Editing Plasma (section)

===8th edition crunch===
8th edition rulebook makes a rather radical departure in terms of how imperial plasma guns work in tabletop's crunch (as per fluff the overheating issue of most imperial plasma guns, barring some experimental models, remains as it was). Now a player can choose to fire his plasma weapons in normal or supercharged mode. Essentially, the ordinary overheat is not simulated for the sake of gameplay, but the overcharge fuck ups are, and you are out of the battle/the tank takes some bad damage if that happens.<br>
- On '''normal''' firing mode the gun functions normally and doesn't have any equivalent to "gets hot" rule and is safe to fire.<br>
- On '''supercharged''' mode, however, the gun gains +1 Strength and +1 Damage, but on "to hit" roll of one it suffers catastrophic meltdown that either slays the shooting model with no armor or invulnerable save allowed or inflicts mortal wounds, depending on the unit and the gun. [[wat|Due to how modifiers work in]] [[derp|8th edition this happens]] [[FAIL|more at night]], [[Awesome|but sometimes never happens at all]]. This has been fixed in 9th edition by changing the rule to specifically say "unmodified ones".

Interestingly, the idea of an overheat-less normal mode appears in the fluff before the 8th Edition. The Fantasy Flight RPGs included the option for Plasma Guns to use an alternate fuel type that would stop them from Overheating, at the cost of not being able to Overcharge at all. On a similar note, Dawn of War 2 portrays some instances of plasma guns being able to be temporarily overcharged at the cost of overheating it (though the overheating drawback isn't potentially killing its user).