Maybe. It's something I've been thinking about for some time. Let me break this down and you guys can see if you've had similar experiences. I have been thinking about this for a while now. Still haven't decided 100%, and let me also preface this by saying that my players are prettymuch awesome, and are down for whatever crazy experiments I come up with.

To remove my ego: When I started running DH, it was after a long period of playing RT with the guys. We were losing some players and were looking at a reboot, and I felt that they hadn't seen how grimdark it was supposed to be. RT's a bit too freewheeling. I wanted to show them all sorts of really messed up things and screw with their heads. While this has been tremendous fun for me and there have been moments of reward for the players as well, I realized recently I have been writing missions more for myself than the players. The big story arcs were getting covered up by the fact that the players felt detached from the importance of the missions.

To give the players agency: While they weren't complaining about it, I could tell they weren't feeling like what they were doing had a lot of impact on the overall game. I would put in hooks and reminders of the results from a previous mission, but since they didn't really have any choice in being sent or knowing why they were sent there, it didn't have a lot of punch. They never had any choice in what missions they would be going on, and the worst part was that one of them felt like any old dude off the street could be sent to do what they were doing, and their personal skillset didn't seem to impact things much. This relates to my first point, and reminded me that my writing needed some work. I want them to feel like they're able to follow along a plot to fruition.

To better establish cause and effect: Again, many of these points are related, but I see this as a big weakness in running a DH game. The players are not yet trusted. While it's fun to ham this up earlier on, it also gives off the impression that what they do doesn't matter much. Even if it DOES matter a LOT, they are never really shown the big picture to see what they're up against, why they are dispatched somewhere, what they're possibly preventing, etc. There are lots of crazy things going on behind closed doors and they don't know about any of it.

To bring in the cooler elements of Inquisition factions: One of the persistent threads in our missions involves some things going on in the background with a Radical Inquisitor and one of his cells. I like that, and I think they like seeing some of it around the edges. I would like to get them more involved in that and allow them to find out more about their own Inquisitor and the rival Inquis.

To harness the awesomeness of some of the books I've read: Some of the most fun I've had in the 40K universe came, surprisingly, from the pages of the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series' amazing stories full of twists, turns, moral quandaries, and high stakes. I would love to get some of that in my game but no matter how great the scenerio, those little guys just can't pull off some of this stuff. I want them to see the power and responsibility a real rosette can carry.

That's the main thrust of it. For the sake of brevity I've tried to keep it simple. The biggest thing for me is to make it more fun and more about the players. They are not AT ALL power gamers, but it's a little tough to explain why they are so weak, underpayed, and generally kept in the dark. They get it, they understand how paranoid the Inquisition is and how many little acolytes there are, and what their roles are, but it's just not as fun in my opinion. Ascension-level characters and plots have the benefit of neatly sidestepping many of the weaknesses and challenges in running a DH game. What do you guys think? Have you seen Ascension as fundamentally different or is it just what you did once your players leveled up? It would take ages for us to get there…

Ascension was always onle a way to level up for us.

If you want to make your akolythe more importat, why dont you grant them their throne agent status now? Why dont you give them a custom payment? I never used the standard payment methods in DH. There were moments where they got some money and then there were moments where they didnt get any over months, depending on rheir mission. The rulebook ist just a suggestion. Your the GM, if you want to change something, then do it.

Jeff Tibbetts said:

I think if you want all kinds of moral quandries, twists and so on, YOU need to hand them to the players. Giving them the option to choose different paths to take and so on can be very important to give their characters life and meaning. These things are perfectly doable at games below Ascension level. It really is up to you to craft the world around them so that they have lots of choices.

An example I have is in the form of more sandox-like sessions. One I ran was in a Hive. Now admittedly the Hive itself is slightly restrictive (especially as there was an Ionic storm that plagues the planets surface every so often, stopping off-world traffic and any surface travel for a number of weeks). This allowed me to create a place that I could flesh out with many different personalities, events and so on. The reason they were there was to perform reconnaissance after they learned a wanted criminal (heretic) had made passage there. Whilst there all manner of shenanigans occured. They were 'hunted' by something. There was an underhive murder amongst work crews, Pit Slaves that were incarcerated for the murder escaped. And there were a number of things where the players could end up accusing the wrong people for things going on. In the end the biggest dilemma was whether to tell the head of the ruling house that the mysterious and deadly hunter that they killed in one of the hives main churches was in fact his son. This was after they found out that he had murdered his sibling….. .

This brought about a great deal of discussion between the players and their characters about what they should do, with each of the players coming up with different reasons why they should/shouldn't. Some of the players got slightly tied in emotionally with this, and it was this that gave me the biggest high point in the culmination of the 4 sessions.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Here's the deal though. I know that it's up to me to build in a lot and it can be done at lower levels, but those were only factors in the decision. There was a lot that went into it besides. That games sounds fun, Lucien! In all honesty, I think I wanted DH to be more like Ascension a long time ago. The things I think sound the most fun usually involve the crazy stuff between Inquis factions and the politics with higher branches of Imperium government. Why not use Ascension, then?

My players have never been power gamers. They just don't have it in them. I think it's time for the big leagues.

FieserMoep said:

I almost did just that, actually. Their characters haven't done enough to get there though, IMO. I first considered doing a time warp and allowing them to skip ahead, novel style, but they expressed more interest in generating a new character, actually.