Compiled Suggestion of Changes for Dark Heresy

OR

Compiled Suggestion of House rules for Dark Heresy

This is a compilation of all the main rules changes I would make to combat and the armory. I also have a lot of ideas for Psychic Powers that I’ll get into in a later post. I really doubt that most of these will make it into the beta, but I’ll try to explain my reasoning behind them.

First off, I’ll get into some of the combat changes I’d make. These are based around people’s observations and comments on the forums. Some of the main problems I have heard with the combat system center around Wounds and Rate of Fire. Here are some of the issues at hand:

Problem: The wound system can result in the nonsensical situation of someone mortally wounded in the leg being punched in the head and killed instantly.

Solution: I know this means more book-keeping, but I think we might as well just track wounds by target area. In other words, your arms, torso, legs, and head each have their wounds tracked separately. This would mean having that little diagram of a dude and having spaces beside each body part to track wounds. Yes, this adds more paperwork. It also adds more realism, though, and allows for the following change. You see, the other problem with this rule is that it will potentially slow combat down quite a bit and increase survivability. However…

Problem: Weapons that in the fluff are meant to be used against vehicles and armor meant to make you into a walking taint balance poorly against other less powerful weapons.

Solution: New Qualities are added to Weapons and Armor.

(Armor Quality) Heavy: This armor OR cover is reinforced to resist most small arms fire. When attacked by an attack without the Devastating quality, the target behind this armor or cover receives no damage.

(Weapon Quality) Devastating: This weapon is able to do damage normally to targets behind Heavy armor or cover. If this weapon is used against a target that is not protected by any heavy armor or cover, add 1d10 to the damage of the weapon.

Essentially, Power Armour, some forms of cover, and most vehicles will count as Heavy Armour. Devastating weapons will be limited to the obvious ones. If a target is behind non-Heavy cover but IS wearing Heavy armor, roll 1d10 and add that to the damage made to the cover, but not to the target. Additionally, I would make the following change to Melta.

Melta: This weapon ignores the Defense value of any non-Heavy armor or cover. If this weapon has Devastating, it halves the Defense value (round up) of any Heavy armor of Cover (sum up all defense values before halving the single total).

Problem: Toughness Bonus acts as “skin armor” that soaks bullets unrealistically

Solution: Toughness bonus no longer adds to your defense value. Instead, those first 10 wounds on the Wound charts are now replaced with your Toughness Bonus. Meaning if you have a Toughness of 4, you can suffer up to 4 damage with no ill effect. If you have a Tb of 10, you can suffer up to 10 damage with no effect. The effects of wounds are otherwise kept the same.

A couple new traits will be added:

Size: Add 1 to your defense value for each level above normal, or subtract 1 for each level below.

Monstrous (X): Add X to your defense value

Problem: High RoF weapons have three advantages over low RoF weapons: Greater number of hits, greater chance for Righteous Fury, and increased Action Point flexibility. The only disadvantage of High RoF weapons is their decreased damage in comparison to high RoF ones. Dual-Wielding weapons also suffers from this problem.

Solution: Weapons all cost 1 AP to be fired. You are now allowed to make multiple attacks in your turn. You may only score 1 Critical Hit per attack, regardless of the number of Hits/Wounds inflicted. RoF is now split up into 2 Categories: RoF and Max Attacks. RoF refers to the number of bullets shot out per attack and Max Attacks refers to the number of attacks that a weapon can make in a turn. So, a weapon with RoF 3 and Max Attacks 4 can make up to 4 attacks per turn each dealing up to 3 Hits/Wounds of damage.

Other Changes:

Called Shot can now be used in an additional way. If a player is able to find a weak point in a target (this will likely require at least an awareness roll), either physical or armor, he may pay 3 AP to make a single called shot attack at -20 (or more at GM discretion and the size of the weak point). This attack counts as having the Devastating Quality. If the weapon being used already has the Devastating Quality, it adds 1d10 to its damage.

I'll add more to this as they come up, and in another post I'll start laying out my specific revised weapon and armoury tables. I hope that these suggestions are satisfactory to everyone in the community, as they are a compromise of added realism (e.g. wound tracking for specific body parts) and abstracting for the sake of balance (e.g. only 1 critical hit allowed per attack). I'll also be happy to explain the reasoning behind each of these changes in greater detail, and may edit more reasoning in as I go.

Other Suggested Change:

Movement: Movement rates in DH make no sense given weapon ranges. The tiny minutiae of single increases in meters moved gives little benefit and also requires doing meticulous tracking or the use of maps in order to accurately depict how combat works. These both slow down combat quite a bit and force the game to use maps that it is not designed for use with.

Solution: Average human jogging speed is 3m/s (15m/round), marathon speed is about 6m/s (30m/round) and dashing speed is 9m/s (45 m/round). Rounding that down a bit gives us 8m/s, or a maximum of 40 m/round. Which, handily, is divisible by the number of action points available, and thus gives us a move speed of 10m per AP spent. This is now the base movement of every character. It still allows for tactical maps, and still allows for tactical decisions. I'll get into the fine details of how this would affect some of the existing talents and actions later.

Weapon Ranges: Where are the range modifiers? I've heard split opinions on these, but I think a decent number of people liked the suggestion to give weapons effective ranges.

Solution: There are 5 Ranges in on-foot combat: Engaged, Short (10m or less), Medium (10-30m), Long (30-60m), and Extreme (60-100+m). All weapons now have a maximum range (which may be greater than 100m) and Effective Ranges. When firing at Effective Range, the user attacks as normal. When firing at a range band one greater or less than Effective range, the user suffers -20 to attack. This increases to -40 at a range band of 2 greater or less, -60 at 3 greater or less, and so on.

Dodging: With these rules, the number of attacks being made has increased. This weakens the use of the dodge skill. The use of Evade against psychic attacks doesn't make sense.

Solution: Dodging or parrying an attack no longer costs AP. Instead, a player may dodge or parry a number of attacks equal to his Agility Bonus per round. Psychic attacks (which I will get to later) that are physical in nature can be dodged normally with this ability. Mental Psychic attacks require a talent in order to use the evade skill against them.

Penetration: This ability is for the most part pointless when it could instead be used to grant more damage. It's also pointless to be so high for many melee weapons, won't have to go through cover.

Solution: Lose the Penetration Value for weapons. Instead, bring back the Penetrating Quality.

Penetrating: This weapon halves (round up) the total defense value of its target, including cover. Heavy Armor or Cover still ignores damage from this weapon unless it is also Devastating.

This is more or less your personal input, not a community compilation (with a few exceptions).

As far as I can say - there is no "community compilation" posible as such, as the community is very divided about different issues.

The only thing you could compile at all, are bugs and general errors inside the beta, but not general oppinions on different topics, as they, as I said, differ a lot through the community.

So don't give it the disguise of objectivity, please.

I wrote at the top that it's what I would put in. That's based on various things I've read suggested on the forums and my own ideas. Thanks for your great feedback, though!

I really don't like your Penetrating suggestion. Doubling/halving AP is one of the worst parts of DH1 and bringing it back would be a mistake. AP and Pen (and Toughness, for that matter) all need to be reworked, but anything that adds complexity instead of removing it is a step in the wrong direction.

I'd like to see a single Soak value that Pen is subtracted from, instead of applying it to AP but not TB, which complicates things when characters have different armor values and the weapons being fired all have different Pens. Having a single Pen apply to a single Soak will speed up combat turns.

This is more or less your personal input, not a community compilation (with a few exceptions).

As far as I can say - there is no "community compilation" posible as such, as the community is very divided about different issues.

The only thing you could compile at all, are bugs and general errors inside the beta, but not general oppinions on different topics, as they, as I said, differ a lot through the community.

So don't give it the disguise of objectivity, please.

This is a bad post and you should feel bad. Nimsim was very clear about what he was posting in his first paragraph; furthermore, he has a lot of good ideas and generally thinks them through, as opposed to just whipping together a couple of broad guidelines.

Nimsim, I don't like the idea that Heavy armour is effectively impenetrable to small arms fire, since it then seems like a no-brainer for any combat encounter. Sure, there might be agility and subtlety penalties involved but it's still pretty powerful. I suggest adding some small chance for small-arms fire to do some damage. Maybe Heavy doubles the DV against non-Devastating attacks?

I was referring to the topic which indead misguides.

Reminds me of a tabloids headlines.

Never the less - stop all that "feel bad" stuff - the world is a grimdark place - grow up and face it.

This is more or less your personal input, not a community compilation (with a few exceptions).

As far as I can say - there is no "community compilation" posible as such, as the community is very divided about different issues.

The only thing you could compile at all, are bugs and general errors inside the beta, but not general oppinions on different topics, as they, as I said, differ a lot through the community.

So don't give it the disguise of objectivity, please.

This is a bad post and you should feel bad. Nimsim was very clear about what he was posting in his first paragraph; furthermore, he has a lot of good ideas and generally thinks them through, as opposed to just whipping together a couple of broad guidelines.

Nimsim, I don't like the idea that Heavy armour is effectively impenetrable to small arms fire, since it then seems like a no-brainer for any combat encounter. Sure, there might be agility and subtlety penalties involved but it's still pretty powerful. I suggest adding some small chance for small-arms fire to do some damage. Maybe Heavy doubles the DV against non-Devastating attacks?

OW has a rule that if you roll a 10 on a damage die and the attack still does no damage after Tb+AP, it does 1 damage. Small potatoes, but there you go.

I was referring to the topic which indead misguides.

Reminds me of a tabloids headlines.

Never the less - stop all that "feel bad" stuff - the world is a grimdark place - grow up and face it.

This is I think the third time you've told someone to "grow up" when they've taken issue with something you've said. Let me be very clear here: taking offense to things people say is not a sign of immaturity. If anything, bristling when someone calls you on something you've said belies both a privileged position in life and an immature lack of self-awareness to recognize it for what it is.

I haven't filled out the stats yet, but I was thinking that the only wearable armor that would be heavy would be power armour. That at least makes a certain amount of sense to me as I think that once someone is putting on power armour, they should basically be immune to small arms fire. Ditto for being in any kind of armoured vehicle.

I was a little surprised - considering I've been in total fanboy mode for every post you've written so far, Nimsim - that I find myself disagreeing with almost everything here. Let's have a look...

Problem: The wound system can result in the nonsensical situation of someone mortally wounded in the leg being punched in the head and killed instantly.

Solution: I know this means more book-keeping, but I think we might as well just track wounds by target area. In other words, your arms, torso, legs, and head each have their wounds tracked separately. This would mean having that little diagram of a dude and having spaces beside each body part to track wounds. Yes, this adds more paperwork. It also adds more realism, though, and allows for the following change. You see, the other problem with this rule is that it will potentially slow combat down quite a bit and increase survivability. However…

I really think that DH2 needs less book-keeping, not more. I'm not sure I even agree that it's more logical.

It's doable if you use some sort of note-keeping system, like you suggested in my thread on using cards, but per RAW I think it's a bad idea.

Problem: Weapons that in the fluff are meant to be used against vehicles and armor meant to make you into a walking taint balance poorly against other less powerful weapons.

Solution: New Qualities are added to Weapons and Armor.

(Armor Quality) Heavy: This armor OR cover is reinforced to resist most small arms fire. When attacked by an attack without the Devastating quality, the target behind this armor or cover receives no damage.

(Weapon Quality) Devastating: This weapon is able to do damage normally to targets behind Heavy armor or cover. If this weapon is used against a target that is not protected by any heavy armor or cover, add 1d10 to the damage of the weapon.

Essentially, Power Armour, some forms of cover, and most vehicles will count as Heavy Armour. Devastating weapons will be limited to the obvious ones. If a target is behind non-Heavy cover but IS wearing Heavy armor, roll 1d10 and add that to the damage made to the cover, but not to the target. Additionally, I would make the following change to Melta.

Melta: This weapon ignores the Defense value of any non-Heavy armor or cover. If this weapon has Devastating, it halves the Defense value (round up) of any Heavy armor of Cover (sum up all defense values before halving the single total).

No offense intended, but I think this is a really bad idea. Armour and Penetration is already way too complicated. The last thing Dark Heresy needs is even more exceptions.

I think all of this can be easily handled by removing Penetration completely and giving a special "Penetrating(X)" trait to specific weapons.

Problem: Toughness Bonus acts as “skin armor” that soaks bullets unrealistically

Solution: Toughness bonus no longer adds to your defense value. Instead, those first 10 wounds on the Wound charts are now replaced with your Toughness Bonus. Meaning if you have a Toughness of 4, you can suffer up to 4 damage with no ill effect. If you have a Tb of 10, you can suffer up to 10 damage with no effect. The effects of wounds are otherwise kept the same.

A couple new traits will be added:

Size: Add 1 to your defense value for each level above normal, or subtract 1 for each level below.

Monstrous (X): Add X to your defense value

This, I find very interesting.

I did really like that the 1-10 result was universally "nothing", so you never had to look anything up, though. That would be out. I'm also concerned that this would greatly increase the lethality of the system - and would make high ROF weapons even more deadly, unless rebalanced.

Problem: High RoF weapons have three advantages over low RoF weapons: Greater number of hits, greater chance for Righteous Fury, and increased Action Point flexibility. The only disadvantage of High RoF weapons is their decreased damage in comparison to high RoF ones. Dual-Wielding weapons also suffers from this problem.

Solution: Weapons all cost 1 AP to be fired. You are now allowed to make multiple attacks in your turn. You may only score 1 Critical Hit per attack, regardless of the number of Hits/Wounds inflicted. RoF is now split up into 2 Categories: RoF and Max Attacks. RoF refers to the number of bullets shot out per attack and Max Attacks refers to the number of attacks that a weapon can make in a turn. So, a weapon with RoF 3 and Max Attacks 4 can make up to 4 attacks per turn each dealing up to 3 Hits/Wounds of damage.

All I see here is "add more complexity", and I really don't see the point.

I see the point in making everything usable with 1 AP, but I think this is much more elegantly handled, as suggested elsewhere, by increasing the RoF of all weapons to 1 and giving them a Single-Shot or Dual-Tap (or, even better, Slow(X), so there's only one definition) quality as needed.

I'm not sure I see the point in capping Righteous Furies, since the entire point in high-RoF weapons being deadly is their increased chance of getting any RF. Nobody cares about getting 2 of them, 'cause your target will likely be dead anyway.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying?

Called Shot can now be used in an additional way. If a player is able to find a weak point in a target (this will likely require at least an awareness roll), either physical or armor, he may pay 3 AP to make a single called shot attack at -20 (or more at GM discretion and the size of the weak point). This attack counts as having the Devastating Quality. If the weapon being used already has the Devastating Quality, it adds 1d10 to its damage.

Again, this just seems like added complexity for no reason.

What's the issue that you want to solve? Is Called Shot not good enough? I'm not sure that adding an alternate use, with a different AP cost and referencing a completely separate weapon quality, is the way to go.

Movement: Movement rates in DH make no sense given weapon ranges. The tiny minutiae of single increases in meters moved gives little benefit and also requires doing meticulous tracking or the use of maps in order to accurately depict how combat works. These both slow down combat quite a bit and force the game to use maps that it is not designed for use with.

Solution: Average human jogging speed is 3m/s (15m/round), marathon speed is about 6m/s (30m/round) and dashing speed is 9m/s (45 m/round). Rounding that down a bit gives us 8m/s, or a maximum of 40 m/round. Which, handily, is divisible by the number of action points available, and thus gives us a move speed of 10m per AP spent. This is now the base movement of every character. It still allows for tactical maps, and still allows for tactical decisions. I'll get into the fine details of how this would affect some of the existing talents and actions later.

I think having a single movement speed for everyone is interesting, although I don't think it's necessary.

The distance seems really far, though. It makes sense for running in a straight line, but if you're thinking about what to do, turning around, diving for cover, and generally doing other stuff, 10 metres in 5 seconds sounds fast. I see why you'd want it, though - weapon ranges are a problem. I guess I've just gotten used to the idea of skirmish games on a map.

Weapon Ranges: Where are the range modifiers? I've heard split opinions on these, but I think a decent number of people liked the suggestion to give weapons effective ranges.

Solution: There are 5 Ranges in on-foot combat: Engaged, Short (10m or less), Medium (10-30m), Long (30-60m), and Extreme (60-100+m). All weapons now have a maximum range (which may be greater than 100m) and Effective Ranges. When firing at Effective Range, the user attacks as normal. When firing at a range band one greater or less than Effective range, the user suffers -20 to attack. This increases to -40 at a range band of 2 greater or less, -60 at 3 greater or less, and so on.

I like the idea of weapon ranges being separate from the weapon stats. That said, I think it's needlessly complex - I'd be perfectly happy with a half-normal-double distance system, as discussed elsewhere.

Dodging: With these rules, the number of attacks being made has increased. This weakens the use of the dodge skill. The use of Evade against psychic attacks doesn't make sense.

Solution: Dodging or parrying an attack no longer costs AP. Instead, a player may dodge or parry a number of attacks equal to his Agility Bonus per round. Psychic attacks (which I will get to later) that are physical in nature can be dodged normally with this ability. Mental Psychic attacks require a talent in order to use the evade skill against them.

This, I think, would be a crime. I'm all for discussing whether or not Deny the Witch makes sense as an Evade skill, but removing the AP cost from Evade actions would be a huge loss to the system. Forcing the players to consider whether or not to spend all their AP on their turn or not is probably the single best thing about having AP.

While this would weaken the Evade skill, it would also strengthen the Agility stat, and I think that's entirely the wrong way to go. Agility is too strong - Evade is fine, now that it's opposed.

Penetration: This ability is for the most part pointless when it could instead be used to grant more damage. It's also pointless to be so high for many melee weapons, won't have to go through cover.

Solution: Lose the Penetration Value for weapons. Instead, bring back the Penetrating Quality.

Penetrating: This weapon halves (round up) the total defense value of its target, including cover. Heavy Armor or Cover still ignores damage from this weapon unless it is also Devastating.

Absolutely agree - except on the definition of the Penetrating quality.

There's no need to complicate matters. Make it Penetrating(X), and make that ignore X points of Armour. Done. No division, no rounding, no remembering what kinds of armour counts and what doesn't. Combat should be fast and fun, not constant rules-referencing.

There's no need to complicate matters. Make it Penetrating(X), and make that ignore X points of Armour. Done. No division, no rounding, no remembering what kinds of armour counts and what doesn't. Combat should be fast and fun, not constant rules-referencing.

How is this different from the Penetration that weapons currently have?

Magnus,

Contrary to some people's opinions, I actually did add some of these in due to what seems to be community demand, hence some of the added complication. To kind of go through your thoughts, though:

I put forward individual limb tracking because it seems to be a decent way to address a lot of peoples' problems with the wound system while keeping the core thing intact. I'd personally be fine with the current system and its level of abstraction, but I don't think tracking damage by limb would add THAT much bookkeeping provided that a decent character sheet was given. Of course, this introduces greater survivability to characters, which allows for some of my other proposed changes.

Of all the things I suggested, the division between types of armor is something that I really really like. Here's the issue: power armour in the game is meant to turn characters into walking tanks and a lot of the handheld weaponry in the game is meant to be able to take out power armour OR a literal tank. This presents a pretty big balance concern, because in order to properly reflect power armour, you'd need to give it armour equivalent to some of the tanks present in the game. In addition you need to make the anti-tank weapons have monstrous damage to compensate. In other words, you see a sudden massive jump in weapon damage and armour in order I reflect the fluff properly, OR you go with the current system that has some armour being near useless and weapons dealing damage that doesn't reflect the fluff. What I'm proposing is simply a way to keep current damage profiles while at the same time reflecting the fluff rule. It also means that someone in power armour gets to walk around like a tank, which is just great. Does that mean that power armour becomes the best choice? Well, it also restricts agility quite heavily and can be easily penetrated by high end weapons, so I'm not entirely sure of that.

The change to toughness I suggest would allow players to instantly know that a wound of X size would do nothing, its just that X in this case would be toughness bonus rather than 10. As for lethality and balance with RoF, I think the other rules I'm proposing address that.

I'd thought the point of high RoF weapons is to get multiple hits/wounds in a single attack? The increases RF is a side effect of that. Keep in mind that not all high RoF weapons are balanced by low damage, especially melee ones. This limit helps balance out righteous fury among all weapons while also keeping the other multiple hits of high RoF weapons (dual wielding I'd probably allow their RoFs to be combined). Also, I think the only difference in my suggestion of Max Attacks and the slow (X) quality is what they're called. Either one would work, although I think you're right that the quality would be more intuitive.

Edit: Ah, I see what you're getting at. I left out that the limit on Righteous Fury would mean ONLY the first hit rolled could score it in an attack.

I added the alternative to called shot as a way to specifically have a rule for targeting a weak point in armour, giving an advantage to low RoF weapons, AND giving non devastating weapons a way to get through heavy armor. The first point is something I've often seen come up in games, the second helps balance, and the third is balancing against a rules addition I've suggested.

The range issue sounds like a personal taste thing. I personally would prefer it because you otherwise are REQUIRED to use a map (or do a TON of bookkeeping in your head) in order to make several of the talents and actions actually count. This was the problem with a lot of talents and abilities in Rogue Trader that required the use of Endeavors, a system that was hidden in the narrative chapter and that saw infrequent use. I think standardizing movement lets people be much more free to not use maps, or to use maps with squares representing larger numbers for long range battles. How would you feel about 5m per AP?

Weapon ranges are another thing where I actually like the added complexity for the tactical aspect it adds to combat. It helps differentiate out the weapons more and also means that a lot more movement is encouraged in combat. I would fight for this one to be used, added complexity or no, because of how much it adds to combat.

Honestly, I didn't like that idea for dodging in the first place but I needed to balance out the added extra attacks. You know, thank you for bringing up the Slow (X) quality, because I think that would be preferable, while also messing less with system numbers. I'd change it to all weapons costing 1 AP and slow weapons can only have X AP spent on them per turn. Sound good?

I wasn't too sure on Penetrating halving values either (have 2 armour? It penetrates 1! Have 20 armour? It penetrates 10!). I think given that I'm eliminating toughness soak, it might be best to just leave pentration.

Does that address some of your concerns? I appreciate the kind words, and appreciate the reasoned criticism more.

There's no need to complicate matters. Make it Penetrating(X), and make that ignore X points of Armour. Done. No division, no rounding, no remembering what kinds of armour counts and what doesn't. Combat should be fast and fun, not constant rules-referencing.

How is this different from the Penetration that weapons currently have?

That was specifically in response to Nimsim's suggestion of having a Penetrating quality halve Armour, but:

It's different because I would remove the penetration stat from the game. No weapon would list its penetration.

The very few weapons that really needed penetration (melta definitely, possibly sniper and plasma) could then get it via a special quality.

Mechanically it would be no different. It's more of a semantics thing. By removing penetration completely from the majority of weapons, it moves the onus of remembering it from the GM to the player.

If 90% of the weapons in the game don't penetrate armour, I won't ask players "what's the penetration on that?" after every single hit. Instead, I'll count on them to remind me in the very few cases that it matters, because it will be a special privilege.

I really like the idea of wounds tied to hit locations. The character sheet already has boxes for defense so book keeping should be minimal (for players at least, Magnus´ comment noted).
If we tie this to increased wound effect modifiers, maybe +10/+15, I think this could have som interesting game effects. Called shot would become very powerful without any changes in its mechanics and players will be more likely to cower in cover calling for a medic after recieving a wound to a vital area.

Also, a note about power armour. The only available power armour in game is described is a light power armour, likely so to differ it from stuff worn by space marines and such.