LINKY

And for those of you who don't want to bother reading it... Black Crusade has no career paths or levels, it is an open choice game.

I'm very glad to see people excited about this. It was a fantastic project to work on, and very cool to get to write a Developer Diary about it.

JohnDunn said:

I will say this is EXACTLY the sort of thing I wish the entire line had from the beginning. and I hope for some sort of future supplements to allow the same in Dark Heresy especially.

Dulahan said:

I can only imagine it wasn't like that from the beginning because that's how GW wanted it (especially since it was planned as a trilogy of games from the start by Black Industries).

Either way, I'm glad FFG get to have more freedom with how they do things now

Yeah.

Honestly, it always baffled me that DH wasn't more like Warhammer Fantasy. I would have been more ok with that then the current system of career advancement. That offered a lot more flexibility and less pigeonholing. And would have given a lot more possible options on the start and endpoints.

Ah interesting. I wonder if they would have done it from RT onwards, had they the choice?

Dulahan said:

Think a lot of us where in a way having played WHFRPG for a very long time, plus it would have made for some easier cross-polination between the two with a little bit of fiddling by the GM if you really wanted that feral guardsmen a former pit fighter etc. Advances and backgrounds sort of fill the void adequetely though.

Im really interested in seeing this system work, it sounds very divergent and flexible.

Dulahan said:

Actually, the first version of Dark Heresy (during the playtest) did have a WFRP-like career system. It was scrapped in favour of career paths, primarily because it's not actually more flexible, just differently flexible, and the WFRP-style system didn't do the job that BI wanted it to do. Every individual career in WFRP1 and 2 was essentially a tiny and largely inflexible block of compulsory character advances, with the flexibility gained through being able to mix and match the careers rather than being inherent in those little building blocks. The system eventually chosen for Dark Heresy throws away that external/mix-and-match flexibility in exchange for a lot more options within each archetype.

This looks very nice and I must say I'm intrigued.

I have to say it makes a lot of sense not to restrict the development of PC's by career advances for an RPG where the core theme is the protrayal of the heretics climb to power...or descent into madness. Certainly a moorcockian feel to it in the way that if you start leaning one way the more heavily aligned/influenced the heretic will become to a particular ruinous power...devoted and submitting to that one power.

Love to see the insanity/corruption rules for this one...hey what about conditions of purity and the ire that would bring from the ruinous powers?

...

I think what BI were intending with the DH mechanics was something akin to a dark medieval feel, basically if you were guardsman who was selected to be an acolyte though you could later specialise by becoming a sniper/stormtrooper/officer you remained basically a guardsman. Because of the lower tier power setting and the feudal nature of the imperium there wasn't really much in the way of advancement...basically you were stuck with your lot.

Problem was though that you couldn't really play a commissar or other roles until someone posted them on say the Dark Reign site or elsewhere...or supplements like the Inquisitor's Handbook.

Then FFG took over the development of the 40k RPG line and seemed to have made some interesting refinements to the line whilst some of the flaws in the core DH were exposed. I'm sure the developers will in time address them...

Hrm. While this could be interesting, I can easily see the Alignment being implemented really poorly. One thing that jumps out at me is the apparent fact that acolytes of Tzeentch, whom I'd think would be the supposed masters of social intrigue, are discouraged from taking Charm.

My thoughts exactly. While the classless system is a great improvement and something I've envisioned a while ago for the similarly "boundless" Eldar Outcasts and Corsairs, the attribute and skill alignment isn't really what I'd imagine to work. With FFG trying to present the Chaos Gods as more three-dimensional entities rather than "all sex all the time", "all rage all the time" etc, I'd think that they wouldn't be just limited to a bunch of skills and talents. There really is a lot of crossover - while, say, Forbidden Knowledge makes you think of Tzeentch and his mysteries, FFG itself presented a Slaaneshi esoteric cult in the form of Ateanism. Both value secret knowledge, but former uses it to increase personal power, while the latter applies it to works of art to experience personal rapture. The methods are the same, what matters is the goal.

Still, I hope that it's just unfortunate wording and FFG's work will be splendid as always.

@MR Inres

Hrm. While this could be interesting, I can easily see the Alignment being implemented really poorly. One thing that jumps out at me is the apparent fact that acolytes of Tzeentch, whom I'd think would be the supposed masters of social intrigue, are discouraged from taking Charm.

I daresay "discouraged" does not mean "precluded". Either just take Charm as one of your early advance before you become aligned or suck up the XP-penalty or just accept that when it comes to charming the pants off of someone, Slaaneshi will have an advantage over you while you'll likely be better at flat-out Deceiving people with slightly wonky Logic.

I do hope the rules for corruption are tweaked a bit, lest the PCs all implode in a twisting mass of tentacles and fangs before they even meet the Inquisition.

MR Innes said:

I don´t think it´s intended for non chaos undivided chars to not pay increased XP costs in some areas.

Let´s take a khorne aligned warrior character for instance. I assume he will need some nurgle aligned stuff aswell to survive melee carnage and some tzeench and slaanesh aligned features to round out the character.

You either get no discounts at all, and play chaos undivided, or you play a character aligned to a specific god and your discounts get balanced out with cost increases in other areas. Otherwhise it´d make no sense to play an undivided char if others come off cheaper all the time.

That´s what I guess it´ll be.

nvm

moepp said:

What were you going to say? I'm curious

Cifer said:

Cifer said:

One thing I never like in a RPG system is when the order you take the advance in has an effect. Especially when one order is permanently and objectively worse than another. Which looks to be the case here. Take a character who wants to go one god, but wants a single advance from another. If they take the other advance first, the total XP cost of all the advances is less than if they take it last. Or maybe they are taking enough advances from that god that the total discount is more than the increased cost of the other advance.

As for balancing it, if you have two players (the costs are before any XP cost adjustment):

- One wants 5'000 xp of discounted advances, 200 of increased price.

- One wants 4'800 xp of discounted, 200 of increased price and 200 of unaligned.

How can you build a system where the order doesn't matter for either player ?

The reason I don't like it is that I don't like having to chose between getting the fun advances now, or holding off on them so my character is better later.

This is especially important when you consider that by making the order important, the RAW is saying that the character has already chosen which god they are going with (you can't plan your advance order if you don't know where you are going). But the fluff says that a lot of people falling to chaos don't chose to, instead they are put in situations that slowly push them in that direction until they are too far gone.

Keep in mind that, whilst many skills or talents may be aligned, you do not become aligned just like that only for purchasing a single skill. It is when you constantly push into a specific direction when Alignment rules will take effect. You do not suddenly pop a Slaaneshi mark just because you've taken Charm. Similarly, a Tzeentchian may find the Charm skill to be more expensive, but will not raise the ire of his Patron God just for a single purchase.

Though, yes, I too think the system would benefit from applying two alignments (on purchase, player chooses which one applies) to some skills/talents.

It's not about raising the ire of a PCs patron god. The problem is that the system described in the rulebook means you can take two identical characters, give them identical amounts of XP to spend and apply the exact same advances to them, the only difference is the order you applied the advances. The end result of this is that one of the characters has spent more xp than the other. Meaning that the character who spent more is equal or worse than the other character in all areas, because the other character has identical everything except unspent XP, in which he has more.

Question: Think about players who plan out every advance they will take on their character sometime around character creation. What do you think of systems that encourage that behaviour ?

Because that is the kind of behaviour that this system will reward. I'm not sure how much it will reward it, but I find any amount to be too much.

Lynata said:

That would lessen the problem. Maybe even allow some advances to apply to three of the gods.

But to remove it FFG would need to remove the mechanic of allowing players to spend XP to alter the cost of future advances while leaving the cost of past advances fixed. Though that does give me an idea about a way to remove the problem: When something changes the cost of an advance that a character has already purchased, retroactively apply the new cost to the players unspent XP.

For example, if a character had taken an advance that cost 500xp when purchased, but does something so that it now only costs 400, the difference is refunded and he now has 100 to spend.

If the cost goes up, then he loses that amount, which may put him into an XP deficit. I'm not sure if it would be better to allow the character to work it off, or to force the character to lose advances with a refund to bring their unspent XP back up to 0

It would take a while to calculate. But it would remove the problem and give a major boon to a character when they align themselves with one of the gods, while imposing a penalty should they break away.

So, worst case, I can house rule this problem away.

@BilateralRope

Are there any systems where a planned character doesn't come out on top of a "let's see where this takes me" one in some way? The phenomenon existed in DH as well - The more Gunslinger advances you didn't take and waited until they became available in the later career stages, the less XP would you pay. Power Now versus More Power Later is IMO a quite valid mechanic.

As for the exact problem, there actually is a balance - the one who bought the Slaanesh power while he was unaligned will become aligned sometime later, thus he must have bought more Tzeentch powers for a non-reduced price. If the discount was as big as the extra cost, there would be balance.

MILLANDSON said:

To be honest, I botched up. Missed a word in my previous post and wanted to edit but accidently clicked the wrong button, thus a new post emerged .

I´ll blame it on the ruinous powers that haunt these forums, if someone asks^^

Bilateralrope said:

It's a bit premature to be invoking RAW when we don't have the book in our hands and are not seeing the actual rules for this in front of us. This maybe far more flexable then you think.

I'm wondering how they will price Characteristic advances without classes/careers? Will every advance cost the same, or will the cost of advances be dictated by your starting "Achetype"?

Some reading between the lines might point to it being based on your Patron God. It does say Khorne favors Strength after all. That would make sense to me, at least.