Hey everyone, we played Vampire the Requiem over the weekend and fell in love with the d10 dice pool system. I like it so much, that I'm thinking about adopting it for my Dark Heresy game (and any other 40K games we play). If you're unfamiliar with the system, it goes as follows.

Roll # of d10's equal to the skill in question. So if you have a 3 in Resolve and a 5 in Composure, a Resolve + Composure roll is 8 dice. 8s, 9s & 10s are successes. 10's are called 10-again, where you not only succeed but you roll that die again. Modifiers add or remove dice from your pool. if your pool is reduced to 0, you roll what's called a chance dice. It's 1 d10, 10's a success 2-9 is failure, and 1 is a dramatic failure.

So the way I'm thinking is you roll a number of d10's equal to the characteristic bonus, ex: 45 WS would be 4 dice. Any +10, +20, etc would add 1, 2 or however many dice. -10, -20, etc would remove 1, 2 or however many dice. Just like in World or Darkness, however many 8's, 9's or 10's would be degrees of success. And any 10's would be a second roll of that die.

Anyone foresee an issue with this? I'm thinking about running with this during my DH game this weekend and would like feedback on the idea before I try it out.

Do I foresee problems with it? That's a loaded question. It's a completely different system… It would have far ranging effects and require some experimentation to make it feel balanced. Does that mean you shouldn't try it and tell us how it goes? Heck no! Give it a shot!

Maybe it's something you can adapt for some parts of the game and not others (how would hit locations work, for instance) but it could work really well for certain types of interaction tests and such. Experimentation is never a bad thing if it gets you thinking about the system and how you use it.

Do low-level people often fail tests that they really should be pulling off? Yes. Yes they do.

Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions? Probably because I'm working on building a Tzeentch daemon host.

Thanks for the insight. Ill try to work on a rule for handling hit locations

Also I made a doc on Google Docs chronicling what I have so far.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WAdvRtkZ2PYbOR-c9e9mrwMP3aYgKOQmiTmpOWOqCf4/edit#

Interesting idea,

It's going to require a lot of playtesting, and I can foresee a few of questions:

For instance, how do you handle +5 bonuses?

Should difficulty modifiers that would offer +10/+20/+30 increase the dice pool, or decrease the target number. (rolling above 7's, above 6's, above 5's) Or should it require fewer successes? Would a task that imposes no penalty require 1 success? 3? Would a -30 penalty translate into needing 4 (or more) successes, thus meaning it is impossible to someone with a 39 in that characteristic? (normally they'd still have a 9% chance)

Will your players need to purchase additional dice to use the system? It's annoying toting around 10 d10's versus 2 percentile dice. Also, at that point it's not quicker.

For gear that has disastrous consequences if there are 5 degrees of failure (ex: Lockpunch): What happens if the player by using this system can only roll 4 dice on the test? Will you just use the "Botch" mechanism instead? (and which WoD "Botch" mechanism will you use?)

Will it be easier to leave dice pools out of Manifest tests? Or will you convert all of the powers so that they have degree of success requirements instead of threshholds?

Don't get me wrong. I think it's doable. But it may take a lot of work and require some thorough playtesting to be sure. Some of the in-depth rules might cause a loophole with the dice pool system if you're not careful.

IdOfEntity said:

Thanks for the feedback. Answers below:

I generally don't use +5 in my games. Never saw a need. I could come up with a mechanic but it would take time.

+10/+20 just adds 1 or two dice. It's still 8's, 9's and 10's to succeed. This is exactly like World of Darkness.

We have tons of sets of dice from D&D. There is no shortage of d10's. Plus you can use the percentile die as well, just take the tens place, ie 10 is 1, 20 is 2, etc.

The equivalent effect of 5 deg of failure for the disastrous consequence would be rolling a 1 on the chance die, a dramatic failure in WoD. See the google doc above.

If by Manifest test you mean Psychic Focus to see if a power goes off, as I mentioned in the doc that stays the same. The only thing the dice pool replaces is the percentile tests.

Jeff Tibbetts said:

I found an old rule in Old World Darkness where you rolled a d10 to determine hit location. Dunno if it was an official one but I modified it for DH and put it in the doc. Thanks for th catch.

Erk… personally not keen on dice pool systems (though WFRP 3rd has so far proven to be quite good), and my (I will admit limited) experience with the Storyteller system in particular just didn't grab me.

If you really want to obviously there is no issue, but I personally would not regard the effort of converting the system worth the time involved.

How will you roll on the percentile tables if this is to replace rolling percentile dice? What will I roll then if I have to roll on the Psychic Phenomena/Perils of the Warp, Mental Traumas table, Malignancies table? How many successes does it take to pas a Fear test, etc.

Phi6891 said:

These are pretty easy to answer using the Dice Pool system, but the real problem isn't the method but the results.

Using Dice Pools the way they are being described means players will have extremely high chances of getting a single success, but lower chances of getting many degrees of success. It works on a pretty severe exponential curve, Can it be done? Yep. Should it be? ::shrug::

I would say check out the books:
- Armory
- Armory Reloaded (If you want the stats for a Boltgun)

You could probably run a dark heresy game by just straight up using the WoD system.

i've run a Fallout game using the new World of Darkness rules system. The thing to remember is it is a Storytelling system, so it is all about lavish description and narrative pacing by the GM, relying heavily on scene setting and the players actually being able to interact in character. Its a lot less about dice rolls than DH is, and so for the more mechanical characters (combat heavy ones, or indeed techpriests and psykers) itll go rather wonky for them.