Regiment Creation Rules: Change the budget from 12 points to 10 points (10 is a much better, rounder and logical number) and to make the system exactly the same reduce the cost of all the home worlds and origins by 1 and commanding officers by 1. This will have the exact same result.
For additional standard kit items, add some details to what the limitations mean, to avoid confusion.

Character creation: A variation of the mercy rule from Warhammer Fantasy 2E would be nice.

Heavy Gunner: Should be +5S not +5T

Sergeant: Shouldn’t have Command, Scholastic Lore (Tactica Imperialis) or Air of Authority. Sergeants are usually raised from amongst the rank and file who either proved themselves through bravery or just living longer than everyone else. Skills like Intimidate make more sense for them and talents that revolve around survival or team work (team up anyone?). Skills like command and talents like Air of Authority should be left for an Officer specialty not a NCO class. You can save yourself lots of work by changing the specialty to Officer and not that it covers both commissioned and non commissioned officers.

Weapon Specialist: Change to simply Specialist. Either allow one or two additional characteristics to be picked from or make it +3 to characteristic of choice. Allow to pick one basic skill or choice and remove fellowship from the list and let them pick one aptitude of choice. Make them a general specialist for all “other” possible military roles, so scout and spy and chef and vox operator and standard bearer and weapon specialist can all fit in one nice class.

Commissar: Too much to talk about, will send separate email to cover that.

Ogryn: Should be a homeworld not a specialty. Just with a narrow specialty options (such as Heavy Gunner only)

Ratling: Should be a homeworld not a specialty. Just with a narrow specialty options (such as specialist only)

Storm Trooper: +5 BS not +5 T.

Specialties should be placed after the creation/advancement rules so you read how it works before you read what you can be. It’s an esthetic thing that’s all.

Recommended Advancement tables: These are skills and talents that characters are considered to have one additional aptitude in, so they will be at least buying them as if they had one aptitude in them and often as if they had two aptitudes (if they already have two, good for them). Or each should cost a flat rate of 100 or 200XP unless their aptitudes make it less.

Would like to have options to create a simple past: ie, ways to gain bonus XPs at a cost of reduced starting wounds (+100 XP per wound lost), fate points (+200 XP per Fate Point) or starting with Insanity, Points (+100 XP per 1D10 or 2D5 IP) or Corruption Points (+100 XP per 1D5 CP). These can represent past campaigns, battles or flavorful backgrounds. Maybe even port in the MISSING LIMB XP equation. I think it was in Dark Heresy where you can loss limbs and eyes and you gain a penalty that you can buy off with XP. Allow these as starting character “disadvantages” but if they attempt to replace or remove the penalty with cybernetics they have to pay the XP cost to “get used or become skilled with” the new tech.

Skills: Much like there is a dodge and parry skill, I am a big fan of making weapon talents into skills. So you use have your BS/WS if unskilled, your full WS/BS if trained and gain the +10, +20 and +30 as with normal skills (and perhaps even the talented talent for +10 more). Or you can do blanket skills like Shoot (BS) and Strike (WS).

Talents: Lightning attack should go back to the Dark Heresy styles as should Swift Attack.

Aptitudes: Can you learn new ones? Do they cost lost of XPs to get additional Aptitudes (1000XP)?

New Specialties: I would recommend adding the following: Officer (unless you redo the Sergeant and rename it Officer), Scout (unless you redo the Weapon Specialist and rename it Specialist), Technician (unless you redo the Weapon Specialist and rename it Specialist) and Grunt (normal, everyday guardsman aptitudes of BS, WS, Offence, Defense, STR and Toughness with +5 SP, talents and skills as deteremined).

The Orgryn and Ratling as Origins makes a surprising amount of sense.

Heavy Gunner with T makes sense to me, whereas S would boost them towards melee combat.

Your changes to Sergeant don't make too much sense. They are the current "command" spec and perform admirably. A Sergeant is the fella in charge of a squad, after all. He needs to keep **** moving, direct fire, etc.

"Scout and Chef and Vox-operator" are all Comrades. The party are Big **** heroes. That said, a Generalist career would be nice.

My only complaint with the Commissar is the mechanical silliness of Summary Execution.

I keep changing on the Storm Trooper. BS, WP, and T all make equal levels of sense.

Starting disadvantages in limbs and Insanity/Corruption would make me unspeakably happy.

Having skills per Weapon would allow a base roll of 70. With a decent sight, aiming, and single shots, you'd have skills of 80+. Bad idea.

No, the point of an Aptitude is to make those advances cheaper for you because you're better in those fields. Some kind of skillmonkey abomination with a mountain of Aptitudes would make no sense.

Scout would be really nice, Technician doesn't fit 40k (that's the Enginseer's business and nobody else's, for to act otherwise is tech-heresy) and the lack of a Grunt is due to the PCs level of heroism above the Comrades.

I think I may add some kind of Space Marine Scout spec to my homebrew now.

Plushy said:

A sergeant leads a small group, he doesnt command. It makes perfect sense. And the solution is as simple as just renaming the speciality. Gaining a weapon skill up to +30 (+40 with talented) and +20 from WS/BS gives you a total of +60, the best of the best who have maxed our their advances and rolled max to start with sure will the at 100 or better, but doesnt 96+ always fail and then you have negative modifiers as well. You are also talking about 8 advancements costing what? 5000 or more XP to focus on a single skill/attack/weapon?

Technician fits just fine, its the vox operator, the signal specialist, the tanker who knows how to rewire the radio or rework the treads so the tank rolls again. Read Tankheads (or was that Gunheads?). He is also the demolitionist or siege engineer. And yes its generally the area of tech-priests, but there isnt a tech priest for every squad/mission and so forth.

OK, so the S modifier makes you slightly better at fighting in melee (you may do an extra point of damage) but to me it directly reflects the side effect of packing around a 50kg+ weapon all the time, you get stronger. Maybe tougher sure, but to me S makes more sense.

Aptitudes, the skill chart essentially makes you specialty a secondary (or tertiary or whatever) aptitude for those skills/talents.

Big **** heroes (who cant have skill of 80+, cause as you said that is a bad idea?) could also be the vox operator, chef or scout. In addition, Grunt could also be a big **** hero. Audie Murphy was a grunt afterall.

Comnrades is a silly rule and too gamist IMHO. I dont like that system at all. If these are the big **** heroes then there is nothing wrong with them being an elite 4 or 5 man team addembled by the colonel to do a dirty job without any spugs around to soak up bullets. Like the A-Team.

Ogryns and Ratlings dont exist on every world though. Are there Catachan Ratlings? Are there Vostroyan Ratlings? Are there Cadian Ogryns? No they come from their own homeworlds

But thanks for the opinion, it is helpful to hear others thoughts aside from "thats stupid" and so forth.

In theory Orgryns and Ratlings all come from a few specific worlds. Also all Commisars and Storm Troopers are Schola Proegenium, and all Psyker have been trained on Terra herself.

That's all being ignored in the Regiment creation system. I believe the idea is that you've been with the regiment long enough to soak up their ways, and frankly that's fine with me.

If you think think Sergeants lack the command skills of 2nd Lts then all I can say is that your military experience does not match mine. It also doesn't match the movie tropes which form the backbone of 40k lore. Find some Kipling and read "The Heathen."

You don't need a Technician/Tinkerer specialty as if you want something like that there is the Operator. He covers everything you asked for in your technician; vox operator, signals, repair, and Demolitions are all aspects of Tech-use in OW so the operators make for the non-specialist option for tech. Add in they tend to need to branch out into jacks-of-all-trades it fits your request to a T.

Andor said:

Perhaps I am reading too much into the command skill. But your last comment underlines my point, there is a difference between a NCO and a officer and I would like to see that in this game. Provide a officer speciality or alter the sergeant so it isnt called sergeant but instead officer (which would cover NCOs and standard Officers as well). (for the record, 2LTs probably shouldnt have command either).

I do understand they are assuming they have been with the regiment long enough and therefore share their backgrounds, but even in GWs novels the character's background separate them from their units (Commissar Cain being from a hive world is a defining factor of his character). But its not much a issue to make a commissar or priest from a different background. I just think Ratling and Ogryn should be different.

Ravenstormchaser said:

I will look more in depth at the Operator.

You should never be giving players, or even anything less than an incredibly power enemy, a base potential of 80+ on skill rolls. It unbalances everything in the game. This is doubly true when combat is involved. Combat should not be something where most combatants are getting hits on 80% or more of their attacks.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Erm.. you do realize that Sergeant are NCOs, right?

In any event when the Sgt leads a charge on a machine gun nest by yelling "C'mon you apes, you wanna live forever?" That is Command, not Intimidate. You'ld have a better argument that Commisars should be terrifying soldiers with Intimidate rather than command, but hey.

And yes, the lack of officers is a rather glaring omission from the text, but clearly the base book is starting out you out as grunts in trenches. Presumably down the road we will be offered another book akin to Ascension where you can get promoted to Officer/Commisar Lord/Psyker Primaris/Commander/Assasin/Ogryn Bon'ead, etc.

For now if you want an Officer stat him out from DH or Ascension or RT and just realize that OW characters will never be good enough to wash his socks.

And as for never having target numbers over 80, tell that to Rogue Trader, my Arch-militant was rolling under a 120 to hit last game. "11 degrees of success!" "He dodged."

Base number for Ballistic Skill: 31 on average.

Five advances take it to 56.

Three levels of skill take it to 86.

If the fella aims, it's a 96.

Stick a Red-Dot Sight on it: 106.

Fire it Semi-Auto: 116.

No Guardsman, no matter how experienced, should be that amazing of a shot. That's also ignoring any potential talents, psychic abilities, better gear, situational modifiers, or anything else. Hell, this gives the guy a 96% of hitting on Full Auto. Not bueno. Things like this are why Ascension was so bad.

Plushy said:

Other than you perhaps meaning "Fire it Single Shot" (since Semi-Auto doesn't give +10 to hit, and even if it did, Red Dot Sight then wouldn't work, as it only applies to Single Shots), I entirely agree - having weapons as Skills is a completely stupid thing to do, that would destroy the balance of the entire combat system for the game.

MILLANDSON said:

Yeah, Single-Shot instead of Semi-Auto. My bad.

The Sergeant is (mostly) fine as he is, for two reasons:

1. Command is exactly the skill used for leading from the front lines, from making sure the orders issued by higher command are obeyed to motivating and advising your squadmates to making sure they don't break morale under duress.

2. OW aims for this grim, cinematic vision of war where commissioned officers are the inscrutable figures moving entire regiments as pawns on the strategic map, while the everyman NCO's risk their assess trying to make it work on the front line.

Andor said:

Yes I am quite familiar and aware that Sergeants are NCOS, since, well, I am a Staff Sergeant. That would be the prime reason I stated above "which would cover NCOs and standard Officers as well" when referring to a simple name change of the specialty.

And yes I now realize that the command skill in OW is massively different than the one I was thinking of from RT.

Plushy said:

4 advances, even at 2 aptitudes costs 1600 XP, Three levels of skill with 2 aptitudes costs 1000 XP. Thats 2600XP or what? 10 adventures solely focused on one weapon/aspect of a character. Maybe that doesnt seem like too much to you but it does to me. I dont care about red dot sight or aiming or semi auto, targets can get Dodge at +30 and +20 to agility and +10 for talented dodge for a total of initial AG +60. And it works against all attacks. Whereas a Weapon Skill only focuses on one weapon type. You can even make it a thinner area, and have the +20 and +30 levels apply to a specific model of a weapon. And then you have the up to +60/-60 modifiers and natural failure one 100. There is definately large rules for failure at over 100. And that min/maxer who goes all combat skill has nothing else, cant survive worth a **** or read or do first aid or anything. If the game is ran well enough the players will know that skills and combat are important but so is navigation, command, perception, survival and other core skills.

And once that gun is empty or broken or dropped or lost and you have to use another weapon, well that skill is obsolete unless its the same weapon.

Ascension was so bad for many other reasons, higher skill rolls was not one of them. Special talents and abilities were the main issue, non-sensical advancement another.

(and by the way, unless I missed something,there are only 4 advances to characterisitcs for a max of +20).

Correction, Talented doesnt seem to exist in OW. My bad.

It was replaced by +30 on skills.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Ogryn and Ratlings are only used for two things, Remember they are abhumans and viewed with suspicion by many, and barely tolerated. They are only really tolerated where their particular skills are useful. Ogryns don't act in any role except being Ogyrns (ie dimwitted assault troops). Ratlings are only really employed as snipers.

Specialities being placed before character creation seems fine to me. Makes the players think about what they are going to be before seeing which is "the best".

If you want a return of the old Lightning Attack etc, then parry should no longer be a skill. Allowing it to get to +40 (or even 50) over WS makes it too good, unless you have the need to negate multiple hits from DoS. I personally prefer the old DH way of doing it myself, but you have to choose one system or the other, not bits of both.

Making Weapon Talents into skills is also messes around with things. That gives another +30 on top of the already generous bonuses that can be grabbed from all over the place.

borithan said:

From what I can see from the main GW sources, most Abhumans are full Imperial citizens. Only beastmen and similar are subject to official restrictions. The idea that there is officially sanctioned discrimination against all Abhumans seems to have no 'cannon' support - please reference it if you find it. Obviously it's not an unreasonable assumption, but the Imperium being an aparteid society isn't the GW position - I stand to be corrected on this.

The IG codex only mentions Ratlings as snipers, but reading this as a hard limit is an over-reading imo. Ratlings might make excellent gunners on fixed emplacements or on aircraft. They might make good pilots. Modifying controls or given them MUIs isn't beyond imagining. Why not a Ratling medic? An Imperial Governor with a 50% Ratling population might wish to fill as many positions as possible with Ratlings.

This might make interesting section in a future supplement imo. Ymmv.

I'd like to sugest to change the Aptitude fellowship in the weapon specialist for Offense or Defence.

yeah that whole aptitude system… I was kinda a fan, now I am more and more opposed to it. it's almost impossible for a psyker to be a valuable melee fighter. Every skill, Talent and Stat concerning Melee has to be advanced with 0 aptitudes.

I would like for them to include, that at chargen every character could add one aptitude of choice.

vogue69 said:

That might be related with how they're focused on blowing people to bits with their mind, not club them to death with that fancy walking stick they get. They're Authorized Psykers, not Space Marine Librarians.

JuankiMan said:

so why do they have a whole melee weapon arsenal dedicated to them specificly and start out with a best quality low-tec weapon?

of course they have STR as an aptitude, because psykers are known for their bodybuilding heritage.