Morangias said:

I never met a system that was not exploitable or 'broken' in some way; musn't been a barrel of laughs at this table. It seems to me you're aiming to have everyone able to do everything with any weapon or piece of gear OR have everyone positioned into a single role and they must not sway away from their designated role within the party (hard to say as some arguemnts swing one way or the other).

Either way, it will remove the uniqueness of each class in combat (as even the mild-mannered adept can soemhow managed to do as much damage with his standard las weapon as the bolter-towing guardsman) , or will limit everyone's options "Well, my Adept can't do anything in that combat, so he'll stay behind that crate with the tech-priest, passing the time playng cards and wait until the guardsman and assasin finish off everyone."

As for Psykers, if you're fearing of getting, or ARE getting a TPK everytime a witch uses a power, then either the player uses too much dice for no reason (more chance of getting those 9s), or is simply unlucky and managed to score a few 9s followed by 75+ rolls (from phenomenas to perils), and again followed by what, 70+ rolls to get deamon popping out of the warp randomly. The worst phenomena that happened to me was the strong, howling wind that knocked people off thier feet and had the psyker being thrown on the floor and whipepd by invisible hands. Never had a peril of the Warp yet. Far from the dreaded TPK that seems to happen to everyone each time the Psyker try to use Call item or whatever cantrip power he's got. But I did had a tech-priest failing to throw a grenade and having it bounce back into the PCs (who were 'cornered' inside an airlock)

It's not about making everything absolutely equal, or shoehorning everyone in a precisely defined role. But the way we see it, the fact that the Adept can never raise his combat skills about 30 and still go to town with an automatic weapon and fare quite well compared to a Guardsman who puts all his advancements in his combat prowess, is a bug rather than feature. If you want to be good at combat, don't exploit the rules that make everyone with an autogun a capable shooter, invest in your combat-related advancements.

It's not so much about MMO-style roles as it is about fundamental niche protection. Everyone likes to be "the best" at something, and rules should support it if someone specifically builds the character towards that end.

Well, in counter view of this, what will the Adept do during combat? Step away and hide until the guardsman finish the combat, or perhaps take shots with his revolvers at BS 30+10 for range (most of the time) with another +10 for aiming half action? It will fall down to the same as firing full auto with an autogun to me, only that he's spraying round around rather than taking a single shot; less effective damage wise, but it would still attract enemy attention on him either way.

The difference with a Guardsman and an Adept would be more 'useful' in a team loadout situation to really 'cover all the bases' so to speak: give that autogun to the Adept, while the guardsman get a longlas; then the Adept's lowly BS would be compensated with the +20 full auto can give him (all the while being useful in combat), while the guardsman can take half action aim/fire with the longlas and take full adventage of his high BS value to get a better chance of some extra damage dice going (and keep his position of big damage giver)

If the Adept didn't bother increasing his combat capability, why does he expect to contribute meaningfully to combat?

Also, it makes much more sense that the combat-incapable character sticks to easy to use, accurate, single-shot weapons, because hitting anything with autofire takes years of training.

My 2 cents -

There are some fairly loaded arguments being thrown around on all sides here, but to go back to the original theme of the thread, I would recommend Dark Heresy for the group as described by the original poster.

A group that likes to RP but also be lead by the the nose doesn't want to have to go digging for their own adventures. RT allows near ultimate player freedom, and it's one of the reasons my group enjoys it so much - Have Starship, Will Travel (and find loot/shenanigans/trouble along the way...). You don't have a boss, you don't need to toe the Imperial line, you can be anything from a Pilgrim-carrying Ecclesiarchy Missionary to a warpfire and brimstone corsair, and the only people who are going to say anything about it are the other people with bigger and meaner starships than yours.

Dark Heresy is very different, in that you start out as a bunch of know-little Mooks but have one thing going for them - apparently, an Inquisitor finds them trustworthy. Inquisitor says "Hey, there's some baad juju coming out of the mines on Scintilla, can you go check it out? Let me know if any of you survive, okay? Thanks..." and the PC's are off. They're on a mission for the God-Emperor. The GM is free to create as straightforward or convoluted a plot as they want, the plot can be as obscure or transparent as the PC's can handle, and they're off to the races.

There are significant differences between DH, RT, DW and BC, there's no doubt. And there are tiny little paragraphs buried within some of the Core books on how best to combine the settings, but make no mistake, they're supposed to be different. Psykers is definitely one of the most widely-varied rules differences, and it's obviously torqued some gamers the wrong way, and others seem to enjoy it. I can't speak for BC because I've never played it, and although I have the rulebook I haven't played DW either. Coincidentally, I have played DH and RT, which was the original question for the thread. I haven't played an Ascension level game, and I can see that it gets pretty screwy, but I think the point of Ascension is to change the game away from the 'small team' feel of DH and jump straight into decades-long, sector-spanning conspiracies, like those seen in the Eisenhorn & Ravenor trilogies. In fact, I think Ascension is almost where Rogue Trader picks up, theme-wise at least (not PC stats-wise) because all of a sudden, YOU are making the decisions, YOU are calling the shots, and YOU are in deep doo-doo if things go sideways. I know a LOT of GMs and PCs out there enjoy the games for the combat, and if the combat is unbalanced "then the game is unbalanced, completely nerfed, and/or impossible to play", but here's the thing: It's not a wargame. It's a conspiracy investigating, cult-tracking, intelligence-gathering, spy thriller game, which features some combat. Just look at the DW rules for "Hordes" - not a Chance you'll see that as an Acolyte.

So I guess that's it, as far as game-choice goes. If you want a straight-forward bolter-blastin' wargame, play DeathWatch. If you want to boldly go where no one has gone before (and loot it for all it's worth), play Rogue Trader. If you want investigative spy shenanigans, Dark Heresy is the way to go. If your group likes playing badguys, I hear Black Crusade is good, but I haven't looked, myself.

PS: I think Plasma in ALL the settings are nerfed, compared to the Plasma I know and love from 40K Tabletop.
Compare the following:
Krak Grenades (40K: S6, AP4), Hellguns (40K: S3, AP3), Meltaguns (40K: S8, AP1), Plasma (40K: S7, AP2).
Krak Grenades: 2d10+4 X, Pen 6, Hellguns: 1d10+4 E, Pen 7, Meltaguns: 2d10+8 E, Pen 13, Plasma: 1d10+6 E, Pen 6.
So the mighty Plasma gun does less damage than a Krak Grenade and has the same Pen as a Krak Grenade, and is nearly identical to a hellgun. Riiiggghhtt.
In my campaigns, Plasma Guns do 2d10+6 E, Pen 9. This puts the damage above Krak Grenades, but below Melta guns (7 does fall between 6 and 8) and the Armor Points for armor seems to go up by 2 for every 1 the Armor Save gets better in 40K, so AP 9 for something able to penetrate Terminator armor seems alright. I also jack up the chances of an overheat to 85%, which is coincidentally approx. the odds of rolling a 1 on 1d6

PPS: I don't have a problem with the Perils of the Warp thing from DH, because it's just not very likely. Mathwise (which, as we all know, has nothing to do with how likely something actually is in a game due to the whims of the dice gods), you have to roll a 9 to trigger a Phenomena test, which is 10% likely with 1 die, 19% with 2, 27% likely with 3 dice, and so on. THEN, you roll Perils of the warp 25% of the time, making it 2.5% likely with 1 die, 4.75% likely with 2 dice, 6.75% likely with 3 dice, and so on. Now, this doesn't account for the fact that if you roll 2 nines on 2d10, you roll twice, but suffice to say that's even more unlikely (1% on 2 dice to roll double nines). But even STILL, you have to roll a 62% or higher on the Perils chart before you even start summoning lesser daemons, which is 38% of the above numbers: 0.95%, 1.81% and 2.57% likely for 1, 2 and 3 dice. The most difficult powers to manifest, Dominate, Holocaust, Mind Scan and Precision Telekinesis, have a power requirement of 23 or 24, which requires an average of 4 dice to pull off with any reliability (Avg. Die roll of 5-6+WP), which will cause Phenomena at least 35% of the time, Perils 9% of the time, and hella trouble almost 4% of the time. That doesn't even account for odds-shifting talents like Corpus Conversion, Discipline Focus, or Favoured by the Warp (huge effect there, but beyond my ability to work the odds).

In short, rolling the devastating kinds of total-party-kill disasters that Sanctioned Psykers are capable of are unlikely. Unless the dice gods are cranky. Oh, and in the grim darkness of the future, life is cheap. Roll a new party & carry on.

PPPS, To calculate the odds, multiply the odds of not rolling a 9 (90%, or 0.9) by itself as many times as you have dice (.9x.9 for 2 dice, .9 x .9 x .9 for 3 dice) and then subtract that # from 1. (1 - .9^1 = 0.1, or 10% for 1 die, 1-9^2 = 0.19 for 2 dice, etc). Then start multiplying by the odds of triggering Perils and then by the odds of triggering BAD perils...)

/end rant.

OP

The problem with Perils is not in how likely they are to come up, it's in how totally random they are in DH. Even the least of powers that can be automatically manifested with one die has a flat 10% chance of going haywire, and it only goes up. Compare with later systems, where you make a meaningful choice between power and safety each time you try to manifest.

So you don't care for the DH system because you're unable to completely eliminate the risk of perils of the warp? There's only a 2.5% chance of any power going 'haywire' on one die, not 10%. The other 7.5% of the time, something freaky happens, but it won't be a TPK situation by any stretch. I guess it's a good thing there are guidelines to convert DH over to RT rules (page 172 RT Core).

Oh yeah, I figured out how to do the math on, how Favoured by the Warp decreases your chances. If I were really that worried about perils of the warp, I would just allow the PC's to take that ability much earlier. Regardless, if you have FbtW, it drives the chances of manifesting perils from 2.5% of the time down to 0.6% of the time, which means the really bad stuff only happens 0.02% of the time. Taken another way, that means that of the 10% likelihood of rolling a 9, you'll only roll a Perils result 94 times out of a thousand.

IMO, the meaningful decision you make as a player (and group) is whether you want a psyker along in the group in the first place.

The meaningful decision you make when playing a psyker is to make sure you only roll as many dice as you think you need to manifest the power.

The meaningful decision you make as a non-psyker PC is whether or not you blow his head off "for his own good" when perils manifest.

Stressful on the players? Maybe, depends on their own take on the game and how personally they take it. I've seen it a few times in the game, and it served as a reminder exactly why psykers are treated the way they are in 40K. Grimdark? Of course.

Regardless, the question posed was whether or not the poster ought to be playing RT or DH, and I would be making the decision based on the role the players are playing in the game (hence the term Role Playing Game), not whether or not the psychic power system was dangerous to its users & their associates.

Orion Pax said:

No, I don't care for those rules because I have no control over them. Regulating the amount of dice you roll is like regulating the amount of roulette chips you're betting - no matter what you do, the casino wins in the end. Choosing between fettered/unfettered/push is a meaningful choice - do I operate on the measly half of my power in return for safety, or do I go balls to the wall and hope the Chaos Gods don't eat me for lunch? There are times when it's dramatically appropriate for the psyker to go nova and get consumed in the process, but with a flat 10% chance of something going wrong, even just cosmetically, the phenomena become a nuisance and distract from the story.

Using the conversion rules in RT creates an even bigger abomination, because all those DH powers are scaled on WP bonus, and thus you can always use them Fettered and still get the full reward. It's yet worse in Ascension, when the same absolute safety is coupled with Unnatural Willpower for truly outrageous numbers.

Orion Pax, thanks for those numbers I found them very interesting. But no matter the facts some players just can't handle the 40k-ness of the system it seems, and wants it to be a magic system like in other fantasy systems where you can spam magic powers.

There seems to be a ratio of danger to benefit to the systems, where DH is the most extreme. And RT plays more safe both in the danger and benefit department. In our game the DH characrters use the DH system, and the RT astropath we have tagging along uses the RT system and powers. It makes more sense that way since astropaths is not the same as psykers.

Half of the PCs in my group have some sort of psy rating, so there is a lot of power being flung around every session. The most memorable moment was when the Vindicare Assassin took out a group of genestealers on the other side of a sealed bulkhead with some sort of blast power he used. The Judge also uses his powers pretty often. It is very rare for something to go bad even with those freshly sanctioned non psyker PCs using powers every where, and just for laughs sometimes.

Morangias said:

I was answering based on what you previously said, which was;

Morangias said:

so I was based on the fact that your adept example meant he spend all of his XP to augment his Int, WP and perception rather than in BS.

As for weak BS character using accurate weapons, I would rather give that to the High BS character who will be able to utilize the full capacity of a weapon having the accurate quality than the weak BS character who will have his chances of success go up, but chances are the DoS needed to gain extra damage dice will be lower than a high BS character. As for autofire taking 'years of training' to master, going back again to realism versus the fact that it's a over-the-top setting as I've said previously.

The fact of the matter is, there's little point in anyone taking sniper rifles, ever, because full auto weapons are inherently more accurate in pre-BC games, and have a better damage potential. Why waste time meticulously lining up your shot when you can just spray from your handheld autocannon and hit more times for more damage each? I've had players eschew all other weapons in favor of autoguns and autopistols throughout all the campaign, even when they could have easily afforded bolt or plasma weapons, because they figured they can punch through most opponents anyway with extra damage Talents and proper ammo, and those extra Righteous Fury chances are totally worth a slightly lower reliable damage output.

Autofire in pre-BC games is a no-brainer solution that makes wimpy amateurs look like hardened killers, and actual hardened killers can be boosted to autohit level if they use it. If something's good for anyone at any time, it's obviously too good. And nothing kills variety like options that are "too good".

In BC, autofire is still a very good option... for ranged combat specialists. A character who didn't build for ranged combat has no business using them, except perhaps for suppressive fire. And that's good, because it introduces actual options and meaningful tactical choices.

Simple, a sniper weapon in DH has traits (accurate) that make it do some really awesome damage in one shot. The target will proabably be unaware. The best, and most important, aspect of the single powerful shot is that damage reduction is only applied once. If you shoot high damage reduction targets with a fully automatic weapon you won't end up doing much of any thing. Shoot that same target with an accurate weapon and it will bypass the damage reduction much better.

I used to use a heavy stubber on my guardsman because he had low BS, and the DH full auto rules helped him to hit stuff. But I was finding that it was doing really bad damage to the tougher targets. So, I mostly use full auto to suppress enemies. None of the ranged combat experts in my group use fully automatic weapons, they are all accurate sniper weapons, or orther hard hitting stuff. Then BC just served to make full auto weapons even less appealing to us than they already were to us.

Morangias bringing up handheld autocannons. The most common and wide spread weapon in DH and RT... Oh wait a minute! those don't even exist unless you severely bend the rules or disregard logic. So much for practical examples. I'm seeing a pattern here.

I suspect it was a slip of the keyboard and Moringias meant autoguns, not autocannons.

While we're sort of on the topic, the most obvious advantage sniper rifles have is range, far beyond anything that autoguns or standard bolters have. In real life, standard 7.62mm sniper rifles can be accurate easily out to 600-800m, whereas an M16 is considered maxed out around 300-400m, and the (now) more common M4 is only around 200m! The trick comes in knowing when each weapon will be most useful. I know for a fact that the Canadian sniper teams in Afghanistan took to travelling in threes. One carried the .50 cal heavy sniper rifle, one carried the more common 7.62mm sniper rifle, and the third was 'security', carrying an assault rifle with an m203 grenade launcher. They carried three different weapons (four, if you count the m203) because each was ideal under different circumstances. A situation where 'autoguns and bolters are best because of autofire' just means the GM isn't being terribly creative. Machineguns (Heavy Stubbers) have their place, and it is at a secured, heavily bagged position where they can pin down enemy infantry who are on the advance, long before their rifles (autoguns) have range. In a world with power armor, psychic powers and orbital artillery, the poor bloody (unaugmented) infantry are pretty screwed in any war of attrition.

For example, in my RT campaign, the PC's will shortly be assaulting an arctic fortress held by the remnants of a radical/heretic inquisitor (with inquisitorial sanction, of course). They might choose to grav-chute HALO assault directly into the fortress, or they might choose to drop in a klick or two away and start raining in targeted fire from a distance. Advantages of the second one include making it supremely difficult for the enemy to locate the source of the fire, and being far enough away that any return fire is minimal and inaccurate. It might also serve well to suppress some of the defenders before the bulk of the assaulting force (mercenary grav-chute-equipped drop-trooper types) arrives. The drop troops, on the other hand, are predominantly equipped with hellguns and hand cannon sidearms, grenade launchers or flamers, with support weapon teams equipped with lascannons and long-las. Each platoon HQ has a melta and a mortar for tank hunting and pinning enemies in the open with light artillery (mortars).

The end result is the PC's have a 'grav-borne' assault force, that isn't equipped to mow down hordes of orks or other humans, but can perform a surgical assault an objective from sub-orbit using the RT's Halo Barges to drop a platoon at a time. The RT can potentially assault a given objective with 500 troops supported by scout bikes, chiroptean scout fliers and a dozen or so tank-hunting sentinel walkers - but thus far, the game has been solidly investigative and diplomatic. You have to find the objective before you can assault it, and that's what the badguys do, is hide from plain view. We've gone 5 game sessions without any combat, and the players couldn't be happier. They're getting a chance to really develop their characters as something other than a gun on legs, stretching their ability to think creatively, plan for contingencies, and of course make astounding leaps of logic that are absolutely right with next-to-zero information.

At the end of it, they will have secured a reliable contact within the inquisition, secured ongoing finances by having the planetary governor owe them huge favours, identified a potential source of future recruits for their mercenary force, and boosted their profit factor by a couple notches. A good endeavour's work.

Which is, going back to the original topic, why we like RT so much - the sky isn't even the limit - but it does take a lot of thought and work on everyone's part.

OP

Actually the keybord slip was when I wrote "handheld" but meant "portable". Portable autocannons can be found in Inquisitor's Handbook, so do Assault Cannons (a weapon that in DW no Astartes can use without welding it to his Terminator armor). Autocannons also have a 300m range bracket, which is better than Exitus Rifle... so much about sniping.

But seriously, even a normal autogun will do. It has a good enough range for most covert operations, it doesn't draw too much attention, and anyone can be a capable long-distance shooter thanks to it.

Sadly, the creativity of the GM doesn't have much to do with it. I've seen several sniper characters get outshot by characters using full-auto weapons, on all possible distances, and it was despite me knowing the problem and designing the encounters specifically so they had something to do. Partial cover helps a bit, but only so much.

All the Autoguns in the world won’t help you if your average damage (plus pen) can’t actually hurt your target. The same can never be said about a Long-Las, that can rack up some considerable damage with a good hit. Our group’s Sniper is the ‘boss killer’ of the group, the guy who takes out the power armour guy or the double-toughness mutant at the end.

No, the Full Auto rules do create situations where they are just as accurate as ‘sniper’ weapons and can cause greater damage to lesser targets, but Accurate weapons have their niche, and a good one at that. Sniping is really only totally redundant in pre-Errata Deathwatch.

Morangias said:

Now, the system as it works in the other games is quite nice, and if I would accept any change to the Dark Heresy system to bring it properly in line with the others that is the one item I would say "ok" probably without too much complaint. However, it does take away from the uniqueness of the system (which I actually like) by bringing it into line with the general mechanics (I am not massively keen on the change to Melee in BC as I liked that ranged combat and melee combat worked in different ways). Also, until BC there was no difficulty system, meaning that particularly powerful abilities had no real balancing factor, aside from the xp cost. Also, the way that as you increased in power had some odd effects. Now, it some ways it was nice. Smite from DW, for example, would start as a rather measly attack if fettered early on. Unfettered it was essentially similar to a weapon attack, but with extra risks, and with Pushed it became a heavy weapon, but with major risks. As you improved it got better, eventually when powerful enough reaching the point where it could be used as normal weapon, and pushed it just got absurd, and right towards the end it was just massively powerful all the time (except when you don't want to hit colleages).

This was a nice progression, but some of the powers, like the one that took over multiple enemies, just got hideous. While it was fine at lower power levels, as power increased you could take over more guys, it became more likely to get fired off in the first place, and then the opposed checks that the enemy had to pass just got stupid. The Librarian on his own could essentially neutralise many encounters on his own, with little or no risk. Now, as with the Dark Heresy psyker this is perfectly in keeping with the setting (psykers are powerful), but it is no more balanced in the party than the original Dark Heresy psyker. Now, I believe they have dealt with this power in BC, substantially nerfing it, and the additions of difficulties help as well, but it is a major wrinkle.