My thoughts from the first read through,

these DO NOT come for any additional play-testing as yet, hopefully we will get chance tonight

Things I’m glad to see the back of;

• Talent Trees – They were a good idea, but they felt a little too restrictive
• Woundless combat – love it or hate it as you will, the original beta combat system was the thing that made my players refuse to play.

Things I miss from beta 1;

• Role-based skill costs – Those simple little tables worked really well, and as far as I can tell were universally liked. They may have needed a little bit of tweaking (assassins having stealth as one of the most expensive skills comes to mind) but they would have worked fine. I’m going to assume that we lost them due to FFG getting rid of the talent trees, all in all I can live with the Aptitude system (expect me to be making a DH2 version of my Aptitude Calculator at some point soon).
• Action Points – This was another surprise to me, I thought these were fairly well liked by the majority and added a bit more variety to combat. This being said I don’t have a problem with half and full actions, especially in their BC/OW/DH2 form.

Areas for concern;

• Minor Psy Powers – ok I’ll admit these could be pretty broken in DH1, but removing them has drastically reduced the utility of psykers, perhaps a “utility” psi discipline could be added to cover the old minor powers.
• The number of psi powers per tree – we’ve gone from 10 powers per discipline to 9, which may not sound like a lot but some of the powers that have gone were some of the most used ones (mind scan, psi blade, regeneration) and some of the new ones seem a little forced (Gateway creation as part of Telekinisis??)
• Influence/money – It’s been debated before on this forum, I still feel that there is room in DH2 for both hard cash and Influence peddling – the thread we had on this during Beta 1 covered the pro’s and cons nicely so I don’t really thing it needs repeating again here.

Other thoughts

• Character Creation – I’m glad they kept the Beta 1 style of character creation, it gives a nice variety for players and GM’s, but I do wonder where “Imperial World” went for those who want something a little more generic. I also miss Mind Cleansed from the old Inquisitors Handbook, some of our groups most memorable characters have had this background and it would be great to see it make an appearance again at some point.
• Reinforcement Characters – an interesting concept, but one that my group will be reluctant to use as they tend to get very attached to their characters.
• The Narrative Chapter – I’m glad this stayed, it was one of the most useful things added in Beta 1 and one of the most glaring omissions from DH1.
• Elite Advance Packages – It’s good to see them in the core rulebook, but im not sure if I entirely agree with the way they’ve done Untouchables. In my mind, from the fluff I’ve read, an Untouchable should be immune to Psi and Warp based abilities – not have a few extra talents that make him a little more resistant to warp-spawned powers and make psykers standing too close a work a little harder.

I know this is all very much personal preference but I want to give my honest opinion, both good and bad, on Beta v2 in the hope that we can, as a community, help make the best version of DH possible.

I welcome well thought out discussion and debate, but can we please try and keep it civil after a few rather personal posts I’ve seen here recently, it would be a shame to see these forums go the way some others have.

Regards

Surak

• Woundless combat – love it or hate it as you will, the original beta combat system was the thing that made my players refuse to play.

A utility discipline sounds like a great idea, as I've always thought a supportive role psyker should always be available in the system.

On the topic of psykers, I'm very disappointed to see the Rogue Trader style psy system back again. The old beta did a good job of making psy powers harder to do again and removing fettered. In the current system it's still very easy to get to a target number 90+ and to beat virtually any single opponent in an opposed test. The main problem is the PR*5 to the WP test. It gives psykers too much of an exponential growth in ability as the range, ability to get off and power of the power all go up as the psy rating does.

The original beta idea of the power being easier to get off when attempting it at a lower power level made much more sense.

Sounds like it might be a good idea to break out some of the ideas from your original post into separate threads so that they can be discussed in detail.

I too hope that the community can work together to bring together the best set of rules from all the available sources.

Naviward,

Thanks for the comments,

I will probably endup breaking the different points out into seperate threads in the end, but I wanted to leave it until my group has had chance to give me feed-back from actual play rather than just from my reading of the book.

I'll try and keep this thread updated as a sort of over-all summery of my groups' opinions on DH2.

Regards

Surak

• Elite Advance Packages – It’s good to see them in the core rulebook, but im not sure if I entirely agree with the way they’ve done Untouchables. In my mind, from the fluff I’ve read, an Untouchable should be immune to Psi and Warp based abilities – not have a few extra talents that make him a little more resistant to warp-spawned powers and make psykers standing too close a work a little harder.

On the subject of the Untouchable Elite Advance Package not making much sense; unless I'm missing something it costs 300xp and gives you nothing except future access to those talents. I wouldn't quite say it's crippling for a starting character, but it doesn't really seem like an effective trade off.

What I've seen so far:

Characteristics: Given the other benefits I think Characteristics should be 20 + 3d10 instead of 25. While Acolytes are special I don't think they're meant to be THAT special.

Character Skill generation has obviously moved to an aptitude system so I'll have to check a little more closely before commenting.

The Armory has moved back to OW Standard. Cudos for that. In answer to an earlier posters question: Range bands have not changed. BTW; The max range of an Autogun is 400m (Extreme range). Are you suggesting that soldiers today with M16's or AK 47's could reliably hit a target beyond that range? With Iron sights? I think the range for said weapon is pretty good. (For clarity; The M-16 lists a max effective "Point target" [person] range as 550m. That's 137.5m range in the current system so it's actually pretty close.)

Vehicles: While there is nothing inherently wrong with the vehicle system I would have preferred a system that allowed the GM to build a "transport" from a series of traits. After all, The variety of personal transports available within the the 40k system is mind boggling! I think it would serve the DH2 system to put a fairly simple design system in place rather than relying on a few basic templates.

Combat: System has basically cut/pasted OW combat system. I like this. Others may not.

I personally would have liked to see Tb soak go away but that's me.

Psychic powers: Same thing except psykers are back to being lvl 1 Psy ability in beginning. I like it!

Elite advances: I agree with the above poster. Nulls are not well represented and need to be rethought. Consider reading the Eisenhorne novels for some inspiration of what people are referring to.

Narrative tools: These were taken directly from the old beta. An excellent addition and one of the few things I really liked from the old beta. I still really like it and desperately want to say: "You see? They didn't get rid of everything!" The only difference was the section on "Reinforcement characters." I like this Idea but I'm not sure it works mathmatically as stated. A DW Marine starts at approx. 14000 xp. this would be a minimum of 140 influence by the book to call one yet the book says it's 55 (?). This probably represents some handwavium application but the numbers should be more concise in the final product. I would suggest that the numbers be mathmatically accurate but that a 1/2 modifier be applied if the characters are working under the correct Ordo. IE: The above mentioned DW Marine would indeed require 140 influence to call and cost 14 Influence but if the group was working on an Ordo Xenos sanctioned investigation than the cost would only be 70 required and 7 spent. Note that such a character would almost qualify to be an inquisitor but this too makes sense. Base Hiver scum don't get to order Space marines into combat!

Don't have much on adversaries yet. That willhave to wait for playtesting!

This is a partial repost from another thread. I included it here to participate in the discussion and it seems where it belongs!