Just a quick question, sorry if the answer is somewhere on the forums - my game's starting soon and I need to know

Can I combine the hip shooting talent with dual shot/dual strike?

Going by wording alone I would say "no". Dual Shote/Strike says you must take a Full Action to shoot both guns, Hip Shooting lets you " move up to your full Move Rate and make a single attack with a pistol ", but also only if you take a Full Action, and you can't combine two Full Actions into one. But ultimately it would be up to your GM. We have created our own "simultaneous actions" that let us use a Half Action Move and the Ready Action in just one Half Action, for example.

I posted this same question awhile back and never got an answer. The errata for Hip Shooting says that you can take two single and move at your full move rate. I think that you should be able to combine Dual Shot w/ Hip Shooting, but I've never seen any official or unofficial opinion on any board. I think that you clearly cannot combo it with Dual Strike as Hip Shooting for Pistols.

Page 13 of the 2.0 Errata.

If you have the Hip Shooting and Two Weapon Wielder talents and are armed with two pistols, you may make a single attack with each weapon while also making a Full Move action.

So yes, an agile gunslinger can dance around 8 or 10 meters a turn while snapping off two shots.

I don't think anyone is debating that you get two, single shots while Hip Shooting. It is clear that you do in the errata.

What I'm uncertain about is whether you can take the two, single shots from Hip Shooting and combine them into a single Dual Shot. Both Dual Shot and Hip Shooting are Full Actions per the rules. If you take a strict, literal interpretation of the rules you could argue that Dual Shot and Hip Shooting could not be performed as part of the same action. If you take a common sense approach, you should be able combine any two, single shots into a Dual Shot so you should be able to Hip Shoot and Dual Shot as part of the same Full Action.

I'm wondering if anyone has seen this issue addressed by FFG. I'm also interest hearing hearing how other people are applying these rules in their game.

My apologies, I misread. I could go either way on this. Either you say that you can't pull of such a stunt as Dual Shot while moving because of the careful aiming required or you say that the Dual Shot Talent indicates the proficiency required to pull off such a feat and the Hip Shooting Talents lets you dance about while being able to shoot as normal. I'm leaning towards the latter now (shooting with both weapons is a full round action, Hip Shooting is also a full round action) but, as you said, it isn't clearly defined by the rules or errata.

Comming from a shooting background myself I would say that you could not combine them. Physically speaking a Hipshot is exactly that. You quickdraw your pistols and shoot them from about hip height. Whereas a dual shot would be having both pistols out in front of you paralell to the ground somewhat aiming them at the same spot on the target.

Hip shot has a faster draw with high RoF and little acuracy. There are 5 people in the world today that can perform this feat with amazing acuracy one of which is female. You typically see this type of thing in Westerns.

Dual shots has a longer draw, high ROF and more acuracy. Typically what you see in the movies when someone has 2 guns pulled and is firing them.

I never included definitions of things like this in any of the errata I did for Ross because I think this is getting a bit too far into the realm of 'giving rules for everything'.

With Dark Heresy, as with all RPGs, the rules work on the principle of 'general rules with lots of exceptions'. The special abilities that a character has (Talents in DH) are the most common means of creating those exceptions to the rules.

Talents like Two Weapon Wielder, Hip Shooting and Dual Shot create exceptions to the general rules about shooting and movement. It is not practical in a rule book to go into detail about how every Talent interacts with every other Talent, and how they 'stack' with each other. It is a matter that has to be decided by the players and GM when such a situation arises.

However, if you want my opinion...

I would allow the combination of Hip Shooting and Dual Shot. After all, you have to be quite talented just to have both of those Talents (BS 40, Ag 40, Two Weapon Wielder). And more than anything, it would be cool and cinematic.

The RAW doesn't offer any really good argument against allowing this combination. To say that you cannot perform two Full Actions in the same round doesn't really work as an argument against it, as there already exists an exception to this general rule; Two Weapon Wielder and Lightning Attack both require a Full Action to perform, but the errata says that you can combine these in a single action, making a single attack with one weapon and the three attacks for Lightning Attack with the other.

The only real reason to not allow a Hip Shooting Dual Shot is the argument for realism. As Dwnhmcntryboy said, performing such an action is realistically unlikely. But arguing against an action in any RPG because it's unrealistic is largely pointless and counterproductive. If you were to ban from your game anything that isn't realistically possible or likely then you would have to do away with psykers, plasma and las guns, the immaterium, mutants, power swords, fate points, navigators, astropaths, etc, etc...

In the interest of heroic characters doing cool stuff in combat, much as cool characters in movies do unrealistic and cool stuff, you should allow talents to be combined.