This isn't intended as edition war!

The thing that prompted me to do this was all the discussion about lethality, realism, etc. Not all of the criticism was based on comparisons to the previous edition, but some of it was and even when not, it's interesting to see how it differs in these aspects because it lets us consider what we were happy with about 1st, what we weren't and see how these things are different in 2nd.

I've done a combat with a party of four starting characters against a small group of attacking cultists and I've run it side by side under both rules systems. The characters are obviously slightly different but where I created a Feral World guardsman in one system, I created a Feral World guardsman in the other.

The results were interesting. I've written up the whole thing here and tried to make it engaging.

http://sdrv.ms/15Q5pZD

I may have made mistakes. I attempted not to.

Anyway, it took me a while and I'd be interested in what people think.

interesting comparison, thanks for taking the time.

The reduced Whiff factor in 2nd ed was very noticable in your example, as was the changes to evade rules.

There didn't seem to be too much interaction with cumulative wounds in the 2nd ed one though. how that worked thematically would be interesting. Previous examples wiht exploding PC's made that seem weird. I do wonder if the top of the wound chart should be wider.

like 30-35 - Death

35-40 hilarous Death

40+ skull explosions and vaporisations.

interesting comparison, thanks for taking the time.

The reduced Whiff factor in 2nd ed was very noticable in your example, as was the changes to evade rules.

There didn't seem to be too much interaction with cumulative wounds in the 2nd ed one though. how that worked thematically would be interesting. Previous examples wiht exploding PC's made that seem weird. I do wonder if the top of the wound chart should be wider.

like 30-35 - Death

35-40 hilarous Death

40+ skull explosions and vaporisations.

Yes. Reduced whiff was one of the most noticeable things when I ran this. There were a couple of rounds in the DH1 example where it felt like everyone was just standing a couple of metres away from each other and swinging at the air. That's particularly pronounced because everyone is Rank 1, but still problematic.

Don't know about the "hilarious death" levels. That's very much a matter of taste and whether you want comedy Grimdark or DarkGrimDark. (LightGrimDark and DarkGrimDark - you heard the terms hear first, folks). If someone scores 40+ on the Critical table, most GMs would probably make something up to reflect it.

Really interested in any other comments and thoughts on this, btw.

This was really interesting, and pretty much demonstrates what I expected; DH2 is overall a hell of a lot less sluggish. Combat in DH1e tended to drag hugely, but it seems that's not an issue under the new system.

Thanks for doing this, knasserll. I really enjoy these play-by-plays.

You showed exactly what I expected: Wound effects in DH2 are much more interesting. I was just glancing through the document, and even then I was feeling the dread of Anna falling to the floor. Nothing that happened in DH1 seemed to matter (which is how I've felt playing it, too - calculating damage was a chore that we wanted over with, not something scary/exciting that we were dreading).

I'm still not entirely sold on the Threat rating system. I desperately wanted something like this since I first discovered the 40k RPGs, but I'm not convinced that it's very accurate. I expected more of a challenge for your team. I fear that the Righteous Fury rules for Novices and (especially) Elites will make combat difficulty very random.

I'll (finally!) get to play my first real game tomorrow, if all goes according to plan. Hopefully I can come back with some feedback.

It kind of already is a little bit like this.

Even before your head explodes, you might die due to blood loss - something I would see as rather "normal" death.

Thanks for doing this, knasserll. I really enjoy these play-by-plays.

You showed exactly what I expected: Wound effects in DH2 are much more interesting. I was just glancing through the document, and even then I was feeling the dread of Anna falling to the floor. Nothing that happened in DH1 seemed to matter (which is how I've felt playing it, too - calculating damage was a chore that we wanted over with, not something scary/exciting that we were dreading).

I'm still not entirely sold on the Threat rating system. I desperately wanted something like this since I first discovered the 40k RPGs, but I'm not convinced that it's very accurate. I expected more of a challenge for your team. I fear that the Righteous Fury rules for Novices and (especially) Elites will make combat difficulty very random.

I'll (finally!) get to play my first real game tomorrow, if all goes according to plan. Hopefully I can come back with some feedback.

Can I ask a favour and you post back how it went? Here if you like as it would be on-topic and keep things together, but anywhere so long as you post. I really enjoy play-by-plays and would really love to hear it along with any thoughts.

Luck was a small factor in this comparison - there was a round of poor dice rolls in the 1st Ed., but the difference was mostly due to the systems, I felt. I think at higher ranks, the 1st Ed. combat would have been a bit more dramatic as both sides would have had greater chances to hit and better equipment and weapons. But it also would have been a lot harder to manage with all the different Talents and I didn't want to take that on. 2nd Ed. definitely plays faster, 2nd Ed characters also definitely begin their careers a bit beefier. It still felt dark and dangerous, however.

Thanks for all replies.

I'm still not entirely sold on the Threat rating system. I desperately wanted something like this since I first discovered the 40k RPGs, but I'm not convinced that it's very accurate. I expected more of a challenge for your team. I fear that the Righteous Fury rules for Novices and (especially) Elites will make combat difficulty very random.

I'll (finally!) get to play my first real game tomorrow, if all goes according to plan. Hopefully I can come back with some feedback.

Any challenge rating system makes assumptions about the PCs. If those assumptions hold true it works, if not it breaks. The two questions you always need to ask are:

- What are those assumptions ?

- Do they hold true for your party ?

Common assumptions:

- The difficulty level the system produces is one the players find fun. I've seen this assumption fail in both directions.

- How combat capable PCs are at specific XP amounts. If they spent too much, or too little, XP on non-combat stuff then this fails. DH adds in insanity and corruption to break the assumptions further

If these assumptions are incorrect, it can be accounted for by adjusting the rating number that's idea for the party. But there are some others that need more complex solutions.

- The party is well rounded. If not, some enemies will hurt the party more than their rating suggests, others will hurt less.

- PCs are equally competent in combat, even after you factor in how they are role played. If not, and you stick to the rating system, the less capable characters will get less limelight in combat. Which might cause you problems.

- The party has characters that fill specific combat roles. This will rarely happen if people play characters they want to play, and even when it does you still have to deal with cases where someone misses a session.

A threat rating system can be useful as guidelines for novice GMs. But as you learn more about the party, and as you get more experienced at GMing, be prepared to more further and further from what it suggests. Especially if you are creating your own enemy stat blocks. Eventually just throw it out.

I'm still not entirely sold on the Threat rating system. I desperately wanted something like this since I first discovered the 40k RPGs, but I'm not convinced that it's very accurate. I expected more of a challenge for your team. I fear that the Righteous Fury rules for Novices and (especially) Elites will make combat difficulty very random.

I'll (finally!) get to play my first real game tomorrow, if all goes according to plan. Hopefully I can come back with some feedback.

Any challenge rating system makes assumptions about the PCs. If those assumptions hold true it works, if not it breaks. The two questions you always need to ask are:

- What are those assumptions ?

- Do they hold true for your party ?

Common assumptions:

- The difficulty level the system produces is one the players find fun. I've seen this assumption fail in both directions.

- How combat capable PCs are at specific XP amounts. If they spent too much, or too little, XP on non-combat stuff then this fails. DH adds in insanity and corruption to break the assumptions further

If these assumptions are incorrect, it can be accounted for by adjusting the rating number that's idea for the party. But there are some others that need more complex solutions.

- The party is well rounded. If not, some enemies will hurt the party more than their rating suggests, others will hurt less.

- PCs are equally competent in combat, even after you factor in how they are role played. If not, and you stick to the rating system, the less capable characters will get less limelight in combat. Which might cause you problems.

- The party has characters that fill specific combat roles. This will rarely happen if people play characters they want to play, and even when it does you still have to deal with cases where someone misses a session.

A threat rating system can be useful as guidelines for novice GMs. But as you learn more about the party, and as you get more experienced at GMing, be prepared to more further and further from what it suggests. Especially if you are creating your own enemy stat blocks. Eventually just throw it out.

It is most definitely a useful tool for newbie GMs. Without it, I would have struggled to guess what was appropriate opposition for the PCs. One helpful thing with it, is that the default 1 for 1 rank setting is not pitched at "very dangerous encounter" So if I have a party of Rank One PCs and I pick a Rank One encounter for them, they should have the odds on their side. This mitigates against several of the risks you mentioned - unbalanced parties, inept players... The encounter in my example as I noted, was actually Rank 3. I wanted something interesting and I didn't care if it resulted in a TPK, though by the guidelines in the book, Rank 1 Party vs Rank 3 Encounter is supposed to be beatable, just dangerous and brutal,

I normally like to force my players to think carefully and to know they're in danger. Probably what I would do in a campaign is start them off with a series of equal rank encounters and once they'd settled in, start using Rank + 1 as my standard, That might be a bit much for repeated encounters, but I'd see how it went. If the party just wasn't very combatty, I'd keep them at equal rank or rank -1. It didn't feel like the difference between ranks was a huge step each time, more a gradual turn of the screw.

Like you say, the more comfortable I got and the more I knew my parties capabilities and how hard the enemies hit, the more I'd move away from using the table. But to begin, I think it's going to be a very popular thing for people to cling to.

Great write-up and comparison. I'd love for Plushy or BaronVonVeigh to chime in or better yet; do their own comparison

interesting comparison, thanks for taking the time.

The reduced Whiff factor in 2nd ed was very noticable in your example, as was the changes to evade rules.

There didn't seem to be too much interaction with cumulative wounds in the 2nd ed one though. how that worked thematically would be interesting. Previous examples wiht exploding PC's made that seem weird. I do wonder if the top of the wound chart should be wider.

like 30-35 - Death

35-40 hilarous Death

40+ skull explosions and vaporisations.

Yes. Reduced whiff was one of the most noticeable things when I ran this. There were a couple of rounds in the DH1 example where it felt like everyone was just standing a couple of metres away from each other and swinging at the air. That's particularly pronounced because everyone is Rank 1, but still problematic.

Don't know about the "hilarious death" levels. That's very much a matter of taste and whether you want comedy Grimdark or DarkGrimDark. (LightGrimDark and DarkGrimDark - you heard the terms hear first, folks). If someone scores 40+ on the Critical table, most GMs would probably make something up to reflect it.

By: 'Hilarous death' I mean the overkill style descriptions you get after 'and the traget is slain', and more like 'anyone with 1d5 is hit by flaming body parts'. but not "tagret is reduced to ash". I feel that perhaps is more ordinary deaths had a larger numeric range and it was harder to get the 'skull explosions after being nicked with a knife' scenarios the wound system woudl seem less; silly.

Can I ask a favour and you post back how it went? Here if you like as it would be on-topic and keep things together, but anywhere so long as you post. I really enjoy play-by-plays and would really love to hear it along with any thoughts.

The game didn't turn out to be a very good test of combat, as it turns out, but we still had fun.

We decided to convert our existing DH1 campaign to DH2. The way we did it was to make new characters (mechanically), based on the old character concepts (a sniper and a skitarii, basically). This took more than half the day, unfortunately.

Here's what I can remember of the criticism (good and bad):

• The players loved the three-split character creation. They had a little trouble building the character concepts they wanted with the old rules - the new separate background/role selection made that much easier, at least in concept.
• One of the players went into min-maxing his role selection. This took a while. He wanted to go Mechanicus -> Warrior, but felt that the Warrior was too slow in progression for everything but combat. He wanted his tech-use, intelligence and other utility upgrades, so he actually ended up going with a Chirurgeon, though he swore he'd never touch Medicae. That felt a little off.
• I felt pretty bad giving out one home world bonus for the Hive Worlder (+2 Initiative) and the Voidborn (zero gravity doesn't count as difficult). They seem incredibly unbalanced.
• Both players loved the new skill system. They never really got the old one - this one was clear immediately. One player's response to when I nervously said that the Lore skills were gone, was an immediate "**** yeah!". I didn't expect that - he's usually all about non-combat skills. He felt the old system was terribly confusing, but really digged the Specialist talent. They also really liked that Evade had been rolled up into one, and the idea of skills using different characteristics based on circumstance. Very positive overall.
• Talent selection took a while. They liked the tree system (and were totally fine with the "talent tax" of having to buy bad talents to get to good ones - they felt that was perfectly fair), but there was a lot of page-flipping. This is fine, of course, since it's usually not handled while playing. Some talents did seem to be placed really deep (one player really missed being "Unremarkable", although it wasn't a big deal).
• The Mechanicus player didn't feel that the Technology tree was very interesting, which was unfortunate. Overall, though, they both seemed really excited looking at future talent options.
• I was nervous about the new weapons, 'cause the Sniper really loved his old Hunting Rifle. The Sniper Rifle is a marked change. He wasn't completely comfortable with the mechanics (and I offered he could switch it for a Long-Las), but decided that the concept seemed interesting enough to try. No verdict on it yet. We liked that the two sniper weapons were so different, at least.
• The players didn't notice this, but I did feel there was a lack of weapon progression, since many weapons now each have their own role, and Best-quality no longer really means anything. It seemed to me like there was nothing to look forward to within a niche (where do you go after the Sniper Rifle, if you want to be a sniper?).
• One player picked up the new DoS system really quickly, the other kept confusing it with the old system. I think the new one will work better in time.
• I loved that the players weren't completely hopeless at all but a few skills. I could actually set up any sort of skill test and expect a reasonable chance of success.
• Overall, for character's of the same experience level, the DH2 ones seemed easier to "get". The players actually remembered all of their talents (they used to forget something constantly in DH1, despite building their characters over time).

When we finally got into combat, it really dragged, but I don't think that can be blamed on the system. It was an awkward setup (turned out the players didn't really want to get involved), we were really tired (I was trying to get in at least one fight toward the end of the night), and all of us had places we needed to be. That was on me.

We play every other week, so hopefully I'll have some proper combat tests in two weeks.

Just a quick note on the comparison that I ran: I forgot to take account of the "Hardy" trait that the Strain Infectors have. I don't think that would have altered the course of the battle or prolonged it significantly, but at least one extra of those who burned to death from Friar Depthus's fury would have surived into the next round and there would have been a couple of extra shots flying around slightly longer. My guesstimate is that we'd have probably seen a second PC mildly wounded from the fight, but the end result and length of battle around the same.

I really liked this side by side comparison. I realise it is a lot of work but do you plan to do another?

I really liked this side by side comparison. I realise it is a lot of work but do you plan to do another?

Potentially, if there is sufficient interest. I would need a sufficiently different scenario to make it worthwhile doing another one.

I have just written up my Bloodletter of Khorne with an eye to doing a mountain siege scenario. I think if I do another one, then I would do a scenario with Rank 5 characters or thereabout. But it's a lot more work to advance the characters up to that level and they have a lot more special abilities to keep track of. It's not so bad in 2nd ed., but it would be a bit of a pain for 1st ed.