Full-Auto Burst

I played a couple of quickly made-up combat scenarios for Dark Heresy to get an idea of the deadliness that the system has. My conclusion? I hope you have a lot of Fate Points. This was also an exercise to aid me in remembering the rules after being used to a d20 system for so long.

The first scenario was a bounty hunter cornering his quarry in a small drinking hole on a backwater agri planet. I had both characters wearing flak jackets; the bounty hunter had a good quality stub gun (a basic solid projectile pistol), an assortment of different ammunition types, and a chainsword (the chainsword wasn't necessary but chainswords are one of the many iconic things that make the 41st millenium so awesome). His recidivistic opponent had a compact autopistol (essentially a micro-SMG or fully-automatic machine-pistol) and a knife.

I actually illustrated part of the bounty hunter/recidivist encounter but I doubt I'll be finishing it because I drew the frames too small to add any detail.

Anyway, it turns out that neither character had many favourable conditions and their fire-fight was mostly misses. Eventually the bounty hunter got hit by a lucky shot from his opponent and I just had him charge over the bar's counter at the criminal. Then we had close-quarters combat. The melee was much more violent and although he had a head wound from the gunfight, the bounty hunter made mincemeat out of the recidivist. One Righteous Fury roll later and the recidivist was just a pile of gore, guts, and splintered bone.

The lesson learned from this battle: gunfights can be all down to luck. Without favourable conditions, there will be a lot of misplaced shots and wasted ammunition. However, a single lucky shot has the potential to kill you outright (or at least severely wound you); chainswords are horrific thanks to their tearing quality (roll an extra dice for damage, discard lowest dice); and running away will not always save you.

This battle could have gone either way at the beginning because of the poor conditions the gun fight was in. Both characters had good cover and neither could advance to a better position without putting themselves out in the open. Once the combat got into melee it became a little more one-sided. I think the recidivist still had a chance, but the bounty hunter only really needed to land one solid hit with his chainsword to kill his opposing combatant.

I asked Nick to help me out with the next one. It was to be a small five-member kill team busting in on a small, illegally conducted ceremony and mowing the cultists down. The cult leader would be the only cultist armed. These weren't your regular fanatical followers of the ruinous powers, they were just misguided souls unknowingly lead to corruption by their manipulative leader.

So Nick played the kill team squad leader. We rolled up initiative as the door to the dry sewer was kicked open and the unarmed cultists start panicking and running for the exits.

At this point we discovered the terrifying power of autoguns (fully-automatic assault rifles) in the hands of trained gunmen. Because the area wasn't particularly large, and because the kill team troopers were firing their autoguns on full-auto, the cultists dropped like flies. There was hardly any point in seeing which part of the body got hit with every shot since the bullets were flying so thick and fast, with the troopers getting so many degrees of success, that everyone in the crowd of cultists was getting hit, and since none of them were armoured most of them went down in one or two impacts. Since they were fighting unarmed cultists, perhaps I should have equipped the troopers with dum-dum rounds for their autoguns.

After the wall of bullets hit the cultists and mowed most of them down, there were two survivors. One fled down an access tunnel, pursued by two members of the kill team. Nick's trooper and the two remaining troopers went for the cultist leader who fired wildly at his assailants. It seems a rifle butt is not as accurate a way to take someone down when compared to a hail of lead. Hardly surprising. Suffice to say, Nick couldn't land a blow on the cultist, despite going all out several times and sacrificing his ability to defend himself in order to land his attacks.

The cultist stabbed Nick's trooper, but couldn't get past the carapace armour and the kill team leader's natural toughness. The same result came from a point-blank shot to the arm. It seems that carapace armour really does amplify the Emperor's protection. Nick finally landed a take down hit, stunning the cult leader. The other two kill team troopers managed to grapple and subdue the dazed heretic, pinning him to the ground.

After giving the dissident a chance to redeem himself, Nick had his enforcer pull out his stub gun pistol and perform the coup-de-grace.

The lesson learned here: if you're up against well-trained autogun-wielding assailants, you had better have some kind of elaborate plan to save your hide because otherwise you're going to be acquiring a lot of improvised ventilation. In other words, if the Acolytes know they're going to be facing a kill team like this one, they had better be on the other side of the planet when the team breaks down their door. And there had better be some frag grenades set to go off in the hallway when that door is broken down.