Hello,

Long time Rogue Trader player here. Recently, my usual GM has been gifted the Dark Heresy core rule book for Christmas and wants to try running it for a change of pace. I'm looking to give the Faith system from BoM a try because it's something new. There's a couple of things that worry me:

The resource they run on: fate points. A char would usually have 2-3 fate points at character creation and they tend to go down from there. It's entirely possible to get 'stuck' with 1 or even 0 fate points. Spending 300 xp per talent and then being able to use one of them once per session or not at all (if out of fate points) seems a bad return on investment.

The power of the talents. Some of them seem really powerful, especially Emperor's Wrath ones. I can use 2 fate points to activate Wrath of the Faithful and Flames of Faith on a clip of Inferno Rounds and get 2d10 damage(or 3d10 vs Daemons), Tearing (from the bolter) and Righteous Fury on a 9 or 10. 2d10+5, pen 4 is almost a guaranteed kill, even on power armor.

So I'm looking for some input: what have your experiences with the Faith system been?

I have a player with faith talents, but spending that fate point is very expensive, and thus the faith talent does not get in play very often.

He does not have the combination you point to there, and while I have seen it too, I think that if you feel it is too powerful, just dont allow incendiary ammo to benefit from it. I don't see it as too powerful in combination with a flamer.

The faith talents are very powerful, so in that sense the xp and fate point cost is appropriate.

I noticed that the use of a fate point for a faith talent will shorten an encounter, and make it less likely that the players would need to spend a fate point in a longer battle. For example, the Passion usually means that the players always have initiative, which is a big advantage in a fight.

I would recommend limiting the amount of fate points your team/cleric has for this reason.

I have just started using the Faith system with my character and I have no issues, nor did I see anything wrong with how it works. My thoughts are that it is a finite number of uses per game session, plus they end, for the most part, after the battle/encounter, so their relative power is fine.

There is also a background option in BoM, (I can't recall the name and don't have my book with me, but it's something like "blessed birth"), that gives you an additional fate point. If you get lucky on your FP roll and on your divination, it's possible to end up with six fate points. (3 plus divination, homeworld, and background)

So yeah, you can get a lot of fate points. Most people won't though. I am currently playing a Battle Sister who is down from three to two fate points. My faith talents still see a lot of use. I think the benefits they provide are usually greater than than the benefits of a single re-roll or heal.

One thing I'll mention is that while the Wrath talents are definitely powerful and some of the most flashy, I've actually been focusing my faith talents elsewhere. My campaign has been very investigation heavy thusfar, so I've invested in the power that prevents people from lying, and it has been fun to use. The non-wrath ones, in my opinion, have a less powerful mechanical benefit, but have the potential to be extremely useful.

The Boy Named Crow said:

Blessed Birth states "You begin play with one additional fate point to a maximum of 3 ." A good roll on the starting Fate Points and divination will put you over the limit it can bonus.

Ah, that's right. Thanks for the correction.

In general, I would agree that Fate Points as a resource is an okay mechanic, given that the effects of the talents newly introduced with BoM are fairly major and thus should not be used too often. It is up to the player to decide when and how to allocate his FP, and a bad spending habit can easily result in harsh punishment up to and including character death if things go awry. The only bad thing about the XP cost for rarely used Faith Talents is that the advancement scheme for the one class most inclined to use them is already less than ideal.

Personally, I would have preferred a Faith System with less flashy, less "magical" effects whose availability is added on top of a character's usual arsenal of options rather than replacing something - in short, more along the lines of how Acts of Faith work in the tabletop or the Inquisitor RPG. Fortunately, it isn't too hard to come up with houserules regarding this, so a group preferring a different approach could easily replace the RAW with something closer to preference consensus. I feel as if this would address both the issue of "it's too powerful" as well as "the player won't use it often enough".

For inspiration, this is how AoF work in Inquisitor.

As an alternative, I'm also considering implementing an additional "characteristic" - or rather, expanding an existing one - by adding "Purity Points" as the counterpart to Corruption Points. Those would double as a buffer against incurring CP (in essence both types of points using the same counter and being offset against one another) as well as an indicator on how many Acts of Faith a character may attempt per day/session/whatever. Everything is still fairly fluid at this point.