My Group's Impressions

By Night10194, in Dark Heresy Second Edition Beta

So, while we will not be able to directly start playtesting for a month or so while we finish another campaign, my group and I have made some characters and looked over the system thoroughly and found a lot to like so far, as well as a lot that looks like it's going to take tweaking and rejiggering.

The Good:

Character Creation is a lot of fun and the variety of stuff you can make now is really good for capturing the feel that Inquisitorial Acolytes are often people who break the mold a bit. Feral Warrior-Psykers, a Highborn Outcast Hierophant, an Adept-turned-Desperado, being able to build those kinds of odder characters is a lot of fun and opens a lot of possibilities.

AP adds more granularity to your actions than half/full action systems and I'm very glad everyone still gets the same pool (except mooks). Agility is good enough as it is.

The new Wound system looks quite interesting, and I'm glad to see them reigning in weapon damage and Pen somewhat. Late in our group's BC campaign, it started to get to the point that if you got hit at all you were going to Burn Infamy. This seems a little less likely to turn into a game of insta-gib and it's less likely armor will be completely useless.

It's about time Availability was just expressed as a number.

Needs Adjustment:

I understand the rationale behind some melee weapons not gaining your Strength Bonus; they're either so light you can't get much muscle behind them or so heavy it doesn't matter. Still, I think this oversells Sword type weapons and Axes, because they can potentially get an excellent rate of attack with a huge agility, overcoming the supposed advantage of daggers and light weapons, while doing much more damage. Also, with Rate of Attack being determined by AB (with some weapons) you will have many such weapons outpacing actual automatic gunfire for how swiftly they attack, which is a bit ludicrous.

I can't speak further about weapon stats until we've actually done real playtesting and seen them in action, but it does seem odd that it's extremely difficult to kill Novices with single, accurate shots. Perhaps add a threshold above which if you pass their Defense Value you kill them instantly, RF or no? Something like exceeding it by 5 or so? That might add more incentive to use powerful single-shot weapons like the Sniper Rifle and Long Las.

I would like to see Homeworld and Role grant some minor Talents/Skills, the bulk of it remaining in Background, so as not to make Background the sole decider of starting skills/talents. Barring that, the return of some Either Or choices for Skills/Talents might help differentiate starting characters more.

Armor Values do seem like they need some adjustment. The sort of 'protective clothing' armors should probably only be AV1 or 2, a tiny help against small arms but not much protection. Power armor may need to be adjusted upwards some.

Nimble needs to go. Like, now. Nimble overvalues an already extremely powerful stat that determines Rate of Attack w/Melee, Speed, Initiative, Dodging, and a host of useful skills. Please don't take Toughness's main workhorse role away from it.

Weapon Proficiencies and Specialists feel a little overpriced at 400, especially considering how much you start with. I'd also consider making it so lacking Specialist instead makes you test Lores and things are a hefty penalty, but give a generally educated and intelligent character a small chance to know something outside their area of expertise, rather than outright forbid it out of hand.

Finally, it's difficult to tell what number in a stat generally indicates competence. You have guys described as standard Guard types having 56 BS and such in the NPC stats, making it difficult to gauge when a character ought to be considered 'good' at a statistic. I won't make a definitive judgment on this until after we've seen it in play, but from my experience with high level WHFRP2E, I think letting stats creep up into the 70s with regularity might not work out enormously well.

Also, really, Unnatural Stats were finally working fine in BC and OW, and existed entirely to allow characters/creatures to have very high stat bonuses without having 100+ in a stat. Replacing them with stats that, under a normal circumstance, actually break the normal dice method's upper level does not seem wise. I can't definitively say this is the case without actually seeing it in play, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.

All in all, it looks quite interesting and my group's looking forward to getting started, and seeing how this shapes up. We've missed being Acolytes, but the old system was just a bit too long in the tooth. Here's hoping for this one to succeed!