Now that the system has been out for a while, I'd like to hear people's opinions on it.

Are there any especially breakable rules? Anything a GM should be wary of? Anything you think is especially brilliant compared to prior 40krpgs?

Accurate is still a Weapon Trait that requires some balancing.

The Requisition can be broken by Players easily and as a GM you should always limit it to what you think is okay for the PCs.

Plasma is useless as ever.

The Damage model is still the soaky one (I am okay with it though many others dislike it)

Medium-High XP PCs with decent builds will screw most if not all regular threats of the Bestiary and Adventures.

Dual-wield was slighty nerfed yet lightning attack (especially with power weapons) is still the king of all damage and becomes even more absurd in dual-wield that is now automatically a dodgy build.

Character creation is somewhat lazy and you are better of with treating the options like packages, not real background for it only annoys and limits everyone.

Elite advances are weird.

The available talents are the basics + some investigation stuff. You might miss some talents from other systems like OW that would work perfectly in DH2 and might appear in supplements.

The aptitudes are still not that great.

Compared to DH1 you have very little options in character development and gear etc. (I do not suggest porting - it breaks stuff)

There is more but that is what came to my mind after a minute of thinking.

I've had a great time with it, but I have the advantage of not playing with people who try to break the system; so I might not be the ideal source for feedback.

As for comparisons with DH1, I loathe class/level-based systems so I'm very happy with the new chargen system.

Thanks for the replies.

I'm with Moep here. I'll also add that DH2e is still a class based system, just more cleverly disguised, and far less balanced(and with less options) than its predecessor. This is not a good thing.

I'm with Moep here. I'll also add that DH2e is still a class based system, just more cleverly disguised, and far less balanced(and with less options) than its predecessor. This is not a good thing.

This is the long and short of it. It's a poorly designed system that's easily broken (without even trying).

Another problem is that the rules are at odds with the stated theme of the game. For a game that presents itself as one where the players investigate and root out heretical cults and such, the rules focus almost exclusively on combat.

Here we go again!

Here we go again!

No. Just no. Ignore CPS pooing on the system. Everyone on these boards knows his opinion. Just quietly move on to the next please.

Eh, weighing statements like "good" or "bad" aside, DH2e is still a class based system, just like Only War was. Aptitudes restrict, and function, exactly like classes do in prior editions. The only truly "open" system the 40k line has ever had was Black Crusade, if you went Unaligned.

It hurts my brain when people go on and on about how much "freedom" they have through DH2e. It's like they've never actually seen an open system at all. I'll just toss Call of Cthulu and FATE out there as examples of how fundamentally different in design they are. CoC is a "build your own starting character" with completely free progression slapped on, while FATE flat out lets you pick within a set number of guidelines and alter or add to them accordingly when the story/your character changes and progresses. These are both "open" systems which provide a good deal of freedom.

DH2e, on the other hand, provides set packages that punish for straying from them with increased costs. This is exactly what DH1e did. Both editions are class based systems.

Yes, DH2 is a veiled-class based system. It's really, really evil for it. Totally unplayable because it's hard to get that exactly perfect character that runs rampant in the imagination.

It's like yelling at a manual stick car, "hey car, you can't drive because your not automatic!".

Another problem is that the rules are at odds with the stated theme of the game. For a game that presents itself as one where the players investigate and root out heretical cults and such, the rules focus almost exclusively on combat.

No. Just no. Ignore CPS pooing on the system. Everyone on these boards knows his opinion. Just quietly move on to the next please.

While I frequently disagree with CPS, he's (gender assumed based on avatar) absolutely right about this point.

Another problem is that the rules are at odds with the stated theme of the game. For a game that presents itself as one where the players investigate and root out heretical cults and such, the rules focus almost exclusively on combat.

No. Just no. Ignore CPS pooing on the system. Everyone on these boards knows his opinion. Just quietly move on to the next please.

While I frequently disagree with CPS, he's (gender assumed based on emoticon) absolutely right about this point.

How does one quantify Narrative with mechanical rules?

Yes, DH2 is a veiled-class based system. It's really, really evil for it. Totally unplayable because it's hard to get that exactly perfect character that runs rampant in the imagination.

It's like yelling at a manual stick car, "hey car, you can't drive because your not automatic!".

Eh, the reason I dislike it has little to do with it being a class system or not. Rather, the constant blather about how it's supposedly more free than DH1, and thus "better" simply irritates me. Generally speaking: "You like a class system. Get over it, they're not all bad!"

It is better suited to certain groups who are not mine for reasons that have nothing to do with the class issue. If you like fast progression, DH2e is certainly the game for you, because you can, easily, reach the plateau of your skills in the 2.5k-5k XP range. For short campaigns or one-offs, this is ideal. I have played a high mortality OW campaign where we got slaughtered in droves and it was glorious. For longer games, you have to have a group which doesn't optimise and take the most powerful stuff first, or you need to throttle XP a bit. That's really it, and why I prefer other stuff, because I like games that take a character over years to decades of their life. I also like games where you splatter against the wall in session two and need to roll a new character, which is what the system does well. The problem with that is, that DH2e isn't suited to my group's "long campaign" playstyle. It fits our short game, but it wants to be a long game.

Other issues, skill system per se etc., we've already spazzed out about at nauseum. I could reiterate, if you really want me to, but I figure, I'll save everyone the headache unless people outright ask.

As far as narrative + mechanics goes, I believe FATE does it fairly well. I've mentioned the system before and it's fairly solid for exactly that kind of game. It doesn't do hyper-simulative well, but that's the trade-off for being solid as a rock with story-focus.

I would like to hear you view points in more matter-of-factly tones actually. I'm running a long-term campaign, and thus far have quite done just well without 'xp bloat' or the 'class-system' being any amount of detriment to my groups fun or progression.

I keep hearing FATE being totted as being a masterful way to handle narrativism. What makes it so? Other than insisting members on the forum, no on really goes on to explain what or how the FATE system delivers in a better or more intuitive way. What do they do right that makes it such a poster-boy for...er...a better game in general?

How does one quantify Narrative with mechanical rules?

The same way you turn the chaotic swirl of hand-to-hand combat into a series of definable probabilities. Defined target numbers, detailed modifiers, a flexible but still rules-driven structure, etc. Given the complexity of the combat rules, why is the (potentially much more interesting and certainly more game-thematic) gathering of information a single boring One-And-Done roll?

As far as narrative + mechanics goes, I believe FATE does it fairly well. I've mentioned the system before and it's fairly solid for exactly that kind of game. It doesn't do hyper-simulative well, but that's the trade-off for being solid as a rock with story-focus.

I keep hearing FATE being totted as being a masterful way to handle narrativism. What makes it so? Other than insisting members on the forum, no on really goes on to explain what or how the FATE system delivers in a better or more intuitive way. What do they do right that makes it such a poster-boy for...er...a better game in general?

I would like to know this, too. I know almost nothing about FATE; the times I've tried flipping through the core book at the bookstore, I've found the modern-slang-filled writing style very off-putting (especially since the majority of RPGs are set in non-modern settings) and have never worked up the motivation to buy it. So, what am I missing?

Oh, and with regard to character classes, I discovered RPGs during the last few years of the reign of Gary Gygax at TSR, so I have a strong nostalgic fondness for class-based systems. Sure, they aren't realistic or flexible, but- nostalgia!

As said, as far as long campaigns go, if you have a group that doesn't compulsively optimise, you should be more or less fine.

If you do get (un)lucky with your aptitudes, though, you may have a bunch of people who have gotten some of the most powerful tier three talents for their role for cheap, while the rest of the party is lagging behind(this is because there is little proper balancing beyond 'tiers' and some tier three talents from advancement paths can be almost negligble for your gaming experience, while others such as, oh, True Grit are extremely powerful); or, you've gotten a party full of optimal builds and they cap out fairly early. Combat builds even sooner than others, because there isn't much you need to be effective in combat in DH2e beyond a decent gear selection and a method to negate damage and a big gun. This is where the skill reduction actually hits investigative builds hard. They have very few things they even need to bother investing XP in, but they end up rolling only on these few talents. By condensing, one creates a far, far lower glass ceiling, in other words. You can reach it easily, through the specialisation inherent in aptitudes, IF your selection was good or optimal for your role in the party.

Unfortunately, I have no real clue how to fix this, beyond paying attention in chargen and keeping an eye out for combinations that max out early on. Challenging your PCs in ways that go outside their respective aptitudes can help somewhat, I suppose.

You may run into problems in venues the rules barely touch, same as we did, though. I'll list a couple pitfalls:

1. Crafting

The 40k line's crafting rules are quite rudimentary. If you have a cogboy, or a chem pusher or something similar in your party, he will want to make his own things in a longer campaign. The problem is, he can only select existing items and is effectively limited in his creativity to whatever the GM deems possible, rather than having a set of rules and abilities he can apply to create an item. This is generally only a problem with between session timeskips, though, and can be solved with decent communication.

2. Requisition:

The system is exploitable to no end. It's barely existant as a rules construct, and just enough that you can easily get top tier gear, no questions asked. Common sense and simply saying "no, not on this planet" or "there is no plausible way you could afford this as a hive ganger at this point in your career. If you want to steal it, it's more something we should actually run as an adventure since there might be -consequences-." help fix this.

3. The Askellon Sector

Sooner or later, one of your players is going to suggest Exterminatus, or ask why it hasn't been done already. If you're playing there, have more than one answer ready.

4. Warp Travel/ship combat:

Rogue Trader or Battlefield Gothic help quite a bit here, but sadly, the non-RT RPGs basically make one of the riskiest forms of FTL a trivial affair, or one the PCs can barely effect. The appropriate Navigation skill exists, I think, but what happens on a failure is cut fairly short. ErrantKnight has a neat warp travel table in the RT section somewhere that fixes this nicely. I use it for my DH1 campaign as well.

FATE and how it works:

I'm assuming you know you can DL it for free on their website.

Basically, FATE eschews standard RPG statlines in favour of players picking what their character is good at specifically,namely various player-defined Aspects that can modify dicerolls when the situation calls upon them, in a positive or negative manner. For example, the aspect "compulsive counting" may give a modifier to creating a solid logistical network, while in situations where time is of essence, it would be a drawback. Then there's "stunts" a character can learn, which are selected from a list (or created via set guidelines provided in the rules), that provide boni to specific tasks as well. So, your character is a collection of Aspects you picked that define him, a skill selection he's good at and stunts which let him do specific things with those skills. Everything that happens in the game is handled with aspects, stunts and skills, including combat. FATE also has no XP. When the party or character reaches a significant moment in plot or character development, the GM can allow a greater or minor advancement, which lets you swap around your skill values (because they can detoriorate if you neglect them), learn entirely new skills, new stunts, change an aspect etc.. Your character is essentially a product of the causality of its backstory and the narrative, in other words. That is what FATE does, in a nutshell.

How does one quantify Narrative with mechanical rules?

The same way you turn the chaotic swirl of hand-to-hand combat into a series of definable probabilities. Defined target numbers, detailed modifiers, a flexible but still rules-driven structure, etc. Given the complexity of the combat rules, why is the (potentially much more interesting and certainly more game-thematic) gathering of information a single boring One-And-Done roll?

This only answers...what it shouldn't be (and it's not a One-And-Done roll, either. It's the narrative the game master invokes with every npc, context clues, scrutiny and awareness rolls, inquiry and interrogation, application of skills and delivery and critical thinking skills...sometimes). How else would you quantify the investigation nature of the game besides the fellowship based skills, investigaiton skills, disposition tables and modifiers, subtlety track and other elements of the game CPS and the bandwagon gloss over?

As far as narrative + mechanics goes, I believe FATE does it fairly well. I've mentioned the system before and it's fairly solid for exactly that kind of game. It doesn't do hyper-simulative well, but that's the trade-off for being solid as a rock with story-focus.

I keep hearing FATE being totted as being a masterful way to handle narrativism. What makes it so? Other than insisting members on the forum, no on really goes on to explain what or how the FATE system delivers in a better or more intuitive way. What do they do right that makes it such a poster-boy for...er...a better game in general?

I would like to know this, too. I know almost nothing about FATE; the times I've tried flipping through the core book at the bookstore, I've found the modern-slang-filled writing style very off-putting (especially since the majority of RPGs are set in non-modern settings) and have never worked up the motivation to buy it. So, what am I missing?

Oh, and with regard to character classes, I discovered RPGs during the last few years of the reign of Gary Gygax at TSR, so I have a strong nostalgic fondness for class-based systems. Sure, they aren't realistic or flexible, but- nostalgia!

Yes, Nostalgia! For the type of archetypal system that places emphasis on job experience and trades that define individuals.

Come on, at what point are we (the community) going to stop arguing over this baseless argument that a class system or classless system is intuitive or not? Either a game will chose to have a framework, or they won't, for character generation. It's a literal binary choice in roleplaying games that has no other option other than an omission of character generation as a whole.

And everyone who keeps saying 'class-system' are really showing their disdain for dungeons and dragons anyway. That vernacular isn't even used in these lines.

Veiled class system maybe. But I think there's a certain distinction in the fact it is still a custom class, where everyone can basically guide their creation. To ME that is a more important distinction. It's not so limiting at Chargen where you have to choose Fighter or Thief or whatever.

Indeed, perhaps more important, the strength of 2e over 1e? Anyone I can think of in the Abnett Inquisitor series can be emulated via this system. While in the old one things were so hard coded limited I just couldn't stand it.

So yeah, for me this is a huge improvement, and the additions of new steps in the 3 stages are just going to improve how robust and interesting your characters can be.

I just hope Rogue Trader and Deathwatch get similar upgrades. Ideally just using sourcebooks in this, but I think we all know they'll get new rulebooks. I just hope if so they take a more Star Wars approach and make the lines fully compatible rather than the 'almost but not quite' of the 1e 40k lines.

The irony about the DnD comparison is that DH2e is actually closer to 3.5e than DH1e was. DH1e is more a product of BRP/Call of Cthulu than anything else.

DH2e allows you to combine several aspects and hence might be considered more "open".

But who on earth actively tries to create a bad warrior? A guy with the warrior role and aptitudes that absolutely do not fit that role? Aptitudes he will never change - no matter how his character behaves int he campaign.

We do play the Inquisition here. Charakters have to be at last competent to be even considered for the cannon-fodder position of akolythe. If you are not competent there are a million other theoretical characters available to fill that role.

And once we start to make a build that is somewhat effective the combinations shrink to a rather small degree.

A degree where DH1 allowed a multitude of more and different characters. (With supplements though)

As said, as far as long campaigns go, if you have a group that doesn't compulsively optimise, you should be more or less fine.

If you do get (un)lucky with your aptitudes, though, you may have a bunch of people who have gotten some of the most powerful tier three talents for their role for cheap, while the rest of the party is lagging behind(this is because there is little proper balancing beyond 'tiers' and some tier three talents from advancement paths can be almost negligble for your gaming experience, while others such as, oh, True Grit are extremely powerful); or, you've gotten a party full of optimal builds and they cap out fairly early. Combat builds even sooner than others, because there isn't much you need to be effective in combat in DH2e beyond a decent gear selection and a method to negate damage and a big gun. This is where the skill reduction actually hits investigative builds hard. They have very few things they even need to bother investing XP in, but they end up rolling only on these few talents. By condensing, one creates a far, far lower glass ceiling, in other words. You can reach it easily, through the specialisation inherent in aptitudes, IF your selection was good or optimal for your role in the party.

Unfortunately, I have no real clue how to fix this, beyond paying attention in chargen and keeping an eye out for combinations that max out early on. Challenging your PCs in ways that go outside their respective aptitudes can help somewhat, I suppose.

You may run into problems in venues the rules barely touch, same as we did, though. I'll list a couple pitfalls:

1. Crafting

The 40k line's crafting rules are quite rudimentary. If you have a cogboy, or a chem pusher or something similar in your party, he will want to make his own things in a longer campaign. The problem is, he can only select existing items and is effectively limited in his creativity to whatever the GM deems possible, rather than having a set of rules and abilities he can apply to create an item. This is generally only a problem with between session timeskips, though, and can be solved with decent communication.

2. Requisition:

The system is exploitable to no end. It's barely existant as a rules construct, and just enough that you can easily get top tier gear, no questions asked. Common sense and simply saying "no, not on this planet" or "there is no plausible way you could afford this as a hive ganger at this point in your career. If you want to steal it, it's more something we should actually run as an adventure since there might be -consequences-." help fix this.

3. The Askellon Sector

Sooner or later, one of your players is going to suggest Exterminatus, or ask why it hasn't been done already. If you're playing there, have more than one answer ready.

4. Warp Travel/ship combat:

Rogue Trader or Battlefield Gothic help quite a bit here, but sadly, the non-RT RPGs basically make one of the riskiest forms of FTL a trivial affair, or one the PCs can barely effect. The appropriate Navigation skill exists, I think, but what happens on a failure is cut fairly short. ErrantKnight has a neat warp travel table in the RT section somewhere that fixes this nicely. I use it for my DH1 campaign as well.

FATE and how it works:

I'm assuming you know you can DL it for free on their website.

Basically, FATE eschews standard RPG statlines in favour of players picking what their character is good at specifically,namely various player-defined Aspects that can modify dicerolls when the situation calls upon them, in a positive or negative manner. For example, the aspect "compulsive counting" may give a modifier to creating a solid logistical network, while in situations where time is of essence, it would be a drawback. Then there's "stunts" a character can learn, which are selected from a list (or created via set guidelines provided in the rules), that provide boni to specific tasks as well. So, your character is a collection of Aspects you picked that define him, a skill selection he's good at and stunts which let him do specific things with those skills. Everything that happens in the game is handled with aspects, stunts and skills, including combat. FATE also has no XP. When the party or character reaches a significant moment in plot or character development, the GM can allow a greater or minor advancement, which lets you swap around your skill values (because they can detoriorate if you neglect them), learn entirely new skills, new stunts, change an aspect etc.. Your character is essentially a product of the causality of its backstory and the narrative, in other words. That is what FATE does, in a nutshell.

Of course, if you really like the weapon/gear customization of Dark Heresy, and the cool ways that different powers allow you to break the rules, Fate will disappoint. In Fate, your equipment will typically amount to one or two aspects, with the rest being narrative based. For the most part, special powers will always utilize the rules in the same way (gain a reroll, gain +2 to a roll, gain extra ability to take damage, etc). In order to have interesting abilities in Fate, you need to assign them a cool narrative effevt rather than a mechanical one (eg psychic flames adding a +2 to Attack versus psychic flames allowing you to melt anything given time). Also, Fate doesn't really add anything to the whole "investigation" aspect of dark heresy. Given how important equipment is to the setting, Fate would be a poor choice for dark heresy. That said, Fate would be a good way to balance out a party with space marines, regular soldiers, and rogue traders, because it handles scaling extremely well.

Honestly, if you're looking for an alternate system for dark heresy, you could try it in Savage Worlds, which keeps the crunchiness of the game and equipment and has a bit more balance to it (but is still a flawed system), hacking it with apocalypse world (which requires a bunch of work, because there's no existing hack), or possibly trying the kickstarter game Blades in the Dark, which is going to release a faux-dark heresy setting. I've also heard good things about cortex +, but dont know much about it. Hell, you could probably try hacking Mutant: Year Zero to work for it too, as that game reflects some similar themes as Dark Heresy (scarcity, decay) with rules designed around them.

So really, my recommendation for most folks on this forum per their preferences is to try out savage worlds. It's pros are allowing crunchy "tactical combat" and equipment use, simple resolution, a pretty decent actually classless system, and the numerous supplements available for it. The cons are that you'd have to do a lot of work to choose what rules you were using, there are some fundamental math flaws with the systems use of exploding dice, and it lacks investigation subsystems.

How does one quantify Narrative with mechanical rules?

The same way you turn the chaotic swirl of hand-to-hand combat into a series of definable probabilities. Defined target numbers, detailed modifiers, a flexible but still rules-driven structure, etc. Given the complexity of the combat rules, why is the (potentially much more interesting and certainly more game-thematic) gathering of information a single boring One-And-Done roll?

This only answers...what it shouldn't be (and it's not a One-And-Done roll, either. It's the narrative the game master invokes with every npc, context clues, scrutiny and awareness rolls, inquiry and interrogation, application of skills and delivery and critical thinking skills...sometimes). How else would you quantify the investigation nature of the game besides the fellowship based skills, investigaiton skills, disposition tables and modifiers, subtlety track and other elements of the game CPS and the bandwagon gloss over?

As far as narrative + mechanics goes, I believe FATE does it fairly well. I've mentioned the system before and it's fairly solid for exactly that kind of game. It doesn't do hyper-simulative well, but that's the trade-off for being solid as a rock with story-focus.

I keep hearing FATE being totted as being a masterful way to handle narrativism. What makes it so? Other than insisting members on the forum, no on really goes on to explain what or how the FATE system delivers in a better or more intuitive way. What do they do right that makes it such a poster-boy for...er...a better game in general?

I would like to know this, too. I know almost nothing about FATE; the times I've tried flipping through the core book at the bookstore, I've found the modern-slang-filled writing style very off-putting (especially since the majority of RPGs are set in non-modern settings) and have never worked up the motivation to buy it. So, what am I missing?

Oh, and with regard to character classes, I discovered RPGs during the last few years of the reign of Gary Gygax at TSR, so I have a strong nostalgic fondness for class-based systems. Sure, they aren't realistic or flexible, but- nostalgia!

Yes, Nostalgia! For the type of archetypal system that places emphasis on job experience and trades that define individuals.

Come on, at what point are we (the community) going to stop arguing over this baseless argument that a class system or classless system is intuitive or not? Either a game will chose to have a framework, or they won't, for character generation. It's a literal binary choice in roleplaying games that has no other option other than an omission of character generation as a whole.

And everyone who keeps saying 'class-system' are really showing their disdain for dungeons and dragons anyway. That vernacular isn't even used in these lines.

I think the reason why the subsystems of this game are ignored by most folks is that they're largely vestigial and not integrated into the system very well. The skill system is a binary success/failure engine that adds nothing to roleplay while also subtracting nothing. The disposition tables, while a nice idea, feel tacked on rather than integrated, and mostly just scream "ignore me!" To GMs. It doesn't help that they're stuffed into a section of a single chapter when combat gets essentially 3+ chapters (combat, gear, vehicles, psychic powers) either completey or mostly dedicated to it. The subtlety track, as I've said, is useless, and I'm disappointed that FFG didn't change it at all from the beta. It's probably is that tracking it is a fiddly process of number tracking but the system doesn't actually give meaning to all those numbers.

DH2e allows you to combine several aspects and hence might be considered more "open".

But who on earth actively tries to create a bad warrior? A guy with the warrior role and aptitudes that absolutely do not fit that role? Aptitudes he will never change - no matter how his character behaves int he campaign.

We do play the Inquisition here. Charakters have to be at last competent to be even considered for the cannon-fodder position of akolythe. If you are not competent there are a million other theoretical characters available to fill that role.

And once we start to make a build that is somewhat effective the combinations shrink to a rather small degree.

A degree where DH1 allowed a multitude of more and different characters. (With supplements though)

That’s, fundamentally, looking at the paths wrong. You don’t go out to make a bad warrior. If what you’re going for is a good warrior, then by all means that’s what options you choose! If you just so happen to take that as one stage, but some other stuff at the other two? It’s probably because your concept was very different from the start. You’re not making a bad warrior, you’re making something else that’s good at what it goes for, and maybe happens to be a bit better at war than someone else with a different choice at that stage.

1e just plain shoehorned you into a limited number of things and that was that. You literally cannot make most of the characters in Abnett’s inquisitor books with them without lots of fudging. Which is a fundamental flaw in a game about the inquisition using said version of the verse as its inspiration!

And adding alternate paths was just making things more awkward yet. Then we get to Ascension, where things just got stupid (Interrogators and Inquisitors separate, but equal on the advancement!? WTF! That’s not even how it works in Canon! The interrogator is the Apprentice!

Finally, and this is also important. You’re not limited by this system. Oh, sure, you might pay more. But the simple fact is even without the right aptitudes, you can still at least buy Talents outside. And then you don’t need to worry about a GM approving an ‘elite advance’ to get something your ‘career’ in 1e wouldn’t otherwise let you get. All aptitudes do is make things cheaper, not prevent you from getting things!

And yes, I consider the ‘elite advance’ system to be a flaw, anything that requires GM approval runs the risk of a GM who doesn’t allow it because it isn’t ‘by the book’ included and they are worried about balance or whatever. There’s none of that here.

Unless you provide guidelines for the DM to make these decisions, which is a generally helpful thing to do. DH2e suffers from "useless" things to keep track of which most DMs can do fine on their own (Subtlety), while character progression and advancement could have used a bit of a make-over. Many RPGs I have played quite a bit (WHFRP2e, DSA, Shadowrun) offer(ed) alternative advancement schemes for training, learning and investing experience and money to progress your character. The main gripe I have with the aptitude system is its lack of fluency. It works in Only War. It is excellent for a rigid, imperial guard environment, where drills and progression are ultimately set and diverting from them might get you shot. Aptitudes work exceptionally well for the guardsman way of life.

Where it falls short is to account for characteristics(You can have a 40+ in one characteristic, for example, and no aptitudes to correspond with it, leaving you exceptionally talented for something, but at the same time paying through your nose for it...), or even time invested in a certain skillset. Aptitudes never change. There is no option to adjust your character in terms of progression, without being punished for investing Xp according to what you did in RP, rather than what is cheap. An organic, sensible system, to me, either has completely standardised costs all around, or makes those things you actively do as a character the ones that cost less. Practise, practise, practise is what makes you better at something, usually. A rigid construct with no avenue for adjustment is a bit counterintuitive for me, there, in an environment where adaptability and flexibility is perhaps the most valuable asset for a character.

This only answers...what it shouldn't be (and it's not a One-And-Done roll, either. It's the narrative the game master invokes with every npc, context clues, scrutiny and awareness rolls, inquiry and interrogation, application of skills and delivery and critical thinking skills...sometimes). How else would you quantify the investigation nature of the game besides the fellowship based skills, investigaiton skills, disposition tables and modifiers, subtlety track and other elements of the game CPS and the bandwagon gloss over?

This is what I keep wondering when I hear the "one and done investigation" argument, but I've never been able to articulate it as well as this.

This only answers...what it shouldn't be (and it's not a One-And-Done roll, either. It's the narrative the game master invokes with every npc, context clues, scrutiny and awareness rolls, inquiry and interrogation, application of skills and delivery and critical thinking skills...sometimes). How else would you quantify the investigation nature of the game besides the fellowship based skills, investigaiton skills, disposition tables and modifiers, subtlety track and other elements of the game CPS and the bandwagon gloss over?

This is what I keep wondering when I hear the "one and done investigation" argument, but I've never been able to articulate it as well as this.

How else would I quantify investigation? Well, I'm no game designer, but...

-create some kind of social combat system for interrogating a subject that also addresses the nature of often having multiple party members. Include different actions to take, a method of tracking progress, an integration with existing social skills

-have the same kind of set up but for investigating a room crime scene or the like for picking out clues and piecing things together. Things like giving guidelines for a GM to construct a scene the same way they are given combat fuidelines.

-rather than having a list of skills for things that characters may do, have the skills work more like combat abilities and give them mechanical abilities that differ depending on what kind of encounter is occurring.

And for that matter, while we're improving things.

-combat that focuses on scarcity and in the moment tactics rather than all of the decisions being made before combat in the form of equipment and talent options.

-have all of the above tie in to the themes of corruption and insanity rather than having them be tacked on subsystems.

Basically, the issue is that the game is a series of unrelated subsystems that often work at odds with each other and give mixed messages to the players about how the game should be played. As is, the game effectively hands the players cattle prods and asks them to play chess instead, given how much of the book is taken up by combat.

Basically, the game part of dark heresy needs to embrace more than just the combat section, and it needs to be unified across the player experience. Also, it needs to take into account that your average combat will have dozens of rolls made to do the same thing, while an investigation is a one and done deal of making the single skill roll or not. Given the terrible odds of success in the game, it's no wonder that players resort to violence.