Well, I picked Scum because of its ability to be what ever it wants at a faster rate, Clerics,Adepts, and Tech-Priets seem to run on the all bark and not bite (at the beginning) as Arbites and Scum have an equal yet slightly choices. Scum are great because unlike the other careers it gets an awesome array of skills that together make you deadly (despite you have hardly and money for armor) I like to think of Scum as an Cleric/Assassin

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

Oddly enough, the Scum in our group doesn't have any underworld knowledge (as defined by her skills and talents) but she does have Peer (Workers) and gets her income from Trade (Technomat). She's more of a 'blue collar' commoner than a career criminal. She doesn't really have any better ability to find a fence than anyone else, but her 'people skills' are great, so she can deal with just about anyone...

OTOH, our corrupt Arbitrator - the Inquisition was his only option to avoid harsh punishment - has all the relevant underworld knowledges along with Peer (Underworld). He can certainly find a fence, and he's quite able to do all of the dealings himself.

The system allows for this by being skill/talent based rather than class-restricted. I like that approach, and I find it more than a bit silly and totally artificial to say that "only Scum can fence loot" when there's really no justification for such rulings.

Has anyone actually tried roleplaying a character and not just the archtype? I don't want to start an argument, but the careers are just guidelines for you to create a good background/history for your character. Just because you are a scum doesn't make you automatically good at underworld things anymore than being an arbite makes you a good law enforcer. Its about what choices you make and what your character learns that makes them good at something.

What my group has done to promote roleplaying is use the career paths as guidelines, while forcing players to justify skills/talents before being able to take them. This also allows us to take advances from other classes if our character has a good reason to. IMO the reason a lot of people are having trouble with scums and adepts is because they think they are confined to a single concept. Our adept went through penance on a war world and came out a Lieutenant in the IG, even though he has a ws of 23 and strength of 28.

Dark Heresy, while it does have a lot of lethal combat, is not a dnd hack'n'slash type game. If thats how your group plays, you might want to just let them all play guardsman and send them against orks.

/rant

If you do it like that it is fine Emprah_Horus, but you might as well do away with careers all together.

I am not saying adepts are not useful, I think they are. I am saying noone is playing as them in my group.

Has anyone actually tried roleplaying a character and not just the archtype?

I think that my post directly before yours shows that my group goes well beyond the archetypes.

If you do it like that it is fine Emprah_Horus, but you might as well do away with careers all together.

Now this is just being foolish - not being straightjacketed by careers is not the same as not having them. Stop thinking in absolutes and start thinking in possibilities.

The two careers no-one in my short little "pre-gen games" ever wanted to pick have been:

Guardsman
Cleric

The guardsman seemed to lack possibilities. He had good armour and all the weapons skills, sure. But since I started to reduce combat in my games as much as possible, the players stopt looking for "combat sluts".

The STARTING(!) cleric lacks usefullness. Not much in the way of social skills and a lot of "trade skills" the player does not know what to do with. The money is great, but that´s it.

Sure, this changes after the first 500xp extra xp are out, but my players tend to want something they like to play NOW. So, they tend to stick to assasines (stealth skills), scum (social skills) and psykers (special powers). Oh, and an arbitrator/enforcer for the investigative work.

I really start to think about offering every pc one of the "basic skills" as an elite advance (for 200XP) at character creation. Therefore allowing them to start at 600xp instead of 400xp.

So, the guardsman would become capable of "intimidating" some-one effectively while the cleric could start out with some "scrutiny" and every feral worlder would have a chance of being REALLY GOOD at "survival" or "tracking"...

My group contained 5 people consisted of 3 that new Warhammer 40k was a table top army game, 1 that actually played Warhammer Fantasy and another who has never role played. Instead of letting them pick their career, I simply brought out all my miniatures (GW - esp. Necromunda, I-Kore, Warmachine, etc. etc.) and said "who do you want to be?" Only after that did we get into what career they had in mind... I ended up with an Adept, Arbitrator, Assassin, Guardsman and Imperial Psyker. They are now rank 5 and I have heard enough to know that the Scum is The utility character... no one else could get Medicae before Rank 4, they had a hard time with Inquiry and making contacts, just to name a few advantages the class offers.

The problem I have is that none of them are that familiar with the 40k universe (even after the Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Calpurnia novels) to play the 40k Universe specific Cleric or Tech-Adept. There is no problem with these classes, only that my players felt they lacked the background to accurately role play how these 2 careers would act and react in the game.

Just thoughts.

-Cynr

Honestly in the game I just recently finished running the Scum was the richest character in terms of thrones. Basically he was constantly taking everything that wasn't nailed down. The rest of the players either weren't inclined to dirty themselves, or weren't able to fence the stuff. Of course the noble born all found themselves "dead" an hour into the 1st adventure after a series of bad decisions and an object lesson by their boss on subtlety. The key thing to realize is that while he skimmed a fair bit for an opulent life style. The majority of the money was reserved quality cyber-ware for future injured team mates, and a slush fund for off the book ops.

I really don't understand the whole personal income thing. As far as what do they need to spend money on? Why do you care? This isn't D&D money doesn't matter. I just keep the insanely rare stuff like lathe blades, force weapons, and the like simply unavailable. (Unless the do something to impress the =][=, or the tech priests.) Blessed gear isn't handed out to the non pious. So a task to prov their worth may be in order. The PCs want power armor sure buy. They can't wear it on investigations, you can't easily lug it around, and who has time to stop run go get it out of storage and put it on. Heavy weapons are the same. Lug around a man portable lascannon? I just show them the picture here:
http://kofler.dot.at/40k/guard_units.html
Can they lug that around?

There are very few items that are game changers. Bolt weapons with the errata are impressive, but carrying around a bolt weapon is basically screaming we are really really rich, and connected!!! People will be trying to either steal it or run the other way. Sure you could conceal a bolt pistol, but ammo runs out quick on the pistols. A boltgun is a massive rifle which you can't hide. On the other hand there are some great buys in the IH. The camo armored body glove, some of the battle drugs, a few tech items and a couple of weapons. I let them buy what ever they want within reason. It doesn't matter that much. Besides sooner or later they will get shot down and have to abandon their gear any way right?

I GM Dark heresy for a group of four players. All but one are veteran gamers wth 20+ years of experience under their belts. When I started my first session, I had everyone roll up random home-worlds and then let them select their career path from those available.

One of my players, when confronted with the choice of Scum, Guardsman, or Adept, decided to go for the Adept role, despite its relative lack of popularity online. Given his inclination towards dour, stodgy characters, he chose the Munitorium Quastor background from IH, purely for roleplay purposes.

Talk about a useful character concept. Aside from all of the wonderful Lore skills that Adepts get access to, he is also able to interface authoritatively with Imperial Guard npcs (our party otherwise lacks a Guardsman at all). Even more importantly, given his background, he is the character responsible for requisitioning all of the party's gear from their Inquisitor. As a result, I allow the party much faster and more comprehensive access to weaponry, ammunition, and gear than I otherwise would if they didn't have a Munitorium quartermaster amongst their ranks.

I found this post interesting enough that I thought I'd join to comment. I've lurked, but this one was interesting.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of the "necessary" classes only become necessary if the GM makes them so. No not by caveat, but how they run their game.

For example, Shattered Hope lends itself mostly to run and gun types. What the heck is an adept to do in the mines? I played the arbitrator in that scenerio, and even the "information" I discovered early on had very little usefullness once we entered the mine. In fact, due to my mediocre combat skills I was somewhat useless. An adept would be a liability.

And that is the problem that the GM faces in my party. For half the scenerios the combat monsters sit on their weapons waiting for us "information" gathers to find the target to point their guns at, and during combat us brain types take a back seat. As times moved on we've kind of morphed as like the Guardsman became a commisar to help with the interogations, my arbitrator died and the GM, party, and I agreed to make a homebrew psyker/arbitrator type, but we still face the same problem. My character is only really good with shotguns and SP pistols, and lets be honest while the commisar is okay in helping me interogate a suspect, he's still only really good with little league players and fills a secondary roll.

In the end though it comes down to communcation between you and your party, and what your party wants to do and what you want to do.

If you as a GM aren't going to play a combat heavy scenerio, its up to YOU to communicate it with your group. Let them know that combat just isn't going to play a part in your scenerios, and I guarrentee you'll suddenly find scum being picked to steal the information you need, adepts to know it, and arbitrators to interegate it.

Don't place artifical contraints on them (such as only adepts able to make requisitions) but instead communicate with your players what type of scenerios you want to run. And stick with what you and your party decide to do. If you want to play a combat heavy game, then don't insist one of them make an adept so that the others can have fun running and gunning while the adept fills out paperwork. If you all decide on non-combat then don't place them into a den of heretics each armed with bolters and combat armor. If you decide on a mix, ensure they know what they'll need, and that there will be times when their characters are liabilies or almost worthless.

But to answer your question, our party started with Shattered Hope, rolled new toons once the book came out, and we've all had at least two characters die, so we've all moved around different character classes, and I honestly can't think of one we haven't had someone play at least once. Once you understand the game, what the different paths give you, and unless you're playing a completely shattered hope style, what has to happen before decending into the mines, your party starts to look for different classes to start filling in the blanks.

Where I am at now is that I have played in two campaigns and GMed one. The games I didn't GM, that guy is now taking the part of a player in my games, and from his GMing is quite aware of what classes do what. Another of our players has played all three previous games and is in the current one too. So we have had a few chances to try out different character types.

Scum are primarily unpopular in my gaming group [i use the term loosely, as we tend to fluctuate members a lot] because of the poor money and lack of money increases when they progress the careers.

Adepts are unpopular because people don't want to be the book guy, who can't fight worth a toffee. They would rather play a combatant, an investigator, a wizard/psyker type or indeed the pretty unique techpriest classes. Perhaps this is because the group has played a lot of more combat orientated RPs, but most of the group come from either white wolf games or directly from WFRP, where combat is a part, rather than a whole of the game.

To be honest my question wasnt concerning my own group, it was more asking what other groups lack in classes and what if anything is done to try to spread the balance. For example, in the first game I played of dark heresy, I played a scum, and we had three assassins and an arbite. A very mismatched group in terms of flexibility, which came with everyone deciding what to be in isolation.

I am trying to encourage the use of adepts and scum, because they are lacking. I feel without bribary, they will never be particually popular, although the noble scum, after I used it has become at least considered as an option. I plan very much on being a gunslinger for my next game group.

HappyDaze said:

Thats like letting only the Guardsman fight, only letting the Adept answer questions and only letting the Arbitrator investigate.

I've recently started running my third game of DH. Altogether, I've played with thirteen players (one has played in two games, with different careers). So far, they've played the following careers:

Adepts: 1, Arbitrators: 3, Assassins: 1, Clerics: 0, Guardsmen: 3, Psykers: 3, Scum: 0, Tech Priests: 3

Opinions and impressions of each career:

Adept - the adept suffers from a marketing problem. The picture of the crippled old man at the start of the adept's section doesn't help. My players generally viewed adepts as a career that did nothing more than sit back and make Lore checks. One of my players looked at their skills and talents and realised that he could make a spy/secret agent character with as an adept. He may not have access to the big guns (though he can get Arms Master by Rank 4), but skills and talents such as Drive, Pilot, Sound Constitution, Sprint, Unremarkable, Swim, Awareness, Inquiry etc are perfect for such a role. The Lore skills help with whatever group he is infiltrating/spying on. Another adept couuld be an Indiana Jones character, with much the same abilities.

Arbitrators: a good mix of combat and investigative abilities allow them to participate in a lot of different situations.

Assassins: good mix of combat and stealth abilities. I'm surprised more players don't take this career.

Cleric: None of my players have more than glanced at this career. I think it suffers from a lack of focus. My players can't seem to get what role they play in the party - they aren't great at combat, social abilities, lore skills etc. Jack of all Trades, master of none.

Guardsmen: Popular initially, after playing with them a while some players begin to find them too limited. Very little they can do outside of combat.

Psykers: Just plain popular.

Scum: Like the cleric, my players seem to have a problem pinning down exactly what the scum is for. They've decided that Scum are the Face-man of the party and while they recognise the importance of such a role, none currently feel like playing such a character at the moment, If one of my PCs dies, he may come back as a scum. I don't think any of them really see the lack of income as a major factor, though in my games they tend to either receive a lot of equipment from their =I= or can pick it up from the corpses of their enemies.

Tech Priests: have lots of weird abilities that make them different from every other career.

I think the assassin and scum careers are actually pretty similar in terms of what skills and talents are available throughout the careers. The money is a problem in my games, as its limited to what the group earns, otherwise a cleric is somewhat pointless, as the extra income is his strongest bonus.

Adepts can end up decent enough in the long term, especialy with some of the expensive pistols available, psychic powers, along with a lot of very useful knowledge skills. I agree they suffer badly from marketting. It doesn't help that in both Eisenhorn and Ravenor, the savants are all aged men who do very little of excitement.

Guardsmen are losing popularity to assassins hand over fists in my groups. Guards have made occasional appearance, as they do fight very well, its just assassins can be social too. Assassins and Arbitrators are IMO the two most flexible careers as they deal with multiple useful social and investigation skills back up the capable fighting abilities. Arbites have a lot of useful legal sway, especially when the group are unable to reveal their inquisition backing.

Psykers do not seem as popular as they probably should be. Normally when I take part as a player in any RP system I will consider being a caster class, but I keep using scum On a marketting perspective, scum probably could have been called something slightly more desirable!

Crimsonsphinx said:

Assassins get the combat ability early on, the social stuff later. Scum get it the other way around. In fact, scum are easily the best social characters in the game. If your campaign focuses on combat, that isn't much of an advantage, but I think in my campaigns, the players would really benefit from a scum. The assassin in one group really wants to be a social character, but he can't get any interaction skills until Freeblade (rank 6, IIRC), where they cost 200xp each. Bonuses to Fel aren't exactly cheap either. As for the cleric's cash, I don't really see it being all that important. The Cleric's bonus isn't the cash, IMO, it's his ability to do a bit of everything (combat, social, lore).

Crimsonsphinx said:

Actually, I think Ravenor includes some perfect adept characters. Thonius (was that his name?) was an accomplished adept and a perfect example of what the career should be.

The problem with being good at a little bit of everything, like the cleric, is that you're never great at anything, which can become a problem in some situations.

Honestly, the reason that our assassin became an adept after her assassin's death, was because of an Indiana Jones style scenerio we were running at the time of the death. As usual we were chasing some kind of mid-level heretic, a flunky to a rather important heretic that our Inquisitor was chasing, and she wanted one of her more trusted Acolyte groups to track down and stop this flunky, aka us. The flunky ended up heading tosome kind of xeno-chaos-heretic temple (we're still not sure to be honest) with us chasing him down, or him chasing us down, we're still not quite sure who was chasing who yet either.

The problem was that while a number of us had okay scores in a few forbidden lores, an adept would have been much better overall, had a broader range of knowledge, and honestly, prevented a number of wounds, insanities, and corruption points from following us. After that she took the adept.

As said before, sure an adept will never be a combat monster, but a smart adept will know his or her weaknesses, and play to her strengths. The current adept is proving that she's no slouch in combat. She's sticking with SP and las weapons, a couple of elite picks (she's in a group with a Guardsman and a Sister, she has access to them), and a very solid academic theory on tactics. She says of course she'll get the psy powers, become a Xeno-archeologist, and maybe work for the Tenbrae which will give her some fantastic accesses.

Scum and Clerics seem to be our least favorite types, mainly because they're jack-or-all-trades, masters of none. In a small group that be great, but our group consists of 5 players, more then enough to specialize with some minor crossover. I don't want to say we haven't played them, we have, and they were useful, but they don't really specialize in anything, meaning that we've moved on to a party makeup that works for us.

Now how long that'll last depends on how long this group survives in its current manifestation.

Usually I would agree that jack-of-all trades characters suffer in RPGs, but I don't think its really the case in Dark Heresy. Rather, the overspecialised nature of some characters makes them irrelevent in many scenarios, which makes them boring and uninteresting to use. The Guardsman is useless out of combat and quickly becoming an unpopular class in my games. The adept you described above has a good range of knowledges, but also wants to be able to contribute to combat. In my games, the players often request Elite advances that will allow them to increase the versatility of their character. They often buy the more expensive skills and talents that allow them the same. All these are benefits the cleric gets from the start and for less xp. And, of course, it's still fairly easy to specialise with the cleric. You aren't going to get every skill and talent possible, after all, so if you want to specialise as the groups face-man, you can pick up every Fel-based skill and talent and focus on Felowship advances. But you can, if you want, round that out with a few combat advances, or some lores. Alternatively you could focus completely on a combat-cleric, or a lore-cleric.

The same goes for the scum, which I don't really see as a jack-of-all trades at all. Certainly you can make a fairly diverse character with a rogue, but I don't see them as any more unfocused than (for example) an Arbitrator, who is split between combat and investigation abilties. The scum is split between combat and social abilities instead.

Was Carl Thronius an adept in Ravenor? I was never sure what class he was, if any at all in dark heresy terms as he dealt with tactical planning and computers most of the time. If he was an adept, he was different to Eisenhorns adept, and indeed the adept of the other inquisitors in Ravenor.

Another thing that really goes against adepts is that traditionally a lore based character would have the spells/psychic powers as standard in other systems. With the division between the two classes, one is bound to be less popular than the other. A psyker can also gain a number of powers to aid in knowledge roles, so can be somewhat flexible.

Arbites are IMO the best career if your really lacking in flexibility in your group. You get sound investigation skills, reasonable combat abilities and strong legal connections. Although there might be some information gathering that a scum can do better, an arbite has, or at least in theory has, access to the arbites data on known criminals and dubious locations etc.

Crimsonsphinx said:

He was highly educated with an amazing amount of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, which seemed to be his main niche. He had a smattering of social skills and some limited combat ability. Definately an adept. He may have been different from some of the other adepts, but that's the point - each of the careers can be used to create a variety of character types. An adept doesn't have to be an aged scholar who sits in the library all day.

Crimsonsphinx said:

The Arbitrator is certainly a good career. But it isn't as good as the scum (or the cleric) at social challenges, finding it more difficult to pick up skills (and related talents) like Charm, Deceive and Blather. The arbitrator is great if you're investigating, less useful if you are going undercover, trying to impress a noble or other worthy individual, trying to charm some information out of a servant etc. For that you need a face-man, at which the scum excels.

My newest group has two assassins [one noble, the other a gunslinger], a techpriest and an arbite. No real flexibility in doing anything other than fighting and investigation.

Crimsonsphinx said:

Do they want to do anything else then fighting and investigation? Do you?

Put them in a Xeno Space Hulk, and then put a door in front of them, where an adept would know that the writing says "Airlock" but of course they won't know that. Sucks to be them.

Switch it up where another Inquisitor's Alcolyte group is chasing the same heretics, but want all the glory for themselves and their Inquisitor, and so they're not cooperative. Make the resources each group can access limited, so that those with better social skills can requisition more and help their investigation out, or use those same social skills to hamper the other Alcolyte group... you know deceive the local Arbites that the other Alcolyte group is a bunch of false Alcolytes who are using forged IDs and have them arrested wasting the other groups time. Since killing another group of Alcolytes isn't the best way for survival you're group is in a real bind. And who do you think is going to be able to requisition that platoon of Imperial Guardsmen that are needed for the final assault, your parties group, or the other Alcolytes.

Have them go up against that one Ministorium Heresy that's in Disciples (sorry the book isn't in front of me.) How cooperative do you think the ministorium is going to be. Worse yet, place a small heresy inside the Munitorium, and see how cooperative both the Administorium and the Guard are to a bunch of combat monsters.

But that's if you want to go a different route. If you and your party are fine with strict combat and investigation go for it there is absolutly nothing wrong with that. If however you want something more, then start looking at options to play to their weaknesses, so that they need to start sucking xp into elite picks. Once they start seeing that their party make up may not be the strongest, they'll start looking for options.

But again that depends on what you and they want. To me, it seems like you want a full fledges realistic game, while they're looking more at a DnD dungeon crawl.

The techpriest and arbite are reasonably sensible on picks of skills. One assassin has taken a smattering of everything and the other went gunslinger and sunk most of his XP into shooting skills and talents. i do have a psyker all been well, but he hasn't rolled up his character yet.

Perhaps its the perception that there will be lots of fighting, even though I suggested there wouldn't be, that is causing my problems of group lack of dynamics.