Hello,

As some of you may be aware I have recently started a Dark Heresy Campaign, now as this has conveniently tied into the Only War Beta test my group felt that the best test we could come up with was to re-create the two Imperial Guard characters involved and see how the original DH version matches up to the new OW version.

The short version is not too well.

Now admittedly comparing DH to OW may not exactly be the fairest comparison however I felt it was a worthwhile execise to get the player's reactions to the new system. The players in question have had experience with Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch, but not Black Crusade, and the first comment that was made is that the regiment creation system was very good for giving a regiment character, however they felt the Aptitude System has serious flaws.

The first character we built was a Commissar. The original DH character was built using the Guardsman career with the Chaliced Commissariat alternate rank, obviously the OW character was built using the Commissar Career. Now the first comment that was made was that it felt strange having a Commissar from the same Regiment as the troops as they are serving with. Putting this aside we carried on and it quickly became obvious that upgrades were significantly more expensive in OW than in DH, and as such by the time we had worked through to 8,000experience there was a clear advantage to the Dark Heresy version of the character, to the point that the player asked me not to make his use the only war version of the character in our campaign. Off the back of this character we looked into re-creating the othert Imperial Guard character in our group, we got as far as spending the initial experience before the player in question decided that he didn't want to play the character, again preferring the Dark Heresy version over the Only War version.

In short both the players and myself as the GM feel that the Aptitude system, whilst being an interesting concept and method for determining the limits on character upgrades, needs some serious thought as to which careers get what Aptitudes. Our Commissar character managed to only get 2 Aptitudes for 2 of his Stats, and none of his Skills or Talants managed to get 2 Aptitudes.

The next bit of testing we will be doing is the new approach to combat actions, mainly the number of actions that used to be Full actions that are now half actions, and I'll be honest we are worried about the potential mayhem of Full Auto, Semi-Auto Burst, Lightening Attack, and Swift attack all being half actions.

Thats all for now

Surak

If you compare DH characters experience point by experience point to OW characters, I feel like pointing something simple out:

DH suggested 200xp per 4 hour session. OW suggests 400xp per 4 hour session. The suggested roleplaying rewards are also slightly higher. While the costs for advances are indeed higher on average, you also get pretty much double the xp to spend in the same number of sessions. That should balance it out.

As for Swift/Lightning Attack and Semi-auto/Full-auto being Half Actions, keep in mind the penalties these actions get compared to their DH counterparts. A half-aimed Full-auto is a whole -20 points worse than a simple Full-auto in DH. Even with a Half Aim you will usually hit two times less than you did in DH.

Hi Saibot,

Thanks for the heads up on the new combat actions not being quite as nasty as they first looked, we haven't really looked into them yet so its nice to hear from someone who has.

As far as the relative experience gain betwen DH and OW we slightly eliminated that by starting both characters at 8,000 experience. The simple fact is at 8k exp spent the Only War character was significantly worse than the DH counterpart.

Now if all your characters are from the same game system this isn't so much of a problem, but as DH and RT at very least have been compatible with each other we were hoping that Only War would sit nicely alongside both of them to give an even wider choice of characters, and from the brief test we have done so far that simply isn't going to happen.

Now if Fantasy Flight Games don't intend for it to be compatible with the DH and RT game lines then please feel free to ignore these comparisons as it obviously doesn't apply, but can we also have some sort of offical line as to whether or not Only War is intended to be compatable with any of the other game lines?

Personally I would love to see OW, DH, and RT all being compatable with each other (I mean OW was originally going to be a DH suppliament after all) as it would make for a far more intersting and diverse game-world.

Regards

Surak

FFG just needs to make a ruling on how much a OW character is worth compared to a DH character.

If memory serves Only War is supposed to be fully compatible with previous game lines.

It's compatible in the same way all the other games are compatible with one another - they all share the same base rules (movement, how D10's work, and so on), but differ in the details (character creation, game themes, objectives and so on).

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

Everyone kinda already knows that, so I don't know why you're making that statement.

The primary difference is that a starting RT PC counts as having 5000XP IIRC, and thats how you get 'balanced' mixed parties.

Surak said:

Have you tried re-creating the DH characters with something like 10,000xp - 13,000xp that would take the xp "inflation" into account. The thing is, advancement works so differently in both games that it is hard to compare them. I think an optimised OW character could get similar worth out of 8,000xp than a similar DH character, but if you take expensive advances (that a similar DH character would have gotten for cheap from his advancement tables) the OW character starts to get a worse deal. It is basically like comparing an optimised OW character with a DH character that got himself lots of Elite Advances.

From the looks of things, and how I felt putting together a Commissar character last night, it may be that, unless FF do the legwork, a lot of GMs might end up reassigning or giving bonus Aptitudes to characters to make sure they're competent.

I don't like the idea that Only War is going to have higher XP costs but give more XP per session. That just seems arbitrary and makes things hard to balance with the other games. Why not just make XP costs lower and give the same XP as every other game?

With regards to my Commissar, since they don't get Fellowship or Social Aptitudes, Fellowship advances ended up being his most expensive characteristic advance! Seems like someone should have picked that up in playtest at least! I think if I were to play a full game I'd end up giving them at least one of those Aptitudes.

Frankie said:

You'd be surprised at the amount of people here who say otherwise.




Also XP costs are arbitrary. If the lowest cost advance is 200 in one system and 400 in another, it really doesn't make much difference. The GM adjusts the XP they give out in accordance with the way the game scales. You don't hand out Dark Heresy levels of XP in a game of Deathwatch, where most advances cost 400-800 a piece, now do you? And you don't hand out 1000-2000 XP at the end of a DH session like you might at the end of a DW session.

Finally there are no 'ranks' in Only War, so it's not like the higher XP levels of advances will see them shooting up through some career path.

BYE

I can't say I mind if they're at a lower 'powerlevel', or things cost more since it's based off Black Crusade. Just fix the aptitudes or add more of them, and Stormies can actually shoot while Commissars can suddenly be charismatic.

Just saying how much starting XP they're equivalent to a DH or RT character is the simplest solution for making conversions.

Kajata said:

I think, if things stay the same with Only War, I'm probably going to end up going through all the specialisations and mocking up a list of costs for characteristic advances and seeing whether they match up with what the characters "should" be good at.

I've heard similar issues with Stormtroopers and BS. I'd'a thought that crack troopers would also be crack shots…

I, and my group like the ranking system, it was one way we could have an Inquisitor travel in a Rogue trader party to meet up with some Deathwatch marines to kick xenos butt. I can't see the characters in OW matching up, which is a shame, since I have players wanting to play an ogryn, commissar, and yes a ratling working in a warzone alongside DH acolytes.

Cheers!

You don't need rank to have equivalency. It's always been a matter of XP.

The problem is, the games don't scale the same way; the cost of the same advances aren't the same, the way the advances are earned isn't the same, and the expected experience gain isn't the same, so there can be no "real" equivalence between them; at best, you can get it to work for a while, but it will eventually crumble. That is not to say that it cannot be enjoyable, simply not "perfectly" balanced.

Finding what the "starting" experience is for a certain line gives a more or less equivalent starting point, but the progression inevitably diverges immediately after that : DH acolytes gain power "faster" because their talents are extremely cheap (like if you bought all your talents with 2 aptitudes), while DW characters gain power "slower", because their talents are more expensive. To keep the game balanced, you'd need to evaluate the relation between the power curve and the xp total of every single line (and, even there, the aptitude in OW systems makes that into a theoretical experiment at best), and give varying amounts of xp to the characters from the different lines so the relative power per amount of game time stays mostly even for everyone. Needless to say, it would probably be much easier to rework characters into the chassis of another system rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Mhm…this is why I'd prefer a Core Book that has yearly updates and only mechanics, while splatbooks such as Rogue Trader deal with advanced careers maybe and things like fluff and equipment.

I know it won't happen though.

It's just a shame since it'd take alot of work to update the older game lines to the newest system of the time.

Well, I'd sat that the aptitude system, if it allowed a little bit more liberty on the part of the user (a few free aptitudes, especially for marines and rogue traders would go a long way), and a slightly larger selection of skills under the General aptitude (things like Common Lore (all)) and making new wide aptitudes for the different game lines (so DW would get an Astartes aptitude and a Deathwatch aptitude, while DH might get an Acolyte one), would make converting most of the classes from the first 3 systems quite easy. You'd probably need to rework a few abilities, and the psykers would be a mess (you'd need to choose a universal system, and stick to it), but overall, the new system should be flexible enough to handle it.

EDIT: thinking about this, I might just get started on some Space Marine stuff…

Frankie said:

Exactly…

Tremere777 said:

Actually, exp equivalency is bull.

Consider two characters, a DH/Ascension Inquisitor and a DW Tactical Marine. Consider them both at, say, 16k exp. At this point, the Inquisitor has gone through 13k exp at a career progression where most skills and talents cost him 200 exp a pop, and now uses the Ascension chart where he can buy entire groups of skills and talents at 1000-1500 exp each. He can be a seasoned specialist in whatever field he focuses on, and quite good at several other activities.

The Marine, on the other hand, starts with +10 base stats, a few combat-related talents, a couple of skills and his equipment. He only gets to spend 4k exp, and all his advancements are much more expensive, with skills and talents routinely costing 400-500 exp a pop. Once he's through spending the exp, he'll be a good fighter, mostly thanks to his Unnatural Strength and Toughness and his powerful starting equipment, but he doesn't get much beyond that.

These two characters will be nowhere near balanced against each other, despite theoretically having the same experience total. They can't be, because in the end, each Talent, Skill or Characteristic Advancement is worth exactly the same to all characters in the world when it comes to build efficiency, but throughout all the systems, these same advancements are priced differently, sometimes drastically so.

Morangias said:

Which is why a standardized system for all is the best (and really only) way to get any "balance". I think the aptitude system could work quite well because it makes it simple to keep the progression curve relatively linear, and so, theoretically, if the starting experience differential is well calculated, the relative power of any character should only be dependent on xp gain after that point, and should grow at a mostly linear and similar rate for all characters (of course, the break off point when a character gets all the relevant advances is not at the same, and after that point, the whole system goes in the favor of those who can still make "progress", and this makes exeption of the power disparity between different skills and talents, but that starts to be more a particular and not universal issue).

One thing I've always thought of is that the games are not designed to be compatible. The games are all different, but because they are based in the same game world, and use the same basic rules, FFG decided to give players the possibility to integrate the different games. Only War and Dark Heresy (or Rogue Trader/Deathwatch/Black Crusade) are not meant to be used together, but they can be used together if you really want because they use the same basic rules and stats. It’s similar to D&D (3.5 if I am not mistaken) and the Star Wars RPG (or Gamma-world or Pathfinder might be a better example… any game using the Open License I guess), the games are very different but both follow the same basic line of rules and thus they could, in theory, be spliced. These games are not meant to be equal or compatible they just happen to be. FFG gave us the option in the other books with the way to do it because they knew we might want them to be compatible and it was relatively easy back then. Only War is something of a culmination of all the other books in a lot of ways and I think with some tweaking, which is the point of the beta, the Aptitude system could be really awesome. So I plan to put my ideas for which Aptitudes some careers ought to get over others in the proper section once I’ve spent more time playing though them.

Personally I think the only two games which are truel compatible are Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. Deathwatch's damage scales are just off kilter compared to the previous games, and Black Crusade uses significantly modified rules.

I haven't seen the rules myself, but I would have thought Black Crusade and Only War would probably be fairly compatible with each other?

Unless the players between each system are expressly duking it out between each other, I see no reason that balance is so critical. Life itself isn't balanced. Some people just have it better than others.

I think part of the issue here though might deal with how its possible that a regiment might not give an aptitude. Aptitudes are amazing, and to not have one, hurts. No matter what talents you get.

Aptitude Toughness or Willpower = Forbidden Lore + Hatred. I guess it helps in a game where everyone knows your fighting X, but still they seem hardly equal.