Dark Heresy 2nd Ed: Let me save you 50 dollars

[TheFlatline]

Don't buy it if you own DH1. DH1 has enough issues to fill a phone book, and DH2 addresses maybe 4 of those.

Pros:
* Chargen feels better. No more fucked up advance trees where you have to keep track of 500 advances and which you've taken and how much they cost.

* They cut skills in half. This was needed.

* They ditch the idea of looting bodies to sell lasguns to scrape enough money together to do anything and just straight up give you influence

Cons:
*Combat is essentially unchanged.

There's a lot more other cons, but I closed the book when I saw that instead of the action point system and the different but kind of novel wound system proposed in the beta, apparently some whiny vocal bitches in the forum convinced FFG to scrap that and go back to the original combat system. I guess when you're 4 game lines in and have a massive bestiary you want to use it as-is in 2nd edition. That's really the only explanation that I've seen at this point for the drastic change. It's roughly the equivalent of AD&D grognards bitching when 3rd edition came out that you couldn't use your monster manual any more in 3rd, and Wizards saying "you're right let's scrap the D20 concept entirely and just patch THAC0 a little by giving everyone a +1 to hit. That should do it!".

There's a few, very few, changes to combat in DH2, like now you get a +10 bonus to hit because everyone was fucking missing and for some reason they don't start your combat skills out 10 points higher, they have to make it a die roll modifier for every combat roll and fucking shit this is bananas.

Oh, and there's some new setting, where the entire sector is off-limits to the rest of the empire because it's being sucked into the warp. This can't be stopped, probably can't be slowed down, and instead of saying "fucking hell let's LEAVE THIS SHIT" and at least take your chances (I'll take "likely doomed" over "certainly doomed" any day) trying to get away, you're supposed to stay in the sector and ride the bitch down like Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove.



I don't even see myself trying to house rule this shit. Maybe I can dig up the beta PDF and see if it stank. If not, I could create a player packet to try and run with the beta, which at least sounded like an attempt to address the real and fundamental issues with the combat system. But right now I am pissed at the idea of open betas and whiny fanboys dictating projects.

Fuck this entire industry really. Just fuck them.

[Longes]

I have a beta PDF. Do you want me to send it to you?

[Koumei]

instead of the action point system and the different but kind of novel wound system proposed in the beta,

What exactly are these systems that were proposed and binned?

[TheFlatline]

First thanks for the PDF I will let you know if I decide to undertake that mission.

As for the action point system, I collect you got like 4 action points. You could save one for a defensive roll, you could spend it on movement and stuff, and you could make one attack a round. When you made your attack you spent 1-4 APs as part of your attack, and multiply that times the weapon's rate of fire. So if a lasgun has an ROF of 2, and you spent 3APs, you have 6 potential hits. So you roll and every degree of success is an extra hit. A heavy stubber would have an ROF of like 10, so spending more than 1-2 APs is pointless because you're not going to be rolling 20 degrees of success. Now that I"m typing this you get the really weird concept that you might be *more* mobile with a heavy machine gun than with a pistol at comparable rates of fire but I'd have to read the beta to see if that was the case.

Your defense roll is rolled once per turn for 1 ap and each degree of success cancels a hit.

You roll damage, subtract armor and toughness, then look at the wound chart for the effect using the damage left over. Every wound you've taken before adds +10 or something to the chart total. So you may end up with a sprained hand, a concussion, and a sucking chest wound by the end of combat or whatever. There are no hit points per se.

The main complaint that I could see is that you have a wound chart for every wound on the PCs. NPCs generally go down in a simplified manner.

So in theory you could like move, shoot, move, and then save an AP to dodge or move, aim, shoot, or move, aim, aim, shoot. There was stuff like a melee charge gave you a bonus for every move action you took before you attacked and a few other things that made it sound interesting.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

I have no idea why DH enthusiasts wanted ablative HP back. One of the main things you'll hear about if you ask fans to sell you on DH is, it's not a game about "fair" or "balanced" combat, it's a game where you're supposed to be sneaking around or setting traps for superior enemies, and bullying the inferior.

Ablative HP doesn't encourage that. They encourage you to judge an encounter based on whether you can outDPS the enemy. Only War was especially bad about this; your verbset boiled down to "kill thing" or "do skill check to avoid ambush", with the occasional thing you could magical tea party with, like recreating Predator with an elite Kroot hunter.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah apparently they lifted combat straight out of Only War and went with it.

[Koumei]

The AP thing sounds fairly workable, yeah. Various tactical video games used an AP system. The "multiply AP by RoF for hits" thing sounds a bit nuts (and implies you can actually shoot twice and blast someone six times, which is... impressive to say the least). Unless they abstract ammunition so one shot is "some payload that may be one bullet or a hail or bullets", but they love banging on about how rare individual bolter rounds are so I don't see that happening.

The wounds... replacing HPWounds outright could work. I'm not against that in theory, but I'm not sold that FFG could make it work well.

[TheFlatline]

Well an AP isn't "I fire once" it's like in a 3 second period how many shots can I let off and maintain control of the weapon if I understand the concept correctly. Sort of like how D&D is all about "each 'attack' is actually a series of feints and swings".

The wounds thing I was okay with because as random as hit locations are by default it's hard to predict what your penalties are going to be.

It's strange. In about 18 months FFG went from being one of my favorite publishers to being on my shitlist. It feels like they just decided to explode in size over a short period of time and the quality of their work is going down.

[Koumei]

I guess that works, and RoF can just be "how many bullets/beams come out when I press the trigger". Again, it means ammunition basically has to be abstracted though. They have an aversion to that.

And honestly, I can't remember FFG ever not being on my shitlist. I never liked their system, they could merely placate me from time to time by offering up semi-decent art (sometimes) and occasionally throwing a bone to the Sisters of Battle by acknowledging their existence.

[TheFlatline]

Oh I meant in general FFG has made some great games. I still love Battlestar Galactica even though it's a hot mess.

[TheFlatline]

So thread resurrection, apologies for that, but out of a masochistic urge to see how bad my ass got whaled on by fanboys I went back to FFG's forum and looked up my equivalent post there. I wasn't as antagonistic, but I did flat out say I felt ripped off and WTF happened.

Well, the thread wasn't buried, apparently I had lit off a 16 page shit-fest of people bitching that it left them feeling jilted. Apparently DH2 is such a rip-off of Only War that not only are there entire sections lifted CTRL-X CTRL-V style, but there's constant references to OW skills and abilities that don't exist in DH2.

The only thing that I can gather is that the AP/Narrative combat solution proposed in Beta 1 was kind of a hot mess that needed tweaking and streamlining. So instead of doing that, they ditched 75% of the beta and did a paint job of Only War and kicked it out the door.

There were two or three posters in there who loudly proclaimed how necessary it was to stay compatible with previous lines because new editions must be backwards compatible with a minimum of work, but like 80% of the responses (at least for the first 5 pages) were basically "Yeah we know".

I have a feeling the Games Workshop license isn't as lucrative any more. I mean they must shit money from the Star Wars license at this point.

[mean_liar]

EotE is a brutal money-grab. The books are expensive, the game uses unique dice that are sold at a premium, the GM and the players both need them, and pretty much all of the settings - EotE, AoR, whatever the Jedi one is - all use universal mechanics with the only new thing being the player background driver (Reputation, Duty, whatever), the classes, and Force power writeups... in books that are what, 300pp+ long? And the expansions are so horribly obvious in their "here are new officially-sanctioned trinkets to kit yourself out in which are low Rarity but high usefulness", with background that is more extensive on Wookiepedia... I just feel like the whole thing is more money-maker than game.

If the Success/Advantage system worked better in play I'd forgive them a bit, but it doesn't, so I won't. FFG is milking the shit out of Star Wars, as well they should, but providing a mediocre product in exchange isn't cool.

[Dogbert]

Just the division in tiers makes it already the best SW game to date... which is depressing.

Their worst mistake, if you ask me, was taking their sweet time in releasing each tier. Making a SW fanboy wait for years before being able to play a Jedi seems counter-intuitive to me.

[Longes]

EotE qualifies for the originial product. AoR doesn't. AoR is a blatant money-grab, with nothing new in it. It's just a number or rejiggled/reskinned talent trees and two new force trees.

[mean_liar]

Agreed. EotE, as a book, is a complete RPG and it's expensive but it's okay. In the context of EotE/AoR/FaB it's off-putting, but standalone it's okay.

AoR and the Jedi expansion should be short add-on books. Maybe they should've made a Star Wars core engine book and sold AoR/EotE/FaB as setting expansions?

[Longes]

Agreed. EotE, as a book, is a complete RPG and it's expensive but it's okay. In the context of EotE/AoR/FaB it's off-putting, but standalone it's okay.

AoR and the Jedi expansion should be short add-on books. Maybe they should've made a Star Wars core engine book and sold AoR/EotE/FaB as setting expansions?

[Hadanelith]

Much the same way that they really need to have a WH40KRPG corebook and have DH, OW, BC, RT, and DW as expansions? Why yes, that sounds like a brilliant plan. For us. But apparently, they'd like to keep selling us the same rules over and over again. At 50 bucks a pop. I can't fathom why that would be.