Hello,

My friend finally got around to running Dark Heresy and so far we having a lot of fun with this game. I ran that intro adventure a year ago, but we had not played since then, so we considered last night our official game instead.

I am sure I will have more questions as we go, but I was curious about fate points.

Does anyone know why they did not make fate points to were they add bonuses to your roll instead of just letting you re-roll? We ended up having to make rolls that were around 14% and they were kind of vital to the story at the time and so we blew a bunch of fate points trying to use this unskilled roll just to get to the next part of the adventure.

I was thinking that fate points would be more useful if they gave you bonuses instead, but I might be missing something here.

any thoughts on this?

They are not meant to make you any better at what you do...

If your not a blacksmith then fate will not make you better at it -> but if you have a tiny bit of knowledge, then fate will hopefully make you lucky.

I look at fate as warping reality to give the PC another chance at it... BTW what was this most essential of all rols that just couldnt be re-rolled in a minutes time?
Also if your not good at a certain thing then you need someone to become good at it, or live with it, or get an Adept (as they are the most likely to be able to help with any given role of dice ).

What was it though, im curious cos, my party did that and managed to win despite doing horribly cos of 2 gung-ho assasins, my yellow bellied Arbite and the severally incompetent psyker ( who was the DM at that time).

Hey, that does make a bit of sense.

We were lost in this HUGE grave yard in heavy fog, and the GM was making us roll on Navigation to try to pin point the other players (we were all in different places and trying to find each other via our vox communicator things) while one of them was being attacked by some weird maggot monster.

Obviously, none of had that **** skill, so it ended up kind of crazy and a little frustrating. I kept thinking, well, we are the heros, why can't we get a break?

I guess the answer is: because this is WARHAMMER 40K!!!

In the games I've played so far I've let people use Fate Points for what they say in the book (although we make it a flat 5 wounds healed - as wasting a fate point to heal 1 wound is disheartening), but I'll also let people use them or burn them if they can give a good justification for their use. I'll also restore them mid-session (even burnt points), if they do something with a high level of 'roleplaying' involved, or something with a high 'awesomeness' factor.

One good example was in our very first game, Scum & Assassin trying to escape a Hive with a dataslate full of vital information. They got trapped in an abandoned Arbites Precinct Bastion and were holding off cultists as best they could. The Assassin had used her fate points, so had no re-rolls or anything, but was buying time for the Scum to get away. A cultist entered the bastion and was behind a large stack of crates. She wanted to charge, jump over the crates, and attack the cultist. I let the player do this, requiring an Acrobatics check. Passed with flying colours, then the attack connected, scored maximum damage, ripped away all of the cultists wounds and took him to the top of the critical chart. The Cultist was quite literally split in two from crown to crotch.

So this Assassin had sprinted down a hallway, done a double-somersault over a stack of crates to land a perfect hit on an enemies head that sliced the cultist right in two. The Assassin got a Fate Point back for that. It was tool cool.

BYE

We were lost in this HUGE grave yard in heavy fog, and the GM was making us roll on Navigation to try to pin point the other players (we were all in different places and trying to find each other via our vox communicator things) while one of them was being attacked by some weird maggot monster.

Obviously, none of had that **** skill, so it ended up kind of crazy and a little frustrating. I kept thinking, well, we are the heros, why can't we get a break?

I'd say the problem isn't the fate point mechanic, but the application of the skill system. A test difficulty of +0 is considered not normal, but 'Challenging' either due to the pure difficulty or the time involved in trying (picking a lock in ten seconds is rather challenging, even if the lock itself might be of low quality). Only someone trained in the skill has a probability of making it that even approaches 50%. The system is also heavily geared towards

In the case at hand, I'd say you roll straight Perception, with the Base Difficulty at Hard (-10), assuming a really Huge graveyard. The test takes two combat turns of searching and a successful test lets you spot one other fellow acolyte. However, you can also make the test a little easier on you:

-A simple vox connection grants a +10 bonus on everyone's tests

-A sophisticated vox relay or auspex lets you substitute the Perception test for a Challenging (+0) Tech-Use test which locates one other acolyte per DoS.

-A Navigation (Surface) test lets you spot significant terrain features that you can relate to others for a +10 bonus (assuming you have a way of contacting them)

-Firing a normal weapon, revving up a chainsword or shouting grants a +10 bonus to others

-Firing a Heavy weapon, a grenade or a flamer provides a +20 bonus to others, as does using dedicated signalling equipment like flares

H.B.M.C.: That was pretty freak'n cool!

We have already decided to use the rule from the indie game "Sorcerer" to were if you get into some really good detail, that can get you some bonuses on your roll (+5-20% depending on how good it was, but mostly expect 10%). If it seems like we are getting too many successes, he may change that.

Cifer: I think you are right on your observation. It was an awkward situation and none of us expected to be in that situation, so we were kind of trying to figure out what would be best to pin-point everyone and get together.

Those are some good suggestions on rolls. I will show that to my Lord Inquisitioner, oh, I mean my GM

I am so excited that we have finally started this game (and that I am a player and not the GM)!

Thanks again!

And since it seems like I forgot to finish that one paragraph from my post...

I'd say the problem isn't the fate point mechanic, but the application of the skill system. A test difficulty of +0 is considered not normal, but 'Challenging' either due to the pure difficulty or the time involved in trying (picking a lock in ten seconds is rather challenging, even if the lock itself might be of low quality). Only someone trained in the skill has a probability of making it that even approaches 50%. The system is also heavily geared towards accumulating bonuses from various sources. Your standard BS may only be 30, but by using a laser pointer (+10), aiming for a half action (+10), firing at half range (+10) you can fire at an impressive 60%.

Kas said:

Actually, Fate Points can indeed make you succeed better on a test, as well as a couple of other things beyond their common use as a reroll.

USING FATE POINTS; Dark Heresy Core, pg. 185 :

" Spending a Fate Point allows the character to do one of the following things:

• Reroll any one failed Test. The results of the reroll are final .
• Count as having rolled a 10 for their Initiative.
• Add an extra degree of success to a Test .
• Instantly recover 1d5 wounds.
• Recover from being stunned. "

Conceivably, this means you could spend more than one Fate Point on a given test; one for a reroll and a second for an extra degree of success if the reroll is a success. And while we have indeed had a PC burn a point to survive his arm being exploded in a blast from a Gauss Flayer, mostly we've managed to keep ourselves alive with the " instantly recover 1d5 wounds " as "supplemental" healing in addition to Seal Wounds and First Aid post combat.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Brother Praetus said:

Unfortunately, not all of us have used fate points in that manner. Although, going forward...

LeBlanc13 said:

I cannot say how much I am looking forward to dodging more bio-lightning this evening. Or, the more likely truth, exploding in gobbets of charged and burnt meat.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Sometimes, as we all know, fate throws us more than an occasional curve ball so with that in mind i've thought about introducing the following talent just to help. It comes in two options. I've tried to take into consideration game balance. It is very easy to introduce something to help but could upset the overall balance of the game. I would be very interested in your thoughts for and against each option.

NEW TALENT.
Fortunate Son
Cost 200xp
This talent allows the player to reduce the degrees of failure by 1 degree per fate point spent. It can only be used to reduce the degrees of failure to achive a maximum of an ordinary sucess.

or

Fortunate Son.
Cost 300xp
This talent allows the player to use 1 fate point per session to get an ordinary success on a task.

With this talent choice you could take the following talent

Favored Son.
Cost 500xp Pre requisite Fortunate Son
This talent allows the player, once per session, to spend a fate point to add a degree of sucess, they can spend no more than 3 fate points in this way to add no more than 3 degrees of sucess.

Sebek - I don't think this would be unbalancing. It's actually similar to the way Willpower is spent in the World of Darkness games (or used to be, at least). The player is spending a good amount of XP on an ability that they will only get to use periodically in a game session. Psychic powers cost arond the same & you can potentially get more out of them. This could even be described as a latent psychic tendancy (like Luke blowing up the Death Star on instinct). The only real problem I see is that you could have your carefully planned, tense, dramatic climax spoiled by an automatic success.

Wouldn't call it instinct when he blew up Death Star, he had been trained by Obi Wan and was using the force.

Letrii said:

I meant "instinct." See how important quotation marks can be?

I like what Kas had to say on Fate points. Fate points shouldn't be a PC's Easy Button. I know if there's a roll I should have won but didn't I'll use fate. But if there's a check that I normally is hard but this particular circumstance should be easier, I'll check with my GM for bonuses and what not.

(I think) A lot of GM's have a habit of making checks just flat checks (at the standard +0 Challenging) which might not be the case.

Echoing, that wasn't a problem with the fate point system, but rather a poorly executed encounter by your GM. Navigate is more of a map-reading, long term thing. If the PCs were trying to follow only his verbal directions (north of this, to the right of that, past the large Aquila gravestone) then make it a Navigation roll with some penalties or bonuses depending both on the situation and quality of his directions.

Finding someone in a dense fog who WANTS to be found, however, is as easy as a game of Marco Pollo where all parties are playing Marco. Unless you were out of earshot of him, or his gun, it shouldn't be harder than a Routine Perception test that gets progressively easier, perhaps even automatically succeeding after a certain time.

If you were out of earshot, then how did you expect to get there in time to save him even if you did figure out where he was? If your planning was really that poor then the characters deserved to be in a tight spot like that.

Short answer, it was a bad call on your GMs part and not a systemic flaw.

Maybe they're new to the system, or new at GMing, or just got caught off-guard or whatever, so I'm not trying to insult in any way. But in general, if something seems harder than it should be in a given rules set, it is. The best response is usually to fix it on the spot so that it agrees with your intuition and keep moving.

When I GM I make quite a few rolls behind the screen, so I can more carefully manage the narrative flow of an adventure without too many jarring failures or unbelievable successes. Mind you, those both have their place. But in the interest of a good time, not everything should be left to chance.