitor but man you haven't followed the community much making a claim like that. Sorry for going off the trail.

JuankiMan said:

However, the sad absence of a canon policy means that anyone can make up their own ideas on the subject, so it is indeed moot to discuss the issue by referring to other publications. JuankiMan's suggestion that Space Marine bolter rounds should be longer is at the very least a good explanation that would work to explain the discrepancies between "weapon classes" in FFG's version of the setting, so perhaps they should adopt it for the next reprint of the book. Alternatively, I suppose it could simply be better materials; the Inquisition comes across fairly undergeared in comparison, so it would actually add to the RPGs internal consistency to drop a line on how the Space Marines' relative independence from the Imperium allowed them to retain better technology or something.

I still do not like it and consider it a hindrance, but I've come to accept that it isn't "wrong" - just a different take on the 'verse. And if one wanted to stick with that idea, these weapons do not require a change in OW as well.

WittyDroog: Can't say I agree with all parts of that statement, but in the interest of keeping this thread clean from further off-topic … interested in continueing it via private message?

Lynata said:

Human bolters are a scaled-down version of the Space Marine bolter, including the clip, so yes, human bolter rounds are indeed shorter (how much exactly it is difficult to say. I've been utterly unable to find a human and a space marine bolter in the same pic). Also, the difference could be like the difference between magnum rounds and regular ammunition: more/better propellant, higher mass, stronger propulsion for increased proyectile speed, etc. And why would they limit production of such rounds to the Astartes exclusively? For the same reason they have a monopoly on Land Raiders and other cool tech. "And with the mightiest guns will they be armed", said the Emperor.

Aditionally, could you cite where in the Codex is such a explicit claim of equality? I admitedly just skimmed my SM Codex, but I failed to find it.

JuankiMan said:

I'm pretty sure this is the ancient Witch Hunters codex written on animal hide in 500 BC to which Lynata likes to refer in the bolter discussions that pop up from time to time. The real issue here is that Lynata is mad that space marines are better than sisters of battle and will not accept that fluff has changed.

bogi_khaosa said:

That was both rude and uncalled for and, quite frankly, I was asking her.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude. I'll go slink off now.

JuankiMan said:

JuankiMan said:

Also, the fluff did not "change". GW will simply continue to work within its own vision of the setting, whereas FFG will continue to work within theirs. If, for example, you think the recent customer-driven change concerning lasgun power settings in Only War will have GW change their fluff from the 5th Edition Guard Codex, I believe you'd be mistaken as well. Thus, it quite simply does not matter what some Codex says or how old it is - for just like with any Black Library novel or comic book, it is well within FFGs rights to flesh out their own take on the 41st millennium, and if around here Space Marines are supposed to be immortal gods of war in reality and not just in myth and propaganda, then that's the way it is.

And just for clarification, I'm not "mad" that Space Marines are simply better (they should be!), I'm "mad" that they are -so much- better at and with -everything-. That is a difference I personally still consider to be unnecessary, inappropriate and counter-productive. I just don't get worked up on it anymore, except when people try to defend this version as supposedly being "more reasonable". It's a matter of personal preferences and interpretation, and we should leave it at that.

Bogi_Khaosa: No worries, you didn't really come off as rude. I've certainly heard worse in such debates. I do realise that my stance and stubbornness must be annoying to some; I just cannot resist jumping headfirst into discussions such as these, where I feel one or two things should be pointed out to raise awareness for the greater picture.

@borithan

While I generally like the idea of the Proven quality, Proven (3) doesn't do anything for boltguns. The Tearing rule ensures that Proven(3) comes into play in 4 of 100 damage rolls (1,1; 1,2; 2,1; 2,2), thus making it essentially a needless and useless complication.

@Lynata

The problem with Space Marines being a bit better is that it makes them irrelevant. As others have said, at any time there are ideally 1000000 Space Marines in the entire galaxy, meaning there's about a single company for every hundred worlds the Imperium has. Additionally, they're a logistical nightmare - their initiation process kills off the majority of aspirants and large parts of their high-end gear are used by noone else, so they'll have to supply their own stuff whether they use regular bolt shells or not.
If they don't generally turn the tide when they appear, I, as an Imperial Commander, would just petition for a few thousand more troopers rather than make use of allies that are technically not even under my command.

Space Marines, whether Death Watch or your preferred version, still have weaknesses when used outside their preferred areas of shock-trooping - they can't hold large amounts of ground because they're just too few and they're vulnerable towards anti-armour weaponry that can be moved to their position when the fighting gets stagnant and they fail to advance quickly towards their objective.

As for the horde rules, they're just an abbreviation of something that the usual system already provides, but would get bogged down in. A trooper can wound a Space Marine - it's called Righteous Fury (or Zealous Hatred, more likely) and always deals at least one point of damage despite TB and AP. So… you can roll for every attack of your fifty-man mob, roll for damage and roll for confirmation of every ten, but I think I'll go with horde rules.

Cifer said:

But yes, on a galactic scale, Space Marines in GW fluff are irrelevant. Their condition and their task in the 41st millennium simply makes them a far cry from the spearhead of human conquest they were during the Great Crusade. That doesn't mean that their arrival would not be capable of turning the tide. They remain the most powerful concentration of force in a single trooper, so if you want to fill a limited space (such as a breach in a wall or the command bunker inside an enemy stronghold) with as much power projection as possible then you'll go to the Astartes, plain and simple. That does not mean that this role could be filled by no-one else (again, Rogal Dorn's quote springs to mind) or that they are not generally nice to have, but to GW's world, they are by far not as important to the Imperium as a lot of players around here seem to think. In short, it's the important distinction between "most efficient" and "solely capable".

Case in point: Armageddon 3. In case someone missed it, this Force Organisation Chart, first printed in White Dwarf during the worldwide campaign, has recently been reprinted in the 6th edition TT rulebook. As you can see, 152 Companies from 24 Space Marine Chapters were engaged in this conflict, making it a whopping 15.200 Astartes (at the very least - I've been led to believe that, for example, Space Wolf Great Companies have more than 100 members?). If what y'all are saying would be true in GW's world, not even a tenth that number would have been more than enough to win that entire war all by themselves. Yet in the fluff, they've suffered heavy casualties, with entire Chapters being destroyed, and have now mostly withdrawn from the planet because their rapid-strike capabilities are of no use in the current stage of the war.

Imperial Guard Codex fluff specifically refers to the Space Marines as a fast reaction force that is incapable of fighting the Imperial Guard's battles for them. Personally, I like the concept of the Guard being the Emperor's Hammer, and the Marines being the Scalpel. I have a feeling, however, that a lot of people rather perceive them to be a broadsword.

There's just been a load of novels, movies and computer games catering to the idea that Space Marines need to be immortal behemoths whacking Daemon Princes around with bare fists. Whilst such interpretation is, of course, just as valid as studio fluff, I find it remarkable how such instances have seemingly been capable of shaping people's perception much stronger than the various instances of other novels and games doing the same for other armies - I've heard Gaunt's Ghosts regularly zapping CSMs left and right, for example, and even in Codex fluff we have a badass Catachan dude strangling a CSM Lord(!) to death. I can only assume the prevalent view is a mixture of both the popularity/abundance of Marine fiction compared to the other armies, as well as simple focus. Unsurprisingly, people are going to buy and read stuff about the factions they are most interested in.

Bottom line: I guess our interpretations and the sources we go by are just too different for our perceptions of the setting to be compatible.

Cifer said:

I think it's far more likely that Horde Rules were inserted to simply make a game of Deathwatch feel more "epic". Wading through an entire army, the team slaying dozens of opponents each round would just not be possible with the normal rules, and even if you grant NPCs the Righteous Fury option they'd hardly be a similar threat.

I'm actually somewhat surprised that we didn't get to see a toned down version of Horde Rules for Only War, now that you mention it (and to steer the discussion slightly towards OW again) - on one hand I suppose it would have been too deadly, but on the other I feel as if this could have been compensated by allied NPCs. This time, the players are moving within their own "Horde", after all.

Lynata said:

Since Black Crusade and Only War they do. If you roll a 10 on any damage dice your attack causes righteous fury (OW) or zealous hatred (BC).
If the attack deals damage roll 1d5, the target suffers that critical hit effect at the location with with the type of damage dealt by the weapon used (various smaller rules apply).
If the attack does no damage due to armour and toughness the attack deals one damage instead but no critical effect.

So every mook can kill every beast (except vehicle who are excempt from the 'at least 1 damage' part) in large enough numbers (and assuming there's no fear test to pass which can fuck things up quite a bit).

15.200 Space Marines is quite an impressive amount, but taking into account that both Ork and Imperial Guard numbers ranged in the billions, even that number would have barely been a blip in the Augurs if they weren't that powerful. If that were the case, Space Marines wouldn't be irrelevant on a Galactic scale, they would be irrelevant on a theatrical scale. Warhammer 40K often works on an impossibly huge scale. If a planetary invasion force numers in the tens of millions, which would be the bare minimum to engage in planetary warfare against all but the more sparsely populated Agri-Worlds, taking out, say a few thousand along a few high value targets in a single operation is still a scalpel surgery more than a broadsword swing.

Space Marines are definetly not immortal, but they're very, very difficult to kill in the fluff. Otherwise the Traitor Legions would have run out of Legionnares millenia ago, Warp time or no.