Hello forum,

I'm participating in a great campaign, where we started out in Dark Heresy and moved on to Rogue Trader, importing some of the characters.

One character, from DH, has now Ascended and gained the Unnatural Agility trait. From previous forum posts I gather that Unnatural characteristics work differently in DH and RT. So my question to this esteemed forum is:

Which rules for Unnatural Characteristics does a DH character in a RT campaign use?

In case the rules in Inquisitors Handbook are used: Does the +10 to tests based on the characteristic also apply in combat, specifically for Dodge (and does other bonuses such as +20 from mastering the skill count towards the +30 limit)?

The rules I know from DH apply to all tests involving the characteristic, including skills like dodge.

For skills it is no bonus but the task becomes one step easier, thus it stacks with other bonuses as normal.

As I play in a DH game with several chars having unnatural characteristics my advice would be to not use them at all for PCs, because they are major game breakers.
A multiplier to characteristc bonuses is just too powerful. For every characteristic.

• The sage I'm playing can't fail any knowledge skill check, heals everyone from near critical to full health with a medicae test (healing twice her Int bonus) and makes the whole group super fast when it comes to initiative with combat formation with her unnatural intelligence.
• Our psyker would kill everything without breaking a sweat with her unnatural willpower if the GM hadn't changed the rules.
• And I will not even start about the vindicare with all his unnatural stats.

It's for a reason that in the newest game, black crusade, the unnatural stats are much weaker.

How they are in DH or RT they break the game.

Ok -thanks for the input. I'll take it up with my GM.

You know, I was going to ask how exactly were they changed, but I guess that would be a FFG no go. I had a PC play an Ogryn in a old RT game, and yes, it was a little unbalanced. Fun though, because Ogryns have claustrophobic. Any ideas or suggestions on Unnatural Traits being scaled down?

Like a Unnatural Toughness X2 now means +2 TB, and a +10 to Toughness related checks.

What an epiphany. Silly me just answered my own question.

I very much like the way they handled it in Black Crusade. Have the unnatural characteristic be represented by (x) where x = the amount your bonus for that characteristic is increased. Eg. Unnatural Strength (3) = your bonus goes up by 3, so if you had strength 40 the bonus would be 4 + 3 = 7.

On top of that: if you succeed a test utilising that characteristic you gain a number of bonus successes = to half your unnatural characteristic. In the above case that'd be 1,5 DoS extra (so depending on how your gm rules it that could be exactly what it says, 2 DoS or 1 DoS).

Wow, so my little rant was dang near close to the Black Crusade rules. The Emperor blessed me with his enlightenment.

Umbranus said:

Actually, there's diminishing returns on the healing element of this - even a Medicae with an intelligence bonus of 21 can't restore someone to full if they're heavily or critically wounded, and most characters (experienced Orks and most Space Marines aside) don't tend to have 20+ wounds. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't matter how smart you are - your patient can only be healed so much in one go.

• Umbranus said:
  Our psyker would kill everything without breaking a sweat with her unnatural willpower if the GM hadn't changed the rules.

If you're using the Rogue Trader psychic rules, Unnatural Willpower is vastly less unbalancing - essentially, you gain the multiplier as "bonus" Psy Rating on top of your normal value after determining power level (Fettered, Unfettered, or Pushed), and all powers scale off of Psy Rating rather than Willpower Bonus. So that PR10 Primaris with Unnatural WP(x3) can throw out some serious power, but nothing compared to what it would have been if powers were tied to his WP Bonus of 18 or 21.

Umbranus said:

Actually, they're not. They're just applied differently. A starting Space Marine still has Strength and Toughness Bonuses of 8 each, and the new Unnatural Agility is arguably better as it now applies to movement rates where it didn't before (so Eldar are really, really fast)

Umbranus said:

Actually, they already occur in a few places in Rogue Trader on player characters - Orks all begin play with Unnatural Toughness, and gain Unnatural Strength in later ranks (and can use that Unnatural Strength when giving orders, thanks to certain Ork traits and talents), while Kroot begin with Unnatural Strength and can gain Unnatural Perception (which is of a huge benefit when it comes to spotting hidden foes), and both Unnatural Strength and Unnatural Intelligence are available from higher-quality bionic implants, which are far more attainable to a Rogue Trader group than a Dark Heresy one.

The problem is more that they were made too freely available in Ascension, particularly at ratings beyond x2. The mechanic itself isn't too problematic in moderation, but Ascension went overboard with them.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

this is not true given that just about any RT group should be able to acquire a Vitae Supplacement rather quickly for every member of the group. This allows them the talent Autosanguine, meaning they always count as lightly wounded. So it's not that big a stretch to see someone go from critically wounded at -1 wound or lower to fully restored at 9-13 wounds.

In DH there is a serious problem with the mechanic as for example the psychic power tweak from RT didn't exist, so a WP bonus of 27 (perfectly feasible for an ascended character) is waaaaay overpowered. The same goes for a vindicare assassin getting a number of reactions equal to his agility bonus (which could be up to 16 reactions/round). Definitely a mechanic problem - if easily tweaked.

BC rules circumvent much of the problem as it means that boosting your characteristic by buying points doesn't automatically increase the bonus x2 or x3 if you have the unnatural trait for that characteristic. Unnatural is a flat modifier, so regardless if you are at intelligence 74 or 30, your bonus only goes up by 4 by GQ cortex implants. (rather then 7 and 3 respectively) Translate that to healing for example you "only" heal 11 wounds rather then 14 if your explorer has unnatural int x2 and an intelligence of 70+. That's a drop by over 20% in return, not insignificant at all. Or to put it another way: my genetor has a toughness of 90 at rank 5. If i purchased malygrisian bioforging for him then he'd have unnatural toughness x2 for a total TB of 18. If we use BC rules then his TB would be only 13 after the same manoeuver ... quite a difference imo. The traditional RT rules were fine if your characters didn't specialise in the characteristic that went unnatural, if they did however they were overpowered.

BC rules are an easy fix, simple to grasp and modifies the overpowered unnatural characteristics enough but not to much.

Badlapje said:

I do know all this (I worked on Black Crusade), and I wasn't disputing that the Black Crusade rules aren't better, merely that a lot of the percieved brokenness of the old Unnatural Characteristics system was more to do with the interactions between particular rules and the availability of high-end Unnatural Characteristics, rather than the Unnatural Characteristics in and of themselves.

Isn't that simply a rephrasing of the conclusion that unnatural characteristics were "broken" and needed a fix? After all, it weren't obscure hardly used fringe rules and high end characteristics for PCs are (or at least to me seem to be) a deliberate design choice in order to allow them to shine.

Badlapje said:

Not really. Used in a more reasonable context, they worked fine - it's perfectly logical for a Hierodule to have Unnatural Strength (x4) and Unnatural Toughness (x3), for example, and entirely in-keeping with the creature's supposed capabilities.

Psychic powers scaling by Willpower Bonus works in its own right in theory, but the moment you give psykers easy access to Unnatural Willpower (x2) and (x3) and pile an incomplete version of the power level (push/fettered/unfettered) rules from Rogue Trader in on top, it all gets out of hand. Unnatural Willpower on occasional NPC psykers of devastating power (Alpha+, Farseers, Greater Daemons of Tzeentch, etc, etc) works, by making it exceptional. Making it available to everyone exacerbates existing flaws that were otherwise fairly minor and inconsequential.

Unnatural Agility (x2) isn't actually all that powerful by itself - it makes you act sooner in combat, gives you a decent edge in sneaking/hiding, and a bit of a boost in dodging, but otherwise doesn't do all that much... until you put it on a Vindicare with the Temple Assassin rule. In this case, it's Temple Assassin that is the problem mechanic, not Unnatural Agility. The Death Cult Assassin's access to Unnatural Agility (x3) and (x4) is over-the-top, but here it's access to the mechanic more than the mechanic itself that is problematic - there's no logical reason why an otherwise normal individual should be able to reach such superhuman heights of agility (unlike Unnatural Strength, Toughness and Intelligence on the Magos - those are in-keeping with the idea of the character continually upgrading themselves beyond the limitations of flesh)

Unnatural Characteristics, taken alone, are not a broken mechanic - how broken they are is a matter of context and availability, and when employed carefully and sensibly they can be used quite effectively to represent superhuman capabilities. Ascension made them too available and provided additional ways to employ them that are in and of themselves broken.

The Black Crusade version of the rules are easier to work with and scale more effectively, without losing too much utility as a mechanic for representing the inhuman... but if you were to just use the Black Crusade Unnatural Characteristics in Ascension without changing anything else, you'd still run into the same problems.

point taken, thx for explaining :-)