I don't get the conversion rules for characters that have reached 100 Corruption in the non-BC systems. Especially this part:

"The character keeps one Skill at the the Trained level, and one Talent for which he has the necessary pre-requisites,
for every 1000 Experience the character possessed when he reached 100 Corruption Points. He discards all remaining
Talents and Skills. If he possesses a Psy Rating, he keeps it, as well as up to three Psychic Powers he already possessed."

They can keep their advanced characteristics and their higher psy rating, but forget everything concerning skills that goes beyond basic training and all but three of their psy powers?O_o

We assumed in our game that for every 1k exp you have one talent and one skill or one lvl of skill which you had. So for the cost of 3 skills you can have one skill +20 etc.

But even thought I think that characters form other games converted to BC are weaker than thoes made for BC. I had RT from RT converted for BC and he was less awesom than the same characted I remade with BC rules.

Mjoellnir said:

Who would have thought that pricing the same traits differently across supposedly compatible systems would one day come back to bite the authors in the ass in a mega-crossover...

And now, for being serious:

Each 40k RPG has a different scale of advancement - in each consecutive system, they advised giving out more exp per session than in the previous one, but also priced everything exp can buy higher. Sounds like it should even out, but it definitely didn't, especially if you tried introducing a lower-tier character into a higher-tier system, suddenly realizing he's going to be advancing almost twice as fast if you give out equal exp, and probably comes with more stuff already. Then, they messed it up even more by rescaling DH again at Ascension level, and introducing a plethora of totally game-breaking traits along the way. All in all, this has lead to stupefying levels of bull happening in crossover games.

Now, most of those problems don't exist in BC, because the system assumes (almost) total parity when it comes to character advancement. Which is a very good move when it comes to creating characters from scratch, be they renegades from the Imperium or Chaos worshipers from the get go. But, alas, the option of playing said renegades, combined with the assumption that BC starts where previous games' Corruption track ended, has made it a necessity to introduce some "crossover" rules.

At this point, the design team was faced with a choice - either they somehow enforced the same kind of parity on converted characters that exists for those made from scratch, or they let all the stupidity of previous crossovers commence - worsen even, considering BC advancement scales yet differently from any previous game. Either way, sacrifices had to be made. But there was another factor influencing the choice - the new Alignment system. If they let converted characters with all stuff they got previously, either everything had to count towards alignments (leaving those characters spread all over the place or accidentally alligned to something regardless of player's vision), or there would be little left for some characters to purchase, screwing the players out of the whole Alignment minigame. Then, there were the small matters of some Talents changing drastically between games or being heavily refluffed due to the different focus of the game - if a Black Templar with Abhor the Witch falls to Chaos, does his divine protection from psykers naturally switch it's power source from Emprah to Khorne, or does he lose his semi-mystical shield of faith? What if he doesn't really fancy Khorne, or spending an hour a day shouting curses at psykers? And so on, and so forth...

Long story short, it's a drastic measure, and feels unintuitive or even downright punishing, but it's a necessary concession if you hope to have fun with your now-fallen character while partaking in all the joys of the new system.

Mjoellnir said it. It's a big, pounding headache waiting to happen. My suggestion would be to simply hand out an appropriate amount of extra XP and let them remake the characters, pricing eventual extra traits and talents they want to keep appropriately and allowing them to be repurchased.

Regardless of the system differences, the current conversion rules simply are unable to do the reason WHY anybody would convert his old character to Black Crusade justice. Converting your character shouldn't be something you do because you want to play Black Crusade but are too lazy to think up a new character name. Converting your character to BC should be something you do because your character has fallen to Chaos. In the best case not through warp shock or hearing Daemonettes sing but by actively using the powers of Chaos thinking that he could control them. Why would anybody do that? Power! The whole point of the Radical's Handbook or the Relictor Space Marines is trying to get an advantage through powers that will ultimately come back to bite you in the butt. With the current conversion rules you actually get weaker. Everybody loses skills, psykers lose powers, Space Marines lose their solo and squad mode abilities (I don't have to understand why a Space Wolf's nose gets worse when he is corrupted unless it is by Nurgle) etc. Look at the Horus Heresy. Imagine what all those chaos marines would have lost. How could Horus even formulate his strategies? That skill should have went down to basic training. The Thousand Sons would have had to relearn all their spells.

Somehow I believe a variant of the crossover rules on page 285 would be better than a conversion.

Other problems if high-Rank characters convert to BC with all their Skills and Talents:

-They might not have any room to grow and/or becoming aligned as they want

-Their capabilities will be in no relation to their Corruption or Infamy. Of course this can be amended easily by the GM.

I'm not saying the conversion rule is good. I'm saying the alternatives are much worse.

I think the point with that "discarding skills and talents" business is that you don't actually need that many skills. Take for example a sneaky character: With Dark Heresy, he needs Concealment, Silent Move and Shadowing. With BC, he needs Stealth. Does he lose anything for not having those three skills anymore? No, because it's all rolled up in Stealth. All in all, one talent, one (formerly two to three) skill and perhaps an ability enhancement are equivalent to 1000 XP.

That said, I'd probably just create characters anew with the BC rules and build them as near to the original as possible, with any discrepancies explained away as results of their traumatic conversion.

By the way, where does it say that Marine characters lose squad and solo mode abilities?

Cifer said:

Interesting.

I can't say that I quite understand the reasoning for the amnesia loss myself.

Personally, I would view a fall to chaos as a chance to do a sort of "soft reset" of the group and campaign. I'd hand out an appropriate amount of XP for the characters to start with, and in terms of numbers, skills and talents, I'd let people remake as they like. The important thing are the character personalities, their past actions and shared history. And those things are usually not defined by the numbers on the character sheet.

I would explain it away as the tumult of actually falling to Chaos and going renegade turning everything topsy turvy. Even things like Corruption can be explained according to that, as the definition of Corruption for a Chaos renegade could be very, very different from a true son of the emperor. What is damning corruption to one could be no more then a minor concern to the other.

Simply put, I'd remake the campaign as a BC campaign, just with an advanced starting point in terms of XP and equipment, and with a past history. The real difficulty would probably in determining Infamy in such a case, but I would probably err on the side of caution in such a case and keep it a bit lower then if they had played through the same number of BC sessions to get to that point of XP. Such is the price of getting to start in the middle of things...

me and my fellow gm came up with a plausable reason he is as they have gone so far into madness that its actually affeted there minds this is so i am told a possible side effect of insanity but not being medicaly qualified, i can't say though as a slightly insane (have to be to do my job) i do notice things not sticking in my mind lol

My entire group agrees that they need to make the conversion system a longer explanation. They're still missing several things that don't get mentioned.

Do traits not related to malignancies and mutations stay?

Does the character still get the equipment in step 6 of standard BC creation?

I think the only reasons they started this "amnesia-thing" is some balance-thing compared to new BC chars.

And nope, I can see the reason for every concerting a pc either. Well, aside from supposedly higher Attribute Stats.

The easy solution for this:

Ignore Insanity
Set Corruption back to zero
Remove all Malignancies the pc had
In the case "sum uped skills" the GM needs to decide which one it shall be (the highest, the lowest or the average) to be taken as the new skill rank
Exchange / sum up Talents in accordance to the new once given

Undo everything not mentioned inthe new rules anymore.
Keep in mind what Attribut advances you already took!

And then; their you are.

This keeps your character what is was before, but it screws balance to BC-pc totally. Assumed that their was any balance to begin with.