In my group, and the two other Dark Heresy groups that I have played in, I have been the only player to be a scum class. Noone has ever been an adept.

I appreciate that the adept has a lot of useful research skills, but players tend to pick cleric, who also gets a lot of these skills but is still be able to get involved with fighting, as well as substantially increase their income.

Scum are pretty much replaced by the far wealthier assassin class. The only two viable scum as far as I can tell are either gunslingers or noble scum. The monetary difference is just too much of a barrier for most players to give up the assassin path, arguing that they can pretty much be a scum anyway on that career, just without being broke.

In my own games, I have attempted to balance things out a bit more. Adepts are the only ones who can requisition things from the inquisition. No adept, no extra equipment from the inquisition. Scum on the other hand are the only ones able to sell "loot" to their contacts, thus earning them an extra revenue stream to try to even the odds a bit.

My question is this, what careers are unpopular in your groups, and what, if anything, do you do to try to ammend the balance?

I never try to amend any imbalance I might think are present in the character classes. IMHO I'm more interested about how the class plays more than anything and I've found that certain classes lend themselves better to roleplaying than others. I've had a great time playing as a Scum in the past and found myself engaging in all types of questionable activity (looting corpses, stealing anything not nailed down, cheating at cards) anything to supliment my meagre monthly income.

Originaly I was pretty apathetic when I rolled up the Scum (I felt that everybody else had rolled up much better classes at that point) but then I started to realise the roleplaying possibilities the class had to offer. The other guys in my group regularly agreed that out of all the characters in the pary mine was the one that they liked the best. It became a running gag that my character had 'aquired' so much stuff that whenever a character needed anything all he had to do was ask.

At the end of the day then I think careers are what you get out of them.

Kahadras

Don't get me wrong I like the scum class. It is actually my favourite class in the game, and in the two games I have taken part as a non gm, they are what I have played, although currently I am using a noble world scum to overcome the lack of funding, plus it gives me another scamming angle! Next up is a gunslinger, when I get a chance.

People just do not like adepts in my groups, they would rather hire an npc to do all the research and "boring bits" to quote one of the group, and while I can see their point, it is a little disapointing that noone has taken one on just to see.

From my perspective as a GM the adept fulfils a very useful purpose and I will be more than a little annoyed if amongst the five players I have for my second campaign, none picks an adept, despite me offering bribes to get them to take one on. It maybe that I offer extra skills and talents to offset the lack of adept if there isn't one, as I am running is a reseach and investigation story, one which they are already aware of in advance.

I don't want to force someone to be one if they do not want to, but it would be nice for someone to give them a go.

Scum was actually the first career to be selected in our group. The character started with the Reclaimator path, skirting tech-heresy while getting sucked into the Inquisition, and now has expanded into a very well rounded character. She has better Fellowship than most of the others (even though she's from Volg hive...) - along with Barter, Charm, and Deceive - and is also the group's medic. Her combat abilities are certainly second tier, and she's lacking in many of the Lore areas, but otherwise, she's the go-to acolyte for just about everything.

OTOH, Adepts have proven rather unpopular in my group.

Crimsonsphinx said:

Personaly I see the Adept class as being a very specific character concept. Most people will veer away from the career as there isn't much scope for combat and there aren't very many 'hooks' for a player to get drawn in by. Best thing to do is create situations to show the gaming group how useful Adepts are. Put an NPC Adept in the group and get the party to start relying one him (remember that knowledge is concidered precious in the 40K universe and isn't handed out willingly to any Tom, **** and Harry). Once the party has started relying on him for information then take him away and let the party struggle for a bit.

This is a great way of show the party defincencies within their group. It might not work straight away but as long as you continue making things difficult for the party they will start concidering the Adept to be an important career for the group to take. People tend to gravitate towards characters that they will feel will have a large impact on the campaign if you encourge them to look at the Adept as a worthwhile choice then people should start opting for it.

Kahadras

I have one character who always plays the research type classes. While we haven't run a DH game with him in it yet, I'm certain he'd navigate toward the Adept class ... he's the type who really enjoys figuring things out and being the knowledgeable character in the group. And the scum, half my party pick the class for the rp potential; especially since my games tend to have plenty of opportunity for scum to shine.

As someone else said, every class is what you make of it. If you play your character as boring, he will be, but if you give him an interesting personality he'll be as valuable as anyone else in the group.

In my experience players will gravitate toward a certain type of character in most games; I have one character who always plays scum and fills the role better than anyone else could hope.

Keep in mind that while a GM may try to convince players to play Adepts because that is the type of game he wants to run, this is often countered by players selecting non-Adepts in an effort to show the GM what kind of game they want to play. If the players shy away from Adepts, you're probably better off not stressing their importance.

It wont be a disaster if noone picks an adept. My other plan is to allow them to purchase a servitor who can fulfil the role, and effectively buy him software packages with different knowledges. I actually think they would prefer this, even if it does mean they are somewhat poorer in money terms.

Either way, they still need some way of doing research into things, as I am not going to just tell them stuff, or have bits of paper or data slates with the information on right in front of their eyes.

For what its worth they were all interested in the investigation and research campaign idea at the start as something different to the blast and chop them style other GMs are running.

Well,

If you have the Inquisitors Handbook the Scum becomes great...Take the Noble-Born homeworld and tadaa, a true Imperial noble ready for some cloak and dagger stuff let alone high social rp-ing.

30 thrones at start and over 500 a month

I know what you mean Santiago, I play as a noble scum at the moment Its a good fix, but not everyones character concept fits that when playing scum.

When I have played and seen scum played, the lack of money has always been made up by the contacts, services and information only a true gutter scum could access. This made the character invaluable any time the pcs had to deal in the underworld, get into or out of someplace unnoticed, purchase something better left unspoken of, etc. Not to mention the fact that he will know how to contact fences, who will not deal with just anyone who walks in off the street and says "so, I hear you buy stolen property". In most cases the scum has taken a part of the profit as a service fee ... though the other pcs aren't always aware of this.

A noble scum is a different animal all together, and while his knowledge of the unspoken things which go on in the noble cast are tremendously helpful, he should be no more capable of working in the dirty underworld than a gutter punk would be of mingling with the rich and famous.

I have a Feral Scum in my game, played by my fiance. She rocks. She doesn't have the hitting power of the psyker, the tech priest secutor or the Arbitrator, but she's a fun character to play off of. I've made sure she has a social network around her, and this network is one of the "vectors of abuse" that the character is easily motivated through. Some of her friends at the Hive are about to be "abused" themselves, and this should make for several fun sessions.

My first character was a scum, and also my first go at RP.

I ended up being the one who got to do the dangerous stuff and thrown into situations where the rest stood far away and only rushed in when I got shot at.(example opening all doors alone while they stood 50m away, by the time they got where I was I lost 5 wounds).
Also the skills didn't suit me very well, and I rolled him pretty bad.
The scum does have some nice things when he advances and indeed alot of chance to roleplay, my GM said that to.

But scum didn't really work for me... I'm playing a tech priest now and I like that carreer a bit more (prolly because I work with alot of technological stuff in real life to ).

Also in our group there was a person who persisted on being an adept. He had the chance to change characters twice and both times he played as an adept
Also the other carreers (assasin, guardsmen, cleric...) are good from the start, they shoot stuff to bits and they shoot hard. But after all thats what those characters do from the beginning to the end. They shoot hard at the beginning and they just shoot harder if they grow. Other carreers got a chance to develop more then just the shooting part.

Maybe your group just loves to shoot? Shoot first ask later?

So far I have a psycher and a techpriest for my new group. Not exactly a balanced start but it should work providing the others pick a balance of careers themselves.

I think scum do get a poor deal, especially without pooled income. I have tried that though, and it can work, providing everyone agrees to divide all income of all kinds. Creates an extra layer of team working.

As I only let scum fence looted property, they do have uses, but the group tends to want to divide this income up equally, and feel it is unfair if they do not do that.

I have talked to most of the players and noone is going to be an adept. Which is fine as I explained they did say they had no problems with doing research and investigation, I just hope someone gets someone who can do either research, or investigation, or some contacts that allows them help in the matter.

I love adepts. If I could have sex with the class without ruining my corebook I would do so.

As I only let scum fence looted property

Um... Why? Fencing loot is something anyone should be able to attempt. Bargain, Charm, Deceive, and Evalute are the most applicable skills, and while Scum have easist access to them, why should other character types be banned from even trying? That makes the careers seem too much like artifical 'classes' for my tastes rather than just a generally guided set of advancement paths for the acolytes.

>>Um... Why?<<

Well, technically there is a difference between fencing and selling to a pawn shop. Fencers can get rid of things others cannot, and contacting a fence is not something just anyone can walk up and do - you need to know whom to work through and the proper procedures in letting a fence know you are on the up and up ... or, rather, not on the up and up. Once you have an established fence anyone in the group can certainly s,attempt to sell to him, but someone has to find the guy first.

If you are just reselling equipment you picked up from slain enemies that is one thing - if you are selling the jewels of princess Kolida of Sarn, who you discovered was a chaos cultist and who died in a shoot out you'd rather no one pin on you, that is something entirely different.

Why would a noble guardsman bother fencing stuff in an underhive to low-life bandits?
Or even a regular guardsman? Why bother fencing items they steal?

Every other class has a bigger income (unless the scum is a noble), I like the loot fencing idea. It makes the scum feel more like a scum and the contacts the scum has for fencin his items could also be used to buy items in certain campaigns/scenario's. There was this one scenario where our group had to buy a ridiculus amount of weaponry with a very limited budget, the only way to get cheap items in big quantity could be trough the fencer contacts the scum has? And as a GM you could even some sort of "favor" chart, the more he sells the more the fencer likes him, the bigger the price he gets for his items...

It is also true that other classes should be able to fence stuff, but in the first place, why would they steal? And it should be harder for them to fence stuff at a decent price, or even just finding a fencer.

I allow only scum class players to sell, because it traditionally falls to them to be in with the criminal classes. If another character has a background, or like a noble, has underworld ties, then that also is fine.

There is a world of difference between selling looted goods, and selling looted goods that will not be traced. Scum should know the right people to sell to.

I don't think it so much comes down to the career itself but more the fact that the Scum gets Common Lore (Underworld) and Peer (Underworld) at rank 2 and Barter at rank 1. Another character who had those would do equally as well in fencing goods.

Snidesworth said:

This is precisely the problem with my play groups: everything that the Scum character can do another character can do better, and with more Thrones to back themselves up. It's really frustrating for the person involved.

I like the ideas going on around here about underworld fencing and all that, but really: if a career class requires house rules to make them become more relevant, then there's something intrinsically wrong here.

Xytonion said:

Why do they steal? They're PC's; it's what they do. I've run a plethora of RPGs with a staggering variety of players and that is the second constant. (The first constant is that PC's kill, and fight when a sane person wouldn't)

In several games I've run I've had to beat players over the head with the concept that it is sometimes (often) socially unnacceptable in civilized settings for the "good guys" to loot everyone they fight to the bone.

btw a fencer is a sport swordsman. One who buys stolen goods is a fence.

A big chunk of this thread has people talking about how no one wants to play adepts.

Maybe adepts don't look as sexy when picking a starting career, but in my current campaign (which has only 3 players) they are constantly wishing they had an adept with them. I'm pretty sure that when one of the current acolytes gets ded someone is going to make an adept just so they can buy themselves a clue as to what's going on in the big bad galaxy.

It is precisely because other classes can replicate the scum that I do not allow it in the first place. Sure they might have the knowledge and even some degree of familiarity as a scum of the underworld, but they were not born there. They are not scum. Much like someone else having peer mechanicus does not give you the same rights as a techpriest.

I now have an arbitrator as a 3rd character, hes a noble and swimming in money. So hopefully he will aid any scum characters with money in exchange for information or "loot". My problem is that most characters just would not loot a poor quality stub revolver just for money. It would be too much like hassle for most archetypes, especially given the dubious legal rights of ownership that particular gun may have.

Crimsonsphinx said:

That doesn't make sense - no one is born an arbitrator or a guardsman or an adept or an assassin either. They're careers, choices made by and through the circumstances/lifetime of the character before the game begins. That's why careers and homeworlds are separate parts of character creation. You could make an argument that psykers are born being psykers, but the psyker career is not that simple; it represents someone who was 1) born a psyker and 2) taken by the Blackships and survived sanctioning by the pykana.

Further, other than psychic powers and tech-priest abilities all careers overlap. To disallow b/c they overlap you could cut back to 4 careers: Cleric, Sanctioned psyker, tech-priest, and scum. (and then there is still some overlap) The carreers are more than just advancement tables, they are broad ideas to help somewhat categorize character concepts. Scum may be the least focussed, but it is a necessary catch all for those concepts that don't fit elsewhere. (I feel scum as written really should be about 3 different careers b/c the only unfying concept factor is the criminal connection which is hugely broad especially in a oppressive society like the Imperium)