I ignore the RAW all the time and I wrote chunks of the RAW, think on that and despair.

TS Luikart said:

The entire phrase and attitude of RAW is one of the worst things to emerge from the stagnant pit of Games Workshop and tournament fans ever.

I have been, and always shall be, a "spirit" man.

I had a long wonderfully (beery) conversation about it with Andy Chambers and Jervis many moons ago now. One of the things that bothers me about a small (but vocal) slice of WFRP fandom is their absolute adherence to RAW coupled with the belief that if you aren't playing the game in one specific way, you aren't playing it "right". I went out of my way to stomp on signs of "one true wayism" in Dark Heresy... so far, I think all signs indicate that I have succeeded. Certainly you guys all seem to feel comfortable expressing a wide variety of opinions on how DH can be played, with (mostly) civil discussions of alternatives.

TS Luikart

its refreshing to see one of the writers of the rules taking the stance that you have. I'm dismayed rather often when i read the posts on this and other forums and i see the RAW laywers, sticking so closely to canon and rulesets that it smacks of sycophancy. I've seen the 40K genre change so often, both rulesets and canon. its one of the most difficult games to keep up with. Its a great genre, easily the best and most engaging but i feel little adherence or obligation within my own games to follow all the rules. the rules at best are guidelines.

once again, I respect your stance and bravery for admitting so.

cheers

the liegekiller said:

If you are willing to share, I would like to hear more about how you have done this... perhaps in a new thread to avoid hijacking this one. I am interested in doing the same but my attempts have been unsatisfying.

TS Luikart said:

So what some of your house rules?

I tend to ignore rules as written when they get in the way of the game running quickly and smoothly, or when interpreting them exactly would cause what I consider an unfair player death. Also, I tend to up the combat damage for head and body shots when said locations are unarmoured - usually x2 for a headshot and x1.5 for the torso - because as a soldier or firearms-trained police officer will tell you; these are the areas where if you get hit you won't be getting up.

Oh, and I ignore an ammount of unnatural toughness bonus on a target equal to a weapon's armour penetration. I do this on the grounds that I don't think Orks should have a toughness of eight against explosive-tipped mass-reactive projectiles...

Oh generally when a new situation or skill comes up I use RAW for ease of play and for 'fairness' sake (in the sense that it is a bit harsh if a PC thinks a talent will work one way when he buys it but then the GM arbitarilly changes this). However after the initital encounter I will discuss rule changes with players.

Not RAW.

Let's see -

* If a psyker can activate a power without rolling any dice (if his WP + Invocation bonus is higher than the activation threshold) then he doesn't have to roll. This means that some minor powers can be activated without the risk of PotW. However I'm considering using the RT system instead, once I figure out how difficult it would be to convert.

* Fear tests: I found fear tests to be too dangerous, resulting in OTT results (something goes "BOO!" and half the PCs faint with terror or go insane). Fear 1 tests are considered Very Easy, so are made at WP + 30, Fear 2 at +20, Fear 3 at +10 etc.

* Shotguns: A shotgun should not hit more people at point blank range (that's a computer game trope that doesn't happen in the real world). Extra hits due to extra degrees of success all hit the same target. However at long or extreme range the penalty to hit is reduced by 10% (armour points are still doubled, however).

* Heavily - Lightly Wounded: Due to the way the healing wounds work as per the RAW, someone with a high Wound total remains Heavily Wounded for far longer than someone with fewer Wounds. This can make it very difficult for them to heal. To change this I changed Heavily Wounded to 10 - your TB. So if you have a TB of 3 you are Heavily Wounded when you have 7 wounds or less remaining.

macd21 said:

Wouldn't that effectively turn Willpower into the dump stat of your games?

Oh well, we all like different styles of play I guess...

I use about 99% of the RAW. I don't play regularly enough to justify tinkering with the rules so we play pretty much as written. The main change I guess is starting PCs off with more experience. After reading this thread I might steal a few of the tweaks mentioned though.

My group has always leaned towards rules lite narrative systems, however I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun we've been having with a more detailed and strategic system. I honestly don't have many complaints with the RAW at all.

Drenmor said:

Have to agree with you on that one.

While I have a few issues with the RAW and do work to change it into something more reasonable, I have to say that im more of the narrative school of roleplaying than being rules heavy. But something Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader seem to have been very succesful with is making the RAW fun to use.

Even if it is pretty rules heavy, the rules themselves are entertaining in a way that few other RPG's can achieve, and that's a great plus.

~98,9% RAW.

That's what we like.

Varnias Tybalt said:

No change from the RAW. We'd been playing with the RAW for about a year before I made this change and the only player buying up WP was the psyker (who has taken it 4 times). Pinning tests are far more common than Fear and are incentive enough to take WP increases - though not incentive enough, as far as my players are concerned. The cost to increase a stat pretty much determines whether it will be taken or not, IME.

A toxic gaming environment is one in which RAW dominates and everyone has a rule book. This situation almost caused a total meltdown of my gaming group. Between the rules lawyering and exploitation of loopholes in character creation (ie "character optimization boards") it became impossible to GM.

After a six-month hiatus, we started playing Dark Heresy. I like the system. Compared to what we're used to, it seems really rules lite and easy to pick up. The players actually demanded that I explain as little as possible about what goes on behind the scenes, and we're having a lot more fun.

I generally use the rules, but I fudge when the story requires an ability the players don't have. I use a lot of pre-packaged material because I don't have time to write a decent story anymore. Designers tend to assume a certain range of skills in the group, so the players are screwed if they don't have someone with security or tech-use (they always dump-stat fellowship, bad habits are hard to break) or whatever.The RAW environment seemed to force people into certain roles (healing being the prime example).

I also ditched Righteous Fury. I hate it when luck die rolls suck the wind out of a climactic encounter.

bhbrenneman said:

I agree with this. I have been playing my present campaign with some guys who are really into WH40K but only one of which has ever done an RPG before. Obviously they didn't know the rules so as a GM I have just fed them the rules as and when. Makes things far more fast and furious and far more down to Roleplaying

Mostly I use the RAW. However, I houserule the use of Basic Skills as (trait -10%), then trained is normal, etc. I also require the players of Psyker's to declare how many dice they are rolling to manifest before rolling. None of this "I didn't make it with one die, time to roll the next one" crap I've seen some people try to get away with.

-=Brother Praetus=-

If you read my sig and know anything of that game then you'll know my answer. But in short. RAW

Also my players (and I) are belivers in the line of thought that there are NO unfair deaths.

Mostly RAW. The only concrete change so far has been to do like a couple other posters here have mentioned, and rule any untrained skill use at a -10% instead of halving the characteristic, with appropriate bonuses or penalties as the situation calls.

Also, after a lot of frustration with the wealth system, that's been entirely ignored. Right now, we just roleplay whatever makes sense based on in game considerations, until Ascension comes out and we get rules for RT's profit system in DH. Yeah, we could probably port it over now, but handwaving it is working fine.

At the request of a couple players I'm looking into doing a D6 conversion, maybe using the new Septimus game when the hardcover becomes available. For now, I'm going to kitbash a test run using various D6 books I already have, and see how it goes. We all like the RAW, but are curious to see how the game would play with a more cinematic, rules-lite system.

Mostly RAW.

The one major difference our group uses is that even the "bad guys" have the potential to get "Righteous Fury". Our group voted that this ensured the potential lethality of Dark Heresy ... i.e., no matter how "bad-ass" we become, there is still a chance of even some minor heretic taking us out with a home-made knife.

And, our GM improvises as needed to ensure "storyline" issues, and to account for the players' incomparable ability to come up with "outside-the-box" actions.

Almost completely RAW for my group.

We like the game the way it is, and have only made a few small changes to suit our style. DH is, of all the games we have been playing over the last 20 years, been the one which we have felt the need to change the least. We still play Star Wars d6 ('cause the d20 version sucks), but with hugely rewritten rules, and our 3rd Ed D&D games included a huge amount of house rules. DH, however, just seems to work in a way that we like and are comfortable with.

It probably helps that we have the honour of being playtesters, so every book includes a bit of our input.

We largely play by the rules, but with a few houserules here and there to 'fix' things we think could work better, or to clear up obvious error in the rules that havn't been caught by errata.

Actually, I'm usually very much against houserules because it makes it harder to include new players or discuss the game outside of your group, and because it can be hard to see the full implications of a rule change in an RPG, but for some reason, I feel much more comfortable adjusting things in DH. Not sure why that is (maybe it's the very nature of the 40k setting that makes me less concerned with game balance), but I'm happily shuffling things about.

Brother Praetus said:

Thats an interesting point. It hadn't even occured to me that a Psyker could keep rolling dice until he succeeded It seemed obvious to me that the psyker had to declare before rolling.

That said arguably the ability to roll one dice at a time could represent better psychic control so could be an interesting Talent.

Size ratings affect Strength Bonus, Toughness Bonus and Agility Bonus. For each step above Average 1 is added to SB and TB for hand to hand damage modifiers, +10 is added to Strength for Strength Tests and 1 is added to the combined SB+TB for lifting rules. Also 1 is subtracted from Initiative.

For each steb below average the modifiers are reversed.

Unnatural Characteristics do not add additional successes when successful as normal, instead, each level adds a +10 modifer to tests, so Unnatural Strength (x3) adds +20 to Strength for test purposes.

Ive been using the doubling skills rules since before RTcame out, much the same as it was done in WFRP 2E. ie, if you get the same skill twice at character generation then you get it at +10.

Well, due to lack of face to face gamers, as I only run a game on RPOL at the minute I tend to stick to RAW as it's something all players are sure off.

Having said that, Play By Board tends to lead to a more narrative approach anyway and, when rolls are required, players have to be paticularly clear in exactly what they are doing so as to avoid miss understandings. This does lead to questioning and rules clarifications, so a set of house rules, not far removed from official, naturally evolve.