I'm trying to list all the systems I'll need house rules for in my next campaign, and I'd appreciate input. What systems do you find broken? What talents or skills are broken? Origin paths? Alternate career ranks?

The major ones for me are starship combat, starship components, profit factor (achievement points, starship acquisition and maintenance, colonization), and navigation.

I'd welcome any conversation on these, and greatly appreciate anything else you point out that I've forgotten since last campaign (or perhaps there's something out there my players just didn't break).

General stuff.

Personal scale armor stacking is a pet peeve of mine. Having PC's require the use of anti-tank weapons to harm seems kind of silly to me. I threw in a house rule that halves the effect of "supplemental" armors. Also lowered the XP cost of flesh is weak and other similar stuff.

In the same vein I've fiddled with Righteous Fury to avoid silly outcomes on outliers and ridiculous damage for multi-dice weapons. For every 10 you get you may roll another d10 of damage, once. Also said that you roll to "confirm" once per attack regardless of the number of hits, but that's more to speed up play than anything to do with broken rules.

In more specific cases.

With navigators I veto them getting adept or mastery of a power at character creation and threw a minor nerf on lidless stare and stack the deck.

I lowered the armor of pressure carapace to make storm trooper armor a viable choice.

EDIT: Oh and I lowered the cost of Exotic Weapons to 200xp (400 as an elite advance)

Other than that I've left things more or less as is.

Personal Combat:

1) I switched the Righteous Fury rules for Black Crusades, which are essentially identical to the vehicle Righteous Fury rules (ie, free 1d5 crit). This stopped some insane damage levels. Against 'beasts' (see below) it ignores toughness instead.

2) I also use 'mooks' enemies with no wounds, for bookkeeping reasons. And 'beasts' enemies with no crit table but extra wounds (usually 2x).

3) I actually raised the damage of a lot of personal weapons to create a more smooth transition between special and heavy weaponry. This is for both PCs and badguys.

Character Building:

1) All skills except invocation, psysence, forbidden lore, scholastic lore, languages and tech use are basic skills for PCs. If the origin path would give them a basic skill they already have, they get it trained instead.

2) All skills elite advance at 300xp per step, requiring rank 4 for a +10, and Rank 7 for a +20

That's the only big ones, though I've considered throwing out the careers entirely for my next campaign, but it would require a lot more start up work on my part. For the most part my group doesn't go out of their way to break things, so ease rather then fixing 'broken' issues.

Well, it does sound as though both of you have a good deal of individual combat in your games. While I'm not averse to that, it's my experience that the party sends the hired help in first, so personal combat isn't so common. Maybe my next group of players will be different.

I'm curious, Spatula, how many of your players took Exotic Weapon Proficiency after you changed the XP cost? I've always thought it was overcharged.

I particularly like your character development rules, Quick. Thanks.

Well I actually put the new rules into place before the game even started due to things that happened in previous games. There isn't even a PC navigator in my current game. For example the critical hit rules changed due to my character having a storm bolter on one occasion. It was silly powerful and slowed gameplay to a crawl whenever I wound up rolling out out 8 lots of 2d10 plus the attendant righteous fury rolls and extra damage rolls, which sometimes resulted in more righteous fury and more damage rolls. It made combat drag like a mofo.

In the current game I'm running there's as much exploration and world/dynasty building as combat, but I don't need to change the rules for those things since they're already pretty simple and I can adjust on the fly with whatever the situation warrants. Generally I try to keep the combats interesting and quirky set pieces rather than boring slogs as they pound on each other till someone dies.

Only two of the players have picked up exotic weapon proficiencies thus far, digi weapons for the astropath's quest for bling and Tau plasma weapons for the RT to be able to use the pistol he'd added to his collection from some unidentified aliens that were surprisingly friendly. It's not like you're ever starved for choices with just the universal weapons skill.

Yeah, it's what one of my players called the "Star Trek Effect" ie, "We're going on an away mission, gather up the 10 most important people and send them." Though generally that's only the case where they're likely to run into difficulties only they can solve, given their skills are way, way higher than any of their lackies. Most of the other 'combats' are hand waved away with a handful of rolls at most. It's very rare that larger scale battles are not very one sided. (ask me about the time they cleared a 'small genestealer problem' intended for a single deathwatch kill team with two companies of infantry advancing alongside an armored company being proceeded with a rolling artillery barrage while the RT & Seneschal had tea on the overlooking ridge.)

The higher weapons damage has also done a lot to shorten combats - with everyone caring storm bolters, plasma pistols and/or inferno pistols, combats rarely last more than 3 rounds. The meta results has been to lower the attractiveness of Sound Constitution (1 wound doesn't do a whole lot against big weapons) while increasing the usefulness of energy shields.

On a related note, I'm a bit more generous then the book with some weapon proficiencies. In general, if they have a universal proficiency and the xeno weapon isn't 'too' strange, i'll let them slide it in under that proficiency. Eldar power swords using the power melee skill, for example.

Yeah, it's what one of my players called the "Star Trek Effect" ie, "We're going on an away mission, gather up the 10 most important people and send them." Though generally that's only the case where they're likely to run into difficulties only they can solve, given their skills are way, way higher than any of their lackies.

Funny thing is it works better in RT than it does in star trek, where logic/reasonable caution/common sense are out the window already. Asskicking equals authority and vice versa. If you never step off your ship to explore and/or engage the enemy yourself (hide behind your troops and cower in metal bokses) you'll pick up a reputation for cowardice, or at least one of your rivals will start a rumor to that effect.

Melee attacks generate an extra hit for each two degrees of success, after first subtracting opponent's dodge/parry successes.

Unnatural Etc only adds a set ammount to various bonuses. Eldar have Un. Ag. (3), Space marines have Un. T. (4), etc

Full Auto is a full round action at -10

Semi Auto is a half round action at +0

Single Shot is a half round at +10

You can lay down Suppressive Fire with a semi auto weapon.

I essentially run http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/82289-rogue-trader-to-only-war-conversion-peach/ .

However, seeing as Snap_Dragon never got around to publish or complete this, I've continued it with his blessing, so to speak. Other houserules include:

• The Flesh is Weak is replaced by Mechanicus Assimilation, as of Black Crusade. It is limited to your TB, unless you go full heretek. Instead of providing immunities as per the Machine Trait, it gives a stacking +10 Bonus to resist the mentioned effects. This stacks with the Resistance Talent.
• The Scatter Weapon Quality functions as something between its Rogue Trader and Only War incarnations. Details haven't been hammered out just yet.
• Crafting uses a homebrew ruleset (designed to be more simplistic in order to lighten the load of the GM, me).

Obviously, I also use the Only War version of every Trait, Talent and weapon which also exists in RT, and the whole ruleset.

Apart from that I haven't had to veto or houserule anything too much.

Oh, I forgot, I also use the following house rule for concealment:

If the party has time to be cautious and/or prepare, concealment is rolled similarly to an exploration check, with everyone rolling and totaling their combined success vs. failure degrees. The idea being that skilled people will place less skilled people in decent locations. It also stops the "stealth is useless unless everyone has it" issue.

I've also rolled it based off perception or intelligence when no movement is involved and there's reasonable preparation time (such as setting up an ambush).

Combat in 40k takes forever, so I usually opt to let one of my players take a 200 point talent called Tactical Genius.

Tactical Genius: The Explorers with the highest Tactica Imperialis, Command, Pilot, and Deceit skills confer with the the Tactical Genius on how to create a foolproof encounter, skirmish, or ambush. Each of the above stats are rolled at -20 Hard check.

If all players succeed their rolls, the combat goes off as narrated by the Tactical Genius.

If any of the rolls are failed, the players must go through the combat using the core rules, with the failed rolls causing factors in the encounter going wrong in a manner narrated by the GM.