One of the issues i've encountered running DH (not so much RT) is the lack of the "non-combat" character. While there are classes, Adept and Tech Priest, Though Cleric and Scum can also fill this role, that fill it, i find it hard to get characters interested in them, or even thinking they are important.

My current game is a BioPsyker, an Assassin, a Arbitrator, a Guardsman, and a Tech Priest (playing mostly medical/heavy support role). Between them they have enough skills to get through most things, but they are lacking in lores an such to help them find out their opponents weaknesses, relaying mostly upon firepower and the handful of interaction skills the Arbitrator has been forced to pick up becuase no one else will.

Has anyone else encountered this? And, if so, what have you done to work around it? I would love to throw some non-combat sessions at my players, but they are so convinced that the Dark Millienium is all Purge and no Convert that its impossible, and making me less and less interested in running the game.

Here is an option. Have a few smaller games that are investigation heavy. That way your players attempt to investigate and just have low difficulty at first before ramping it up.

If you have it this way you can show its not all about the combat. Any time that your players give up and just start mowing down folks in the streets you get a chance to flex your DM muscle with consequences and such. Woops you shot down a wealthy noble and now his family or buisness associates.

That and I am going to have to point out something to you in your post. You find "Yourself" not willing to run games because you are getting bored. Add variety to your games. That is your power be the GM be the GAME MASTER. Also I dont know how your games are run or your philosophies on GMitude so I can only offer you opinion. Its NOT about you. Its about your players working with you on a memorable and fun gaming experience. It took me a while to work it out.

First off you must figure out what sort of game your players want to play. Then let them know what sort of game you want to run. (This of course if it is tough to figure out through the course of a regular gaming session). Then once you come to an understanding you will be able to figure it out together. Everyone will have a good game.

Of course you can wuss out and have a GM controlled PC to help out the players.

I tried the GM character for one or two sessions, and the group complained about being railroaded down a path because he was the only chracter that took more than a token non-combat skill to move down his carrer tree. I guess i should just start adding more elements into the game that make it more interesting for me, while i understand where you say that its not just about me, its about the group, i'm the only one who is willing to run any game, so if i'm not enjoying it, they loose out too. I've given them plenty of combat, and don't plan to remove it entirely, but one of the reasons i like DH the best of the 40K trilogy, is that its by far the least combat focused of the bunch. I guess i just need to stress that more.

I actually have something of the opposite problem, the PCs in my campaign can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag but they are stacked up on lore and interaction skills.

Really, it's a matter of the kind of players you have and the kind of game you run. I once ran a d20 game where one of the players came to me about midway through the campaign and pointed out that he had created a total rule-twisting combat monster, only to discover that it hadn't helped him at all because the game required the PCs to use interaction and investiation skills more than combat.

So, my suggestion to you is to shift the game a little. Don't have the heretics come rushing out to meet them, force them to find the heretics... a task which requires lots of interaction and investigation skills not to mention actual thinking on the part of the players.

Fitrst of all I have to say that GMing is most fun when the players have fun (at least this is my experience after 20 years of GMing and almost never playing myself) and it is a very satisfying feeling in my opinion to have thrilled players at the table. On the other hand, it drives me nuts when one player snores away most of the time or is desinterested or constantly distracted.

Regarding your problem regarding combat oriented players/characters, I would recommend using scenarios where the use of certain non-combative skills can help them (maybe a little later) in a combat situation. Do not try to use strict non-combat scenarios as you would bore your kind of players and discourage them even further. The mixed approach is the best and like feeding your kid bitter medicine together with the favorite dish.

My players for example are also mostly quite combat oriented (except the Psyker and the Tech-Priest), but they still know how important other skills can be. The only problem I still have is the Assassins rationale that every combat-related talent helps him directly, while any lore and whatever non-combat skill helps the whole group and in so far is fine enough for another one of the group to have. Still, from an Assasins point of view it is somehow in character and thus OK for me.

Maggots in the Meat SPOILER approaching

To bring it back to the mentioned scenario of non-combat skills helping in a later combat: My players were on Acreage regarding certain weird activities there (Maggots in the Meat) and finally encountered the extremely deadly Slaught in a sky-mill. After a short and almost deadly skirmish with the Slaught, the players moved out and kind of recruited a formerly met platoon of Plumes (kind of local PDF) with some very good roleplaying and interaction skills. Together with this platoon they tried to storm the sky-mill. In the end the whole platoon except one trooper was dead, the Guardsman PC lost a fate point, the sky-mill was on fire and the acolytes on a rout through the city...

Anyway, they learned their lesson (and some humility) and about all of them have at least Inquiry and even Scrutiny nowadays...

Player likes fun. I agree with that eariler response. You cant force players to focus on skills by making them nessisery, that will just feel like chores. You need to make them fun.

- Give them loads of of fun information that is useful in a lot of way. Avoid giving only clues that just useful one way. Then it feels like railroading.

- Let players make up neutral facts if they got a lot in a skill. With neutral facts I mean things that dont twist things to their favour and the GM can trist anyway the GM wants. "Oh. Animal heraldy is common on this planet.", "If they start stomping and wawing the guns that is a good sign.", "This is reminds me a bit of a code a saw on Taurus, but the rythm is totally diffrent. I dont know if they are related." Just being allowed to state an awesome fact now and then, just drop it into the conversation without having to ask the GM first is fun.

- Don't make combat take a lot of time. Non combat character will feel bored then and be less attractive.

- Don't give just clues after a roll. Knowledge is a way to view the world. Give characters diffrent description of a scene. The gaurdsman will see the security at the ballroom dance, the scum will see awesome oppentuneties, the adept will see the political and historical context etc...

talsine said:

Please dont take me the wrong way. I know how you feel about being the only one willing to run a game. I am the resident game master in my group. This makes it difficult to get in to the head of a player if you never get a chance to play. One way for you to get around railroading is to give your PCs the occasional contact. Whether that is some scuzzy underground guy or an enforcer from the local arbites with an over inflated sense of justice. They can call them on a vox bead for information on people or to forward evidence to that contact and see what they can make of it (behind the screen roll to see if they figure it out). That might be a way of you edging them along with the semblance of choice.

Luthor Harkon said:

I want to add a thought to that praticular train. Non combat activities during a combat encounter. There happens to be a door with a number pad. You hear footsteps running down that hallway. A non combat character can try and lock down the door to stop enemy reinforcements? Or a classic example, chandelier on the celing and a rope to a wall. Non com drops the chandelier and that makes difficult terrain for melee enemies to run through. Stuff like that can be a boon to non com characters who need something to do. It adds another dimension to the battle as well. Just a thought for ya.

w176 said:

That first one is a really good idea, would also help get the players to invest more fully into the world itself, most of them only know a little baout 40k, basicaly just Dawn of War and the old 2E TT codexs i have laying around.

I try not to just hand out clues, but at this point, i almost have to , to keep part so of the plot moving. I'll try and be more subtle, but several of these guys came over from 3E, which despite s solid skill system was still run more as a combat fest, least in most of the groups i encountered

talsine said:

One more awesome aspect of this that soon enough, more then funny or cool facts begin to pop up. The players begin push for things that would be fun dramatically. "Jeesh. Look at thouse clouds. A storm might be coming." or "Its not uncommon with hand to hand fights to prove yourself among hive gangs" because they think a storm or hand to hand fight would be fun or fit dramatically. These hints are most often really good, and giving player what they hinted at adds even more worth to actively use skills etc.

My group is pretty well rounded now and most of them will investigate the hell out of things if given half a chance. It was not always so.

When we first started out the group was a bit smaller and the characters were all more or less combat machines: Two Guardsmen, an Assassin and a Techpriest. They could fight their way through things well enough, but they struggled with information gathering. They would come up with ideas that could not quite be followed through on properly due to lack of skill or knowledge, or find clues that they could not make full use of. Pretty soon those "non-combat" skills were getting pretty popular for most of them and their missions started having better outcomes because of it. Plus they got to pick the terms of the fights they got into more often once they could make good use of the clues they had gathered by their investigations, which allowed them to kick even more ass! They are also alot more prone to aim for some live captures now that Kira and Psi are both skilled at interrogation.

What I am saying is you will end up with a much more well-rounded game experience and a heck of alot more variety. With the exception of one of our Guardsmen the "combat-classes" have been steadily picking up a bundle of "utility" skills and talents, while the more intellectual and social characters have been slipping in some combat training into their more typical pursuits. The team's Prime (and very soon-to-be Inquisitor) is a Guardsman who is now a pretty impressive social and investigational force as well as a murderously accurate shot. The Assassin has cultivated several underworld contacts and street-skills. Our Adept is a walking pile of Lore skills as you might immagine, but most people learn too late that she is a master swordswoman too! The social-butterfly Cleric has grown into a tough little cookie that can out-party an entire rave, then go Purge the Impure with a hangover, flamer and melta!

The key here is to make it rewarding to the players (and their characters) for them to be more versatile. Is one of your players picking up every drive and pilot skill they can get their hands on? Give them situations where those skills can be put to good use to help the team. No need to railroad either, just throw things out as nice options: "Underneath a dusty and grease-smeared tarp you discover the discarded remains of a damaged Chimaera APC." If they investigate the vehicle the Techpriest will determine that the engine's machine spirit has grown docile due to lack of proper maintenance, but some fresh prayer strips and seals and a few adjustments to the physical body should placate it. Suddenly they have a new option for tackling those cultists they are hunting down, especially if the Scum can swing some sort of deal to score some ammo for the Heavy Bolter! Or there is a huge explosion about to take place in a compromised factory and the team can either run like hell and hope to get far enough away (using a variant of the pursuit rules) or they can make a dash for the landing pad on the roof where a (hopefully) fueled Aquila Lander rests.... In one of my game sessions they managed to locate a rickety old Sentinel cargo variant and repaired the thing, then one of the "terrible in combat" characters who had Drive (Walker) ended up wading in on one of the climactic fight scenes driving the Sentinel like Ripley from Aliens! There is something really cool about killing the Emperor's foes with a walking forklift! Say one of your players always wants to be a Psyker: Sure, they can go with Pyro or Telekinesis and take all the killing powers like they always do, but what if they were rewarded with extra "moments of awesome" in the game for instead opting to be a Telepath.... There is a reason the Inquisition makes extensive use of Telepaths!

Combat is not in itself a good thing. Nor is it, in itself, an exciting thing. Gunning down wave after wave of goons can get very boring very quickly. My advice is this;

1.
Fighting should be a last resort. Fighting should be what happens when the PCs plan goes awry or they are insufficiently imaginative. In Dark Heresy the PCs are inquisitors, not ground pounders. They don't have to take personal responsibility for wiping out every last deviant. This is what guardsmen and enforcers are for. Their focus should be on inquiring and investigating in order to identify the nature of a threat/conspiracy and the ringleaders. Ideally those people should then be arrested and interrogated, not just wiped out. Dead men tell no tales.

If your PCs are going fight-first then the fights are probably not hard enough or maybe your PCs are too powerful. I am not a fan of power gaming. I think it can make a game very bland very quickly. A battle should be a life or death struggle, not a cake walk.

2.
If there is going to be a showdown, choose a good location. An empty warehouse is dull as dishwater. Maybe your PCs attend a rendezvous between two cult leaders at which they intend to arrest them. So have them meet on a crowded subway station (or DH equivalent) at rush hour. Not such an easy decision to hammer away on automatic when your target is in a crowd of innocent people. Or maybe they decide the follow them instead. The cultist wises up and then you have a chase on a train, a hostage drama, etc.

3.
Plan intelligent actions for NPCs. NPCs engaged in a conspiracy will want, first and foremost, to avoid detection. Sending goons to shoot up the inquisitors is not very clever. Have them set up a patsy instead. Or ambush the PCs not with gunfire but with a situation. Sabotage is good. So instead of attacking the PCs they sabotage the reactor/warp engines/life support etc and the PCs face a race against the clock to fix it. In a dangerous environment. Or they try to set the PCs against the local authorities.

4.
Make the people the clues. If the PCs need to get information out of someone, they can't just gun them down. If they are not sure who has the information, so much the better.

5.
Absolutely the best way to avoid mindless shooting matches is to put the PCs on a covert mission. Maybe they are operating on another inquisitors turf and need to avoid discovery. Best of all, give them a cover. Make 'em have to pretend to be adepts, enforcers or the like in order to infiltrate an organisation or a settlement. That way they can't tote power armour and heavy weapons around. Those sorts of things are confined to the end of the scenario when the cover comes off.

6.
Bring home the violence. Don't have your NPCs keel over and stay quiet. Have them shriek with pain, call for their mothers, crawl through a slick of their own blood, try to put their intestines back in, plead for water, beg for their lives and brandish pictures of their children. When the PCs search a body, they find a wallet (obligatory pic of spouse and kids), receipts, lucky charms, an engraved watch (to Daniel etc etc). Even deviants are people. Although the culture of DH takes a tough line on this (there is only war, etc), make sure the human cost of violence is apparent. This is especially true of innocent bystanders.

Being an adept player I can attest to at first the Adept career looks lacking in terms of combat related skills. In the first few ranks, my adept could hit a threatening looking wall and thats about it. As time went on and I concentrated on at least one good fighting style, she got better. True lore skills are the bread and butter of the adept career but remind your players that the adept can become the acolyte cell's medic. Player wants some psyker powers without being a psyker, the adept can do that too. Zilla mentioned already that she's quite an adept swordswoman, but now she's also a minor psyker, Pyrokinetic. I've had to burn a fate point to avoid the stat loss due to possession (yea that wasn't fun). She's taken a few corruption points from reading things that weren't healthy for her to read. Upon Ascension, she's going Sage (who'd of thought). Right now im working on elite advancing her for blademaster and hopefully lightning attack (plus all the other things she needs).

Adepts start out on the low end of things compared to the other careers, but in the end can compare to the combat classes as long as the player remembers not to go in guns blazing (sure death sentence). Find a way to stack the bonuses to attack, to make battle easier. And don't be afraid to let the "combat" classes do their job while standing back and enjoying the carnage. The first time I played my adept, our cell got ambushed by some common thugs. The combat classes were easily taking care of business, so when asked what my character was doing I had her lean up against the wall and kick back and chill.

Oh and when it comes down to noncombat investigations adepts have an advantage to the other careers. Guardsmen, Arbites, and the like tend to want carapace armor and other "large" armors. When it comes to stealth and covert, those players will feel naked without their armor. Whereas an adept can wear a bodyglove underneath their adept robes and have some armor constantly (which my adept does 99% of the time). Being able to go anywhere armored, even lightly, and not attract attention is the best advantage of Adepts. Plus tell the player who's complaining about the adept career, that adepts can go virtually anywhere and blend in.

Oh and just on a side note: My adept does NOT have the meek and mild attitude. She has the "I'm smarter than most if not everyone here" attitude. The only person on the team that she sees as her intellectual equal is the team's tech priest and she's not above using her femininity to aquire the information that the team needs. In my head shes one part The Librarian, one part Indiana Jones, and one part Lara Croft (game version), vigorusly shaken.

There are always players who like to create combat-monster characters and go in guns blazing. Sometimes this is because they like playing a wargame more than playing a roleplaying game. Sometimes this is because they don't feel quite confident about their abilities to think their way forward in the game so they resort to rolling to-hit and damage and build their characters that way. It makes them feel more confident and in power when they can (or think they can) solve problems with rulesplay (optimizing skills and throwing dice) instead of roleplay. Sometimes it is because players (not characters, but players) feel frustrated because they are unable to solve problems presented to them and lash out through their characters.

Now almost all players I've met want two things:

1) Tension

2) Success

Its very simple. They want a certain amount of tension so they can feel exited over what will happen next. And, most likely, they want to prevail with a feeling of success. The feeling of success is very important. Its easy to feel successfull when enemy dies because you (the player) were clever enough to optimize your combat skills, you (the player) decided to start a fight and you (the player) rolled good. Its harder to feel successfull when you think you are "forced" to seek clues and whatnot and maybe do the kind of brainwork you really don't like.

I have three recipies I use to tighten the reins on more combat oriented players:

1) Denying the target. I give players a clear target which is either passive (characters are hunting it) or active (it is hunting characters) and then deny the target simply by making him not show up on their sight before they do their homework. Passive denied target leads to an investigate - find - kill type of scenario and can be frustrating for combat monsters who find themselves doing legwork they don't know how. The solution to this is active denied target: Imagine players being under attack by a shadowy assassin taking potshots at them with sileced weapon and psychic powers in the middle of city. When played right it can lead to very exiting ambush-the-ambusher kind of setup where the players must gather clues using perception and socila skills (with a little tech use and whatnot thrown in) in order to outsmart their hunter. Just make sure the end-fight is tough, exiting and rewarding so it feels like worth all the work put into getting there.

2) Denying the feeling of success. This is a second degree shock-treatment when denying target doesn't work and players go in guns blazing regardless just because they feel like shooting stuff. This is very simple. Give them a few inferior opponents. Let them say they shoot them. Then just describe the whole event shortly and curtly. "Okay, the hivegansters didn't expect you to pull out guns right away and stand awed unable to even reach their weapons when you gun them down.". When the players ask don't they get to roll hit or damage just say "No need, these guys didn't have any chance." and go on with the scenario. Treatment like this does much to denying the feeling of success in just shooting anything they come across. Sooner of later they'll start to look for worthy opponents and you can go to "Deny the target" option.

3) Denying the victory. This is a classing "Barbarian Trap" I've used for a long time. Its a first class shock treatment and should be reserved only to the most bullheaded violence-seekers. Make a character. Make a really, really, really overpowered character. Now this character is not the end-level-boss. S/he is neutral but looks suspect. If the players do their homework they can approach this character without combat and get a few helpfull clues or something equally nice from him. If they kick in the door and start a fight make sure they can't win it. Make it clear that since they did not do their homework on what they are facing they did not have any chance of winning. Most important thing: Make sure that before the fight starts you identify which one(s) of the characters made the fatal decion to go pick a fight. Then make sure they are the ones who lose most. This is important because it gives a clear signal that you bear a personal responsibility for anything stupid you do and that you, the GM, are fair and won't punish those that were just following the stupid guy out of loyalty or feeling that "since this is the direction things are going we need to go their too".

Polaria: *drools in awe* Can I have your autograph? Awesome mind****.

Just a quick note. "Success" dont have to mean success, it can mean failure, standoff, or an awesome death scene Boromir style. It can mean any type scene the players finds awesome and a cool experience.