During our time of playing Dark Heresy a few house rules have cropped up into the game, some that has been with us since playing WFRP 1st edition (Technical Knock-out and Perfect Hits). I just thought I would share these thoughts, and see what you fellow players and gamemasters think of them.

Blessings of the Warp
When a psyker or sorcerer rolls a 10 on any of the dice rolled for power manifestation, he may choose to recieve the blessing of the warp -> gaining more power for greater risk. For each 10 rolled on the initial dice rolled (not additional dice from this rule) he may roll another 1d10 and add to the power manifestation roll. However this carries greater risk, and these "blessings" of the warp cause psychic phenomena on a roll of 7,8 or 9.

Technical Knock-out
Whenever a hit to the head occurs, there is a damage dealt x 5% risk that the character is knocked out for 1d10 minutes.

Perfect hit
No defense against damage is perfect as every armour has weak spots, and each person has vulnerable spots that can be hit with a lucky blow or shot. As a result any double roll (11, 22, 33, 44, etc.) on an attack roll that is a successful attack, ignore armour and toughness bonus for the purpose of dealing damage.

Crafting - Time
The crafting rules as written in The Inquisitors Handbook made little sense to me, in that it did not matter how well you rolled when it comes to reducing the time needed towards completing what you where trying to create, but when you fail it greatly increase the time needed to complete the work. As such the time needed is not only reduced by the time interval as described, but the Degree of Success on the roll is also deducted from the time needed.

Firing Squads - Group Fire
When a group of at least 5 characters is firing weapons at the same target or targets (count this as firing into an area with a radius of 5 meters), their weapons fire is treated as a single automatic fire attack. Make one roll with the average of the characters BS, and for each Degree of Success allocate one hit to a target in the firing zone. Damage caused are in this order; least powerful weapon, medium damage potential, maximum damage potential, and then over again. Roll hit location randomly. The maximum number of hits is equal to the number of characters participating in the firing squad. Automatic weapons gain no special bonus to the effect of causing more hits when using these group fire rules. ANd further facing fire from a firing squad causes Pinning just as Covering Fire does.

I miss the ol' Fumble-charts too. Hilarious, but always happened at the most inconvenient times. However, the extensions to Perfect Hits, on Doubles below or equal to your WS (BS) led to some long and tedious discussions involving probability. The short version is that 99 and 00 are both doubles, and "spectacular failures", while the lowest "good" double would be 11. This means more failures than successes, and the solution would then be to treat 00 as a zero rather than a 100. I do this anyway, as it allows for the "Easy DoS" rule, which I heartily recommends.

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Easy DoS
Whenever rolling a test, the 10's digit is also your DoS.
Example: Bob shoots Greg, at short range using Semi Auto for a total bonus of +20 to his BS, which is 30. His effective BS for this test is 50, and he rolls 34.

Under the Easy DoS rules, this is a hit with 3 Degrees of Success. That being resolved simply by looking at the first die (the one showing 10's).

This means that you want to roll as high as possible, under your threshold, rather than as low as possible. The statistics are the same, however, you have just as much chance of scoring the same number of DoS as you have under the normal rule. The higher your effective threshold, the higher you can roll and still pass the test. And the more DoS you can achieve. But this saves you from a calculation on every test, and they add up. In a 10 round combat with 6-8 fighters, this simple subtraction to work out DoS can account for several minutes real time. Over a long and combat intensive game session, it really adds up.

The only minor deviation is the result of a 00. If you do not count this as a success, then you only have 9 possibilities of scoring 0 DoS (I.e., "just made it", while you have 10 possibilities of all others. Turning the 00 into a 0 rather than a 100, and counting it as a success resolves this inequality, and as an added bonus you get a more evenly distributed number of "special" results if you use the Perfect Hits/Fumbles rules

As for your other rules, my 2ScintCents are:

Blessings o' the Warp: In my game, the Psyker is much too powerful already. Having gained the "Favoured by the Warp" talent, the effect of 9's has already been reduced, so I don't really want to boost him any more

Technical KO: I'd allow the target a Toughness test. After all, it shouldn't be equally easy/likely to knock out an Adept as an Ogryn, eh?

Perfect Hits: We always ruled that the Perfect hits were an automatic Critical Hit (I.e. Righteous Fury). No need to test for additional damage, just re-roll that damage die!
Armour and T count as normal.

Crafting Time: Makes perfect sense.

Firing Squads: I don't understand this rule at all

Arioch said:

Psykers are already very powerful. no need to increase this.

Technical Knock-out
Whenever a hit to the head occurs, there is a damage dealt x 5% risk that the character is knocked out for 1d10 minutes.

This seems like it would be a nice rule.

Perfect hit
No defense against damage is perfect as every armour has weak spots, and each person has vulnerable spots that can be hit with a lucky blow or shot. As a result any double roll (11, 22, 33, 44, etc.) on an attack roll that is a successful attack, ignore armour and toughness bonus for the purpose of dealing damage.

I like this a lot, except the Tbonus should always occur.

[quote[Crafting - Time
The crafting rules as written in The Inquisitors Handbook made little sense to me, in that it did not matter how well you rolled when it comes to reducing the time needed towards completing what you where trying to create, but when you fail it greatly increase the time needed to complete the work. As such the time needed is not only reduced by the time interval as described, but the Degree of Success on the roll is also deducted from the time needed.

my guys have never crafted anything so I havn't noticed that it takes very long.

Firing Squads - Group Fire
When a group of at least 5 characters is firing weapons at the same target or targets (count this as firing into an area with a radius of 5 meters), their weapons fire is treated as a single automatic fire attack. Make one roll with the average of the characters BS, and for each Degree of Success allocate one hit to a target in the firing zone. Damage caused are in this order; least powerful weapon, medium damage potential, maximum damage potential, and then over again. Roll hit location randomly. The maximum number of hits is equal to the number of characters participating in the firing squad. Automatic weapons gain no special bonus to the effect of causing more hits when using these group fire rules. ANd further facing fire from a firing squad causes Pinning just as Covering Fire does.

This seems more complicated than just shooting each weapon seperatley.

Not really. The group fire rule is there to reduce the time it takes when th characters is facing 30 or 40, or even more armed opponents all blasting away at them. Which has happened on two ocassions while I have been GMing DH. Rather than spend all that time per round rolling each hit etc, or just say "you are dead or seriously wounded", I on the spot made this rule up. It works pretty well.

When a group of at least 5 characters is firing weapons at the same target or targets (count this as firing into an area with a radius of 5 meters), their weapons fire is treated as a single automatic fire attack. Make one roll with the average of the characters BS, and for each Degree of Success allocate one hit to a target in the firing zone. Damage caused are in this order; least powerful weapon, medium damage potential, maximum damage potential, and then over again. Roll hit location randomly. The maximum number of hits is equal to the number of characters participating in the firing squad. Automatic weapons gain no special bonus to the effect of causing more hits when using these group fire rules. ANd further facing fire from a firing squad causes Pinning just as Covering Fire does

Example; 20 guardsmen armed with lasrifles, laspistols and an autocannon blasts away at a character. Their average BS is 34. Since it counts as automatic fire, the single attack roll gains a +20% bonus to hit. Lets say they rolled 23 and scored three hits. The first would be damage from laspistl (least damage potential), second from lasrifle, and third from the autocannon (maximum damage potential).

If you want numbers to mean more, you could grant a +5% bonus to hit for each character beyond the first in a group. But that would cause an awful lot of hits too. It all depends on what flavour you want, realistic or heroic. The very purpose for this rule was to not summary just determine the outcome, but have a rule that would save me alot of dice rolling. Its far from perfect though.

Statistically, it doesn't make sense.

20 Guardsmen with a BS of 34 shooting at a target (with no mods due to range, but +20 from Auto Fire) would generate an expected average of 10,8 hits, with a standard deviation of 2,2.

So anything between 8,6 to 13 hits would be normal for this group according to the RAW.

The chance of them all missing is 0,00000018, or 0,000018%

Your rule gives them a 10% chance of 1 hit, 10% for 2 hits, and so forth up to 4% for 5 hits. The chance of them all missing is now in fact 56% (as a success by less than 10 gives 0 DoS and so no hits). The expected number of hits from this situation with your rule is 1,2 with standard deviation 1,6. Anything from 0 to 2,8 hits can be expected from such a Firing sqaud.

When you in addition makes the least powerful weapon the one most likely to hit, you're basically nerfing the enemy. In fact making the single, most powerful of the enemy LESS efficient than if he were on his own. More to the point: The group as a total do less hits and damage than the most powerful member of the same group. That makes no sense whatsoever.

Case in point, the guard with the Autocannon. It's range is incredible, so he will most likely be firing at a +30 bonus for an effective BS of 64. He will on average score 2 hits a round (a hit with 1 DoS) for a massive 8D10 dmg. However, stick another 19 guardsmen in his group, and he will only hit once every 5 rounds.

Now, if you want to make mook rules, thats one thing. But if your goal is to simplify mass combat but maintaing balance, you´ve failed.

But do not despair: there are simple formulas that tell you what the numbers of likely hits are for a group like this.

If n guards shoot with a probability p of scoring a hit (where p is a number between 0 and 1, ie ,54 in your example above) the average number of hits is simply n*p. (Ie, 20 * 0,54 = 10,8 in the example above)

This should give you an indication of what to expect, but if you want to know more about the range of likely values, you need to find the standard deviation.

This is slightly more tricky, and will probably require a calculator: Take the square root of n * p * (1-p).
Ie: Sqr of 20 * 0,54 * (1 - 0,54) = 2,2

This tells you what can be considered a normal range of results, where values that differ much more from the average than the standard deviation are unlikely to occour.

I would suggest making a little table of some sample Firing Squads, and then make a very simple rule based on the probabilites this yields.

Arioch said:

Just a thought, isnt the quality of a crafted item usually reflected by the time and effort spent in building it? I mean if you consider fine custom handguns for instance, where every part is handcrafted, it usually takes a great deal more time building it than lets say a standardized mass-produced handgun. So why should time get "reduced" because you roll well on the crafting roll? It doesnt make much sense to me, but thats just my opinion...

Supplemental retcon:

Actually, the expected number of hits from the guards in question would be greater, as my numbers only count the number of successful BS tests, not taking into consideration additional hits from any DoS (Full Auto Fire)

Each of the 10,8 succsessful BS tests from the guards would on average grant 2,7 actual hits (scoring with 1,7 DoS), so the actual number of las-bolts to be dodged or suffered by the targets would be around 30 (as an average result, normal results ranging from 24-36)

This is quite a big difference with your example of 3 hits. Granted, that was just an example from a roll of 23, but in a best case they would still score no more than 5 hits

Summary:

RAW:
Average # hits: 30
Chance of 0 hits: 0,000018%
Chance of scoring between 1-5 hits: 0,83%
Chance of scoring more than 5 hits: 99,17%

Your Firing Squad Rule:
Average # hits: 0
Chance of 0 hits: 56% (As you need 1 DoS to score the first hit, it means they need to roll 44 or less to hit)
Chance of scoring between 1-5 hits: 44%
Chance of scoring more than 5 hits: 0%

I rest my case

Firing Squad

The rules for aiding another simply suggest having one character make the test while each character helping out adds an extra degree of success. I would use this as a basis for quickly resolving massed fire against the Acolytes.

E.g.: Andy the Cultist fires his autogun on ful auto against the Acolytes. His friends Barry and Carl help out by taking a few pot-shots at the Acolytes as well. The dice settle, resulting in a miss. The Acolytes suffer no damage. The next round the cultists try again, and Andy scores three dregrees of success.Thanks to his two friends he adds two more degrees of success.

-K

It still does the Cannon Fodder a disservice though, as added numbers increase the chance to hit by quite a lot.

In your example, the chance for them all to miss remains the same as Andy's chance to miss on his own. However, even it his buddies have abysmal BS, their chance of all missing is much smaller.

Ie, if Barry and Carl have a BS of 30, the chance of them both missing is 0,7*0,7 = 0,49 (less than 50%)

The chance of Andy, Barry and Carl all missing is less than half of the chance of Andy missing. Numbers count a lot in these kind of statistics. Any rule trying to simplify this kind of "firing squad" or "mass firing" situation must take numbers into account. Numbers matter more than the BS score, actually.

Darth Smeg said:

As I said. A quick and simple rule. Not to maintain balance. And yes, that would be used for mooks. I dont want to roll separate hits for 40+ henchmen. That is alot of wasting time rolling dice for nothing. And if I dont want to roll that many dice, you guess easily I am not going to do square root math in the middle of combat. Any character that is equal to the PCs in importance of course I handle on their own, on their own initiative etc.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Simply because degree of failure greatly affects the time for the worse. Whilst increadible skill does not. Trust me, there is big difference between a skilled craftsman and one who is not when it comes to both quality as well as time it takes to make something, even if it is of a better quality. To state otherwise is just to justify rules that is supposed to be "balanced" so that the PCs are not running around with too much modified equipment. Something my players always do anyway. As such I made this rule to allow their constant modifications of equipment to take place within a reasonable time frame, as well as the fact that the default idea that DoS had no effect whatsoever...

Darth Smeg said:

I have used this rule in WFRP ever since i learned of the Harnmaster version (not counting doubles but 5:s and 10:s). And i treally have no problem with the results being skewed towards bad thing happening more often ... actually i think it is a nice bonus.

And i have used the easy DoS also and it speded up a lot of things during play...

As a possible alternative to the "Firing Squad" dilemma, why not use the "preview" rules for Hordes from Deathwatch ? You can download the first scenario for free, and it has the simplified rules posted to get a campaign going.

If want to have, say, a tide of mooks coming at you, get a Horde of such-and-such a magnitude (representing, as they say, tens or hundreds of enemies) and try to knock the Horde out. They have Horde rules for the Horde's attacks as well, which represent the sheer weight of fire or storm of blows.

Also, just looking at the crafting rules in Step Four: Test (IHB 248), success reduces the time by 1 Interval, plus each DoS may EITHER reduce the remaining time by 1 Interval OR improve the level of Craftsmanship (with higher cumulative DoS improving the level). Failures of 3+ degrees BOTH increase the time AND reduce the level of Craftsmanship.

So, really, unless the mathematics are really badly against you OR you have a REALLY hard project, a high level of Skill in Crafting should do more good than harm in the long run. (Just how badly were the players rolling? And how hard were you making their projects?)

I suppose you could lower the threshold for Craftsmanship: 0-4 is Common, 5-14 is Good, 15+ is Best, -1 to -4 is Poor, and -5 or more is scrapped . But then, as the man said, isn't handcrafted stuff supposed to take more effort (not necessarily more time, as the IHB points out for Step Two: Difficulty and Duration)?

Darth Smeg said:

Very interesting,

Sorry to derail this thread, but tell me Darth Smeg how does the Easy DoS rule handle thresholds when they are over 100 ?

Nevermind my last post I started a new thread instead.