Editing Plasma (section)

=== Gets Hot ===
This is basically the ''ONE'' downside of plasma weapons. They have a chance to overheat to the point where it explodes in the user's face. If any of a plasma weapon's shooting dice come up 1, the model has to make a save (armor or invulnerable) or take a wound. To multi-wound models, this is a noticeable dent, and to most models, which only have one wound, it's potentially deadly. Vehicles were immune to this rule until 6th Edition; with the advent of Hull Points, they now lose one Hull Point unless they save on a 4+.

Still, a lot of players aren't really concerned with this because of the simple fact that plasma is one of the most easily-accessible anti-armor weapons there is to IG, SM, and CSM players. Besides, it's not like you're rolling a 1 every turn, right? In any event, if your plasma gunner(s) are power armored, you usually won't care, although bad luck can cause a pretty nasty waste of points sometimes. If they are guardsmen, you have reserves so, again, you won't care, other than about the gun itself a bit.

It's a common belief that when a plasma weapon gets hot it always explodes and like many common beliefs, it's totally wrong. What happens most of the time is the weapon's fail-safe mechanism makes an emergency heat dump in order to avoid the containment breach and explosion (sometimes, albeit rare, plasma guns do experience meltdown and an explosion). Unfortunately for the wielder, this "heat dumping" takes the form of a cloud of superheated steam, hot enough to boil the unfortunate wielder's flesh alive. While such occurrences are almost guaranteed to be lethal to unarmored shooters, a Space Marine's power armour could provide some measure of protection from it.

Note that all of the previous paragraph is nullified in 8th edition; see the section below: