I am sure this has been discussed before, so feel free to point me to the relevant thread.

What I'd like to know is if there's a point-by-point comparison between the two systems. BX lists a number of differences, primarilly with regards to degrees of success and failure.

However, there is also a difference in how the game handles Full Auto Burst and Semi-Auto Burst attacks: BX uses the -10 and +0 modifiers repectively, while Dw uses +20 and +10 modifers. This suggests rather significant differences in the design concept: BX goes for "game balance" with risk (increased chance of missing altogether) vs. reward (more damage potential), while Dw applies "realism" in that more shots fired should mean increased chance to hit with one (or more) of them.

Also, I am aware that the Righteous Fury rules of Dw differ significantly from the BX equivalent.

Any other items of significance?

kjakan said:

The shifting of modifiers for standard attack/semi auto/full auto seems to have had massive repercussions. For instance, Standard Attack now gets a +10. Since ranged attacks get this, melee attacks have to also. This wound up with melee combat becoming more mechanically similar to ranged combat (personally I think this was a bad bad idea).

The alignment system required massive simplification of skills.

Just can't stop myself pointing out, single shot giving bonuses to hit, and fully auto giving minuses is FAR more realistic.

There's a reason that normally weapons would be fired in small bursts, rather than just holding the trigger in real war time situations, (unless suppressing fire was required), because the recoil of sustained fire would stop you hitting anything without some heavy duty forms of recoil suppresion.

So BCs system is both more balanced, AND more realistic (well, taking into account this is WH40K ofc).

Other major differences include free form character advancement, and the unnatural stat changes (They work like pluses instead of multipliers now).

Also you can play humans. That's a pretty big change.

NeverNever said:

I agree that it is more balanced and realistic for ranged combat, not at all for melee.

Thanks for the feedback!

-K

bogi_khaosa said:

Melee was garbage before. not in Deathwatch, but in any non-I'm-a-super-soldier-with-a-strength-bonus-of-14 system melee was gimped. This makes using a fully automatic weapon not the only choice in a really deadly game. I would say it is FAR more balanced.