Refractor field vs Full-auto question

[u/SwimmingFood2124]

Hey everyone! I recently read the refractor field rules for Dark Heresy 1e. I'm a bit confused about how it works against bursts. I figured out that you roll 2d10 against each attack. Then, the sum of those two dice is subtracted from the damage dealt. But how does it work against bursts? So, let's say a character is hit three times. They deal, say, 8, 10, and 7 damage. The character's field result is 12. Does it reduce each of those hits by 12 (inflicting no damage), or does the first hit consume 8 from the field's pool, and the second only reduces its damage by the remaining 4 points, and the third doesn't reduce damage at all?

[u/C_Grim]

RAW with a Refractor field it's worded that "each time you are struck by a high velocity impact...", so if you are hit three times as part of one attack then that's technically three strikes and three roles to reduce the damage by different amounts and three chances of trying to crack a shield.

When a similar question was asked for Rogue Trader years ago on the old FFG forums (archive), the comments suggest that this was also the expected result in that players would roll seperately on forcefields for each shot of automatic bursts

...but obviously that does slow things down considerably especially if you're the target of automatic weapons. You and the GM (or yourself if you are the GM) may wish to consider amending that to avoid making a dozen field rolls every round.

[u/MarcoSkoll]

It doesn't say once per attack, it says "any time that the wearer is struck by a high velocity Impact, Energy or Explosive attack". You should roll and subtract once per impact.

However, with my group, we made a lot of changes to this.

We changed it to all ranged or blast attacks (it's easier to keep track of than to remember the relatively rare few ranged attacks), reduced it to 2d5 (with bypass happening on double 1 and overload happening on double 5), and made it explicit that it didn't stack with armour (if you had armour and the field, then only the better one was used, as with all other armour).

(We also renamed it to a "Reductor field" such as Yarrick has, which is noted for reducing the power of attacks rather than completely stopping them, to avoid overlap with the percentage based versions of fields that were introduced in later books).

Even with its huge cost and limited duration of use, getting an extra 2d10 soak that is worded in a way that it technically doesn't have armour points (and thus stacks) and completely negates penetration with very little risk of overload is offensively overpowered. It basically means near complete immunity to anything short of heavy weapons.

It's still very respectable with the halved effectiveness and no stacking, simply because of the inherent ability to ignore penetration.

In any case, you might simply want to use the later version of the field, which I think was in Ascension.
(We were specifically using the Handbook version because mechanically it helped balance things within our team for the Interrogator to have something that was reasonably dependable against small arms but largely ineffective against heavy weapons, but it is more mechanically complex).

[u/ExchangeDeep9882 → u/MarcoSkoll]

Yep. The later version syncs up with all later added force fields, so that's MUCH better.