A. First make attack & damage into ONE SINGLE roll based off of DoS

This is probably the #1 change need to speed up the game. It's kind of ridiculous that a single attack can take as many as 5 rolls (roll to hit, roll to confirm RF, roll for damage, roll for dodge/parry, roll on the critical damage table). It's fine to not like the Star Wars system's dice, but the thing they nailed was incorporating all of that into a single roll (except the critical table).

Another change I think would make the game more usable is removing all of the modifier descriptions. Item availabilities and skill check difficulties have 2 sets of words describing their difficulty but map to the same +/-60 modifier. It's particularly silly in the weapon profile table where everything is described in numbers except its availability. You have to memorize what each means or just look it up every time.

So are we thinking about replacing the Dodge/Parry roll with a straight deduction of DoS (i.e. using a Reaction to Dodge grants -2 or -3 DoS on the attack roll)?

A. First make attack & damage into ONE SINGLE roll based off of DoS

This is probably the #1 change need to speed up the game. It's kind of ridiculous that a single attack can take as many as 5 rolls (roll to hit, roll to confirm RF, roll for damage, roll for dodge/parry, roll on the critical damage table). It's fine to not like the Star Wars system's dice, but the thing they nailed was incorporating all of that into a single roll (except the critical table).

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I assume that RF stands for Righteous Fury. Isn't that part of the damage roll? Or did you mean something else with "RF"?

The Critical damage part more often than not does not apply to npcs (same in Star Wars), and a player hopefully won't be forced to consult that dreaded critical damage chart. The amount of evasion opportunities is also limited.

Naturally, you're right that Star Wars does this more elegantly, as I also pointed out in my previous post about Star Wars.

Or or - just XCOM (ie make a version of it) the game as a play table for both the GM and Players alike together!

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.

Extra calculations do not necessarily speed things up over extra dice rolls. Rolling a d10 and adding a fixed number to it takes almost no time (Clatter of dice... "9... so 15 total). Calculating DoS, and then multiplying... something by that would likely take more time ("Wait... is that 3 or 4 DoS? Ok, and now times 7... ok, that's 21... no wait... 28, it is 4"). Extra dice rolling doesn't necessarily mean more time if the dice rolls are simple (which damage rolls tend to be). This is one of the the same reason I don't think turning reactions into opposed checks is superior than the "flat success/failure" way they work at the moment, as you don't have to work out DoS, which is the thing that takes time in my mind. Most players I know will quite quickly internalise all the common modifiers (short range, aim etc), so they can very quickly go "I Succeeded" or "I failed", but having to stop and do DoS slows things down.

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'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:

• 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.

Adding more choices for players will slow things down... now, it isn't necessarily a bad thing, if they are interesting choices, but they do tend to slow things down, especially if these are choices made each roll. And from my experience with the Star Wars game, those choices can eventually get a little wearing ("Oh, right another Triumph... how the **** am I going to use that in a meaningful way in this climbing check? That's the 3rd plot changing event in this goddam fight scene. And that 3 advantage over there? Do I really have to give a narrative reason why I am passing this blue dice to you, as frankly I am a little worn out and just want to shoot some stormtroopers.")

Also, your players should have worked out the damages for all their weapons in advance... it isn't exactly hard. Yes, I will admit there are some situations that will change it, especially with the changes to things like Mighty Blow (but why are your players even frenzying? That is a quick route to PC death in my experience...) but even these changes are predicable and so can be precalculated (unlike mechanics revolving around DoS). For my Barbarian in D&D I always listed things twice: once for normal, and once for rage effects. Didn't have to calculate much at all at the table.

Not having the Critical tables on the GM screen is an oversight... but then they have so many it would take so much space up. But yes, that is a problem. However, with mooks you can just ignore them and just have them fall down at 0 wounds for simplicity.

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.

For the 2 or so years I played the system I am pretty cure we rarely made a mistake. Most of the common ones become second nature, and they do tend to follow a +/-10 pattern. Not that I necessarily disagree completely. Some could be ironed into the stats or whatever, but I don't actually think they are nearly as difficult to remember as you suggest.

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.

Actually, if you have any Advantage it cancels out all Disadvantage and visa versa. One Disadvantage vs 6 reasons to have Advantage (not that I can think of that many) and you are just back to rolling 1d20. Same the other way round. Very simplified, and a nice idea (and making the "levels" cancel each other out I guess is an easy house rule).

I'll say it before and I'll say it again; If FFG tries to sell me special proprietary dice that can be easily done with numerical dice that all rpg players (except newcomers) already have for a WH40K game I'll just never play the game.

I say this as someone who was equally opposed to weird custom dice: you really should give it a shot. The dice mechanics are interesting and allow for deeper results than a simple numerical roll. It's a very well designed system and is a lot of fun.

I think like all systems it depends on the players and GM. I cam currently playing in a group where the GM wants the mechanics of maps, etc. The Star Wars system doesn't fit how he wants to run the game, and the mechanics just leave unanswered questions for him (like moving... if I move away from a towards b, what happens to my distance to c? Answer is... it doesn't tell you, it is entirely up to the GM... so our GM has just started mapping combat with simplified grids). It is an interesting idea, but it can be a little draining to find interesting ways to use the advantage or disadvantage you keep rolling (or more so the Triumphs and Despairs... as they are meant to be a big deal yet they can come up a lot, particularly in combat. It is a lot of narrative pressure, especially if you are GM. It isn't a bad system (and I don't think the 40k RPG one is either), just it will not work for every player group (just as it is clear that the 40k rpg system doesn't work for everyone here).

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It isn't a bad system (and I don't think the 40k RPG one is either), just it will not work for every player group (just as it is clear that the 40k rpg system doesn't work for everyone here).

This so much. There is no "one size fits all system", it's what the GM and his group ultimately wants.

This so much. There is no "one size fits all system", it's what the GM and his group ultimately wants.

And even the same GM and group might like different systems for different genres. For example: I wouldn't mind using a rules-light, player-empowering, narrativist system for something like Star Wars or a 'four color' superhero campaign, but I would never want to use such a system for something like Dark Heresy or any kind of horror game.

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.

That's not how it works. If you have advantage you have 2d20kh1, if you have disadvantage you have 2d20kl1, if you have both you roll 1d20. If you have three sources of Advantage and one of Disadvantage you roll 1d20. Having more "advantages" than "disadvantages" is not a mechanic.

Morbid's suggestions are spot on. Honestly I'm pretty happy with the state 40kRPG ended up in,DH2e makes for a tidy, cohesive package with the products available. However, if we see a return of 40kRPG in the future, I wouldn't be interested in any more iterative designs. It needs to be something either built from the ground up or radically reworked from what we have now to include morbid's suggestions.

The combined attack roll & outcome is a fantastic idea.

As a GM of DH/OW/RT/BC & DHII I usually have to assign an extra hour to the average session time, per small encounter..