Dark Heresy mega-game post mortem

[TheFlatline]

Hi folks, I've been gone a long time here, but decided I'd drop in and muse about Dark Heresy a little now that I've just ended probably the largest campaign I've ever run.

The campaign started out as "let's roleplay in Grimdark!" and ended up turning into a 3-year long epic, sandbox mystery game. While I wish I could claim uber-GM titles, the game only succeeded to the level that it did because of some really awesome players who were all jonsing to get into the meat of a game at the same time. It was serendipitous to the extreme.

I won't talk much about the writing of the story other than "fuck sandbox games. They make my head hurt." I never finished a session without a splitting headache. But the worse the headache, generally the better the session. All players generally agreed that it was the best campaign they've ever played in, which I'm kind of flattered by.

Dark Heresy can really be divided however into two halves: The setting and the system. And I really wish they'd relaunch DH with a different system, because it needs it. Bad.

Dice mechanics blow. Period. I hated going into combat, because combat goes something like this:

1. Add up modifiers to attack, apply the modifiers to your ballistics or weapons skill, and roll D100. Try to roll under the TN.

2. Every 10 points you rolled under your target number is an extra degree of success. This normally doesn't matter but sometimes it does, like with automatic weapons.

3. Reverse your attack roll to get your hit location (head, torso, and each limb). Hope to god your players remember the number they rolled or don't snatch up their dice because otherwise you need to reroll or, as I eventually house ruled, it's a body shot (which usually has the best armor).

4. Roll a dodge. Your dodge skill probably sucks at first, but once trained dodging is good. Parrying is even better since it defaults to your weapon skill and not agility. Succeed? You negate the attack. Entirely.

5. Roll for damage, on a natural 10 you threaten a crit and roll again to see if you hit a second time without dodging. If you do, you crit, and can reroll all 10's on damage and keep adding damage.

6. Subtract armor from the attack (taking into account penetration) and then subtract your toughness, which is natural damage reduction (plus it influences hit points too. Nifty stat.). Apply damage.

7. If you lose more than like 5 hit points (and you'll never get more than, say, 25 as a mortal human), you're seriously wounded and take forever to heal. Once you hit zero, you're stunned, and start taking critical damage. Yes, there are 6 critical hit charts, one for each body area, for each of like 5 types of damage. Seriously.

Now player 2 gets to go.

Yeah. And with automatic fire, degrees of success equal extra bullet hits, which have to be calculated out, one at a time, because armor and toughness reduce *each* shot individually. Even then, the choice between full auto and not-full auto is absurd. If you're in close range, you hose. Not only does the damage go up through the roof, it gives you basically 20% bonus chance to hit.

Oh! And each weapon has one or two qualities to them, like tearing (roll 2d10 for damage, keep the highest) or reliable (normally a gun jams on 95-100 on attack, with reliable you roll again, and it only jams on a natural 9.) or... whatever. Even after 3 years it was hard to keep all the weapon attributes straight.

Out of combat was significantly easier (which originally is why I ran a mystery campaign, because those rolls took so much less time). I decide appropriate modifiers to your particular skill, which is linked to an attribute. If you're trained, you roll against your attribute. You can train up +10 and +20 in skills too. If you're unskilled, and you can default, you halve your skill. And most players will never see skills above the high 40's, so skills are *very* important to have. To the point that rank 1 characters are basically blundering fucking idiots who survive in spite of themselves.

So numerically, damage usually ranged from 1D10 up to like 1D10+5. Really, really frightening weapons roll multiple D10s (A lascannon is like 7D10, penetration 15 or something absurd like that, and takes out tanks). Toughness soaks 2-3 points of damage, and the best armor in the game adds another 8 points of damage soak. So by the end-game, you're more or less immune to hails of small-arms fire, and go splat against anything really serious.

Which led to a story problem. By rank 5 out of 12, combat just wasn't very threatening any more. So I started only attacking the PCs when the battleground wasn't favorable to them (enemies learn, and want to live, so like literally 90% of firefights became one side ambushing the other, which surprisingly the PCs never minded, probably because they got to set their own ambushes against the enemies and fucking clean house).

But even then, by rank 6 or 7, combat was back to either being a joke or being so over the top lethal that TPK was a real likelihood. I was forced to change combat again, deciding on being story-centric, and started using combat as delay/distract/mislead tactics. The enemy assumed his foot troops would lose even in an unfair fight, and deployed them to achieve alternate ends. Which ended up being a very, very popular shift for my players when they figured out what the enemy was doing. By the end of the game, when the players were epic level equivalent, combat was almost unheard of, and usually had some kind of major twist going on to make the gunbunnies happy still.

Aside from that really, really odd wall around rank 5 in combat, and the utter ineptitude of n00b characters, non-combat progressed almost insanely smooth as glass. Players around rank 3 started favoring investigative skills, even the guardsman, and once I introduced the rules for influence and contacts, the party spent *huge* amounts of XP cultivating a truly impressive web of power, which is kind of the idea for Inquisitors.

Epic/Inquisitor levels sort of broke down, but the story was nearing it's finish by that point, and actually I didn't explore much in the Inquisitor rules ironically.

Overall, mechanically, the game would be severely better off with a Shadowrun dice pool system or even the funky custom dice that Star Wars & Warhammer Fantasy went with. Combat is a cluster-fuck of epic proportions, and sadly for all that effort is a diminishing return as time goes on. I lost 3 characters in 3 years, and all three were in year 1. There were a few close scrapes in year 2, and none in year 3. Part of that was me. I didn't want to throw in a half dozen hive tyrants for lethal combat. It didn't fit the story and the idea of "I go first. I kill all of you. End of campaign." levels of threat suck ass.

So yeah. System. Fuckin straight D. It'd be an F if the non-combat system wasn't proficient, because of the combat plateau and just how complicated everything is. However, there are barely any crafting rules, the tech-priests still feel listless even though they've had their own splat book, and the line between what an Arbitrator gets to do and not do is so vaguely defined that there was some serious player rapage for the first few ranks (I did that out of necessity until characters got competent, and portrayed it as a slow drifting away from your profession). So maybe a D- even. The unofficial motto of the campaign became around year 2 "I hate this fucking system...", which I apparently uttered at least 3 times a night.

So... the system blows. How about the setting? As a lackey for a super-powerful Inquisitor, it's a great jumping off point. Describing GrimDark 40k as a setting? That's far more hit and miss. A lot of it is DM fiat, with examples (well written fluff) to give you ideas, but still...

Like- Data networks. They exist. Data gets transferred around, and there are computers. The Tech Priests commune with them all the time. But there's also wireless comms, which imply networks, and... yeah it's sketchy. It took a lot of world-buliding on my part to make what ended up being *my* grimdark setting. Below are some of the ideas and themes that helped smooth the setting over, until even people who had no concept of Warhammer 40k before playing were comfortable with.

Technology: Non-existant for most people, but for the elite and wealthy, there are computers, a very few networks, and mostly mainframe technology. Adepts can usually work with computers to process data, but for the lay person, you walk over to the servitor skull that's half fused into the machine, pray to it, and hope one of it's half-dozen capabilities that it can moan back at you. Otherwise you had to go to the Tech Priests, who I ran as something akin to the Spacing Guild from Dune.

In between almost no tech and the wealth are the servitors and half-human/half-machine amalgams that do everything from temperature control to opening and closing doors to running message errands. As an aside, I admitted eventually there was a flicker of intelligence left in these undead cyborgs, and that's why they functioned so well. In fact, it was generally considered for the lowest of the low that you'd fulfill your duty to the Emperor better dead and as a servitor than you ever could in life.

Government: The government is such a huge, mind-numbing cluster fuck that is so large, and has so many cracks, and so much momentum, that it's almost impossible to bring it down. Corruption at the shipping/quartermaster level is so absolutely common that it's necessary to keep the empire functional. An entire planet could be lost and it could be a thousand years before the forge world that makes weapons and farm equipment gets the notice and stops shipping to that planet. In the mean time, a quartermaster reroutes the farm equipment to an agricultural world that was recently conquered and the lasguns to the Imperial Guard in the middle of a firefight. Once the crates are marked with their destinations, they become standard freight and they disappear into the system. It seems corrupt but it's necessary, and on an individual level is actually generally seen as altruistic, serving the Emperor directly and for some folks is a form of worship. Which brings us to...

Religion: This was kind of odd, as it factored deeply into the plot, so I won't go through all my house rulings. But to make it short and sweet, picture Europe circa early 1500's, right around when Luther posts his 99 thesis. The Catholic Church is pretty much the de facto power in Europe. But they don't actually, blatantly rule (well they do in some cases, but not absolutely). Instead, they name monarchs to the Holy Roman Empire to rule in their stead. The Imperial Cult works this way. It's the true source of power, but doesn't actually rule officially, dispensing the power to the Administorium, who actually does the mechanics of ruling. It doesn't, of course, prevent the Ecclisiarchy from meddling directly, but it's a nominal separation of powers.

Actual worship is diverse and relies on iconography, usually reflected in decks of tarot cards or other common items- beer mugs, posters, charms, whatever, seeing as most of humanity is completely illiterate. As the Ecclisiarchy isn't uniformly spread across the universe, in places where it dies out formally, humans are left to interpret their religion for decades, sometimes centuries, just off of maybe 20 or 30 icons/paintings/sculptures. This leads to... really weird sub-factions of the Imperial Cult. They're technically heresy, but so long as you serve the Emperor, and the Empire, and don't cause trouble, there are more important fish to fry.

Morality: This is where I had the most fun. Officially, the ends justify the means, so long as the ends serve the Emperor. In the opening session, the characters murdered over a thousand innocent civilians in order to ensure that half a dozen cultists were killed. The players were expecting an ass chewing, and instead they were lavished praise, given promotions, and more importantly, given a measure of blind trust. This set the tone for the rest of the game.

For the first year real time of gameplay, the characters met their patron once. For one scene. Otherwise they communicated via long distance telepaths, and thus would often send and receive brutally short messages. I was asked, out of character and in character, over and over again, for some kind of shaping hand to define the limits of the group's authority. I refused over and over again. Aside from, at first, being unavaowed agents of an inquisitor, they "couldn't get caught" but other than that, all that was expected of them was results. They might be tasked with proving the heresy of a noble house, and that's it. More than once on a mission like that they dabbled with simply falsifying information. The patron knew, everyone in the inquisition knew that the proof was false, but nobody cared. It delivered results. For the players, their actions didn't fall on them for their actions or misdeeds, but on their patron instead, who was punished or rewarded off camera a hundred systems away, and who only rarely let them know of what he was going through.

In this vacuum, the party experienced an unscripted, rather polar schism. On one hand, you had the ends justify the means crowd, who was fine with running guns, falsifying evidence, and allowing minor heresy to pass without complaint to pursue the big bust, the big kill, and on the other you had half the party committed to purity of deed as being a core tenant of duty to the Emperor. In the middle one of the better roleplayers in the group played a priest who underwent a major crisis of faith early on and spent the next 3 years as the fulcrum in the party, acting sort of as the swing vote. As the game developed, oddly enough, there didn't seem to be a party leader any given time. Each of the factions had their "leader", and the party constantly fought for it's own soul and identity. When I say it fought for it's soul and identity, I mean at times I sat back and just listened to a two hour debate about duty, obligation, and the ends justifying the means. Everyone really stepped out of their comfort zones and found a different way of looking at the world, and out of all that mess often came some truly impressive brainstorming. The detant they arrived at around the end of year 1 was uneasy, but embraced both sides, and when they finally met, and was drawn close to the patron Inquisitor, he turned out to be so... alien in his thoughts that the party would engineer evidence to send him off as far as they could get him away, because he was destructive to the very cohesiveness of the party.

So the two major themes of the game in the first two years turned out to be "Nearly unlimited power with almost no responsibility. What do you do with it?" and "How much of your own soul are you willing to sacrifice to do your duty? What society wants and what is healthy for you as an individual are often at odds. How do you balance that?" In the end, the party pursued the conspiracy not just to gain power and accolades, but literally, in character, to learn more about themselves.

By the third year I threw almost everything the characters thought they knew about the cosmology of the universe out the window and went with a Jungian Archetype/fisher king/authurian legend story that kind of transcended canon cosmology and forced the party to really shatter towards the end of the campaign and sacrifice pretty much all they as characters believed in in order to participate in the conspiracy at that level. While it was fun, and a satisfying ending, it was really kind of my creation so it doesn't belong in a discussion about Dark Heresy.

Anyway I'm meandering here. With strong roleplayers, I found that they latched onto the ideas of those two main themes really strongly, and provided with opportunities to think on their own and at times flat out outhink me (Out-think me by how much? At one point the boss at the end of the first "chapter" of the story was defeated entirely by roleplaying, since they managed to manipulate the situation to a point where I'd be pulling a major railroad if I didn't give them their victory. So I shrugged, smiled, and ran with it, and there were many cheers. Best decision I made.), they really dug into the characters.

As an RPG, Dark Heresy splashes into a lot of different themes- Doses of Call of Cthulhu, doses of D&D, as well as it's own muddled history/setting. And it provides a scaffold and a scene shop for your play as opposed to a world of sets you can start establishing if you want your world to be anything more than a backdrop. What makes the game unique, to me, is the idea of unlimited power (Inquisitors basically answer to each other on occasion and that's pretty much it.) without the responsibilities of an Inquisitor. It's frustrating, scary, bizarre, but sooner or later becomes almost a narcotic, and right about there, if you're loyal enough, you get your own rosette and orders of magnitude more power, but now a responsibility to go with it.

But I still fucking hate that system.