I could be delusional, but I was under the impression that your characteristic bonus added to relevant rolls. Aka, I seem to remember your willpower bonus adding toyour invocation of psychic powers in Dark heresy, but when looking that up in Black Crusade it is the psy rating of the character that adds to the roll, and not the willpower bonus.

In my effort to understand the material, the section "playing the game" There is mention made of the myriad uses of the Characteristic bonus, but no table that shows them. Also, in that same section there is a mnetion that there are other modifiers that can add or subtract to the roll. THis is vague to me, and this may just be my failing.

The question I am trying to answer is does the Characterstic bonus add to the roll when testing something for that statistic?

If I test my tech use, do I add my tech use +10, +0 (standard diff), and my Int Bonus 5 for example?

No, that doesn't happen. As far as I know it has never happened, even in Dark Heresy. Characteristic Bonuses (Bonii?) only add something to your roll when you have an Unnatural Characteristic. Even then, it only does so if the roll is an Opposed Roll that got tied up or if you have already succeeded.

There are a few cases where a Characteristic Bonus is applied to damage dealt, mostly when making melee attacks. I believe there is also a mutation that deal damage where you add your Int or WP bonus to the total.

EDIT: I was looking in my Only War Core Rules when I quoted page numbers. They have been changed to reflect the correct page numbers in the Black Crusade Core Rules. My apologies. So many books…

See pg 144 of the Black Crusade Core Rules, Unnatural Characteristic (X) , for the rules on Unnatural Characteristics.

See pg 37 for the rules on Opposed Tests.

See pg 34 , the very last sentence in the section titled GAME DICE , for rules regarding the rounding of fractions.

These three references should clear this up for you.

Side Question, in BC it says you take half of the bonus and add it as DoS to a successful test, which makes sense with +2 or +4, but what about +1 or other odd numbered bonuses, do you round up or down? I think in the other 40k RPGs it is round up but I haven't seen that part in BC yet,the same also applies where you apply half of any characteristic with no information on rounding up or down

Cymbel said:

On pg 34 of the Black Crusade Core Rules, in the section titled GAME DICE , between the last two examples it says "There are times when…", followed by an example of how to roll and calculate a d5 result rolled on 1d10. The next to last sentence in the example rounds the fraction 3.5 up to 4. All fractions are rounded up to the nearest whole number.

Thanks! I knew in my heart it had to be that, but I would have never thought to look in that section for that rule.

Thanks for the feed back.

I traced out what led me down this path of thought, I thought I had posted it, but I guess the reply did not stick.

If you look at Dark heresy, You get led on a chase that takes you through the skills section for Invocation, and the equipment for Psy Focus. These steps when followed. Have the psyker spend a full round action to "invoke" their psychic power and allows them to add their willpower bonus to the power roll.

So that is partially what led me down this dark alley.

You unfortunately can't use DH, RT, or DW reliably as templates for how certain things are handled. Unnatural stats in those games were COMPLETELY different from how they're handled in BC, and mixing the old and new logic can get confusing.

Since my group has played DH for years and has regular crossover material between all 5 systems, we've ended up making rules to convert the funky Unnatural Stats from BC/OW back to DH/RT/DW logic, just because we're more familiar with that (and because a Salamander in DW ends up being tougher than a Plaguemarine in BC due to how things are worded).