I know I've banged on this multiple times, but the current system causes differentials in starting character xp totals.

Which is entirely meaningless, as you can't really "game the system". You choose one of the packages, then you choose how much the stuff in the package would have cost you if you didn't have it already . This isn't the same problem as with WW games.

Also, perfect mathematical balance is a red herring anyway, as it's impossible to ascribe objective numeric values to various traits in a roleplaying game.

I know I've banged on this multiple times, but the current system causes differentials in starting character xp totals.

Which is entirely meaningless, as you can't really "game the system". You choose one of the packages, then you choose how much the stuff in the package would have cost you if you didn't have it already . This isn't the same problem as with WW games.

Also, perfect mathematical balance is a red herring anyway, as it's impossible to ascribe objective numeric values to various traits in a roleplaying game.

I fail to see how it is meaningless given that the end result is that some background/role options start with more xp worth of skills than others. Just because the starting skills are chosen before skill costs does not mean that they lack intrinsic xp value. It is fairly easy to game the system, first because most people are allowed to go back and change backgrounds during creation if they want, and second because after becoming familiar with the system you'll know in advance what the xp value of your starting skills are. In addition, it's easy for people to inadvertently game the system if they don't pay attention to this. I know that WW doesn't have the same problem, but I was using it as an example of imbalanced character creation.

If the backgrounds were all within around 100 xp of each other, it would be fine, but as it is they have wildly varying xp values, talent totals, and equipment rarity as well as there ring obviously better choices in the special abilities. There's a difference between admitting that mathematical balance is an impossibility and just trying to get the curve as low as possible, and just throwing your hands up when presented with an easily fixable imbalance and declaring that it's not worth fixing.

I wonder if given the current costs the xp totals per level aren't a big part of the problem.

If you were to say, double the amount of xp necessary to advance to each rank and then double xp rewards (or just use 500 as in the update because that is a lot for a session unless your sessions reach 4+ hours) the end result would be that characters would be able to diversify themselves more and be less intent upon spending all their xp on their schtick.

It would also mean that you could double starting xp pretty comfortably, allowing for more variety at rank one.

In any case, I think a motivations step would be a great addition, although i would be happy for it to be pretty open-ended, not unlike the role system.

I agree that backgrounds are a bit too conforming, I think some choices offered for starting skills/talents/gear coming out of those background might help a bit. One could even just list "one weapon of X rarity and its associated proficiency" in some cases.

I definitely had fun with the roles mechanic and the openness it offered. I created a unique "breaker" out of the hierophant role with the psyker elite advance and described them as a sanctioned interrogation specialist who took advantage of psychic techniques and the usual fear of psykers to scare/beat information out of high value subjects on this particular plaent. I then gave this character the Arbites background to represent the law enforcement origin of the character. This sort of thing would not have been possible under DH1 and I am very tickled it was here.

As a power gaming option it was not particularly awesome I suppose, but it is different from the shoehorned role even mystic offers in the current system let alone the sickly scholar trope of the previous edition.

This character is primarily a biomancer, telekine, and pyromancer. he inflicts pain and cajoles victims into confession through fear and intimidation, and he views this as his sacred duty to use his curse/gift in the Emperor's service in this way. He is dogmatic about the Imperial Creed and the Lex Imperialis. He is physically imposing and frightening. His intelligence and knowledge of lore are not his greatest assets, but rather his ability to get information out of people.

Perhaps that exact example doesn't float your boat or match your vision of 40k, fine, but I am pleased that this flexibility is there and if anything I want more.

I don’t think there should be anything mechanically tied in to recruitment or motivation. I think it’s enough for those things to just be a part of your character bio, and making it an integral part of char-gen could potentially be limiting. For example; I plan for my next campaign to start the characters off before they get recruited, have them get stuck together by circumstances, and then have them get drafted into the Inquisition a few games in.

As for the sameness of characters with the same background, I don’t think it’s terribly bad though it could certainly be improved. Maybe just give each background a finite range of options but allow the PC to make choices within those options. I think the only part of it that really bugged me was starting equipment, which I had already planned to houserule allowing PC’s (with permission) to swap items for items of equal or lesser rarity (so long as they made sense).

I've been wanting that since everyone first pointed out there were holes in the 'life path'.

I've always thought the 'destiny' could also use a little more. Perhaps a two-step "some good some bad" set similar to Black Crusade's motivations?

If well written the tables could prove to be character or plot building as well. Right or wrong, if you're supposedly fated to get torn apart by khornite hounds, that +3WS probably comes from the extra care you've taken in trying to make **** sure it either doesn't happen, or if it does they have to pay the price. Likewise the -3 int probably had you foregoing your studies a little because "death-by-warp-dogs-soon".

Vorzakk : Since DH characters are supposed to at least have a little bit of history behind them though, it does make sense for something to be there in terms of things learned and/or experienced. Fine details on how the big I picked you up are best left to character interaction of course, but "You're with the inquisition because you survived a chaos incursion and seemed more unfazed then corrupted or insane", or "Sanctioning: It's like being guaranteed a job when they're done with all the dental probes" is plenty vague enough, and explains the mechanical extras you needed just enough.

I'd actually prefer if character creation was even more open-ended, with starting skills, traits, etc. not being intrinsically tied to a character's fluff background at all. Sure, skills and talents should be justified by the background, but that should be left up to the players and GM in my opinion, not the rules. There's so many different branches of the Ministorum, Administratum, Imperial Guard, etc. that it's unlikely two characters with the same background would be the same. You only have to look at the regiment and character creation rules for Only War to see this.

edit: To expand on this, have players pick four skills from the cheapest category, and four tier 1 talents and one tier 2 talent, assuming they meet any prerequisites. This is an example only; I'm not concerned so much with the numbers as I am with the method.

I know I've banged on this multiple times, but the current system causes differentials in starting character xp totals.

Which is entirely meaningless, as you can't really "game the system". You choose one of the packages, then you choose how much the stuff in the package would have cost you if you didn't have it already . This isn't the same problem as with WW games.

Also, perfect mathematical balance is a red herring anyway, as it's impossible to ascribe objective numeric values to various traits in a roleplaying game.

I fail to see how it is meaningless given that the end result is that some background/role options start with more xp worth of skills than others.

It is meaningless, because "X xp worth of stuff" means nothing in a system that doesn't have fixed xp costs.

Just because the starting skills are chosen before skill costs does not mean that they lack intrinsic xp value.

Care to back that up?

It is fairly easy to game the system, first because most people are allowed to go back and change backgrounds during creation if they want, and second because after becoming familiar with the system you'll know in advance what the xp value of your starting skills are. In addition, it's easy for people to inadvertently game the system if they don't pay attention to this.

The prerequisite for gaming the system is the ability to gain something. What can you gain here other than a greater sum total of exp value of things on your sheet? Which, by itself, is meaningless?

I know that WW doesn't have the same problem, but I was using it as an example of imbalanced character creation.

Yet haven't in any way proved that DH2 character creation is imbalanced.

If the backgrounds were all within around 100 xp of each other, it would be fine, but as it is they have wildly varying xp values, talent totals, and equipment rarity as well as there ring obviously better choices in the special abilities. There's a difference between admitting that mathematical balance is an impossibility and just trying to get the curve as low as possible, and just throwing your hands up when presented with an easily fixable imbalance and declaring that it's not worth fixing.

It's not about ignoring the problem. It's about dismissing the faux problem so we can focus on identifing real ones.

Okay, so I'm going to break this down. Every skill has an intrinsic value of 1 divided by X, where X is the number of possible advances that a character can buy with XP. This value is in turn multiplied by the xp cost to determine the value for an individual character. I am aware that not every skill works for every character. However, if we were to take every single character concept, we could assume that the distribution of importance for each skill would form a bell curve from least to most important. In other words, all skills, on average, are of equivalent value. If one character starts with more skills than another, he has a greater value of skills. HOWEVER, these skills are in turn assigned xp values. Suddenly, two characters that started with equal skill values can have those values be changed. This is unbalanced, and unfair. An administratum warrior is getting more xp of skills than a chirurgeon.

Look at it this way: you and your friend are both building houses. I give you bricks and your friend glass. This is fair at first because you both have an equal amount of supplies (1brick set versus 1 glass set). The intrinsic value of the supplies is just the amount, which for both of you is 1 (1 set of bricks and one set of glass) I then tell you that if you want glass it will cost 800 dollars, and if your friend wants bricks it will cost 200 dollars. Suddenly it's unfair. You can't build a house without spending 800 dollars and your friend can build one for 200. This is where the unfairness comes in. What started out as equitable (intrinsic value of the bricks and glass was the same) suddenly becomes inequitable when you add the next cost.

This is what happens with skills. The backgrounds are "balanced" on the 1/X value of skills, but they ignore the in-game value of 1/X*xp cost. Fixed XP costs don't matter because you still have the constant in the form of 1/X. You're ignoring that constant in your interpretation of the system. Put another way, the X/10 constant represents the intrinsic value that each skill has to the players, which is assumed to be equal for each skill when averaged across every character concept.

I'd actually prefer if character creation was even more open-ended, with starting skills, traits, etc. not being intrinsically tied to a character's fluff background at all. Sure, skills and talents should be justified by the background, but that should be left up to the players and GM in my opinion, not the rules. There's so many different branches of the Ministorum, Administratum, Imperial Guard, etc. that it's unlikely two characters with the same background would be the same. You only have to look at the regiment and character creation rules for Only War to see this.

edit: To expand on this, have players pick four skills from the cheapest category, and four tier 1 talents and one tier 2 talent, assuming they meet any prerequisites. This is an example only; I'm not concerned so much with the numbers as I am with the method.

The ultimate issue you have to consider here is that FFG have to try and cater for multiple audiences. Your suggestion works GREAT for people who have a heavy RP focus, the kinds of people who think out all their character details before they touch a sheet then build their stats around that concept. I use a similar system in my games.

For someone who's a bit less roleplay oriented and needs a helping hand though? They'd be totally lost.

stuff

I get what you're saying here, but I'm with Morangius in that I don't see this as a real problem. Sure, an Administratum Assassin gets Logic (worth 200xp) and some other stuff, giving him more 'total xp' out of the gate than other option mixes, but these expensive skills are the ones that don't jive with the role. Someone who chooses Assassin as their role is likely doing so for the options that are cheap for Assassins, like Stealth. If they want to advance their expensive options, it's going to cost a lot.

Nobody is going through chargen trying to maximize their equivalent XP out of the gate.

There's some contradiction there, though. You say no one is going through to maximize xp but people are going to pick role based on what they want to be cheap. I too have my doubts that many people are going to try gaming the character gen system, but I do feel that its unfair when players unintentionally start with different xp levels.

I get that it seems unlikely that someone in an assassin role is going to want logic, but this is where we come back to the constant value of 1/X. Taken across all possible assassin concepts, you will see a distribution that makes logic average out in value, thus making its constant value be 1/X. Some players may fit a character concept based on background/role combinations that cause them to pay a lot more or a lot less to get equivalent skills to each other. That is the problem. In order to account for every character concept, we have to assume that every player wants every skill equally. That means if you dart with more xp of skills, your started getting more of what you want than another player. That is what I'm getting at. This kind of problem can't be looked at by individual characters, but has to look at them in sum in order to make the balance work.

Okay well then why have character backgrounds and roles at all? Why not have every advance cost the same for everyone? It seems like it would be a lot easier to have flat costs for all characters than to have variable costs while retaining the balance you seek.

Nimsim, I get what you're saying, but, to use your own analogy, you make a mistake in assuming both me and my friend need both bricks and glass. This may be true theoretically when we average out all potential builds at any exp level, but in practice, an Administratum Assassin is just going to start as a weak assassin (due to not having skills useful in his line of work) with a bunch of skills that will not help him in his job and that he's going to have a hard time upgrading in the future. The possibility of "gaming the system" is steeply reduced by the amount of starting exp you get, which will make people choosing backgrounds that don't synergize with the role start off gravely incompetent at their role.

First, I'm not suggesting that every advance be priced equally. Elite packages have extra xp costs and talents have extra xp costs to represent their assumed greater value. I'm fine with having role-based xp costs as well. My issue is that this system has a hidden inequality between characters. You don't have to throw out the whole system to fix this. All you need to do is have players but their starting skills with a set amount of xp. Just provide a list of starting ones they can buy based on one thing, and the costs will be based on something else. Leftover xp carries over. To counter any argument that this is too complicated, I will throw out that it's still simpler than the regular xp system, which every character is expected to use (500 starting xp) at the end of character creation. This keeps the balance without seriously changing the game.

As for players not picking incompatible roles and backgrounds, I will toss out cps's argument that if some of them are incompatible, why allow players to pick them in the first place? This is the work that has to be done for character creation balancing: the various options should all be relatively equivalent. I can pretty easily show that (number of roles)*(number of backgrounds) are unequivalent to each other based on the background skills. There are also plenty of combinations that have good synergy AND higher xp values. Would you like me to post the actual numbers?

Again, this is an easy fix to the problem. I've been asked to show what intrinsic value skills have, and I've made the point that this is a problem due to its invisible nature rather than its possibility to game the system. Here is what I'd ask: what is the problem caused by revising character creation to use xp in order to keep the system balanced and internally consistent. Keep in mind that players already do so with 500xp during creation, and it's simple to limit what starting skills they can buy based on background or what had you.

I didn't say that all advances should be priced equivalently; I said that all advances could cost the same for every character. Subtle difference.

I'm not sure that there are backgrounds and roles that are incompatible. If someone takes, for example, an Administratum Assassin, they're likely building a character good at either melee or ranged combat and will have the characteristics to back that up, and the skills an assassin should have will be cheap enough to start the game with most of them. One of the major strengths of this new system is that it allows a wide range of characters in a way that previous iterations of the game haven't.

I would love to see some concrete examples of what you consider unbalanced characters possible under this system (I'm sure they exist and I'm sure there are holes in the system that should be patched, I'm just not wholly convinced that the mathematical differences you're talking about are a problem).

And your system would probably work fine, too.

I put up these posts on it a while back. I'll try digging up the specific combinations later tonight when I'm not on my phone. I haven't gotten into the imbalances with starting items (although this info is out of date a bit) in this thread, but I bring it up in that one.

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/88209-the-numbers-behind-character-creation/

I still see a lot of numbers, and nothing to suggest any correlation between these numbers and actual gameplay experience.

I'll admit that some of those were just descriptive numbers meant to look at character creation but things like the approximate values of each background and my later post about the actual discrepancies between skill xp values are useful for the game. I've explained that characters can start off with different xp values. This isn't really balanced out by being ineffectual, because the character will start with the cheap advances needed to become competent in their role and can likely just use his 500xp to buy them. The problem becomes more tangible as the game goes on and players want to buy skills outside of their main niche and find that they are suddenly paying a lot more. That is the game experience. It's not incredibly obvious to everyone, but that fact doesn't mean that it shouldn't be addressed. As I've said, it would not take a lot to fix this problem. What I'm getting from you is that this glitch will only affect a small number of people, so it's not worth fixing. Congratulations on being an actuary, I guess? Id prefer if a problem affected 0% of players rather than 1-2%, but that's just me.

No, I'm still saying it's not a problem at all.

Say, I'm a guy who deliberately chose a Background/Role combination that makes my Background-given stuff cost the most exp, and rounded out the character concept using starting exp. Great, except what did I really gain? Some stuff that, given my role (the most defining part of chargen when it comes to what you actually want to do in the game), will be of tangential use at best. And if some of that stuff proves useful in the campaign, that's great, as long as I can use it on the current level. But if I ever think, yeah, that Remembrance is really getting a lot of use, but I'm not succeeding at it too often, I'll better invest some exp into being better at it - this is the moment I lose my "edge", as any investment I make into the expensive stuff effectively means paying back the "credit" I gained at character generation.

At the same time, other people in the group will spend their exp with different cost/effect ratio, depending on personal preference. Since the actual value of any particular advance differs from campaign to campaign, and since people prioritize their advancement in different ways, it's actually impossible for everyone to maintain the same cost/value ratio. On average, any starting advantage will even out as campaign goes on.

So, what you consider a problem is only a problem in a hypothetical scenario where a)someone who gains an exp advantage at start deliberately maintains it by only buying cheap stuff throughout the campaign, and b)this strategy turns out to be unambiguously successful in play as the campaign unfolds, and c)whatever advancement strategy other players at the table chose yields visibly worse results in actual play.

The chance of that scenario happening in actual play approaches zero.

I'd actually prefer if character creation was even more open-ended, with starting skills, traits, etc. not being intrinsically tied to a character's fluff background at all. Sure, skills and talents should be justified by the background, but that should be left up to the players and GM in my opinion, not the rules. There's so many different branches of the Ministorum, Administratum, Imperial Guard, etc. that it's unlikely two characters with the same background would be the same. You only have to look at the regiment and character creation rules for Only War to see this.

edit: To expand on this, have players pick four skills from the cheapest category, and four tier 1 talents and one tier 2 talent, assuming they meet any prerequisites. This is an example only; I'm not concerned so much with the numbers as I am with the method.

The ultimate issue you have to consider here is that FFG have to try and cater for multiple audiences. Your suggestion works GREAT for people who have a heavy RP focus, the kinds of people who think out all their character details before they touch a sheet then build their stats around that concept. I use a similar system in my games.

For someone who's a bit less roleplay oriented and needs a helping hand though? They'd be totally lost.

I'd say this is preferable to having experience equivalence disparity. For Only War they listed suggestions for spending your starting experience - they could do the same here.

I'd say this is preferable to having experience equivalence disparity. For Only War they listed suggestions for spending your starting experience - they could do the same here.

I disagree. Ease of character creation is a much more worthy goal than false character equivalence.

This argument and discussion has become less about how to make a meaningful background or at least a list of or simply ideas to help flesh out characters and more about how many GMs have gotten upset they let players bully them.

I've played as both GM and player (mostly GM) and at first I hated background packages, as I saw it as simply stat boosts or new career paths to overpower players. In a sense they are, but here is the thing. They are for your players, not you the GM. If a player wants to make a Tech-priest with a high fellow ship and diplomatic, fine, he has that option for its costs. Does it break the mold of what to expect? Yes, and there is no reason to not allow it. Claim any concept you want about abusing the system, or microing as much of a stat as a player can but the final call and judgment comes down to the GM.

Now I love background packages and point them out (from the many source books I have) to players who are interested in leaving their standard mold, looking to make a more particular type of character or sub branching with a new career rank.

Background packages and alternate careers, may be 'over powered' or even 'pigeon holing' to some, but to those of us, who have something called creativity or even just want to use the tools available to play a style of character they have in their minds, these tools are excellent.

This argument and discussion has become less about how to make a meaningful background or at least a list of or simply ideas to help flesh out characters and more about how many GMs have gotten upset they let players bully them.

I've played as both GM and player (mostly GM) and at first I hated background packages, as I saw it as simply stat boosts or new career paths to overpower players. In a sense they are, but here is the thing. They are for your players, not you the GM. If a player wants to make a Tech-priest with a high fellow ship and diplomatic, fine, he has that option for its costs. Does it break the mold of what to expect? Yes, and there is no reason to not allow it. Claim any concept you want about abusing the system, or microing as much of a stat as a player can but the final call and judgment comes down to the GM.

Now I love background packages and point them out (from the many source books I have) to players who are interested in leaving their standard mold, looking to make a more particular type of character or sub branching with a new career rank.

Background packages and alternate careers, may be 'over powered' or even 'pigeon holing' to some, but to those of us, who have something called creativity or even just want to use the tools available to play a style of character they have in their minds, these tools are excellent.

lol, this guy.

Setting and story should always take precedence over the rules, but that's not an excuse for bad rules.

Setting and story should always take precedence over the rules, but that's not an excuse for bad rules.

The way I'd phrase it, solid rules give you the freedom to ignore them when they're not necessary, while weak rules leave you with the challenge of fixing them when they are necessary. Former is always more preferable.