What mechanics would you want to see redone to be less brutal, clunky or overpowered? If there is ever another errata, what would you like to see in it?

Of all the psychic disciplines, I really think Biomancy is the best of the bunch. It provides utility in being able to heal, get rid of fatigue, and change your appearance. Once you get to the bottom of the tree it gets crazy. Warpspeed makes other characters at melee or at range obsolete. I just witnessed one such biomancer tear apart a chaos space marine with no effort, using Lightning Attack and Two Weapon Master to kill him before he got the chance to strike at him or the rest of the party. It was nuts.

Snare is also an issue of that group, mainly because it it renders targets helpless. I could see Snare immobilizing them, perhaps dropping the target prone as well, but rendering a target a non-threat until they pass a test is a bit much in my opinion.

I'm interested in seeing what some others think, based on some discussions here in the forums.

I've said this before but I'll repeat it again: Get rid of Skin armor! Damage reduction based on Tb is ridiculous! Unnatural toughness maybe but average -3 points damage due to toughness against a bullet? Really?!? Not in my game! And I hope they will make that a standard rule.

I would also like to see weapon damage reworked to reflect their TT capabilities. I know this is somewhat controversial in some circles but, If an individual acolyte takes a direct hit from a Krak Missile or Lascannon, they should be little more than a Splat mark! And said Lascannon should reliably frighten even Tank crews since that's what it's for!

The biggest change that needs to be made is to speed up combat . Not really sure how to do that without a major re-write. One logical step would be to base damage off of Degrees of Success rather than a separate roll.

And if we're talking major re-writes, I'd love to see Psychic Powers reformatted to be broad, mutable effects, like they are depicted in the fluff, rather than narrowly defined D&D-style 'spells'.

I've sort-of done that in my game, Radwraith. AP penetrates normal Toughness bonus. Added Proven and an extra d10 to all explosives, gave Plasma weapons Razor Sharp, etc. That said, only one PC has died completely in my game (one has burned a Fate Point, and one character was literally a failed Toughness roll away from death with 9 Critical damage and poison gas in the air). I don't know why you think a Lascannon isn't scary, though; 5d10+10 with 10 Pen is freaking dangerous.

I also don't know why you need combat sped up, B. It runs plenty quick in my group; About two and a half hours got us through a combat with ninety enemies vs. nineteen of us mooks included, on variable moving terrain. I've never had a faster fight of that scale in another game.

I too would probably nerf Snare; if any of you have played Forgotten Gods, you remember the end-game boss? My group used a Webber on him, he failed his checks to break free and got shot to bits.

A way to let lone big, bad bosses shine without being mauled by a group targeting them would be nice. At this point, I can never throw a lone enemy who isn't invulnerable at my party; it gets overwhelmed and destroyed post haste.

I'd like see a competent combat rework. There is this pipeline of modifiers that get inserted into every shot and every sword strike. I'd like to see that done away with to some degree, so that characters and goons are just rolling a set number off their sheet. This isn't XCOM where the computer does all the heavy lifting.

Pipeline

Typical attack ---> Attack Type (Standard, Swift, Full Auto, etc.) ---> Aim Y/N ---> Range Ex/L/S/PB ---> Weapon Bonuses ---> Gang Up and other special rules ---> "Attack Roll"

Perhaps getting rid of aim as a half round action would be the best plan and adding a short range bonus to all weapons initially would be good too, since most combats take place at short range. Maybe we could also do away with dodge. You could also probably simplify the attack types a bit and reduce the number of potential special rules.

They also need to fix 'grapple'. The rules for grapple are on four separate pages and extremely unclear.

I'd like to see some of the roles have their aptitudes touched up. My favourite example right now is that the Ace, the role meant to be a pilot, has only one matching aptitude built in for the Operate and Navigate skills; Penitent on the other hand has all 3.

Weapons get a short range weapon bonus, Fog. +10 at half the listed range on the weapon, Point-Blank is a +30 if 2m or closer. I don't see how getting rid of a half-action aim helps.

I'll just say this right here; getting rid of Dodge is ludicrous. No-one will ever survive if you do. Folks can only take so much punishment before dying. A well-shot meltagun kills almost everything man-sized, and you'd get rid of the option to get out of the way? No avoiding explosives? Sniper rounds? Automatic fire? Insanity.

Weapons get a short range weapon bonus, Fog. +10 at half the listed range on the weapon, Point-Blank is a +30 if 2m or closer. I don't see how getting rid of a half-action aim helps.

I'll just say this right here; getting rid of Dodge is ludicrous. No-one will ever survive if you do. Folks can only take so much punishment before dying. A well-shot meltagun kills almost everything man-sized, and you'd get rid of the option to get out of the way? No avoiding explosives? Sniper rounds? Automatic fire? Insanity.

I'm well aware of all the bonuses. Also, PB is 3m and not 2m. I'm perhaps suggesting maybe combine the short range bonus with the BS characteristic. I'm also suggesting instead of exactly getting rid of dodge entirely doing away with the roll. Right now, you want to decrease the number of dice rolls and decrease the number of modifiers. Dodge could be a modifier instead of a roll. I'm not saying remove an advantage to running a agile character; just re-imagine ways for the mechanics to streamline it.

Getting rid of aim I see more as getting rid of an automatic +10 and maybe combining it with BS too.

Either way, we won't see a new edition for ages, so it's kind of a moot point.

I've been doing a lot of programming lately and basically every time you add a new conditional statement you are adding a layer. The more layers you add the more you bog things down as you get more and more potential outcomes.

What we have right now is a game where many GM's and players don't use all the modifiers because there are just so many. I forget 'gang up' all the time.

Weapons get a short range weapon bonus, Fog. +10 at half the listed range on the weapon, Point-Blank is a +30 if 2m or closer. I don't see how getting rid of a half-action aim helps.

I'll just say this right here; getting rid of Dodge is ludicrous. No-one will ever survive if you do. Folks can only take so much punishment before dying. A well-shot meltagun kills almost everything man-sized, and you'd get rid of the option to get out of the way? No avoiding explosives? Sniper rounds? Automatic fire? Insanity.

I would be much happier if Dodge functioned as a penalty to hit you, not something you do after the fact. Being harder to hit makes more sense than doing the Matrix or somehow jumping out of the way of a shot that should've connected.

I'd love to see a flow chart for all rolling dice modifiers in Dark Heresy. It would be insane. Like a nuclear power plant blueprint.

A way to let lone big, bad bosses shine without being mauled by a group targeting them would be nice. At this point, I can never throw a lone enemy who isn't invulnerable at my party; it gets overwhelmed and destroyed post haste.

I have houseruled that no more than 3 people can attack another in melee combat (unless the attacked person is extraordinary large) because more would get in each other's way. And when shooting into the melee, each additional attacker adds another -20 to the BS of the shooter. So if 3 pc's attack the level/end boss in melee, any remaining pc's have a -60 to hit instead of the basic -20. Also, have the npc focus his melee attacks on one pc instead of spreading it around as most GM's do. And remember all the talents the npc has!!! Each combat round on average should put a pc in crits against such an opponent. That way, surviving a fight against a single high threat npc (without burning faith points) becomes pretty epic.

Indeed. The Star Wars Edge of the Empire system works very well; boiling down to a second or so putting together the right 'dice pool' before rolling and a second or so cancelling results after rolling.

Speeding up combat is important to me too. Yes, umpty-ump combat maneuvers give you tactics and flexibility, but at the moment the system dies a death from detail. I do not really care if I have a 50% or 55% chance of hitting....in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal.

Status tokens and cards do help a lot in this regard - putting it into perspective, we had a melee fight with four characters yesterday - two named NPCs and two PCs. It felt very slow and clunky when you have to work things out from first principle. Yes, all right, theoretically a PC should work out damage for each weapon in advance, but it'd be a lot faster if they didn't have to, and even then, things change a lot from combat conditions or whenever XP gets applied.

Each round is

• Pick what you're going to do
• Work out what you need to roll to hit - in this example throwing in weapon quality, frenzy, hatred, standard attack, aim, defensive stance, target size
• Roll to hit
• Roll to parry/dodge
• Realise you've forgotten what you rolled to hit and try to remember to find the location hit
• Try to figure out the damage - with strength bonus again varying with frenzy, ws degrees-of-success changes to dice rolls, armour, pen value, toughness bonus, mighty blow (which provides damage bonus based on WS bonus which again varies with frenzy)
• Flick back and forth in the rulebook to find the critical tables because for some ****** reason they didn't put them on the GM screen
• Pass onto the next character to repeat.

The problem is that it doesn't feel like the extra detail really does anything. Nothing feels missing from a gunfight or duel in Star Wars.

I understand that you want the 'classic' 40k statlines - WS, BS, etc, with values that can trace their heritage to the tabletop (in this case more-or-less divide by ten) but the mechanics seem over the top.

I'll be honest, in Only War, your comrade has the possible states of being of unwounded, wounded, and dead. For about 90% of NPCs, for about 90% of the time, that's enough detail.

Making damage work of Degrees of success directly is a nice idea. To be honest, you could do a nice merger of the systems:

• Frankly for the sake of speed and focusing on the narrative, I can't see any reason you couldn't stick to a D10 rather than a D100; do you really need to have the option to have BS33 rather than BS30 to 'flesh out the character'? Awarding insanity or corruption a point at a time over a campaign makes a 0-100 scale useful, I'm not sure much else really requires it. Anyway, that's a personal thing.
• A check is a roll - much like it is now - aiming to roll less than your stat (plus or minus bonuses), so a higher stat is good.
• Each degree of success allows you to 'buy' effects - much like 'spending advantage' in star wars. So if I roll a 01 on a BS check and get 4 degrees of success, I can spend them on damage 4 times (Ka-Blam!) or spend some on, for example, hitting you in the gun arm specifically but do less damage, or on critical effects like stunning or causing blood loss.
• Armour reduces your degrees of success - and can reduce them to zero (because you've bounced off the armour).
• Toughness also reduces your degrees of success - but can't reduce them to zero. So essentially, if you've put a bullet through a weak spot in astartes power armour, you will do whatever wound one degree of success represents (a flesh wound of some kind, or maybe stunning for a turn) but no more - that way, as per old-style inquisitor, Toughness won't stop you getting hurt at all, but it will turn major injuries into minor ones.
• Weapons can still ignore armour or toughness based on traits, and may add extra degrees of success to your damage roll if you hit at all (rather than having a damage stat as now) - so that roll of 01 with a stub pistol will do 4 degrees of success, but if it had been a bolt round it might be increased to more like 6 - enough to both make the hit a focused shot to the gun hand and do enough damage to remove the extremity.

I'll be honest, I like Deathwatch as well as Dark Heresy, and the one 'new' setting I'd love to see is the Horus Heresy as a 'new generation' version of Deathwatch - if it was done with the same art style and production values as the HH books, they'd be stunning, and there are dozens of ready-made campaign ideas in the background from the end of the Great Crusade to the start of the Heresy.

I'd love to see a flow chart for all rolling dice modifiers in Dark Heresy. It would be insane. Like a nuclear power plant blueprint.

I work in Nuclear power fog. (Hence my username!) Have you ever seen one of those prints? Much like the modifiers chart, they're not that hard to understand but you have to have an understanding of how they are written to do so! The same is true of ANY game system! You have to understand the system in order to apply the rules. I like the fact that DH has a fairly complete chart of modifiers for different situations. As a Gm it allows my players to use tactics to create concrete advantages or suffer real disadvantages based on their current conditions rather than having to make it up on the fly. As a player, I like the fact that it allows me more options than just; I see the enemy, I attack!

It feels weird to say, but I think they would've had a better system if they had just ported over what was done with the Inquisitor TT game, and just converted everything model-related.

I'd love to see a flow chart for all rolling dice modifiers in Dark Heresy. It would be insane. Like a nuclear power plant blueprint.

I work in Nuclear power fog. (Hence my username!) Have you ever seen one of those prints? Much like the modifiers chart, they're not that hard to understand but you have to have an understanding of how they are written to do so! The same is true of ANY game system! You have to understand the system in order to apply the rules. I like the fact that DH has a fairly complete chart of modifiers for different situations. As a Gm it allows my players to use tactics to create concrete advantages or suffer real disadvantages based on their current conditions rather than having to make it up on the fly. As a player, I like the fact that it allows me more options than just; I see the enemy, I attack!

Depth is an interesting topic. Ideally, you want the ruleset to be able to interpret any reasonable command and give realistic odds. I do know how the 'target number pipeline' works, as a GM - for the most part. The problem is that I don't always have an infinite supply of nuclear power plant blueprint enthusiasts clamoring to join my games. In my life I've done a lot of things, but the latest obsession with programming has lead me to really think critically about what is right and wrong with systems.

Modifiers add depth at the expense of speed. When you look at something like Stars Without Number you can see how fast combat can run in a rules lite system.

I'll give you a challenge. Next time you play. Try to write down on a bit of scrap paper how often one of your players screws up a modifier pipeline. Just humor me and get back to me.

I'm not a "blueprint "enthusiast" so much as I've worked with the prints you're talking about. And you're missing my point: I've run enough games in enough systems to know that my players get very used to applying modifiers (Correctly) in most ANY system. It just takes a little practice and a solid understanding of the rules. In DH for instance, combat modifiers come in flavors of + or -10. And there generally are not more than two or three of them! Sure, there are exceptions but those are simply multiples of the above. This hardly requires advanced programming calculus or or physics theory to figure out!

You're right! I prefer some depth to my combat encounters. I've played enough D&D games to know that "I see the monster, I attack" type scenarios get horrendously boring after awhile! I've also played savage worlds which is an extremely simple system! In that system I have often found myself thinking "I wish I could..." but the system doesn't support it. You want complicated? Try Rifts or GURPS! I think Dark heresy adds a pretty good level of depth without being insanely complicated.

In reference to your experiment: I've already done it but I handled it a bit differently; I expect my players to know their positive modifiers and I handle the negatives. They don't remember...they don't get it. I find that within 2-3 game sessions my players are pretty much informing me of both their positives and negatives during a turn. YMMV of course but that's been my experience.

It feels weird to say, but I think they would've had a better system if they had just ported over what was done with the Inquisitor TT game, and just converted everything model-related.

Inquisitor had its own problems.

Moving from rolling to hit for each attack (with a pair of ***** machine pistols!) to rolling to hit once and doing extra hits based on the degree of success is a lot faster.

At the same time, one thing it did have is the ability to parry any number of times - each successive parry gets harder. One thing that bugs in DH combat is the one player attacks, makes the defender react and the other attacks with no risk of being parried (add one extra attacker as required for step aside).

I don't think the +/- 10s are too bad, but there are other options that people tend to forget - I can count on one hand the number of times a player has used feint or guarded attack unprompted, for example.

At the same time, one thing it did have is the ability to parry any number of times - each successive parry gets harder. One thing that bugs in DH combat is the one player attacks, makes the defender react and the other attacks with no risk of being parried (add one extra attacker as required for step aside).

Like generally it is in a real combat.

You can't parry 2 attacks at the same time, unless your adversaries are trying to both hit your blade.

The only thing I really have a serious issue with is the way that some aptitudes are significanly more useful than others.

I've just started playing in a D&D5E campaign (2 sessions in), and I'm kinda liking its gimmick for avoiding excessive 'bonus math'. Basically, instead of endless +2s and -2s that have to be carefully tallied, bonuses and penalties are replaced with Advantage or Disadvantage. If you have more Advantage than Disadvantage, you roll 2 d20s and pick the best one; if you have more Disadvantage, you have to take the worse one. It definitely speeds up combat, but on the downside I feel it has stripped out the benefits of some tactics (like bonuses for Charging and Flanking) that I enjoyed incorporating in 3rd Ed.

If you wanted to port this over to WH40KRP , you could say that with more Advantage than Disadvantage, the lowest d10 is the '10s' digit, while if you have Disadvantage the highest d10 is the base.

I've just started playing in a D&D5E campaign (2 sessions in), and I'm kinda liking its gimmick for avoiding excessive 'bonus math'. Basically, instead of endless +2s and -2s that have to be carefully tallied, bonuses and penalties are replaced with Advantage or Disadvantage. If you have more Advantage than Disadvantage, you roll 2 d20s and pick the best one; if you have more Disadvantage, you have to take the worse one. It definitely speeds up combat, but on the downside I feel it has stripped out the benefits of some tactics (like bonuses for Charging and Flanking) that I enjoyed incorporating in 3rd Ed.

If you wanted to port this over to WH40KRP , you could say that with more Advantage than Disadvantage, the lowest d10 is the '10s' digit, while if you have Disadvantage the highest d10 is the base.

While this is an interesting idea I prefer the grainier approach! If the player assassin spends the time and effort to get to a perfect shooting position and take Aim on the HVT, I wouldn't want to treat that the same as "You flank him you have advantage." (Which is essentially how 5E works!) If the player wants to play the "One shot one kill" guy, that's certainly possible in the character development. Why would you nerf that?

I've just started playing in a D&D5E campaign (2 sessions in), and I'm kinda liking its gimmick for avoiding excessive 'bonus math'. Basically, instead of endless +2s and -2s that have to be carefully tallied, bonuses and penalties are replaced with Advantage or Disadvantage. If you have more Advantage than Disadvantage, you roll 2 d20s and pick the best one; if you have more Disadvantage, you have to take the worse one. It definitely speeds up combat, but on the downside I feel it has stripped out the benefits of some tactics (like bonuses for Charging and Flanking) that I enjoyed incorporating in 3rd Ed.

If you wanted to port this over to WH40KRP , you could say that with more Advantage than Disadvantage, the lowest d10 is the '10s' digit, while if you have Disadvantage the highest d10 is the base.

While this is an interesting idea I prefer the grainier approach! If the player assassin spends the time and effort to get to a perfect shooting position and take Aim on the HVT, I wouldn't want to treat that the same as "You flank him you have advantage." (Which is essentially how 5E works!) If the player wants to play the "One shot one kill" guy, that's certainly possible in the character development. Why would you nerf that?

Because it is not set up to be a system designed for flavorful choices, but one that rewards bonus hunting. Everyone is going to try to be the "One shot, one kill" guy since the majority of bonuses aren't restricted to class or character type. If your sniper character is up high with a long-las and a target that can't see him, his bonuses would be the same as the Sage in the same position.

I would much prefer something similar to Numenera or Dungeon World, where there are fixed actions - but you narrate how they work.

Social interactions. It doesn't work very well right now and there are too many unknowns in the rules for it to work properly.

Social interactions. It doesn't work very well right now and there are too many unknowns in the rules for it to work properly.

Unknowns such as?

What I currently dislike is the way that the rulebooks are written. They often mix flavor text and game mechanics together. Not the best combination when you have to look something up very quickly, having to scan through all that text.

What I'd like to see is the flavor text first, and then followed up with bullet points of what a certain ability, talent, combat action, whatever actually does mechanics wise.

Or keep it as is, but also show a quick bullet point overview of what was discussed. Problem with that are the total extra pages added just for this handy overview.

That would be soooo much clearer then when you try to introduce somebody to the system then. I'm composing a document for myself that has exactly this.