Hi, just an FYI that the new edition has been announced:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4754

There is a new message board for it as well:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/forum/391-dark-heresy-second-edition/

The entire Dark Heresy team here at FFG would like to pass on a huge thanks to everyone who participated in the beta. Your feedback, comments, and especially playtesting reports were invaluable in developing the game, and we couldn't have done it without you.

-Tim

Will this beta forum be closing, and if so, can we get an ETA? There's a bunch of quality writeups here I'd like to save for future use.

I'll check and let everyone know. We'll give plenty of notice if it does go down.

-Tim

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

Well, FFG have had two fully completed betas so far (that I know of, anyway). Only War, and Edge of the Empire.

Both of these games received virtually no changes between the end of the beta and their full releases; there were spelling corrections, minor balance changes, and some very minor systems added (minor manifestations in OW were added post-beta, as far as I know).

If we go by FFG's past, chances are DH won't change much from what we've already seen and played.

Looks good. It will be very interesting to see what this heralds as I didn't take part in the beta.

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

I can read...

• Reinforcement Characters allow players to call on the aid of powerful individuals in the Askellon Sector such as Deathwatch Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Assassins.
• Easy-to-use NPCs come with threat ratings so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.

Well, I'm quite happy to finally see the release confirmed, and I was generally pretty happy with the direction of the beta. Feel like we could have had two more testing sessions or so though, oh well. Hopefully you guys are changing a few more things based on suggestions from the forums (guardsmen bonus, accurate and called shots are things that spring to mind for me)

Anyways, excited to finally get the finished product in my hands, and hopefully see the birth of a great new line!

Glad to see it finally made it out.

1) Do we have an expected release date?

2) Is there a collector's version planned?

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

I can read...

• Reinforcement Characters allow players to call on the aid of powerful individuals in the Askellon Sector such as Deathwatch Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Assassins.
• Easy-to-use NPCs come with threat ratings so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.

But do you know that these things were not "tweaked"? My point was more about the tone of your comment. I understand that some are not happy with the first beta being essentially scrapped. But after all is said and done, you made your point about that! (Add nauseum!) How about trying to be a little more positive?

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

I can read...

• Reinforcement Characters allow players to call on the aid of powerful individuals in the Askellon Sector such as Deathwatch Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Assassins.
• Easy-to-use NPCs come with threat ratings so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.

But do you know that these things were not "tweaked"? My point was more about the tone of your comment. I understand that some are not happy with the first beta being essentially scrapped. But after all is said and done, you made your point about that! (Add nauseum!) How about trying to be a little more positive?

Not to speak for someone else, but going by FFG's previous two public betas (Only War and Edge of the Empire), there was very little in the way of substantive changes from the end of the beta to the game's release. Expecting those listed mechanics to be essentially what we've already seen is totally reasonable, given FFG's pattern. Also, both of those things were in both the original beta and the OW-ish beta - the distaste for them has nothing to do with whether one is bitter about the original beta being rolled back.

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

I can read...

• Reinforcement Characters allow players to call on the aid of powerful individuals in the Askellon Sector such as Deathwatch Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Assassins.
• Easy-to-use NPCs come with threat ratings so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.

But do you know that these things were not "tweaked"? My point was more about the tone of your comment. I understand that some are not happy with the first beta being essentially scrapped. But after all is said and done, you made your point about that! (Add nauseum!) How about trying to be a little more positive?

The concepts as seen in the Beta and described in those single sentence summaries are unredeemable. No amount of "tweaking" can save them. They both should have been thrown out or re-written whole cloth... and any worthwhile rewrites would not be described in the terms used.

Looks like the absolutely horrible Reinforcements rules seem to have survived and even worse, it sounds like the flawed and useless "threat ratings" made it in. I am very disappointed.

Nice upbeat comment! How would you know these things are unchanged?

I can read...

• Reinforcement Characters allow players to call on the aid of powerful individuals in the Askellon Sector such as Deathwatch Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Assassins.
• Easy-to-use NPCs come with threat ratings so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.

But do you know that these things were not "tweaked"? My point was more about the tone of your comment. I understand that some are not happy with the first beta being essentially scrapped. But after all is said and done, you made your point about that! (Add nauseum!) How about trying to be a little more positive?

The concepts as seen in the Beta and described in those single sentence summaries are unredeemable. No amount of "tweaking" can save them. They both should have been thrown out or re-written whole cloth... and any worthwhile rewrites would not be described in the terms used.

This is weak tea.

Classic DH had all sorts of problems, but threat ratings never numbered among the serious ones. At worst they were *sometimes* be misleading, and that's more down to the ability of the writer to eyeball the enemy - something a GM is going to have to do anyway. More than that there aren't actually any actual 'threat ratings' in the beta as we have it, just the good rule of thumb that is Threat Threshold and the same Troop/Elite/Master rankings of enemies that we've had in Deathwatch, Black Crusade, and Only War before this. I doubt anyone who was clamoring so hard for DH 2.0 to be backward compatible is going to balk at their return.

Displeasure with reinforcements is marginally more understandable... but it's at the discretion of the GM. Acolytes are only supposed to use them in rare, special circumstances, and indeed this is mostly just following a precedent set down in the Daemonhunters expansion book in DH 1.0. If a GM doesn't want reinforcements to show up, they simply won't - as a best case scenario. As a worst case, the recommendations that the GM bring down the wrath of the Acolytes's Inquisitor comes into play...

Displeasure with reinforcements is marginally more understandable... but it's at the discretion of the GM. Acolytes are only supposed to use them in rare, special circumstances, and indeed this is mostly just following a precedent set down in the Daemonhunters expansion book in DH 1.0. If a GM doesn't want reinforcements to show up, they simply won't - as a best case scenario. As a worst case, the recommendations that the GM bring down the wrath of the Acolytes's Inquisitor comes into play...

I think LuciusT referred to the problem where you need reinforcements but you don't want to call in a Canoness/Space Marine just something small like a few Tempestus Scions or maybe an Arbites investigator team. Currently, you can't do this with the Reinforcements rule even though these options would be 1000x times more useable. The whole rule is kinda' like a waste of space in the rulebook...

Displeasure with reinforcements is marginally more understandable... but it's at the discretion of the GM. Acolytes are only supposed to use them in rare, special circumstances, and indeed this is mostly just following a precedent set down in the Daemonhunters expansion book in DH 1.0. If a GM doesn't want reinforcements to show up, they simply won't - as a best case scenario. As a worst case, the recommendations that the GM bring down the wrath of the Acolytes's Inquisitor comes into play...

I think LuciusT referred to the problem where you need reinforcements but you don't want to call in a Canoness/Space Marine just something small like a few Tempestus Scions or maybe an Arbites investigator team. Currently, you can't do this with the Reinforcements rule even though these options would be 1000x times more useable. The whole rule is kinda' like a waste of space in the rulebook...

Not to defend the Reinforcements system, but you can use other characters than what's printed. The rules say that if you don't want to use one of the options presented, all you need to do is just go through the regular character creation process but with "additional experience".

Yeah, the system is literally "you can play as the better, stronger, cooler character you went through the bother of creating, but only sometimes ." 'Waste of space' is a pretty good descriptor.

Classic DH had all sorts of problems, but threat ratings never numbered among the serious ones. At worst they were *sometimes* be misleading, and that's more down to the ability of the writer to eyeball the enemy - something a GM is going to have to do anyway. More than that there aren't actually any actual 'threat ratings' in the beta as we have it, just the good rule of thumb that is Threat Threshold and the same Troop/Elite/Master rankings of enemies that we've had in Deathwatch, Black Crusade, and Only War before this. I doubt anyone who was clamoring so hard for DH 2.0 to be backward compatible is going to balk at their return.

You are clearly misunderstanding or mis-remembering Threat Ratings from the Beta. In the Beta each adversary template was assigned a numeric value, representing it's Threat Rating and there was a lengthy section detailing what sum of numeric threat ratings represented an appropriately balanced encounter for a group of Acolytes with a given amount of Exp. Essentially DH 2.1 was trying to replicate the ( flawed) D&D concept of Challenge Rating.

The problems with this are simply too many to fully enumerate... However, at the most central we have the assumption a Feral World Warrior who has invested 600 exp in Weapon Skill and combat related Talents can handle the same challenges, as defined by the these Threat Ratings, as a Hive World Sage who has invested 600 exp in Lore skills. The degree of "eyeballing" required by the GM in these circumstances alone is so great as to make the entire system a waste of pages which could be put to better use.

Displeasure with reinforcements is marginally more understandable... but it's at the discretion of the GM. Acolytes are only supposed to use them in rare, special circumstances, and indeed this is mostly just following a precedent set down in the Daemonhunters expansion book in DH 1.0. If a GM doesn't want reinforcements to show up, they simply won't - as a best case scenario. As a worst case, the recommendations that the GM bring down the wrath of the Acolytes's Inquisitor comes into play...

I think LuciusT referred to the problem where you need reinforcements but you don't want to call in a Canoness/Space Marine just something small like a few Tempestus Scions or maybe an Arbites investigator team. Currently, you can't do this with the Reinforcements rule even though these options would be 1000x times more useable. The whole rule is kinda' like a waste of space in the rulebook...

Not to defend the Reinforcements system, but you can use other characters than what's printed. The rules say that if you don't want to use one of the options presented, all you need to do is just go through the regular character creation process but with "additional experience".

Yeah, the system is literally "you can play as the better, stronger, cooler character you went through the bother of creating, but only sometimes ." 'Waste of space' is a pretty good descriptor.

It's literally saying to the players... nice job, now stand aside and let my super-powerful NPCs who are the Real Heroes save the day, but here I'll you play them for this scene.

It's literally saying to the players... nice job, now stand aside and let my super-powerful NPCs who are the Real Heroes save the day, but here I'll you play them for this scene.

Ouch. I read it as the players creating these backup characters, but the GM handing them out colors it in an especially unflattering light. What a failure of a rule...

Not to defend the Reinforcements system, but you can use other characters than what's printed. The rules say that if you don't want to use one of the options presented, all you need to do is just go through the regular character creation process but with "additional experience".

Actually, you can't, because you can't calculate their Influence costs as the generation rules are completely broken and will result in hilarious things like a humble Tempestus Scion costing more than a Canoness.

I don't have problems with the idea of the Reinforcements rule though. Taking the super-inflexible classes into account, sometimes it is necessary to have a backup character for situations where my original character is useless. It is just... very unsophisticated in its current form.

Can anyone tell me why I should be excited?

Not being negative asking that; just the opposite in fact. Long ago I played the Inquisitor game from Games Workshop, and I have Deathwatch, Rogue Trader and Black Crusade books. I've also seen the Only War book and had no problem with it. Seen some people saying DH2ndEd is just Only War. But I want to get into the Inquisition and Acolyte side of things.

At the same time I've been looking into starting fresh with Star Wars RPG's. But I don't want to run both SW and 40K.

Two things I've always liked about the 40K RPG's:

Character creation.

Being able to create my own Adversaries and NPC's.

Can anyone tell me why I should be excited?

Flexible character creation and advancement.

Revised psychic rules.

Expanded social interactions rules.

Investigation guidelines and suggestions.

The ability to play an Inquisitor.

Compatible with the other 40K RP games (I know people are down on that, but I see it as a big plus)

Can anyone tell me why I should be excited?

Flexible character creation and advancement.

Revised psychic rules.

Expanded social interactions rules.

Investigation guidelines and suggestions.

The ability to play an Inquisitor.

Compatible with the other 40K RP games (I know people are down on that, but I see it as a big plus)

Now I'm excited! Thank you

I want to run my Dark Heresy alongside Rogue Trader and Black Crusade. Perhaps a bit of Deathwatch. So I see compatibility as a big plus too.

Expanded social interactions sounds good too.