For example: there are two PCs and their two NPCs, all in cover. So you have to make judgment calls every turn. The GM has a wealth of options when it comes to combat, as do the players.
Establish where cover is.Ī Dark Heresy combat is far more tactical than many other RPGs. If you're going to have a combat involving more than 8 individuals, I'd map it out before hand. As is trying to decide how things work in a 300m fight versus 100m fight versus a 50m fight. So, for example, cover? Yeah, tracking the actual AP value of the cover all the PCs and NPCs are standing in, as it changes over the course of the fight, is a bookkeeping headache. Dark Heresy is in many ways modeled after the table top war games it tries to include as many rules that echo the table top as possible. There's a rule for just about everything in Dark Heresy, even when maybe there shouldn't be.Ģnd biggest piece of advice: Decide how granular you want combat to be and how closely you want to follow the book on it. Know the combat actions like the back of your hand. My biggest general advice for running the game would be: know the combat rules, because they are crunchy as hell. Basically, the goal was: get players to a place where they can be heroic, quicker, instead of making them fail left and right like your average, schlub NPCs. It can be hard to reconcile healing and recovery with your adventure or with the other PCs), some other stuff. We cleaned up the dual-wielding rules, changed the rates of healing to be more forgiving (having a character get critically wounded at the start of the session, according to the rules, puts them out of commission for at least two weeks. Secondly, we cut the XP costs for any non-combat skill by half, to encourage people to buy those abilities (or to not tax the shit out of them for buying something they need.) We trimmed down the attribute advances so you don't end up paying 1500 XP for an attribute advance outside of your scheme. That means everyone has a chance to dodge, to parry, to swim instead of leaving them with a 95% chance of failure tying their shoes, walking and talking at the same time or breathing.
So what we did was a) give everyone access to every BASIC skill in the game for free. Who wants to spend XP on an ability that says "either you know this, or you don't, the die determines"? How useless does an adept feel when they've spent 400xp on knowledge skills only to have the dice say "Yeah, sorry, you just don't know." I rarely if ever ask people to make knowledge rolls. The end result is that non-combat PCs pay just as much XP as combat characters, are basically useless in combat, and have to spend experience to buy things like Scholastic Knowledge: Munitorium Procedures. It's been dubbed "Clown Shoes" by my players, because even simple tasks like trying to clear a jam border on an 80% failure rate, and new player characters rolled up by the book end up looking like buffoons when they try to do anything, or are faced with the slightest negative modifier.ĭark Heresy further divides combat from investigation, and can't make up its mind whether it wants PC/NPC interactions to be driven by dice rolls, roleplaying, both or neither.
While that sounds like a good starting place, in Dark Heresy, it results in TONS and TONS of failures. We pretty heavily house-ruled the game, because brand new Dark Heresy characters are weak and don't know shit about shit. Quote from: nenjin on February 07, 2013, 10:33:37 am I'm running a game of it right now.