Not enuff dakka

One problem that has concerned me from early on in Dark Heresy is the lack of damage dished out by basic weapons. Without worrying about the issues of hitting being converted from d6 to %
- guardsmen with 30 Ballistic skill effectively hit on average once using semi-auto 40% of the time unless under half range, where they get 60%.

So i did the maths based on the following premise. The wounds are probably under estimated, but lets assume fatigue, un-healed wounds and the like drop them back a little.

Imperial guard, 10 Wnds, 3 Toughness bonus, 4 armour

That means a lasgun should be doing 1d10+5 if it has a penetration of 0.

Marine, 14 Wnds, 8 Toughness bonus, 8 armour

This means that a boltgun should be doing 1d10+7 with 4 penetration.

This also means that the bolt gun is going to have a better than 70% chance of taking out the guardsman. The problems are- 1 deathwatch gives every marine 19+ wounds, but you could argue they are deathwatch.. and the players expectations are already scaled. Hmm.

I think the biggest issue is how much tougher the marine is in the rpg than on the tabletop. That isn't a real problem but it makes scaling other stuff a bit tricky. And it means fighting a sea of orks is impossible. Which is a shame :p

Anyway, I think there should be a bigger gap between pistols and basic weapons, so i might experiment with these stats for lasguns and boltguns. I think I 'll leave special and heavy weapons as they are. I might increase vehicle mounted heavy weapons so they do appropriate amounts of damage but I'm happy with the hand held ones at the moment.

If anyone has any thoughts feel free to make comment.

*edit. Apparently a spacemarines bolt gun does 2d10+5... as opposed to, what? , a normal person's boltgun which is stuffed with party crackers?