So, what did I miss?

I get that the woundless system was a bit clunky and in need of tweaks, but why was it removed? To me it seemed like one of DH 2.0's strong points.

I don't mind a classic HP system, but this just seemed interesting.

Could we get some constructive discussion going?

In my houserules we use a Wound Threshold. Essentially, any damage (after armor and any weird mitigation) is divided by your Wound Threshold (its your Tb). The result is compared to very simple wound effect tables and applied. Its fast, its deadly, it forces players to use cover, instead of allowing them to stand in the open pretending to be Neo. It also rewards the players who behave carefully and get in good shots.

From the games we played with the old beta, we too found that the wound system worked pretty well.

Sadly it also needed the rest of the system (like the weapon stats) to support the way the wounds (and crit chart) worked. As the aim now is to maintain compatibility with the older game system, I think this might be difficult.

Maybe a form of cross over could work, for example, every time to take more than 5 wounds from a shot it generates a D5 crit at the same time (same as the emperor fury rules) or possibly a talent that means you take the effect of any hit over 5 wounds but then only lose a max of 5 wounds.

It was by far and away the most complained about change of the old beta. It didn't fix the problem of no wounds it just added a bunch of random status effects between perfectly fine and dead. That is not a woundless combat system. All it did was make everyone have the same number of wounds regardless of how much it made sense.

A good example to think of is Chaos spawn. A creature of random organs and limbs that's mass should offer it a lot of resilience to minor hits but not make them immune to those hit. The only option in the old system was to give it damage reduction which has the effect of making weapons that should be able to at least hurt the creature pointless. If you lower its damage reduction then it takes damage like a normal person. As much as some people don't like it hit points are useful for modelling larger enemies.

What people want is the chance for each hit to be effective which the old wound system did but made a terrible job of. It made you use a really stupid 2 hits kill rule for most combats which just nullified most of the weapons in the game that were low ROF or Single Shot. If I hit a guy with a melta gun, I shouldn't be like, ****, I wish that was an autogun so I could have killed him this turn.

For me it was one of the things that killed the old beta. We already have a mod to the game which allows any shot to cause critical effects and make weapons like Bolters incredibly lethal to the point that they can reliably kill or incapacitate a regular guy in one hit. (Mod is damage over TB after reductions causes crit effects, creatures divide this by wound bonus, True Grit reduces as normal).

All it did was make everyone have the same number of wounds regardless of how much it made sense.

Well, it still had TB to differentiate between character types, but ... I get what you mean, and I agree.

From how I perceived the old Beta Injury system, it seemed like an awkward hybrid stuck somewhere in-between the original Dark Heresy's "TB Skin Armour" and the Inquisitor game's "every hit causes an injury", without truly playing to the strengths of either system. It is this stubborn insistence on keeping Toughness Bonus as a stacking resilience superior to actual body armour that is evoking the very issues you've mentioned.

I continue to believe that an approach such as using it as a buffer between Injury levels would have been notably better in that it (a) avoids this "no hurt at all" phenomenon as well as (b) has TB still make a notable difference between people/creatures. That being said, this thread isn't about possible alternatives, and this is not the only option to deal with the problem.

But I have to add, I also agree that hitpoints per se do not deserve the "demonisation" that they often seem to receive these days. In a system intended to be gritty and lethal I actually prefer a woundless approach in favour of a "directly to crit", but I could certainly see hitpoints being used as some sort of bonus to represent additional resilience. For example, how about the trait Unnatural Toughness adding TB as Wounds to each hit location - in a system where the average character or creature does not have any Wounds?

tl;dr: The sad thing about the Beta is that I feel it went into the right direction - but it did not go far enough, and thus ended up with something that was actually worse than the original system.

I think that keeping the new/old the wounds system is an unfortunate necessity if we're going to keep the compatibility between game lines which is obviously a strongly desired feature.

The old new wound system was one of the most interesting changes in the old beta at my gaming table. For once , players were actually interested in the action, because they were all falling over, bleeding and about to have their limbs chopped off, rather than going through the same routine every round ("What? Oh, it's my turn? I... guess I stay behind cover and semi-auto again.")

It forced players to react to constantly changing circumstances, simply because their abilities were changed by wounds.

It certainly wasn't perfect. There were way too many tables, spread out over too many pages. High RoF did seem to have a minor advantage (though certainly not as big an advantage as Kaihlik pretends - Nimsim ran some great analysis of this back then). The tables could have been condensed, however, as several of us suggested at the time.

"More hit points for tough creatures" was an issue, but one that could be easily solved by a scaling True Grit talent, as suggested at the time.

The "2 hits" problem for mooks was solved in one of the first updates. A Meltagun would almost always be better at insta-murdering someone than an Autogun.

It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the old (now new). I, for one, can't stand the thought of sitting through another DH1-style battle.

Disclaimer: I've yet to download the new update, but I'm lead to understand that the wound system is essentially back to basics. If that's incorrect, disregard some (not all) of what I said above.

I think that keeping the new/old the wounds system is an unfortunate necessity if we're going to keep the compatibility between game lines which is obviously a strongly desired feature.

Not necessarily - all you'd need to do would be to make sure to keep the same stats from the profiles, and make sure they retain their exact same usefulness. Exact application may vary from book to book.

I think that keeping the new/old the wounds system is an unfortunate necessity if we're going to keep the compatibility between game lines which is obviously a strongly desired feature.

Not necessarily - all you'd need to do would be to make sure to keep the same stats from the profiles, and make sure they retain their exact same usefulness. Exact application may vary from book to book.

I'm game for any working variant that does not involve me looking stuff up in one of 9+ different charts every time somebody get's hit. That's what I hated about the old Beta combat system. I don't love it about the current combat system but at least I don't need to look up every single hit.

I'm game for any working variant that does not involve me looking stuff up in one of 9+ different charts every time somebody get's hit. That's what I hated about the old Beta combat system. I don't love it about the current combat system but at least I don't need to look up every single hit.

To be fair, you didn't have to do that in the old beta, either.

You needed to look up a table when a non-mook (elites only on a non-crit) took damage in excess of their Defence and their total wounds reached 11+, usually the second or third (wounding) hit.

It was still too much - agreed. But it wasn't as excessive as all that, especially if you used mooks liberally.

I'm game for any working variant that does not involve me looking stuff up in one of 9+ different charts every time somebody get's hit. That's what I hated about the old Beta combat system. I don't love it about the current combat system but at least I don't need to look up every single hit.

I hear ya. I also loved the detailed charts in DH1 etc back then, but the novelty of it disappeared over time, to be replaced by many, many minutes of page-flipping just because it was so much. And the DH2 Beta brought with it even larger tables.

That's one of the reasons for why I was argueing for shorter, general Crit tables that leave more room for the GM to improvise when it comes to the narrative description of standardised mechanical effects. Aside from avoiding prefab descriptions not really fitting to what actually happens in the game, you also need far less space, and thus less page-flipping. The original Inquisitor game, for example, had all its Crit effects in a single table occupying half a page.

Hit points are also very handy for those nutters like myself (and my gaming group) who always run full damage rules for all npc's (essentaully every npc is a master level character in our games). Running combat using the beta 1 combat system was next to impossible for us simply becuase we hate the idea of mooks,

It made sense to us that the hord of renegade PDF (mooks) commanded by a couple of traitor officers (elites) would be tougher than the apostate preacher (master) they are defending.

Either way i'm happy to see wounds back, but I do still think there is some sort of middle ground that can be found between the crit table system and hit points system.

Regards

Surak

Hit points are also very handy for those nutters like myself (and my gaming group) who always run full damage rules for all npc's (essentaully every npc is a master level character in our games). Running combat using the beta 1 combat system was next to impossible for us simply becuase we hate the idea of mooks,

It made sense to us that the hord of renegade PDF (mooks) commanded by a couple of traitor officers (elites) would be tougher than the apostate preacher (master) they are defending.

Either way i'm happy to see wounds back, but I do still think there is some sort of middle ground that can be found between the crit table system and hit points system.

Regards

Surak

My players always thought the same, so we applied a slighly different system.

Characters (NPC's and PC's equally) have wounds as usual. When one takes X wounds, you apply the crit of the same number. When you're on 0 wounds and below, you stop applying TB when wounded. Every character dies at -10 wounds.

So it was quite easy to kill somebody, just making 8+ wounds to the head or the torso after armour and TB. If that arch-heretic leader of the cult is not wearing any armour and you made a good hit to the head... Pops!

Hit points are also very handy for those nutters like myself (and my gaming group) who always run full damage rules for all npc's (essentaully every npc is a master level character in our games). Running combat using the beta 1 combat system was next to impossible for us simply becuase we hate the idea of mooks,

It made sense to us that the hord of renegade PDF (mooks) commanded by a couple of traitor officers (elites) would be tougher than the apostate preacher (master) they are defending.

Either way i'm happy to see wounds back, but I do still think there is some sort of middle ground that can be found between the crit table system and hit points system.

Regards

Surak

My players always thought the same, so we applied a slighly different system.

Characters (NPC's and PC's equally) have wounds as usual. When one takes X wounds, you apply the crit of the same number. When you're on 0 wounds and below, you stop applying TB when wounded. Every character dies at -10 wounds.

So it was quite easy to kill somebody, just making 8+ wounds to the head or the torso after armour and TB. If that arch-heretic leader of the cult is not wearing any armour and you made a good hit to the head... Pops!

an interesting concept, I may have to try something like this when my group starts playtesting.

Regards

Surak

Don't know if this helps for an alternate wound idea, but with my group I've been running with both wound points and the DHbeta1 wound tables, but using them like crit tables. Admittedly I'm running a Black Crusade game atm, but how it works is when zealous hatred is rolled, damage over soak gets applied to the appropriate wound table equal to the excess, and also adds the usual +5 to future checks on the table. When wounds reach zero, further wounds taken go straight to the table and add the +10 to future checks. Since zealous hatred does 1 wound even if soak normally negates damage, at this point it will always generate at least 1 point on the table.

This system has had some pros and cons, but the benefits to our game have so far outweighed and downsides, and has made even our chaos marines a little more thoughtful in their approaches to combat

I strongly encourage such a merge of the old and the new system.

As the Beta1-wound system has its first 10 points without effect anyway (an average humans "wounds" in Beta2), it would be easy to set them instead of the "wounds" and enlargen the crit table to around -20 instead of -10.

Of course this would mean to find a way to increase damage (or +5 on following wounds), so the game remains deadly.

As we were running it, every time you had to check against the table, until you had time to heal you suffer a +5 to subsequent checks, much like in DH2v1, and once your wounds are gone each additional check is done at a +10 per check. it added up quick and actually seemed to make bolt and chain weapons more lethal as they generated zealous hatred more often, making them even less likely for even a space marine to ignore. We have had situations where the players still had wounds remaining, but a few lucky hits have left them with some lasting damage, and added some drama to the climactic finale. Of course we had to make it so that mooks could generate ZH, but overall it seems to add more to the game than take away