Hello all,

I just started a Dark Heresy campaign with 3 friends and am running into difficulties with encounter building -- specifically, how do I tell what monsters/NPCs are an appropriate challenge for PCs of a given level? All the creatures in the core rulebook and Creatures Anathema are assigned a very nebulous "Inquisitorial Threat Rating," which as I understand it has less to do with a monster's combat strength than it does with how badly the Inquisition freaks out if a given creature is discovered during an investigation. Given the very unpredictable nature of damage in DH (a lasgun shot is just as likely to knock off half a player's health as it is to bounce harmlessly off their jacket), I'm having a difficult time designing encounters that feel like a suitable challenge for my players.

Could someone with more experience with this rules system please shed some light on this matter? Any advice is much appreciated.

Covered in Weasels said:

Welcome aboard- always good to see new recruits to DH . Be sure to check out the latest offical Errata- it contains lots of tweaks to the rules that will make your games run smoother.

'Inquisitorial Threat Ratings' are purely roleplaying guidelines (i.e. how worried the =][= is about a certain threat)- they are not comparable to 'Challenge Ratings' in D&D . There are no real guidelines about how to 'scale' encounters in this game, unfortunately; it's just something the GM picks up with experience. One way to judge the danger of a particular Adversary is to compare their damage potential to the PC's 'damage soak'. For example, a guy with a standard autogun can deal 1d10+3 per hit; if the party is inexperienced and poorly equiped, they likely have damage reduction (from armour and Toughness) averaging around 6, so an autogun's max damage of 13 is a signifigant threat, especially given its rate of fire. On the other hand, a medium-Rank party who have taken some combat-focused Advances and Talents, and who are wearing good armour, can probably ignore around 10 points of damage per hit, making an autogun a trivial threat as most hits simply bounce off their armour. Then you factor in how hard the adversary is to kill (Unnatural Toughness is huge - very difficult for low-Rank PCs to overcome) to get a sense of about how long the combat will last, and you can scale the total number of bad guys appropriately.

I recommend running a small combat early in the campaign, to give everyone (GM and players) a feel for how resilient characters are in this game system; a run-in with some pistol-and-club-wielding spaceport thugs (one less than the total number of PCs if the party has a balance of 'combat' and 'support' characters, or one more than the PC total if the party consists mostly of combat-focused characters) should serve as a good crash-course on what constitutes a legitimate threat to the PCs.

Thanks for the advice, that helps a great deal!