Couple of newbie questiong.

By Sylrae, in Dark Heresy Rules Questions

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(Accidentally posted this to the wrong Forum this morning).

I'm borrowing a friend's Dark Heresy II core book, and I'm unfamiliar with the game and trying to piece it together, and am having trouble finding the rules explaining a few things..
How do Hit Locations & HP work in this system? How do I know how many hit points I have?
ColArcana gave me some useful information over at the old thread I accidentally put up in the wrong forum. Is that informations still accurate?

Hit locations don't really matter aside from fluff effects until you hit Critical Damage. Once you get to critical damage, then you calculate the effect based on the location.

Example: Acolyte Bob has 8 wounds left. He suffers 5 impact damage to the right arm. He's now down to 3 wounds, but it has no further effect because he's not in Critical.

However, if Acolyte Bob has 3 wounds left, and takes that 5 impact damage to his right arm, then he's reduced to 0 wounds, with 2 critical damage. I will go into the Critical Damage chart to see what happens to him when he suffers 2 critical damage to the right arm.

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Now as far as RAW is concerned, Critical Damage stacks regardless of location (ie. If Bob is at 2 critical damage in the arm, and takes 4 more damage to the left leg, he's now at 6 critical damage to the leg), but nobody I know plays this way. They largely keep the critical damage centralized to where it occurred-- ie. Bob is at 2 critical damage to the arm, and takes 3 critical damage to the right leg, then his leg suffers ONLY the result of the 3 on the critical damage chart, not 5. If he takes that 3 damage to the same arm though, THEN it goes up to 5.

As far as how I keep track, it's not hard. Once a character enters Critical damage, I simply designate the critical damage they've taken with something easy like 4H, 3RL (4 Critical Damage to the Head and 3 to the right leg).

But until you get to the Crit chart, there's no difference between wound location whatsoever.

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As for your question about extra damage, GENERALLY no, but you can do additional damage based on degrees of success with certain weapons. Accurate Weapons deal an additional 1d10 damage for every 2 degrees of success, firing a weapon on Semi-Auto adds an extra hit of the weapon for every two degrees of success, and firing on full auto gives an extra hit for every degree of success.

But for a common weapon without any special rules there are no inherent advantages to hitting with a large number of degrees of success.

I'm having a hard time finding this stuff in the book.
Edited by Sylrae
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From page 232 and onwards the details on wounds and how they work in DH2 is described.

Character starts with a number of wounds determined by their home world, check the different home world descriptions for number of starting wounds.

What ColArana says does indeed apply in DH2.

Edited by Alox
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Not quite,

Hit locations do matter, a lot, unless you have the same armour value everywhere.

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I would caution against using ColArana's house rule regarding crits though.

It makes characters far too tough given the system is arguably already too forgiving. Stacking the crits may not be as logical, but the effect is probably a lot more representative of taking hits from multiple bolt rounds.

Far from most people doing it that way, I've actually seen more evidence of players applying critical damage immediately to represent how debilitating it would be getting hit by fire arms.

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Thanks, Guys!

:)

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Another question, how do you manage character death about the new character creation ? Same amount of XP and Influence ? Penality ? It seems me that there was something about that in DW but I don't have the book anymore.

And for information, how long for a combat normal encounter in this V2?

Edited by Taratata
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It is up to the GM, some prefer to give players that have lost their Character a "leg up", others prefer to have them start from scratch.

As combat duration, it depends. Our small fights/brawls, involving 6-8 NPCs; appear to last anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour.

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I always keep my players on the same level, so everyone has the same amount of XP regardless of whether they've missed sessions or characters die or whatever. Forcing new players or new characters to start at 0 when everyone else is at a higher level is just punishing that player by forcing them to play a character less able to contribute to the group. Which isn't fair.

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Another question, how do you manage character death about the new character creation ? Same amount of XP and Influence ? Penality ? It seems me that there was something about that in DW but I don't have the book anymore.

And for information, how long for a combat normal encounter in this V2?

There's no set rules regarding how much XP a newly created character gets, although in DH1 I have the faint memory that it was hinted at new characters starting from scratch - but it's a very faint memory at best. DH1 also assumed death to be a meaningful part of the game, while later games have (IMHO) seemingly wanted to brush over that quite a bit.

As a general rule of thumb, I usually recommend half the total XP for newly created characters, but it's largely a call of the GM depending on the situation. Depending on what overall "power level" of the game, the disparity could end up being huge.

For the second question; combat encounters vary extremely. I've run combat encounters that easily end up running over an hour, and I've played combat encounters that are over very quickly. It really varies a lot on what kind of characters we are talking about, what weapons or abilities they employ (oh god, flame weapons, oh god) and what happens in the game (...Mass Possession during a large combat scene.. anyone?).

Flame weapons are funny because they herald the coming of the rapetrain, so players will want to use them, but they are also so goddamn slow when used in combat. Generally speaking, I really like the WH40kRP system, but the combat is sometimes painfully slow.