How does penetrating officially work?

[JCR]

Greetings!

I am fairly new to 6e and only slightly familiar w/ 4e so I still have a lot of questions and confusions about certain aspects of game. In this case I would appreciate an official clarification on how Penetration actually works. I had a side note about this on another post and someone pretty much confirmed what I understood how it works:

" Um, Penetrating doesn't mean that all damage goes through, but rather that a certain amount gets through.  So if the 4d6 rolled, say, 6-4-3-2, the 15 total would have bounced against your 20 rPD, but at least 5 BODY would get through (2 from the 6, and 1 each from the 4, 3, and 2).  On average, 4 BODY would have gotten through with each shot.  Still hurts a lot, but not instantly fatal." this is a quote from BoloOfEarth in that other topic.

The peculiar issue I am having is that my GM is convinced that penetrating means that ALL damage goes thru unless your defenses have the Impenetrable add to them. In which case using the above example when he rolled the 4d6 and got 6-4-3-2, I suffered a total of 15 damage even if my resistant defenses where 20.

Now I really don't have a problem if it works one way or the other, but I would prefer an official clarification, because depending on the actual way it works is how our characters will have to be built. Thank you!

[Steve Long]

Your GM is incorrect (unless, of course, he wants to change how the Advantage works -- it's his campaign, of course). As described by the rules on 6E1 342, Penetrating means that a certain amount of the damage gets through, based on the amounts shown on the dice. I haven't double-checked the math in the example you gave, but the methodology is accurate.