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So, I'm about to start my first game of Dark Heresy with a bunch of strangers at a FLGS near me.

I was just wondering as a player, what sort of characters have people found worked best? Or, what was your favourite set-up?

I have a few ideas I'm balancing (although, they might get completely scrapped by the time we start):

-Feral World Guardsman.
A typical 'Big muscles, little brain' character. Built for smashing faces and kneecaps with little regard for logic or talking. Because, who needs to talk when your fists are big enough to talk for everyone?

-Hive World Scum
I'm thinking along the lines of a quick-witted, silver-tongued criminal. The diplomatic route is one I've never been down before (I've usually gone for the big idiots, because I like my characters to live), so I thought it'd be interesting. However, I was thinking of going on a 'Green Hornet' style, making a small gang that specifically targets other gangs in order to make a place safer.

-Void Born Tech-Priest
I also thought this would be an interesting concept. Going for a usually 'support' style character. The Driver, the demo-man - he's the guy that preps everyone's equipment.

Thoughts? Critiques? General ideas and things to watch out for?

Something that a lot of people don't really look into is the knowlege skills. In the group I am running they suffer sometimes simply because they don't have any forbiden lore/scholastic lore amongst them. As far as those builds they should be pretty good, the tech priest can't be a face anyway so having him be void-born doesn't hurt. Feral guard are pretty cool and hive scum is really good if he is going to be a charmer.

Be a rebel - play an Adept!

But seriously, there are a bunch of various builds. I tend to favour Arbites as they can do a lot of everything. The Awareness and Search skills are very useful.

The Foot wrote:Something that a lot of people don't really look into is the knowlege skills. In the group I am running they suffer sometimes simply because they don't have any forbiden lore/scholastic lore amongst them. As far as those builds they should be pretty good, the tech priest can't be a face anyway so having him be void-born doesn't hurt. Feral guard are pretty cool and hive scum is really good if he is going to be a charmer.

Knowledge? Thoroughly noted.
Both my Scum and Tech-Priest ideas could have some knowledge in various things. I'm also glad you think they're playable. However, what's a 'face'? Never heard that term before. >w>

H.B.M.C. wrote:Be a rebel - play an Adept!

But seriously, there are a bunch of various builds. I tend to favour Arbites as they can do a lot of everything. The Awareness and Search skills are very useful.

I usually go for search, mostly from my days from DnD, when my DM would always hide things in various rooms. But noted on the Awareness skill!

Guess I should've been more specific. A face character is anyone that will have good felowship so he can act as the "face" of the group. So if you feel like interacting with a lot of NPCs then bring up those charm and intimidate skills. If the group you are going to be working with is just going to be a bunch of gun wielding psychopaths then diplomacy goes away really quick though.

Ahh fair enough.
I'll probably try and make my character last, if I can. Then I can see if everyone else has made Berserker-style warriors, I can make my Scum to be a diplomatic character.

As I found in DnD; there are only so many heads you're able to crack to solve a problem. But a silver-tongue always seemed to work.

Unfortunately, I was always the head-cracker and never the diplomat, so often just wanted to kill people.

Make sure you have some armour or the ability to dodge.

This is DH and the world's smoothest talker will still end up in a firefight before too long.

Ah fair enough.

What weapons are good to invest in?

generally speaking there arent to many "BAD" weapons imho.

Though, it depends alot on what you are fighting and what rank you are. Solid Projectile training opens up alot more possibilities to you in my opinion then going las training. Though, Lasguns and all their variants are trustworthy and dependable.

Melee, As long as it's mono you are good. Combat attachments turn your gun into a "spear", which is always good. Unless you plan on going mostly melee, then swords. (but mono is a must) till you get Chain & Power weapons.

Grenades are also fairly useful. Oh and flame weapons for those who can't aim are great too.

How viable is two weapon fighting? Either two blades or two las pistols or something? =3

Wolfun wrote:How viable is two weapon fighting? Either two blades or two las pistols or something? =3

It is very viable. The two pistols user can fire with penalties and use the pistols in melee. Two blades gives you one more attack in melee and you are harder to completely disarm. You can also take dual shot or dual strike, allowing you to combine your weapons damage, creating a killing blow against your target.

If you have the agility to pull it off, then go right ahead and dual wield.

The one thing to remember is that two-weapon fighting is reliant on a number of Talents that will make life difficult if you don't have them. Ambidextrous is easily the most necessary of these, as you'd imagine, but the Two-Weapon Wielder Talents and things like Gunslinger or Dual Shot and so on are also all very necessary.

That's good to know. I've always preferred two weapons over a single one. More attacks ftw.

If I go Scum, I think Ambidextrous is a talent you can start off with - so I might go that way. I'm liking the thought of a Silver-tongued Gunslinger more and more.

Scum are one of the few career types that can get Gunslinger at any reasonable rate. Gunslingers become very dangerous in short ranged fights.

Keep in mind though, you don’t have to pick between one weapon or two weapons. You can do both. In our last game one of our Assassins had two pistols that she used for any sort of close-ranged combat, but then broke out a nice crossbow for sniper duty. It’s also possible to have very well rounded characters, such as the Arbite in our main campaign who is lethal at range and in HTH.

Thanks for the tips guys. It's happening in a few hours, so I'll let you know how it went - and if I need any more pointers! =)

We had a great time. Unfortunately it took almost 3 hours to design our characters due to book restrictions. Especially when two other guys had nigh 0 knowledge of the 40k universe - so we had to brief them.

I've gone for a Hive Worlder Scum, as the others went for a Forgeworld Guardsman, a Forgeworld Techpriest and a Shrineworld Cleric.

I've already managed to annoy the other characters by looting the corpses we found in the Space Station we docked at (after spending three days locked in a shuttle - we could have got out but the Techpriest decided to rip spare parts out of the interface for himself).
However, I got a nice pair of Common quality boots - much better than my poor streetware boots.

Unfortunately we ended on a cliffhanger; we entered a Cargobay, the lights turned on and it was covered in blood. All of us bar the Cleric took an insanity point.

Sounds good wolfun, make sure you know were and use cover when available in combat! So long as your cleric doesn't just charge stuff all the time, you guys should be doing just fine with that setup.

Look into what the tactical advance and overwatch actions are in the rulebook btw, if you haven't already.

We have quite a varied group now. We had the addition of a Psyker and an Assassin today.

We even got some combat. I outdid even the guardsman by insta-killing two Mutants, before killing two others. The Guardsman missed every single on of his shots. It was mildly amusing.

It's not specifically Dark Heresy related, but our Deathwatch game went swimmingly yesterday. Several massive fights against the Tyranids, put my guys in serious peril of dying for the first time ever (had a few of them in criticals for quote some time) and even managed to kill one of them using a [REDACTED].

He burnt fate to come back, but it was great fun.

Also, learned a new lesson:

Vortex of Doom is a scary power. The fact that they just keep moving around sucking stuff into the Warp is frightening. They also seemed to follow our Dark Angel Dev player around - no matter where he ran to they'd always come after him.

Well mates, it looks like we too are about to embark on a Dark Heresy adventure at my local FLGS. Tonight was our normal 40k night and one of the more hard core gents made some comments as I picked up a copy of Black Crusade.

Long story short, he mentioned he had Dark Heresy and Radical's Handbook but never a chance to play as nobody wanted to do. Well, that was the wrong comment to make because we now have a group getting ready to start.

So, any advice on what character to go for? I do not wish to be a hack and slash gunslinger. He only had the Radical's handbook available, but Hive Mutant or Voidborn sounded intriguing. Penal Legionaire or Warp Dabbler seemed like nice combinations with that.

Any advice, input, whatever? Please keep in mind I have not played an RPG like this in 20 years. So I am nervous getting back into and excited at the same time.

Regards,

You've said what you don't want your character to be, how about what you do want your character to be?

You could be a somewhat heretical adept type guy. In fact, adept works best with tons of forbidden lore. Makes for that kinda quiet guy that just happens to know way more than he lets on. Plus you can make a psycher later on.

Well, that's the real trick, now isn't it?

I don't really know that much about the game other than what I gleaned from flipping through the Radical's Handbook and Black Crusade last night. The only thing I don't want to be is someone who just fights and that's all they do. I am more interested in a character with other abilities that make them more useful. The adept above sounds interesting. But, not really knowing what is available makes it difficult to choose.

I am really open to anything however and just looking for input on what people have found to be the most fun (in their opinion).

Thanks.

There are a few classes open to you if you don't want to just fight. Tech-Priest, Adept, Psyker, Cleric, and Scum are all classes that you can play without just having to max out your killing skills. Scum maybe less so since they are more about back stabbing type tactics. They do have a lot of good social skills and a little bit of knowledge that can add a lot to a group.

Scum actually sounds right up my alley. I am not against fighting, I just don't want it to be a straight up fair fight is all. I am 100% down with stabbing people in the back. I will have to look into that. The adept also sounds intriguing from what I have read on the forums as well.

Thanks.