Questions on Errata, and other new player questions

By player1405144, in Dark Heresy Rules Questions

Ok, I am new to Dark Heresy, but not RPG gaming. I love the WH40k universe and am totally stoked to start playing.

I am rolling up an Imperial Psyker, and had some questions:

1. From the errata:

"Sanctionite Advances on page 75 should include the Invocation
skill at a cost of 100 xp, the Literacy skill at a cost of 100 xp, the
Psyniscience skill at a cost of 100 xp the Trade (Merchant) talent at
a cost of 100 xp, the Melee Weapon Training (Primitive) talent at a
cost of 100 xp, and the Psi Rating 1 talent at a cost of 100 xp. "

Why does the errata include such things as Literacy, Psyniscience, and Psy Rating 1 as advances for the Imperial Psyker, when you start with all of those already? It's not as though you can take Psy Rating 1 a second time, am I right?

2. When building an encounter, how do you know how many "bad guys" and which "bad guys" to use? In other RPGs, you have specific levels to guide you as to what is properly leveled for your group, but this game seems to have such a vague manner of listing the "difficulties" of the baddies. For instance, what is "Hereticus Minima"? I understand the designation of "Hereticus" but "Minima" doesn't tell me much of anything about what rank of PC should be facing them, or how many of them is an appropriate encounter for a group.

I am sure I have other questions that I just can't think of yet, so I will post them as I think of them, but for now this would be great! Thanks to anyone willing to lend a helping hand!

1) They included all starting skills and talents for all classes. This is to insure if you take an alternate starting career you can still pick up any thing you missed. For example if you can't buy PSI 1 you can't buy PSI 2.

2)Generally as a starting GM I'd start the players out on some thing easy. Say some gangers with a few stub pistols (no full auto!!!). Don't have the other side use cover or tactics. If the PCswipe the floor with them move them up to a smarter gang using cover. Be wary of full auto!!!

a)Try the following find the average low-high damage of the PCs weapons, and the other side. If it's 1d10+2 it's 3-12. Now look at bad guys armor plus TB. For example 3 armor and a 35 toughness. That would be 6. In this case the PCs are going nearly kill a bad guy if they roll well, and not hurt them if they roll poorly, but on average they will crit the other side in about 3 hits. This would be a long combat. It's generally a bad idea if the PCs can be push into crit +5 by a single enemy hit.

b)Remind the players that they can aim, use cover, and fire full auto.

c)Make sure that every one gets some armor. Having a party with a guardsman with flak, and an unarmored adept is bad. The flak wearing guardsman is going to soak 7-8 damage and the adept maybe 3. It's hard to balance a tough fight for the guardsman with not killing the adept.

Dalnor Surloc said:

1) They included all starting skills and talents for all classes. This is to insure if you take an alternate starting career you can still pick up any thing you missed. For example if you can't buy PSI 1 you can't buy PSI 2.

2)Generally as a starting GM I'd start the players out on some thing easy. Say some gangers with a few stub pistols (no full auto!!!). Don't have the other side use cover or tactics. If the PCswipe the floor with them move them up to a smarter gang using cover. Be wary of full auto!!!

a)Try the following find the average low-high damage of the PCs weapons, and the other side. If it's 1d10+2 it's 3-12. Now look at bad guys armor plus TB. For example 3 armor and a 35 toughness. That would be 6. In this case the PCs are going nearly kill a bad guy if they roll well, and not hurt them if they roll poorly, but on average they will crit the other side in about 3 hits. This would be a long combat. It's generally a bad idea if the PCs can be push into crit +5 by a single enemy hit.

b)Remind the players that they can aim, use cover, and fire full auto.

c)Make sure that every one gets some armor. Having a party with a guardsman with flak, and an unarmored adept is bad. The flak wearing guardsman is going to soak 7-8 damage and the adept maybe 3. It's hard to balance a tough fight for the guardsman with not killing the adept.

So there is no real method of building an encounter, other than crunching some numbers and trying to balance it out? I really wish the encounter system was better than that.

There is no encounter system. Don't make encounters; make stories.

The way I design my stories is I simply come up with an interesting f'ed up situation that would demand the big =][= to look into it and, as such, the players are sent to check things out. I then come up with about 3 "sets" or locations for the bulk of the action and story to take place and detail them, thinking of things that will leave a lasting impression in the players mind. I then come up with no less then two factions who are involved in the bad going's on that have goals that run counter to one another and to the PCs to insure that, no matter what, things will happen, tensions will rise, and the players will have more then one way to solve the situation before it goes critical. Finally, I jot down a few interesting vignettes that pop into my head that can be inserted anywhere in the narrative as I run the story so I can keep things exiting if things start getting a bit dry.

All I have to do then is toss the PC's into the thick of it, sit back, and just watch what happens. I don't worry about balance, fairness, encounters, or any of tat because the PC's are free to handle anything anyway they see fit. They won't be forced to go toe-to-toe with a daemon-host; they might be able to get the other faction to take it out for them, drop a building on it, or call in a squad of PDF solders (who will be purged latter) to blast it to hell with las cannons. Solving the problem I concoct is their concern, not mine. Mine is to come up with a memorable situation that's sure to evolve into a seriously dramatic story no matter what the choices made. Whether they "win" or "lose" is irrelevant as it's the journey that they will ultimately remember -that's were the fun is.

And you don't need to worry about balance too much, this game has a built in safety-net called Fate Points. If things go terribly wrong, bad choices were made, or dice just rebelled, Fate Points will be burned and everyone should learn their lesson. As Fate Points go, don't be afraid to let them completely rewrite events if that's what it takes to save a PC's life. Just give it the ol' Clue: The Movie treatment of "and that's how it could have happened, but here's how it really happened!"

For illustration purposes, here's how I would go about setting up one of my stories.

I would start with the premise, something like: an Inquisitorial agent recently found he could acquire a truly nasty bio-engineered xenoform that smacked of Slought bio-alchemy. The agent purchased the xenoform from a small bunch of rag-tag dregs and bounty hunters who obviously couldn't even catch such a thing on their own and weren't exactly the brain trust of the lower hive. They had to have gotten it from somewhere or someone and the PC's boss would really like to know who that is and where they can be found.

Now for the setting. For this, it could start where the xenoform was purchased, in a section of the hive just above the underhive slump, a massive cavernous waist-wash known as the Cascades where water and sewage falls for hundreds of meters down to the underhive from the opulence of up-hive, where rickety cat-walks criss-cross in an endless web of slippery corrugated iron. The second stage would be a decadent plasure-burge known as the Dyonisian District where all of ones desires could be fulfilled, a sick district built up around the Blood Arcade where just about any blood sport and gladiatorial fight imaginable could be seen and wagered on. Finally, for good measure, I could toss in an old decrepit mortuarium were the dead and dying from the Blood Arcade are sent and never seen again.

Once I have a few interesting stages, I decide who the various factions are that's involved in what's going on and I make sure they all have goals and ambitions that will bring them into conflict with one another and the PC's. For this, I could decide that there's obviously the Beast House at work here. Further complicating matters, the three primary heretics involved in the Beast House operations in the Blood Arcade are at odds with one another, as criminals are want to do. I brainstorm a bit and come up wit three heretics. The first is the main Beast Hunter, The Huntress Skayde, a magistratum redsash captain who's love of the hunt has gotten the better of her. She has a whole division of Killsquad Troopers at her disposal who idol worship her killing abilities and will do anything for her.

Second is a brutal assassin who slaughtered his way into a sizable fortune and near immunity from the law (he kept winning his trials by combat in the most brutal fashions imaginable... soon, no local really wanted to attempt to prosecute him in the legal arena). He's the front man for the Blood Arcade, though he's having second thoughts about how sick the Secret Game known as the Dead Man's Ball has gotten. Skayd knows he's getting cold feet and is working to have him removed in a very permanent way, but such, even for her and her troopers, isn't easy, especially since he is perpetually surrounded by the "Shadow Men" -his own personal guard and assassin, trained by him with a fanatical drug induced loyalty to him.

Then, there's the alchemist, a deranged but brilliant embalmer named Melchoria who has fallen into secrets of bio-alchemy no one of her station should possess. What no one knows is she is but a tool for a coven of Slought living deep under the Blood Arcade. She has started feeding them the bodies of the slain in exchange for the secrets of their nightmare technology in a desperate bid to rise up out of the desolate mire of her biennial life. The Slought are growing tiered of their playthings in the Beast House and are becoming a bit uncomfortable with the amount of attention the "Dead Man's Ball" has started drawing from the wrong sources. The last thing they want is for the buffet to be interrupted by the Imperials and they might move against the Beast House to quiet things up.

Finally, there's the ones who started all this, the dregs and bounty hunters. I decide they're a group eking out a living on the edges of the underhive led by a fallen academic cartographer with an unnatural love of the hive in which he lives and mapping all it's nooks and crannies. He's started a bit of a freelance business for himself hiring dregs and heavies as pest exterminators as well as guides to the underhive for jaded nobles looking for good hunting ground. Ever the entrepreneur, he found himself contracted by Skayde on several occasions to hunt some of the most terrible mutant beasts from the deepest depths of the hive base for use in the Blood Arcade -and working with her is how he came to see that Thing in the cage that matched the description of something someone else was looking for. Greed got the best of him and he and his boys managed to slip the cage out under the cover of their motorwagon to sell it to the crazy rube who was asking around about such monsters. Now he's in hot water, the Beast House is looking into what happened to the beast Melchoria had finished altering, and some inquisitorial acolytes are about to pay he and his boys a visit. How that visit goes, however, is up to the PC's. They can kick in the door, guns blazing in the hopes of black-bagging the survivors and beating the truth out of them, or they can play good cop and convince them the best hope they have for survival now is to play along with the inquisition's wishes and help them find out where that thing came from with the promise of clemency latter on.


In fact, the whole thing is dependant on how the PC's chose to tackle it. They can try to take out the heads of the hydra, perhaps if they're savvy enough, they can play one side against the other letting the heretics eliminate each other before they take out the survivor. However, as their mission is strictly a fact finding mission, they don't even need to do that, they just need to stay alive long enough and play it smart enough to find out who all the heretics are, identify the targets that need to be taken out, where to take them out, and how, and their master can send in several arbiter killsquads to do the wetwork. Of course, if the PC's can take care of the problem to boot, they'll get some serious brownie-points with their master and move one step closer to his inner circle and a bit closer to wielding the power he dose.

To summarize, don't make encounters, make stories. The encounters will simply organically grow from it and the players decisions. Sure, they all won't be balanced in any way, but in this game, just because there's a guy with a gun at the end of the hall doesn't mean it's a good idea for the PC's to attack. Sometimes, other methods are better to deal with the situation and sometimes that method is to just run. It's, at it's heart, a game of problem solving, not head cracking. So, come up with a problem and have fun while they work at finding a way to solve it with their characters heads and limbs still attached.

Hope this has been of some help to ya, and good luck!

I would like to second everything Graver said.

The problem with "encounter design" and "balanced encounters" in other games is that they all presume solving those in a particular manner (mainly slugging it out) and trying to bypass a "balanced encounter" is discouraged (if not downright considered cheating).

The trick is... if you, as Graver put it, build stories instead of encounters, I think both you and your players will find a lot more freedom in how they go about solving those inevitable encounters.

Imagine, for instance, a situation where the players have to "question" a wealthy nobleman. The noble knows that the players are after him and has bunkered down in an easily defensible building, waiting for them. The D&D-esque way to deal with that situation is to give the noble weapons and bodyguards that are balanced to the players' capabilities. The Dark Heresy way (IMHO) is to simply design the 'encounter' from what the noble would reasonably have access to. How many mercenaries can he hire in the time he has, what kind of equipment might they have. Given time and resources, he could (and should be able to) build defenses that are virtually impossible to penetrate with a frontal assault.

However, this also allows the players to get creative. How do they penetrate these defenses? Are they equipped to storm a heavily defended position? Can they just level the entire building with explosives? Can they find a weak point to sneak through so they can take the nobleman hostage before his bodyguards can react? You can't defend a position indefinitely, eventually you need supplies. You begin to wonder if everyone is actually after you. Can the players use this to their advantage? The possibilities are almost endless.

The bottom line is that 'unbalanced' encounters are fine as long as you don't abuse it. Some enemies are just stronger, better equiped or better prepared than you. As long as the players are able to recognize a hopeless situation and pull back to reconsider, it's not really a failed encounter. Just a failed attempt at solving the encounter. Despite what the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer might say, not everything can be solved with a lasgun blast. :)

Remember, here's no fast and easy capability guage in Dark Heresy - One rank 2 party might be all guardsmen with vanaheim full-auto combat shotguns. Another might be all adepts with laspistols. Equipment accounts for a lot, so you can't really set up 'encounter design rules' that cover every possibility. In the end it all boils down to GM instinct.

I agree with everything those guys just said.

Just reiterating, fate points are there for a reason.

In the DH system a person with a lassgun and a 25 BS can, with all the right modifiers and rolls, take out a high level person, even a Space Marine. It’s not likely, but it is possible.

Mooks = 1 wound generic filler enemies, Star Wars Stormtroopers if you will. By having 2-3 or more mooks per one squad leader(normal wounds) you can bulk out a force but the players will still be able to chew through a large group, if they fight smart.

Shotguns, Las guns, and autoguns are they way to arm the masses. Heavy weapons and Special (Bolt, Plasma, etc) will decimate a starting group of players.

Hold off on grenades until your party starts using them. Then teach them a lesson.

Taking cover is key to surviving combat.

As was stated, the enemy should start out dumb and get smarter as the party does. The party also needs to learn to think about what and how they are going to do something before doing it.

The group I play in is a sledgehammer. We have had a lot of fun just going up the middle. Since we started thinking more about HOW we do things we have become spectacularly successful at shocking our GM in getting things accomplished without having to spend weeks in the infirmary after missions.

Excellent posts above here. I couldn't agree more!

If you actually want to make a challenging straight up unavoidable combat encounter, it is quite possible to use the DHsytem to do so and even make the fights require a bit of thinking on the players part. I'll try to share some of the things I consider when I create combat encounters.

First, consider what sort of combat your acolytes prefer then choose the location to help or hinder them. For example: pistols, flamers and melee talents are powerful in close quarters, but are useless if you are at the wrong end of 800 meter open ground. No night vision goggles makes darkness a nasty enemy. Void conditions, acid rains, deep waters, high speeds etc add extra deadlyness. Firefights on a crowded plaza will cause some interesting moral choices (Sure you can move with the panicked crowd, they will count as 5 points of extra armor. Wanna use a flamer? no problem!). Generally give the bad guys equipment and talents to match the location. This point has a lot overlap with point four below.

Second, consider who has the initiative. If the acolytes are being ambushed while sleeping in their underwear, any thug with a piece of lead pipe becomes dangerous. If the acolytes are doing the ambush, they will kill lots of bad guys the first two or three rounds until they all have weapons and such ready. A part of this is how well trained and disciplined the enemies are. Soliders will stay and fight longer than thugs, will prob have better awareness scores and will be very capable of focusing their damage to take out one acolyte at a time, etc. Try to RP the fight accordingly, by making more or less clever tactical choices.

Third, make the opponents within the group a bit varied. An officer, priest or hivebrain that allows the bad guys to reroll pinning tests as long as she is alive. A psyker that takes control over the playes characters andforces them to shoot eachother. Some genestealers that sneak up on the players through the sewers while their human mindthralls keeps the acolytes busy with ranged weapons. Fear ratings and psychic powers can be really powerful when used against a low-lvl party. Bring one or two models with much nastier weapons than the average goon, these will make for good priority targets. Monoedged greatweapons, grenadelaunchers with crakgrenades, heavy stubbers etc do this good. Don't expect these to kill lots of acolytes, they will be using fate points to reroll their dodge etc.

Fourth, (and this is the most fun part) consider adding an additional challenging tactical factor. Here only your imagination sets the limit. Some of these challenges are much easier to GM if you have models and a map to place them on. Here are some examples from the top of my head: Pitch darkness, equip the players with flashlights that illuminates a bit, but makes them clear targets if they have them lit. Make them escort a civilian that must be kept out of harms way. Give them a timer (the train you are on will hit the broken bridge and tumble to your death in 20 rounds, unless you fight your way through the stinking heaps of mutants to the locomotive in time). Give the enemies creative grenades (choke, hallucinogen, flash-bang, firebombs etc). Give the acolytes lots of smokegrenades and put them at the wrong end of a huge field wihtout cover. The fight is on a spaceship with systems damaged by the recent combat so every second turn will be pitch black and in zero G, every second will be bright as day with normal gravity. Place the fight inside a room full of prometheum fumes so the players must avoid any weapon that might cause an explosion (grab a lead pipe, a table leg and maybe a crossbow...). Have the big bad use her goons during the fight (cover, ammunition, ingredients for summoning horrible things with tentacles). Lascannons are mounted on tripods along the wall, free to use for whoever can hold them. Have the enemies regenerate and get back into the fight unless they are burned with flamers. A warprift will teleport everyone to a random spot in the room every third round. A tight and winding corridor with genestealers hanging in ambush under the roof. Two additional factions are involved, both could be considered enemies to the acolytes.

Fifth and lastly, after all these things have been designed you might want to take a look at damage output. Try to calculate how much damage the acolytes can do on average in one round. This does not need to be exact, just wing it, you will learn as you go along. Try to make sure that there will be bad guys enough to last for at least a couple of rounds of fighting. Also calculate how much damage the enemy can do. Generally try to bring mostly weapons that will wound the characters, not kill them in one hit. Do not bring only one big evil target. It will be killed very quickly, unless it has a high unnatural toughness or similar, good dodge only works once or twice per round.

Feel free to let the setup of your combat encounters be governed by how the players use their skills and RPing. A Peer(underworld) might give the acolytes a hint that a gang boss wants them dead. With a few skilled inquiries they can then find out who was hired, and then go ambush the people he has hired for the job, or just go fight the boss and his bodyguards.

Most importantly, talk to your players to see what they thought was fun. Good luck!

Scrow said:

So there is no real method of building an encounter, other than crunching some numbers and trying to balance it out? I really wish the encounter system was better than that.

Not really, but DH is a much more level game than say D&D. A rank 2 acolyte given similar weapons, and armor could kill a rank 5 acolyte. In fact if the rank 2 guy fought smart he'd stand a good chance of winning. (IE using cover, aim with basic accurate weapons, full auto, and the like) A rank 5 guy is only maybe 15% better at hitting, attacks x2 as much, and has a mere 2-5 hit points. Gear and player smarts count for a lot. In a game like D&D the level 5 guy might beat a level 1 without needing his weapons/armor or tactics. In DH a rank 1 guy in guard flak with a lasgun kills a rank 5 guy easily. (Unless the rank 5 uses grappling of course.)

PS- That said psykers tend to be the exception to the rule. At high ranks they are very dangerous, and not just to the bad guys.

Dalnor Surloc said:

PS- That said psykers tend to be the exception to the rule. At high ranks they are very dangerous, and not just to the bad guys.

Seconded. Never underestimate the ability of a "friendly" psyker to make a bad situation infinitely worse.

Psykers are definitely the wildcard career and over the course of a mission can turn a mission on its head several times (there's something anti-climatic but funny about the big boss for an encounter starting to taunt the PCs only to fall to the ground in spasms). Of course these same effects can be turned on the PCs but should probably be done with caution (although the dangers should emphasise why the Inquisition hunts down rogue psykers at every opportunity).