What in the world are they thinking?! I'm referring to the entry on page 186 of the Dark Heresy core rulebook.

"A success on the Test allows you to roll 1d10 and add the appropriate Characteristic Bonus ... and subtract this value in hours from the time it takes to uncover the information sought."

Then, at the bottom of the page is a chart detailing the number of hours required for various difficulties. The issue I have is, anything more difficult than a +10 "Ordinary" test takes upwards of 72 hours! Even rolling a perfect ten for time, every time, and with a +5 bonus, that's 5 rolls! It's -22- rolls for the next step up in difficulty! And this is, again, assuming perfection. Emperor help you if you -fail- some of these rolls. It could end up adding even more rolls.

Can anyone tell me what in the world good any of this would be, unless you just really wanted to roll lots of dice for some hours? Are you supposed to make these rolls occasionally during the course of an investigation? If so, does your character do this research in his/her downtime? Or are these rolls based on the assumption that you are working your acolyte ass off in a library somewhere, spending eighteen-hour shifts combing through dusty tomes? Even if you assume that each roll takes about an hour (as stated for the Inquiry skill entry in the skills section, which may or may not apply here,) that's still a whole lot of wasted time spent rolling dice. I admit I may be misunderstanding something here. In fact that is the most likely issue. Nonetheless I am super confused and would appreciate some help, please!

What I'm confused about is the base time required to make the check. For something like "marketplace gossip" do I make the check, which takes no time, succeed and have discovered it instantly?

If we assume each hour of work allows you to make a roll, then it makes slightly more sense and we can kind of ignore the idea of the hours of work to translate a book (for which a month doesn't seem unreasonable).

Basically, you'd need to accumulate enough successes. So, to complete an ordinary task you'd need 24 successes. Each hour spent would count as 1, you would succeed, 1d10+Char Bonus+Degrees of Success and maybe you'd get the research done in 2 or 3 hours.

This seems like a much better system. For more advanced stuff, I'd hope the acolytes either hire someone else to do the research, or do it during their random massive downtimes. e.g. taking certain alternate career ranks involves traveling to other worlds and training at special murder shrines (or whatever).

I think DH is supposed to have a relatively large amount of in-game downtime compared to most other PnP RPGs.

But yeah, the original system seems a bit strange and I, for one, have never seen it used.