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I will GM'ing a session of Dark Heresy in the next few weeks and I have a few questions for other GM's. I have DM'd in dungeons and dragons and I was wondering what the best way to approach Dark Heresy as a new GM would be like. Thanks in advance for any help.

I have a lot more role playing in my Dark Heresy games, but then I have a lot more 40k players so they know what they are looking at when I use basic 40k terms. I mainly do this because if they are having nothing but combat encounters thy are going to die very quickly. D&D you are more likely to survive several encounters in a row. Hope this helps.

So more focus on role playing than combat, shouldn't be too different then. Prefer the role playing aspect. However in combat encounters how many mobs would there be against a 3 man party?

Honestly there is a lot that you need to think about before you look at how many of enemies they are facing. I like to have them fight a lot of little crappy enemies sometimes since it makes them feel good about themselves. Then throw in either some trained guys, (bodyguards, paramilitary/military, etc.) or a big guy or 2 (assuming they have the weapons to defeat it, unless you are mean like me). Look at an enemy's intelect and decide whether they will use good tactics like abushes or covering fire, or if they are stupid and such things are beyond their grasp. Just remember it takes a while in order to recover and they can lose limbs and whatnot very easily against a variety of enemies.

The best way to start out with combats in any new system is to start small until you as a GM get the hang of just how lethal the fights can be - and indeed, how well your players know how to use the system. An experienced Dark Heresy player will know to find cover (which makes a HUGE difference to survivability), which weapons to use when, their full range of options (a player who has paid attention to the expanded skills in The Inquisitor's Handbook can be far tougher - the ability to use Dodge to move behind adjacent cover is useful!), how best to advance their character, or indeed, avoid combats in the first place.

Start with a couple of wannabe muggers or some drunkards looking to prove themselves. It'll let your guys learn the ropes of the combat system, and after that, you can start ramping up the difficulty.
Also, you are the GM, so you can adjust fight difficulty on the fly. In the case that a fight wasn't tough enough, some more thugs might turn up, or perhaps it turns out one of them has grenades. But if they get into a brawl in a spaceport and it turns out you've made it too much for them, have the Arbites arrive to break it up.

Obviously, the plot central fights should be pretty brutal, but players won't appreciate TPKs every other session. They can survive death once or twice by burning fate points, but after those are gone, there are no clerics who can cast resurrection. Although, you as a GM can give/replace fate points for especially good roleplaying or just doing something really cool. (A really epic and well roleplayed "death", might, therefore not even cost the player one of their fate points.)

And don't make it to easy for the players to gather minions.

The best way to think of dark heresy is a campaign to remove hidden guilds/cults in a city or whatnot.

Not your standard just go into a goblin cave and kill everything, more like rooting out the assassins guild and finding them consorting with demons.

hpred wrote:And don't make it too easy for the players to gather minions.

Alternatively, dissuade players from gathering too many minions.

If your players want to hire a dozen bodyguards, then make them start to wonder about whether they're all fully loyal, penalise their covert investigations for walking around with half a platoon, and generally have the NPCs screw things up if the players become over-reliant on them. If they start getting in the way enough, the players will stop delegating the holy Emperor's work.
That said, it is definitely useful to have an NPC or two milling around. Occasionally you do need a NPC to point out the bleeding obvious, cover an occasional hole in the group's skill set* or save the PCs from themselves. Just don't let them overshadow the PCs.

*Absence or incompetence in certain Advanced skills can be pretty crippling, at least if you don't rule zero it for the sake of the plot. Big ones can prove to be Literacy, Tech-Use, Language (High Gothic) or the Vehicle skills. It's quite hard to have a group where none of them can read, but it's not that tricky to not have Tech-Use or High Gothic (they do get offered as Basic Skills for Hive or Imperial worlds respectively, but that's still going to result in some problems).
Missing key basic skills doesn't help either. Awareness, Charm and Inquiry are bad ones to have untrained.

The biggest one is probably Tech-Use though. I went out of my way to get my Arch-Militant the Tech-Use skill when part of the group also started a Rogue Trader campaign. Which was fortunate, as the player who was playing our Explorator dropped out very quickly!

Heck, if my players don't want to get certain skills I let them suffer. I do this because I have told them out right that skills are your friend, especially ones that make you smart. If they don't want to listen then hey, it isn't my fault. They've done alright so far. I do agree that having an NPC or 2 isn't a bad thing though.

Sorry if this is considered a bit of a hijack, but I'm set to GM a Dark Heresy game sometime in the next couple months. Have never run an RPG before and am finding all the rules a bit overwhelming. I'm gradually plugging through the core book and have some of it down, but it still seems like I'm going to miss a lot when it comes down to it.

Any advide for what to focus on?

My advice to new players and especially new GMs is not to use all your best ideas first. If you’ve got a killer idea for a campaign and a great story in mind then put it on hold and don’t use it right away. The reason for this is that you and your players will be spending so much energy on just getting the rules right (and you won’t get them right first time or even second time, but don’t worry about that) that they won’t be paying attention to your great story.

My first game involved a simple chase – two characters running away from some bandits/cultists. They had a small bit of interaction with some Interaction Skill Tests, then a brief combat encounter, then some movement (climbing etc.) Tests, then a bit more combat, then some more interaction with another NPC, then the final combat (and then some railroading where I wouldn’t let them get away and threw Genestealers at them until they died... but it was in service to the story... honest!).

I then did another two ‘demo’ games that involved the characters the players would be using, but were set up to be simple ‘one-shot’ scenarios. Once everyone had the rules down we then started the campaign proper.

And don’t worry about getting rules wrong. It took us a year to figure out we were using flamers incorrectly!

Thanks dude, I'll bear that in mind.

So would you recommend crafting a basic story to start with? I was considering going with the Illumination scenario(s) from the rear of the core book.

The illumination mission in the back of the book isn't bad, just make sure you read through it a couple of times before you run it otherwise you will probably get bogged down in what you need the players to do next. Also if people aren't/haven't been paying attention then they will die in the end of the game. There is no question about it since you literally can't kill the end baddie by normal means. The nice thing about this one is that it really spells out how to run the game and gives you a few combats that are easy to run and whatnot.

Thanks. I'll make sure to read it right through. Lots of rules to memorise first