When you dual wield you straight up double the amount of damage you can do, and with some xp investment it comes at no disadvantage. It is poor game design.

A more factual statement would be, when you dual wield if you start the round within agb in meters you double the amount of damage you can do with single handed weapons.

with the investment of between 1000 and 10000xp depending on choice of role and attributes. Other than the xp investment, and the minor loss of damage vs tough opponents, there is no disadvantage.

It is excellent game design, Dark Heresy is a brutal setting, barring some very specialist cases, offence trumps defence. What ever method you choose to deal damage will deal large amounts and whilst at a cursory glance dual wield appears to be the best method of fighting, a closer inspection shows it is far from clear.

I did further analysis of the xp costs of dual wielding, my preivious stats assumed using a point buy system, however that seems to be a best case scenario, rolling your stats, the xp cost of dual wield rises dramatically. Dual wielding master has a pre requisite of 45 agility, There is only a 1% (2.8% Hiveworld) of starting wih 40agi. Using the more experienced characters rules, this rises, to 21% (40.6% Hiveworld). Therefore it would be wise to assume that when rolling your char stats, you will require at least 2 agi advances to get to agi 45.

Furthermore, there is a 45% (15.6% Hiveworld), if using heroic characters a 10% (1.1% Hiveworld), that your char has 29 or less agility thus requiring 4 agility advances to be able to buy the final dual wield talent. And a 10%(1.1%) chance you require all 5 advances.

Factor this back into the xp requirements and how does this all change?

Desperado assassin and Warrior are okay still, they can happily take hiveworld as their homeworld, and whilst their xp costs rise due to requiring the additional agi upgrades, it is important to note, that the xp costs of everybody in the game doing anything also rise so there should be very little noticeable difference.

All of the rest will be missing the agility aptitude and in worst cases, be unable to take the hiveworld as homeworld due to lacking the perception aptitude.

The XP costs for dual wielding climb by upto 2000xp and by an average of 1000xp. Whilst the statement that you may aswell dual wield is fine if it is only costing 1500xp and you have because you have the aptitudes already. When it costs you 5000xp to dual wield in addition to the 1500xp for exprtise in WS and you now have only 3500xp left to actually use on finding the **** heretics in the first place.....

All that said couple of caveats, i forgot to factor in imperial tarot and the ability to reroll one stat into the percentages, this would have a minor effect on the overall results, slightly lessening the xp costs but further widening the gap in xp between dual wield specialists, and those splashing into it from another class.

Dual wielding is clearly superior. Because you can dual wield grenade launchers. Which is amazing.

I doubt you find a GM that allows this, the indications are that its probably not possible. At only 5kg weight the sniper rifle is not allowed to be dual wielded, grenade launchers are 12kg a piece. Whilst not strictly prohibited by the rules, it just to me seems like a no chance thing.

Generally when new players in my group find out that I actually will allow them to dual weild grenade launchers, and similar weapons, they're all over it. Then they find out there are more, and potentially suicidal, disadvantages to doing so and that when I ask "Are you sure?", I really mean it...

So, you're dual weilding grenade launchers. First off, they're heavy. Without a sufficiently high minimal strength, you're taking accuracy penalties and they're getting overheat, because you might "drop" your aim and shoot a nade at your feet due to the strain of keeping them on target. This is cool with you? Excellent. You'll also be making toughness tests against fatigue that get progressively harder as strenous activities carry on.

So, you minimise the weight somehow, be it by getting power armour, anti-grav suspensors for your guns or a servo-arm to help. Now you find out that carrying two full mags of grenades close to your body can be a horrible idea if:

Your enemies have flamers

Your enemies have energy weapons

Your enemies have psykers

Your enemies have webbers, put themselves on overwatch and fire when you discharge your nade launchers to trap you in a tight metal net with two live grenades.

Now, I don't spring this on you right away. You'll be perfectly fine early on, but the moment you make the news, the moment you let one foe get away, or the moment someone voxes your standard MO to their superiors, the cult you're chasing will adapt and be ready for you.

And if you're using grenade launchers, the odds of making the news are pretty high.

That's some really adversarial GMing, DBG. There's absolutely no RAW support for webbers trapping your projectiles to blow up in your face, or for rolling so poorly you fire a grenade at your feet and blow up (short of firing at point blank and missing and the scatter comes back to land on you, but come on).

I'm all for having the badguys adapt to the party's refusal to be subtle, but blowing your players up for using a weapon you don't like is messed up.

So far, the only complaints I've had was when I went easy on them or didn't have NPCs get "creative". Combat is a fairly rare, and climatic, occurrence in my games usually so my players want it no punches pulled and maximum grit.

Most of these restrictions are easily avoided as well, simply by twin-linking the grenadelaunchers in a stable setup with a tripod. Added bonus: You don't need to invest in dual weilding at all to make that work, and tech use, Trade(armourer) is far more universally applicable.

Incidentially, "blowing yourself up" is one of the jam results for using grenades and launchers. Guess I don't need overheat after all!

Wow. I am so glad DBG isn't my GM.

As long as his group is okay with it, different GMs, different styles.

Not my style however.

I finished GM-ing last campaing when players had 15k xp. It was not uncommon for melee fighter to do 8-10 hits using two power swords. Combine that with parry over 90 and hard target, true grit and other such things. He was unstopable. W40k rpgs have insane power level if players know what they are doing and even if you don't make godlike melee fighter even normal character can be op so much that "normal" humans can do nothing else than die in encounter.

To the trio before felis, all I gotta say is this lil bit here, illustrating how a few people with such an attitude fared in my game. They generally don't stick around long and I honestly am glad, because I don't need someone whining at me for playing my NPCs smart and deadly, and my players don't like it either. It's been the convention at the table since anno domini, no matter which of us is GMing, that the dice fall as they do and combat is absolutely merciless, which goes both ways. We've been using variations of the "cinematic fighting" rules from the Horasreich box set for over a decade. What NPCs can do to you, you can, and are more than expected to, do to NPCs. So, tossing a molotov into a heavy bolter's ammo backpack to trigger a detonation that will splatter everyone around the opponent's heavy weapons' team in bolt shells? That's the norm.

"Waa, you can't do this, it's not in the rules!"

"OK, imagine I said that to you as a player. How would you react?"

"I'd be REALLY MAD!"

"Would you like a pacifier? Also, the door's over there. Bugger off! Shoo!"

And this is how the campaign went on, approximately:

"Thank god he's gone."
"Yeah, what a whiner."
"Who was that guy anyway?"
"Who cares, let's get on with the game!"

"Cool. Now, I see the rest of you have all done things that aren't covered by the rules this round. Let's just do some simple checks to see if it all goes as planned. That one's fairly simple, +30, that one's challenging due to factors Y and Z so +0 and, oh jesus christ, you want to rip off the genestealer's arm and beat him to death with it? Are you sure?"
"Hell yes! Maximum style, man!"

"You know if you mess it up the counter attack will probably be lethal?"
"I don't care. It's too frickin' awesome not to do."

"Alright, since you're not augmented at all in any way, -60 strength test followed by an easy weapon skill due to what is probably shock even for the genestealer. Just let me roll his bloodloss and if he's stunned after if you succeed."

"Cool. Why the difficulty though?"
"-10 per toughness bonus. Let's go by that for future shehanigans like that."

"Alright, pre-fating for +10, let's get this puppy rolling!"

And so the cinematic show down on the outer hull of a space ship against genestealers in the expansion phase, looking to get a cult offworld, proceeded as planned. One character lost an arm, half of the NPC mooks they'd brought along died, but, that's what cybernetics, the fratres milites* and the party medic are for. One proper demolitions test later, and they got to watch the ship explode from the safe confines of their own attack craft.

*Yes, my group uses pilgrims and fanatics as meat shields and fodder, just like the ecclesiarchy is supposed to. I'm so proud of them!

I finished GM-ing last campaing when players had 15k xp. It was not uncommon for melee fighter to do 8-10 hits using two power swords. Combine that with parry over 90 and hard target, true grit and other such things. He was unstopable. W40k rpgs have insane power level if players know what they are doing and even if you don't make godlike melee fighter even normal character can be op so much that "normal" humans can do nothing else than die in encounter.

And it's fairly harmless in that regard compared to other systems I've played on top of it all. But yeah, the system is fairly forgiving towards players. It's virtually impossible to die, with multiple steps like fate points, 7 to 10 extra, unlogged hitpoints and the new "call space marines for backup" mechanic. Back when we still played by RAW, I have seen FRESH characters soak four grenades in one round and other hilarious things where we were left wondering if we were playing a superhero game. I see no problem with cranking lethality up a few notches anymore. In the two combat's I've had this campaign, I pulled absolutely no punches. The tau had stealth suits, shields and plasma grenades, and the genestealers their full damage and attacks. And even so, a headshot from a pulse rifle did not kill a rank 1 DH1 character, you know, one of the supposedly "weak" ones. Severely injured and out of the fight? Yes. But dead? No. There are so many safeguards against character death in this system that unless your NPCs take the extra time to put a few rounds into the heads of people already down, your players may survive even a full wipe.

I finished GM-ing last campaing when players had 15k xp. It was not uncommon for melee fighter to do 8-10 hits using two power swords. Combine that with parry over 90 and hard target, true grit and other such things. He was unstopable. W40k rpgs have insane power level if players know what they are doing and even if you don't make godlike melee fighter even normal character can be op so much that "normal" humans can do nothing else than die in encounter.

the question is what else was that character good at? from the sound of it that character was a pure combat monster. I think the idea of balance in this is less about balancing against enemy strengths and more against other players. no one should be stealing the spotlight most of the time, and if you have a "godlike melee fighter" who trips over his own sentences, knows jack about anything, and can't see an ambush until he's already been shot or find clues, he won't be hogging the spotlight outside of combat.

The main deal with dual wielding is its expensive experience wise for most characters and the attributes prevent those who do well in combat from doing well in too many other areas. I know CPS's stance on attributes but this is kind of the point behind forcing people into choosing roles. you don't want anyone becoming so dominant in a game that no one else gets to participate and have fun. You know from the start who is going to be good at doing what and you work with each other's skills and abilities to create a cohesive team. Even if said team is gallivanting around the imperium trying to slap genestealers with their own arms

ITT: DBG's irriting brand of elitism.

I hear when DBG poops, a pot of gold appears and when he pees, rainbows shoot out.

Kidding, but seriously, whatever works for you and your group is fine, just don't expect a lot of people to share that sentiment. Calling anybody who don't like your way of playing to be whiners, well, see the first line of this post.

RPGs tend to be centered around a few main characters like a movie, and those "movie" characters tend to be resilient. If a player survives 4 frag grenades because of bad rolls, well, then make up a reason why that happened. Use your imagination.

When a laspistol don't kill some one at point blank in the face on an unarmoured acolyte, the shot grazed him on the side of the face, justyfing the loss of some Hit points since it burned hard, but nothing else. When it does nothing, the lasbolt fled past him, was hot to the flesh and made a 1st degree burn, where a weaker acolyte would have lost 1 wound (a 2nd degree burn because his flesh is weak).

In the end, i'm with DBG about what can be done or not with the rules. Munitions can explode (it is even in the critical effects...) and targetting ammo supplies is a way to me for working up combat, with bonuses/penalties going accordingly.

I finished GM-ing last campaing when players had 15k xp. It was not uncommon for melee fighter to do 8-10 hits using two power swords. Combine that with parry over 90 and hard target, true grit and other such things. He was unstopable. W40k rpgs have insane power level if players know what they are doing and even if you don't make godlike melee fighter even normal character can be op so much that "normal" humans can do nothing else than die in encounter.

the question is what else was that character good at? from the sound of it that character was a pure combat monster. I think the idea of balance in this is less about balancing against enemy strengths and more against other players. no one should be stealing the spotlight most of the time, and if you have a "godlike melee fighter" who trips over his own sentences, knows jack about anything, and can't see an ambush until he's already been shot or find clues, he won't be hogging the spotlight outside of combat.

The main deal with dual wielding is its expensive experience wise for most characters and the attributes prevent those who do well in combat from doing well in too many other areas. I know CPS's stance on attributes but this is kind of the point behind forcing people into choosing roles. you don't want anyone becoming so dominant in a game that no one else gets to participate and have fun. You know from the start who is going to be good at doing what and you work with each other's skills and abilities to create a cohesive team. Even if said team is gallivanting around the imperiom trying to slap genestealers with their own arms

Actually not true, he invested in combat something about 5k xp. Rest goes into awareness, heightened senses, intimidate, scrutiny and so on. Also you don't need a lot of xp to make character op in combat. With two aptitudes you can get tier 3 talent for 400 xp which is rougly one sesion (acording to rules) but most oficial adventures give much more xp.

Aptitude system give characters much easier leveling than DH1 and roles should create team but instead it gives players more options to be OP at start like taking lighting attack or step aside after first session.or make jack of all trades who has every skill. Last time one of after two sessions had step aside and amost 70% to dodge a feat you could never do in DH1

.

Currently i am giving no more than 300 xp per session since DH2 are easy mode after you level up a bit.

Rant over Still Dh2 is a great game but character power level is a little too much sometimes. Instead of cthulhu in space we have expendables in space.

.

Currently i am giving no more than 300 xp per session since DH2 are easy mode after you level up a bit.

Rant over Still Dh2 is a great game but character power level is a little too much sometimes. Instead of cthulhu in space we have expendables in space.

For DH1 we started faster (200exp per session?) and once our characters were kind of "settled" into their roles, we slowed down to ~100exp per session. That worked really well, in my opinion.

I am just now reaching the point where my players have experience of about 1100k-1300k. We have been playing the system with the same people for almost four years and DH2.0 for almost 6-8 months. I have my nitpicking with 2.0 mostly the removal of all roleplaying talents. But other than that, I feel it is a much more polished and still entertaining version of the game.

My players quickly realised that the new system had no methods of slowing character progression and maxed out their desired stats and goals early on. Even though they still do not have power weapons, boltgun and the like. most of them are beyond deadly, even stronger than most bosses I would dare have them fight in DH1. For example, a 'fighter' techpriest player of mine currently has a chainsword combined with his talents/statline to do 1d10+12 P2 tearing. This is nuts! I also have a psyker who is now PR 7 and has the meltagun fire attack and consistently does 2d10+10+PR P8+PR. He popped a defiler in two rounds (albiet a severely weakened one due to plot circumstances). Dark Heresy 2.0 is a high-level power play compared to first edition.

It may sound like I am griping, but honestly I am not. I personally prefer the weaker characters facing the greater struggle which fits the setting, but my players seem much more engaged with their characters now that they can power build them right off the bat. Also as always with DH, their super duper characters (relatively) are just as easily, I would argue maybe even more so) killed in this version than the first. There are many more offensive talents to beef up damage, an amount of attacks and re-rolls than there are defensive traits.

In particular the Duel weapon talents, combined with lightning attack, combine those with the other talents to boost melee attacks and you have a death dealthing nightmare for players to build.

What I have been experimenting with this new power scale is that my players put no points into wounds but all in tougness and others like WS or BS or S. This means they are all glass cannons till they get power armor or heavy carapace. Which I am okay with, because as always, everything they can get, so can their enemies.

Last session, my fighter techpriest character had three full rounds fighting a high powered Sargeant who mocked his character. They both had duel weild melee weapons and talents. They dodged, parried, counterattacked and parried counter attacks. My player spent all his fate points re-rolling botched rolls and the whole party was engrossed, knowing that whoever landed the first blow was liking to kill the other.

Indeed the new system favors multiple weapons over single, but I have seen plenty of circumstances where powerplaying and stylized combat have been both fun to play and fun to watch fail as my players rethink strategies.

Out of curiosity, how much experience were you giving them after each session and how many sessions were you doing on an average monthly basis?

Book recommended 400 exp for a full session 4-6 hours, usually at least one form of combat, not always. We generally play about once a week. A week missed here and there. I also doll out bonus exp at +10 intervals for good roleplaying and character building. Lastly I have the group give each other awards at the end of each session (i have no say in the matter) to doll out an addition +25 points for Best Role Player, Most entertaining, Most Valuable Player.

Well, since you stated that your players become powerful very quickly, and you prefer more low power games, reduce the amount of experience they gain after each session. I know what was recommended in the book, but these are also just guidelines.

Maybe give out a standard amount of 250-300xp. They can still gain XP from good roleplaying etc bringing to closer to the recommended 400xp. And if they don't make the 400xp, whatever really, right? You play often enough to see characters develop themselves in a quick fashion.

I know, its what I should do, but the group seems to prefer this style over the old, and its also my job to make sure they have fun with it. So despite my yearning for the air and atmosphere of 1.0 or an attempt to tame the party, they like it, so it is what they shall get.

Also consider simply ending the campaign in a grand and memorable way, tied in with your plot naturally, if you feel like your players are becoming way too powerful.

Then you can start something new and again, low level, for a while.

Then again, from the sounds of it, your players aren't complaining about the powerbuilding, so just supply them with opponents that have also been powerbuilded.

As long as everybody has fun, it's all good.