Hi.

I'm directing a game of Dark Heresy to a small group of my friends, only three players. By now they has played the Demo Adventure, the Core Book adventure and the first of the Purge the Unclean. They are two guardsmen and one scum of four-five level.

The last weekend we played the first session of Shades on Twilight. After the game I asked them his opinion, I ever do this to know if I can improve something. His unanimous answer was: There were too much Fear Tests, and they were too easy to miss one.

I only asked for the fear tests that the adventure asked. I thought to lower the penalizations because they are a small group, but I would like if anyone could give me his opinion in this respect.

Thanks.

Kinai.

Me, personaly there is never too much Will Power tests

That's just the name of the game, But your players can work at it & get better,

- If they start failing alot of then and start getting Insanity points...eventualy they will be immune to Fear
Example: 20 Insanity points immune to fear lv1
40 Insanity points immune to fear lv2
etc...

- There can spend experience to get more willpower
- and some talent give then re-rolls and etc

My Players in my campaign, are all immune to fear lv1...and I even had an assasine that was immune to fear lv3
it did take a long time to get all those insanity points but xenos and demons are everywere...

GLV

Fear, horror, corruption, and insanity are important elements of the game. Characters are engaged in the business of handling threats that are so terrible that the truth is violently supressed. If they don't develop their Willpower, they should expect to crack.

That said, failing a Fear Test usually has fairly minor results unless you fail by a lot and then roll badly when checking severity. That's when you use Fate Point rerolls.

Cynical Cat said:

Funny that you comment this. Do you remember the first encounter with a Dark Eldar in that adventure? With the Terrorfex grenade one of the guardsmen PC, the one specializing in Close Combat Weapons, blew it (97). His total in the Table was the "attack the nearest person". So this combat was Astarte vs Dark Eldar, 1PC vs 2PC.

Kinai.

Drugs! Seriously, kids, do drugs!

No one ever mentions them, no one ever thinks about them, but if you're having fright troubles, Frenzion or one of it's cousins will take care of it for you lickity split. All a PC has to do is keep an injector full and in an easy to reach place. A PC who's dedicated to his habit should also look into a nice injector rig that'll keep him going through any encounter. When they feel the fear coming on and the Emperor abandoning them, they can spend a turn grabbing it and dosing up to negate the effects of fear and gain an nifty +10 to WS, S, T, and WP while they lay a frothing screamy nut-job smack-down on the thing that caused them to fear. Problem solved.

Remember, kids, drugs are your super-friends! Do as many of them as you can!

Next level they should all be taking jaded and buying their own combat drugs to help out with the fear. Plus as someone mentioned, you only fail a lot of fear at first. Once you are immune to level 1 fear it becomes much less of an issue...if they survive that long.

Next level they should all be taking jaded

Jaded can be a two-edged sword, especially if you don't already have the insanity points to get immunity to Fear 1.

Cifer said:

Well, I don't know if I'm too lenient as a master, or they had a lot of luck but I don't think that anyone has more than 10 insanity points. One of my players spent XP to low his insanity points. I suppose that they had bad memories of Ctuhulhu.

Thanks for your comments, I will advise them to buy drugs the next session.

Kinai.

Currently playing that mission, and thank you for the no spoilers.

But, to the point, I am personally in belief that there can be never too many willpower tests, albeit my Arbitrator gained 12 insanity points in two rolls.

With this universe, there are so many things that can frighten, or freak out a person, you just cannot account for them all. So, any Willpower tests, I'm not likely to complain, there is just so much ****ed up *hit.

For my online game though where I GM, I personally avoid it mostly. I find it heavily detrimental when you're really forced to take an action you wouldn't do and how it heavily affects you.

For example, I ran away twice in front of my Lord Inquisitor, screaming like a maniac. "THE GREAT DESTROYER HAS COME!" I yelped when an Dark Eldar raider threw a terrorfex. "THAT'S NOT MY DOG!" screamed when the warp beasts came out and there was a Mastiff. And, because of this situation, if the Lord Inquisitor is still around, I must look like a serious idiot. Not because of roleplaying, but because I failed two rolls, and no one else did. I see it as very bad there.

I see it that some classes would do different things, like, a Guardsman would duck for cover, or go to ground, waiting out the storm, hands clutched to helmet in the foetal position. Then again, it'd be difficult to do a different table for each character on each different circumstance. Much too clumsy.

TL;DR I like Willpower tests, and see their point, but sometimes, they can be a real killer.

Failure of a fear test is really not so bad, unless you completely blow it (like the 97 above). Last time I hit my part with fear, half of them failed, lost an action or so getting themselves together, took a few insanity points, and skill offed a Thrice-Bound Daemonhost in two rounds.

The corruption from sufficiantly bad failed rolls is what gets you.