Is a dark heresy-style advancement system salvageable.

[Orion]

For those who haven't seen it, Dark Heresy uses a strange hybrid of a point buy and a class/level system. It's a hybrid that sounds conceptually appealing, since it might have the best of both worlds. However, the implementation in the actual book is seriously flawed. I fear that might be because it's a nightmare project guaranteed to be a trainwreck with the worst flaws of both. Dark Heresy characters don't automatically gain any fixed improvements by leveling up. They earn XP and spend them piecemeal to pick up new skills, weapon proficiencies, and special abilities a la carte. However, each character is locked into one career track, like cleric, psyker, or scum. They spend their XP to buy abilities off the list of options for their class. As they spend XP, they eventually "level up," which earns them access to an expanded list of options. This system has several really appealing features.

• Restricted min-maxing. Although the game never forces you to buy more HP or reflex saves, it also doesn't allow you to set your character on fire to max out one broken ability. You can't get Major Psionic powers until rank 4. Your Rank 3 Guardsman can have 8 HP or 13 HP but not 20 HP. Your assassin could actually buy all the available sword tricks and be forced to learn an actual skill.
• Restrict cross-class skills, don't punish. A Rank 3 Assassin is allowed to buy Dodge 2. A rank 3 Psyker can only buy Dodge 1. But he doesn't pay more for it than the assassin did.
• Easy role changes. The Guardman goes through 3 ranks with almost no social skills. Then at rank 4 he gets promoted to an officer and suddenly gets a pile of social options dumped on him. Basically, the kind of midgame concept shifts that Prestige Classes were supposed to bring us can be built in to the normal leveling system.
• Implicit storytelling. Even when you're not doing a radical role shift, you can tell a story with which skills you hand out when. For instance, level 1 Arbitrators can buy Knowledge (Law Enforcement) but not Knowledge (Underworld). Level 1 Scum can buy Knowledge (Underworld) but not Knowledge (Law Enforcement). At level 2 they can each enter the other's world. This is a cool little detail you couldn't do with a class skill list.
• Ad hoc role protection. Even if you have two conceptually similar characters like Assassin and Scum odds are good at any given level that one has a skill option the other doesn't. You don't have to make a grand statement like "assassin's get poisons and scum don't." You can just give the Assassin poison use at level 2 and the Scum poison use at level 3. Give the Assassin pilot hovercraft at level 3 and the Scum pilot hovercraft at level 5. Give the Scum disable device at level 2 and the assassin disable device at level 3. Even without a fixed "protected role" you will always have the option to buy something that is not currently available to anyone else in your group.

Unfortunately, there are some massive downsides.

• Painful to Write. The basic Dark Heresy book had 8 classes and 8 levels per class. Actually more because every class branched at some point, either permanently or briefly before reuniting. Or both in one especially perverse case. So their design team had to write out 80 fairly arbitrary ability lists and make sure they didn't put the same ability in the same track twice. Or worse, make a typo and leave one ability out entirely, making another ability impossible to learn because of missing pre-requisites.
• Painful to Use. When you go to spend XP, you can buy anything from your current rank or any previous rank, but the rank 3 list doesn't include the legacies from ranks 1 and 2. That means you have to look over 3 lists to see all your options, and you can't answer a question like "am I allowed to take Dodge +2" without checking all of your levels (until you reach the one that unlocked Dodge +1) You could fix this by making the listing cumulative, but this makes it harder to tell what's new and ruins everything if you let a branched path recombine with the main track.
• Painful to expand. Dark Heresy tried to add more customization by introducing "alternate career ranks" -- alternative level charts intended to work like PRCs. Each one had a list of approved classes and a *minimum* rank you could take them at. So for instance, Saboteur could be take by a Scum, Adept or Assassin in place of their 3rd rank, or in place of their 4th, 5th, or whatever. This flexibility makes it way more likely these things can actually be used, especially if introducing them into an ongoing game. It also creates optimization hell. Deciding WHICH level of Scum to trade out for Saboteur is a brain-melting exercise. Oh, and it's mechanical hell, because it causes those missing pre-reqs we've talked about. Suppose Assassin 3 allows Dodge+1, and Assassin 4 allows Dodge +2 (which requires Dodge+1). Saboteur only allows Dodge +0. If an Assassin takes saboteur at level 3 then he ends up having acces to +2 without +1. A reasonable person would probably handle this by saying you're screwed out of Dodge +2, or that it includes access to its prerequisites (dodge+1) or that it slides down a notch to fill in the empty row so that the unattainable Dodge +2 becomes a Dodge+1 that you can take. The Dark Heresy designers went with option D: beg your GM for permission to buy something off the list you nominally gave up, at 50% surcharge, which is ridiculous. You could avoid the problem by fixing the alternate option to one particular class and rank and making sure it was compatible. Or, you could write an entire branch so that once you took an alternate, you rode ti the end of your days, thus preventing the dissonance from arising. Either of those produces an unbelievable amount of writing work to generate a very small number of options.

So: is this salvageable? Could you write a functional game this way?

[RelentlessImp]

Second Edition is coming. You're not locked into one career path, well, kind of. Overall, Dark Heresy 2E is more or less Only War with the serial numbers filed off and some new things tried out. But overall it's a much more functional system.

[Laertes]

I found Dark Heresy's levelling system to be a clunky horror that violated WSoD in egregious ways. The characters had left their former professions, after all, and had become Inquisitorial acolytes. Having their progression restricted to what might have been their career path had they remained in the administratium / Imperial Guard / arbites felt grating and weird.

I agree that one virtue of it was that it produced characters which were fairly rounded, but even that was pretty ugly: they were rounded into the class archetype rather than their own actual personality. For example in our campaign the Tech Priest was the one who carried out interrogations early on the campaign, and the players enjoyed that. Then suddenly the Arbitrator got Interrogation and we had the awkward fluff vs crunch conflict because she had up until then been playing her character as a "genuinely good person stuck in the 40k galaxy", and now was being told that she was somehow perfect for the role of party torturer.

Psykers were quadratic, but that's something we almost expect by now in games: like hit points and initiative and other holdovers from D&D, it's ugly but players would riot if you took it out.

I think it's fair to say that we enjoyed Dark Heresy in spite of its system.

[tussock]

From your description, it seems like it'd be easier with a common list of powers with minimum levels, some per-level minimum and maximum attack and defense limits, and a set of archetype characters that build from those, supported by fluff and art for why characters develop that way.

If a few things need restricted for enforcing desired tropes, restrict just the few that need it. Otherwise if players care to start with a "proper" street-rat they can just choose to follow the archetype build fairly closely, and otherwise do something better or more interesting.

And if your Arbitrator doesn't want to be an interrogator, they just don't choose that, even though the archetype character does and the fluff says it's almost universal. PCs are special and we get to tell our own stories with them.

Could you write a functional game this way?

Yes, but I can't really see any benefits to doing so over something with more freedom. Other than a way to turn a set of trivial mechanics into a giant high-price art book to cover the giant per-book component on your licence fee, eh.

[Koumei]

It's basically the same thing as talent trees as seen in basically every Action RPG or MMORPG ever. Or indeed, tech trees in a lot of strategy games. They don't usually spell out "You are now this tier, unlocking these talent choices", they just happen to have minimum levels across various points.

And while those trees are nice to look at, the fact is that including them takes zero physical space because it's on a PC game. Filling a book with them just kills trees for no real gain, and unless you want to put the trees themselves on the character sheet or draw all over your rulebook, even denies people the quick "Look at it, see where you are on the tree and what you can access right there in front of you" benefit.

[Orion]

I don't understand the arbitrator example. You don't just suddenly learn interrogation by accident. That's actually the nicest thing about the system; there are way more options for your level than you can actually take. So while core D&D does class features, where all druids get wild shape at level five, dark heresy can do class and level protection by putting wild shape in as one option at druid level 5.

[ishy]

Weren't you writing a review for Dark Heresy?

- Edit: not meant in an offensive manner or anything, I just was interested in that review.

[Username17]

First off, allowing players to not buy hit points is fucked. Exhibit A: Earthdawn. The whole point of having levels is to assign challenge to parties. Off a player can simply choose to not have level appropriate defences, that is out the window.

Second, branched advancement is fucked. See: 4e paragon paths. Branch points exponentially increase the amount you have to write, but only linearly add to real character advancement options.

Thirdly, your description of the guard advancement to officer sounds like the shittiest thing that was ever shitty. I mean, that's twenty level prestige class using builds level of fuckery. If your character gets a promotion and starts hanging out with a different class of people, that should happen because of the character's actual story, not because you declared a page number for this to occur on before the story even started.

-Username17

[Laertes]

I don't understand the arbitrator example. You don't just suddenly learn interrogation by accident. That's actually the nicest thing about the system; there are way more options for your level than you can actually take. So while core D&D does class features, where all druids get wild shape at level five, dark heresy can do class and level protection by putting wild shape in as one option at druid level 5.

In practise there aren't actually that many options. There's a few good things at each level that you snap up as soon as you level, and then a lot of dross that you just have to wade through as you wait for the next level. It's like an awkward mix of a skill based game and a class and level based game.

There isn't much room within each class for character diversification (except for the Psyker, but again that's normal in RPGs.) To use your example, it's like putting wild shape in as one option at druid level 5, and then being surprised when everybody takes it even if their concept doesn't support it. Why wouldn't you take it? What are you going to take instead that's even nearly as good? You can hardly have an advancement scheme entirely stuffed with things as powerful and character-defining as that. People will pick and choose the best ones, and every druid will end up the same. Again.

[Ferret]

Yeah, I really like the fluff for the various WH games, but actually PLAYING it made me really, really wish that it used shadowrun chargen and advancement.