Greetings again!

I have a question on how other GM's play encumbrance and weight. After reading page 215 in the rules, I am led to believe that the carry amount should be roughly how much the weight of all a PCs gear should be. Would you let a player with 2 sb and 2 tb use a chain coat? The weight of the armor alone equals their carry amount.

The reason I ask is the vagueness of the first paragraph, are they saying that under normal circumstances there should be no weight limits? I am going to play with them anyways because I think they help balance armor, but what does everyone else think?

-curiously

Well, if the character is especially puny regarding Strength and Toughness then maybe you should impose some restrictions. But as a general rule of thumb it's fair to let a character wear a set of armour and be able to carry at least a basic weapon and some ammo for it.

When the PC's start to pack up on several pistols, grenades, melee weapons and rifle sized weapons, then you might want to enforce the rules regarding carrying weight.

Remember that it isn't always the carried weight of the equipment that present a problem, but also the size and shape of it. Try to effortlessly walk around with a balloon, the size of a small car for instance. Sure it's filled with air and probably doesn't weigh very much, but you will have problems when trying to navigate tree-rich enviroment or even just entering a standard sized door.

True, although there are plenty of armor and weapons that weigh close to nothing so it is not hard for even weak characters to have a decent set of gear; even while counting every single item's weight.

It just seems common sense that someone carrying 5 weapons and full body armor would need to be fairly buff to not take fatigue eventually. Although I think it is really the body armor and the larger weapons that really key off the issue. *shrug* If there are any house rules that have worked well let me know.

curiously said:

Ideally, yes, a PC's gear should be equal to or less then their Carry limit. However they can carry up to their Lift limit. Doing so, however, imposes a -10 on all Movement tests, reduces your AB by 1 for the purpose of determining your move rate while over burdened, and after a number of hours equal to your TB, you have to succeed at a Toughness Test or take 1 pt of fatigue. While the book doesn't state the fallowing, i assume that after another number of hours equal to your TB, you would have to pass another toughness test or take another fatigue point and repeat until you are either no longer over burdened or collapse from exhaustion.

So, a character with an SB of 2 and a TB of 2 would be able to carry, without penalty, 18 kgs worth of equipment., However, they can technically carry up to 36 kgs, but if they go above 18, they will suffer the -10 to movement tests, have their move rates slowed down by one step, and, after 2 hours of activity, have to make a toughness check (good luck with a TB of 2) or gain a fatigue point, and again after another 2 hours, and again after another 2 hours, etc.

Hope this clears things up a tad.

I pretty rigerously enforce encumberance rules and have found them useful for limiting a party's equipment to the sensible rather than extreme (I also check how much ammo they're carrying from time to time). This came in espeically useful when I gave the party a truck, allowing them to load up for a long term expedition, only to lose the truck and be forced to hike back to civilisation. Provided that you remember that PCs can happily go upto double their encumberance limit for a few hours at a time then it doesn't become a particularly unrealistic or unpleasent set of rules.

I try not to force it. It's way too much book-keeping. I just go by eye.

I recently decided to start enforcing this for my group because they tend to be a bit loot happy and like to gear for every possible situation. Some people weren't bad, over by a few kg but two players were over by 20+ and one player was carrying 40kg+ over his already high load (the tech priest). Sooooo I found it was a good idea to do it and it really does help balance the gear they can carry. They recently managed to aquire hellguns with the back packs but decided against it due to the searious weight of those things (Got a lot of low str and tog party members).

So all in all, Im for it and enforce it. It's only a little book keeping and easily doable if the players and you aren't extremely lazy ;D

karn987 said:

Im thinking of maybe doing this for ammunition as well. Running around with a bandolier of power packs for a lasgun is completely acceptable. But when a PC can run around with a bolter, armour, additional gear along with like 100 bolter rounds, im starting to doubt it. A single bolter round is a pretty hefty chunk of metal. A hundred of those in their metal clips would provide for some hefty weight.'

I don't know I just feel like sometimes running out of ammunition rarely seem to be much of an issue in any game of Dark Heresy I've played. Perhaps I should really consider converting the Rules to the rules of Noir, where ammunition expenditure isn't a fixed value but rather depends on how well you hit your target. The better you hit it, then the more bullets you have likely spent in doing it. And suddenly, bolter wielders would seriously consider their budget for ammo.

Varnias Tybalt said:

This I would love to see...

Graver said:

Well I could give you the rough idea of how the system works. The combat system of Noir has some similarities with Dark Heresy (i stress the word "some" here because they do differentiate on a whole lot of topics). The combatants act according to their initiative where a roll determines how much initiative you get by adding the dice roll to your value in "Overview".

The system in Noir does not use a percentile roll either, but rather use two d10 for any standard roll, and by adding the relevant skill value of what you are trying to do. If you reach a value above 20 then the test is a success, if it is any lower then you fail. If the two d10 show the same number (two sevens or two ones) then the roll is considered to be exceptional, meaning that it can be either an exceptional success or an exceptional failiure.

This naturally affects combat as well, for instance when rolling for overview to get your initiative, a standard success means that your initiative will be set to the total of the dice result. However if you have an exceptional success then you would get an initiative of double the total dice result instead.

Your initiative will also change during combat depending on what actions you take and how well you perform them (exceptional successes usually means that your character takes the initiative from the other combatants, and his or her initiative i increased by +5)

During combat each character is able to preform one "initiative action" and any number of defensive actions. There are many initiative actions but I will concentrate on firing weapons primarily.

The most common initiative action for firearms will probably be "concentrated fire", meaning that you fire your weapon in the general direction of your enemy. When this is done a "resistance roll" is called for, where the gunman rolls two d10 and add their skillvalue in "Firearms", while the target rolls two d10 and add their skillvalue in "Defense" (which is the catch-all skill for defensive actions, whether it be throwing yourself in cover, kneeling, dodging etc.). Whoever gets the better result succeed (during "resistance rolls" there is no concern for whether a character manage to roll above 20 or not). Regardless of whether the gunman succeed or not he/she ALWAYS has to strike a number of bullets according to the lowest number rolled on the two d10's. If this number is higher than the number of bullets left in the gun, then it means that the magazine has been emptied. Effectively meaning that the higher you roll, the better your chances of hitting are, but it also more likely means that you spent more ammunition.

However if the gunman were to fire pot shots instead (sort of like semi-automatic fire with not to careful aim), then not only would the gunman suffer a penalty to hit where the penalty is equal to the "recoil" value of the weapon, the gunman would also have to strike a number of bullets equal to the HIGHEST result rolled on the two d10's. Which might seem like a bad thing, but the positive aspects include increased damage (it hurts more to get hit by a barrage of bullets, rather than a few more controlled shots).

There are several other combat actions and ways to fire a gun like shooting aimed fire, marksman shots and "pray and spray" type of shooting as well, and all of them have different conditions, bonuses, penalties and rules for how much ammunition will be spent. But that's the rough idea behind the rules for shooting and combat in Noir. Note that while the game isn't very realistic per se you can get hit by several bullets in a firefight, get up, light a smoke/knock back some whisky and ignore the injuries "action-movie style", but this is intentional since the narrative aspects are always more important in Noir than realism. The rules try to be reasonable rather than realistic, but I think that this form of random ammunition expenditure is both pretty realistic and also makes the combat more interesting.

Now im not exactly sure of how you would convert this mechanic to Dark Heresy, since Dark Heresy uses percentile rolls where you have to roll "below" a value rather than trying to roll "above" it. But I guess one approach could be that for semi-auto fire you fire as many shots listed by the weapon plus one additional round for each degree of success?

I'll have to think about it for a while...

Yeah I agree with the issue of ammo, I intend to actually make them calculate ammo weight today. Going to give all the ammo weight depending on how much they have of it. (ex: 10 rounds weighs this little etc) it will add up eventually.