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Being a psyker is even more unforgiving. You are a walking time bomb of scolding hot marrow and bone fragments.

Grot 6 wrote:

Like charging headlong into the pack of mutants, or knuckling up with the Dark Emesary type cult leader.

[

My Space Wolf Blood Claw did this....lets just say a Boltgun Rounds chew through cultists and when charging a Cult leader matching Chainsword and Chainaxe to his fists was more than enough, the chain sword having carved out his chest and the axe took his head off, haven't finished the mission yet but within the first two floors he has killed 10 cultists and 2 Magi while suffering Minor damage himself(due to implants and power armor) but mostly i agree don't rush baddies it tends to end badly and normally for your character

If the fluff and universe of 40K interests you, I highly recommend trying Dark Heresy. Some tips for the way:

- Combat is deadly. PC´s have some extra tricks over common grunts but that doesn´t mean you are invulnerable. Use your brains, make use of cover and suprise. And most importantly don´t start unnecessary fights. Dying for the God-Emperor is easy, its the living and serving that is difficult.

- Keep an eye on the party Psyker. He can be an invaluable asset to your group but he is also the only class that is capable of causing TPK all by himself.

- Don´t underestimate non-combat skills and talents. Depending on your GM and the campaign, most of the time you should not be walking around crying "Imperial Inquisition" and shooting Xenos/Heretics/Mutants. Instead you most likely are undercover trying to find out leads to some case causing concern to your Inquisitor. A whispered discussion here and a small bribe there will get you further ( at least initially ) than raising an unholy ruckus by beating people up.

- You are not the Inquisitor. Unless your boss has given your group somekind of letter/dataslate/whatever that indicates your status as his servants, you are effectively on your own. You have as much authority as your boss seems fit to delegate, which for most low-ranking Acolytes ranges from zero to very minimal. Good luck trying to bully the Sector Admiral in his own office by claiming to be the Inquisition with nothing to back you up!

Do not "pretend" in game to worship ANY of the Chaos gods alternatively never infiltrate a cult. It always will end badly.


The best way to stay alive is as characters find a quiet peaceful planet and settle down and hide from the inquisitors but hten you will probably die of rickets or exploding head sydrome or something.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Who uses miniatures to play it?

That's the way I intend to run it, and have since been gathering every tileset (Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest, D&D, etc.) I could get my hands on.

I remember The D6 Generations review where it said that the enjoyment was determined heavily by the GM, and his willingness to make people roll on tables all the time, and generally how willing he is to be 'fair' to the players - and moreso than other games with a GM because there are so many tables and the characters start off as really pathetic losers who can't hit anything.

Using minis for combat is a great way to play. We've all been tasked with finding, converting or creating the perfect mini for our characters. I'm just going to use that finely sculpted Naval officer by Juan Diaz as my Adept stand-in while the girl is going for one of those privateer press females from the mercenaries range for her assassin.

I love DH. Just finished running the adventure in Cults of the Dark Gods. It turns out the Slaugh, ridiculously tough and powerful they may be, are no match for a melta gun.

Oh, and a biomancer with Seal Wounds can really save the party's bacon. Unless he gets possessed by a demon. My psyker almost did, and the demonhost I'd rolled up ahead of time was sick sick sick. Luckily he made his re-roll from resist possession.

I've been DM'ing DH since it came out and WFRP second edition from almost the time of its release.

Most of the points here are pretty correct, IMO. Here are some pieces of advice I'd offer to potential PC's:

1) Equipment is a great leveller. Gear yourself up for a task, specialise in any skill required and you will massively increase your chances of success. Get good gear when you can.

2) Psykers should play it cautious. Flinging fireballs all over the place is fun, but it will only pay off for so long. If you build your psyker right, you can eventually bust out any power in the game on one dice, so the risk reduces as you go up in career ranks. Also, remember that the bloody Fear minor power works on your team-mates too - every single group I've DM'd for has made this mistake once.

3) In fact, everyone should play it cautious. People do overexaggerate the lethality of DH, but death is still pretty inevitable if you act rashly or stupidly. Make sure and use cover whenever it's available.

Remember that grim humour is very much a part of 40k. DH turns up the GRIMDARK even more than the normal game, so don't be afraid to laugh at the hideous misfortune that befalls your beloved character.

"Do you have your characters?"
"Yes"
"Good, they're all dead! Do you have your next characters?"
"Yes."
"Good, they're all insane. AND dead."

...as the old CoC joke goes...

I'd advise also that when dealing with meltabombs/democharges, assume your character is holding the living head of a psyker who is actively drawing on the power of the warp. If you fumble, the results are about the same...

I am the GM of a Dark Heresy group, too. We had a voidborn psyker who got hit by a zombie with a crowbar. He lost 9 of 10 wounds due to a critical hit on his leg! Crowbars are now a kind of running gag in the group.

Yeah. I remember I had a ten-minute sesh with some lads at the local store.

I ended up trapped behind a box, with no ears.

sA

I've been running DH since a few days after it came out. I own all of the books. It's amazing. Every once in a while I notice that I'm FINALLY playing a FREAKING 40K RPG and I get very happy... my players then suffer massively for it.

I've waited 20 years for it, written many adaptations (40Kd20.2 (d20 Modern), 40Kd20.1 (DragonStar), GURPS Necromunda (um...GURPS), and Inquisitor HERO) and this beats them all. Hands down the best I've seen.

Fluff, Speed, Customization, Character Options, MONSTERS, DAEMONS and ORKS. If you aren't playing this as a fan of 40K, then I suggest professional help.

Disciples of the Dark Gods is the best RPG supplement ever written. I've been playing since the age of 16 (I'm nearly 43 now) and I've played just about everything. I do not say this lightly or in jest, but as a serious gamer with too much time and money on his hands... buy it... play it.

I'll go againt the tide here..

I bought the book and really, really wanted to like it. Unfortunately the game as written is allmost unplayable. Default difficulties are too high (even for a supposedly highly skilled character). The weapons chart is completely wrong, Autoguns are somehow the best weapon. The advance charts are a mess, and class balance is non-existant. Psykers completely dominate the game once they pick up a discipline, and for the most part their drawbacks effect the entire group.

I found it allmost impossible to run.

I'm running (and playing) D&D4E now, really it has spoiled me.

Neil wrote:I bought the book and really, really wanted to like it. Unfortunately the game as written is allmost unplayable.

By my actions I have proved that untrue.

Default difficulties are too high (even for a supposedly highly skilled character).

You have to run a different game at the start than you do at the end. I don't know how you were playing this but it's more than possible to run an appropriate adventure for starting characters.

The weapons chart is completely wrong, Autoguns are somehow the best weapon.

At the start, possibly. They contest with reliable las weaponry and extremely powerful shotguns. The main advantage is the rate of fire which in my experience is not that huge a bonus. In many cases suppressive fire is a wiser choice. The Handbook adds more detailed weapons charts.

The advance charts are a mess, and class balance is non-existant. Psykers completely dominate the game once they pick up a discipline, and for the most part their drawbacks effect the entire group.

Agreed, psykers are the most powerful class. However, this is partly counterbalanced by their higher risk factor. I don't think the gap is as big as you are making out - in my games everyone has usually brought different things to the table at different points, and it's been extremely rare for one player to dominate (I often run scenarios with specific restrictions, as is, IMO, appropriate for DH).

I'm not trying to get all fanboy here, don't get me wrong, but I do wonder if you're approaching the game from a different viewpoint to most of us. If it's not for you then fair enough. I play and GM 4e extensively and it has in no way ruined me for DH.

I agree with Mysh, if you come at it trying to play it like it's 4e, it does not work. Though I find the idea of a 4e player complaining about party imbalance funny when I see nukeawizrds in 4e totally dominating...

So far I've run a game, as well as played a SoB, a guardsman, and a psyker (surprisingly it was not me that caused the TPK, either... LOL)

While I agree, psykers are pretty powerful in the game, it's not game breaking. Of the five I've seen played, two were killed by warp effects, one by a nervous guardsman player who thought that the psyker was about to do a 'eadbang, and one by a fumble with a demo charge by another player. Ironically only the demo charge caused TPK.

the fifth one is still alive so far... but likes to skirt corruption a little too much... which is making the rest of the party a bit worried...

H.B.M.C. wrote:Who uses miniatures to play it?

That's the way I intend to run it, and have since been gathering every tileset (Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest, D&D, etc.) I could get my hands on.

I remember The D6 Generations review where it said that the enjoyment was determined heavily by the GM, and his willingness to make people roll on tables all the time, and generally how willing he is to be 'fair' to the players - and moreso than other games with a GM because there are so many tables and the characters start off as really pathetic losers who can't hit anything.

I do and I converted a whole party of miniatures for the seven (!) players in my group. I even got my wife to paint her figure. We use a D&D battle mat that one of the gamers brings. When there is a combat I set it up and use random figures for whoever the bad guys are.

Our group is a mix of 3.5/4th ed D&D players and 40k players with little RPG experience, and my wife who is neither. So far none of the PC's have died (though one is dangerously close right now as we head into the final confrontation) and the combat is brutal but fate points are a good evener (my group mainly uses them to heal damage). The critical damage charts are hilarious, and have resulted in my wife's character (an arbitrator) basically swinging her club like a baseball bat into two enemies and knocking them several feet away, the feral guardsman with the axe causing so much blood that he and the arbitrator slipped in the gore, heads being removed with horror movie geyser effects, and ammunition/grenades being cooked off and damaging those around. I've never GM'd before and haven't played any RPG's since Junior High so I'm using the stock adventure from the book but everyone is having a blast and heading in to the last phase of the adventure they are still arguing over who the real bad guy is!

The starting difficulty can be high but the GM can compensate by making things auto-pass or by lowering the difficulty by making a test Routine (+30), Ordinary (+20), etc.

Dear God that looks awesome

Ozymandias wrote:The starting difficulty can be high but the GM can compensate by making things auto-pass or by lowering the difficulty by making a test Routine (+30), Ordinary (+20), etc.

Sounds cool Ozy.

And as to the comment above, as I said before, the D6 Generation guys basically said that the game is very GM dependant, so if he lowers the difficulty of things it can make things more fun because the characters won't be failing all the damn time.

Yeah, I have to keep reminding the D&D players that this isn't a dungeon crawl game. You don't get loot, you can't steal each other's xp by getting the kill, etc.

Often, I'll just tell them to roll and then tell them the modifier after the roll. So they roll and say, "I failed..." or "I passed!" in which case I apply the modifier to tell them what actually happened.

I think some discipline in tests in also required. Considering a 'routine' driving test might very well be piloting a familiar vehicle to the town centre, I do not make my players test to see if their civillian land speeder or steam wagon plummets into the crowd in a fireball of death. Obviously I'm using hyperbole, but you get the idea. If they are in a rush I MAY use such a test to determine the time they spend getting there, depending on the circumstances.

I haven't bothered with any of that. I only make them test if failing/passing is relevant. So driving to a town, no test. Driving in difficult circumstances that may disable the vehicle and force them to walk, yeah, I'll make them test that.

Ozymandias wrote:I haven't bothered with any of that. I only make them test if failing/passing is relevant. So driving to a town, no test. Driving in difficult circumstances that may disable the vehicle and force them to walk, yeah, I'll make them test that.

That's sort of what I was trying to get across. You explain it much better than I can.

As a DM for a variety of games (L5R, oWoD, nWoD, D&D 3/3.5/4, Scion, M&M, Spycraft, and a few others) I have to say that DH was one of the more enjoyable ones I've run. (hell, it was one of the few RPGs that entertained and motivated my players before we got the book. See below.) Granted, I had little time when I played, so I mostly ran with prepared adventures, but my characters still had a blast.

A resource that I found to be invaluable? Dark Reign. If you're unaware, it's a site devoted to fan-made Dark Heresy material, and most of it is pretty good.

My favorite DH story came from my party facing the final boss in the prepared adventure in the core rulebook. They'd made it through the adventure with no players lost, and finally, they came to the big ritual thingie (trying to keep spoilers to a minimum), well, the BBEG's minions are getting some smack down laid on them, and are dabbling in it themselves. (I think one NPC was skilled by the shrapnel from their ally's skull.) And it comes down to the final moment, and the psyker lashes out...and gets possessed by a daemonhost. Suddenly, the rest of the players see the psyker burst into flames, and it starts raining blood. They do the smart thing, and RUN. The psyker starts to hunt them down, after handily destroying the BBEG ("I'm the monster now!") and one of them pulls off a daring trick, which sadly escapes me atm, which results in the psyker "dying" (he'd be conscious again in a few days, the daemon repairing him) and with only the one member still alive, but bleeding out.


(The entertainment and motivation I mentioned early: my friend group and I were pretty big RPG and 40k nerds, so when we heard DH was coming, we immediately set our eyes on it. The problem: no store in 30 miles of us had it! (we lived in small town in western Washington.) So we wound up having to take a ferry to Seattle, to go to our default comic and rpg store. Nothing. We go to the Barnes and Noble a few blocks up. Nada. At this point, we've spent 3 hours trying to get what we figured would take 1. So we commit. We aren't going home until we get this damn book. another 2 hours go by before we find the book, 5 copies no less, in a Barnes and Noble in northern seattle. We do so in time to head back, and take the last ferry going back, and wound up needing a taxi to get home.)

Actually, it looks exactly like Rolemaster!

Expecially with the uber crit charts.

Nice.

Well, my group finished their game. They managed to survive with a few critically injured. They're already looking forward to the next one!

Would you kindly view this thread.


http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/228672.page


Hopefully it can help.


My professional Opinion: Graet reading material. AN dif someone's being a jerk or has broken into your house, makes for some great blunt force trauma!


Allow me to tell you of the first time I DMed.

Place: Old factory, 40 meters long, 35 meters across. Two large, burnt out shells of machines are fifteent feet away from the entrances, which are at the ends of the factory. On the right inside wall of the building is a staircase leading up to a cat walk. My charatcer, an Assasin, and my teachers, an Arbitor, start at opposite ends. I make a move to run up the steps and get a good view of the building. He rushes to one of the shells to take cover. I open fire with my hunting rifle. It clips part of the machine, and sends soem shrapnel into my opponents arm. He gets tetnus and dies, but not before throwing a knife, which strikes a bolt holding up the catwalk. It collapses underneath me, and I fall. My groin is impaled on a shaft of metal, and I bleed out.

No joke.

I change my mind.

Dark Heresy has more in common with Paranoia than anything else.

Now now, friend citizen, you know full well you and the entire team can die during the breifing in Paranoia. Even Dark Heresy isn't that bad.

The game systems do bear a resembelance, but I'm sticking with Call of Cthulhu. You make the same mistake in either game (try fighting everything that moves) and you die. If you're really lucky you might get to go nuts or get infected by some gribbly beast from a different dimension.

So is playing a Psyker worth it? I'd love to be a Techpriest, but zapping everyone sounds like a lot of fun.

If you like being a walking bomb that can take out the rest of the party at really awkward times, then go on ahead. Psykers can be fun to play.

Blow up my party? Hmm...

Dickery ahoy.