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My Plan is to make it more realistic (Note: I haven't had a good read of the rules yet)

This is what I've got so far (with Notes)

1. Take ‘Critical Damage’ from each hit, if wounds are decreased to 0 count it as a 10 on ‘Critical Damage’ and No burning Fate to Survive (Note: This Rule is Because war is Brutal)
2. Unarmed Attack: Class=Melee, Damage=1d5-1, Damage Type=Impact, Pen=0, Special=Primitive + Unwieldy (Unless fighting against an Impact Weapon with the wielder having equal or less strength), (Note: this Follows Normal Damage Rules Not the above rules)
3. Point Allocation for Characteristics (Note: Because Characters would have trained in what they wanted to train in)
4. All Starting Character begin with 100X2d10 (This replaces the 500XP) (Rolled by the G.M. to keep it fair) (Note: Not every one is skilled [But some are])

I cant realy think of anything else to add, any suggests?

Note: I am not looking for players

Taking crit damage to normal wounds and no fate burning will make for short character life.
unarmed combat does more damge, don't know about unwieldy..

#3 and 4 seems to make rather over specialized characters which cannot move behond their respective role

I've been running DH and other stuff for years.

My bit of advice, is less home rules, the better.

As for dealing with burning and crits, just use the crit results. When a character burns to survive, they survive. You decide how.

The various 40k RPGs' rules are cluttered enough - the disadvantage of a rules-heavy system. That being said, if you are able to keep track of everything and you as well as your group feel the houserules make for a more entertaining game, go for it!

Take ‘Critical Damage’ from each hit, if wounds are decreased to 0 count it as a 10 on ‘Critical Damage’ and No burning Fate to Survive

I'd go for a compromise:

#1 Get rid of Wounds entirely
#2 Toughness Bonus acts as a buffer between Crit Levels instead of a "natural armour", soaking a portion of the damage before a hit "jumps" to the next Critical
#3 Only triggered Crit stages are recorded; a new injury is calculated using the last Crit as base
#4 Maintain Fate-Burning

Example for average characters with TB3:

This should result in injuries being far more common and characters not becoming more resilient than the armour they wear, yet still avoid the risk of characters dying to a single bad roll or some such stuff. You have to consider that your players will likely put a lot of thought and effort into creating their characters, yet by making them too vulnerable you are essentially penalising them for spending time coming up with elaborate backgrounds and well thought out personalities, instead promoting the use of cardboard-cutout throwaway avatars that are easy to replace. I'm assuming this may not be what you want - and even war has its heroes that can soldier on in spite of their injuries.

An example using the above houserule:

A lasgun blast hits a character with TB 3 on their poorly armoured leg. After reduction of armour soak, the remaining damage, an impressive 7 points, is applied directly to the Criticals. This immediately triggers the 2nd Critical Injury (1st Crit, Soak, Soak, Soak, 2nd Crit, Soak, Soak = 7 points).
The two Soaks after the 4th Critical don't matter and we just forget about them. Any next injury this NPC receives on this location would be calculated using the 3rd Crit as a base, just like the first hit immediately triggered the 1st Crit. In essence, this ensures that any attack that punches through the armour causes at least one injury, or worsens an existing one.

Just a suggestion, mind you. The above is inspired by Games Workshop's own Inquisitor RPG.

Thanks to All

@Lynata: Nice Rules! mind if I steal ALL of them? (I wont take credit)
@Juraigamer: Thanks, but the group I may be playing with are into a more realistic feel to the game, and taking a bullet to the face and surviving isn't realistic enough for them
@Jex: good point might remove the Point Allocation, but I do like the XP rules

Thanks Again

jessedevaan wrote:@Lynata: Nice Rules! mind if I steal ALL of them?

Go right ahead, that's why I posted them, after all!

Credit goes largely to GW's "Inquisitor"; I merely took their groundwork and applied it to FFG's Dark Heresy, as the "Toughness = Armour" just never felt right. You can check out the Inquisitor rules on the company website - the rulebook is available as a free PDF here!

Note that, although I've been tinkering a lot with such rules, I never actually had an opportunity to playtest them yet. Feel free to report back with how it worked out, and if your players feel this makes for a good game! The "soak" between Crits should make for a good alternative to Wounds and prevent player characters from becoming easy kills, but they ought to be much more likely to incur injuries now, and may end up actually having to get bionics/cybernetic replacements over time - something which I think was never very likely in the original Dark Heresy rules, simply because the gap between "oh, I'm injured" and "KIA" is so very small. With Wounds, player characters just take hit after hit without any mechanical effect, then suddenly once you go into Crits everything turns into instadeaths. Always seemed kind of a waste of the Crit tables to me ...

Oh, also feel free to have the Crit tables start at a higher level for mook enemies if you want combat to appear even more gritty - for example, that an injury is always 2 or 3 levels worse than it'd be for a player character or more important opponents.

Enjoy your game(s)!

LOL sounds like you guys want to play DH 2E.

DH2 made the (imho) mistake of still having Toughness Bonus work like body armour. Which will ultimately mess with high-tier characters and Space Marines just like the old system did. And the new injury calculation just looks like an unnecessarily cluttered mess that has sparked a ton of debate over on the FFG forums.

From all I've read over there, I am rather disappointed in how the new ruleset is turning out. Some interesting/intrigueing new concepts (action points), some good ideas that ultimately do not go far enough or end up taking a wrong turn (getting rid of hitpoints), and a lot of stuff where I just think whyyy (return of talent trees, maintaining the TB armour, getting rid of weapon ranges, lessening the differences between the various types of armour, ... the latter of which is a band-aid directly resulting out of the designers' insistence to stick with the established use of TB).

But then again, it's impossible to please everyone so it was bound to happen that some people would be left behind. For what it's worth, I already lost interest in Dark Heresy over my disappointment in its latest supplements. I'll probably continue to stick to Only War, though. Still the best of FFG's rulesets for me.

I never understood what is so wrong with TB; doesn't the human body resist to shock, shot and cuts? It may function as armour, but it is merely the way the body naturally can resist hits. without it, might as well say that humans are paper thin constructs without any form of natural resistance.

As for DH 2.0 I'm not liking the actions points concept, not to mention the lack of wounds; hello bookkeeping. for the GM...the careers appears actually more strict and limited than with the original DH, especially when ti comes to the 'role' aspect in the cell. No, I thought they would have gone with a Only War ruleset but with the DH background, instead of...that, whatever that is...changing juuust enough that all those books I bought can't be used with it too.

Really a stand alone game without any sure way of connecting it to the previous ones, This is Warhammer Fantasy 3rd ed all over again to me.

I haven't seen the DH2 rulebook and I dont plan to, why? because its expensive, and I have most of the DH1 Books anyway (Which was expensive).

oh and I came up with yet an other rule (That works well with Lynata's Rules), you know how your head is one of the more weak parts of your body, well how about this, if hit in the head, after taking off you head AP off, times the damage by 2, what do you think?

Inquisitor Jex wrote:I never understood what is so wrong with TB; doesn't the human body resist to shock, shot and cuts? It may function as armour, but it is merely the way the body naturally can resist hits. without it, might as well say that humans are paper thin constructs without any form of natural resistance.

It took me a while to come to my current opinion; I think I had no problem with TB either for at least a year if not longer - but the more I got accustomed to the system, the more I noticed how it suffers from how Toughness Bonus is handled.

I certainly agree that the human body should have a natural resistance of some sort. The big problem with Dark Heresy, or at least that's how I perceive it, is that this resistance ends up being way too good compared to actual armour. A naked guy is able to take a knife stab better than a leather jacket? I don't think so. Also, the way TB works is an oversimplification that goes the route of avoiding injuries entirely rather than softening their impact. Realistically, "toughness" should be a representation of the person's bone density, muscles, and how well their body deals with an injury. Instead, it is limited to the skin as if it'd be a form of armour - you either penetrate it (at which point the game ceases to differentiate between a TB2 Hiver wimp and a TB5 Catachan brute) or the person remains completely unharmed.

This is why I like how the Inquisitor RPG approached the subject. You don't shrug off injuries entirely - you get wounded, but your Toughness affects how badly. Because that Catachan brute will be able to deal with a knife stab in a much better way than the Hiver wimp, but they should both still bleed, no?

Apart from the aspect of realism, however, I also noticed how this system makes for larger gaps between characters (TB-focused characters tend to be the fighters, who also tend to wear the heaviest armour) and how this affects gameplay with high-tier characters. Even just donning carapace, you can become entirely invulnerable to las- or autoguns. That just shouldn't happen. And let's not even talk about how this affected FFG's version of Space Marines and how they had to receive specially buffed enemies and weapons to re-balance them, essentially creating a separate tier of gaming instead of making sure that everyone can play next to everybody.

I still remember the thread for the "Purge the Unclean" adventure when someone pointed out how the NPC Space Marine effectively cannot die because the combination of power armour and his TB makes for such a resilient character that the Dark Eldar NPCs have no chance at even injuring him with their "puny" splinter rifles.
And that's also why the Deathwatch RPG had to invent a special Horde mechanic where weapons magically start to become more dangerous as soon as you group 20 guys into a pile instead of handling them as individuals.

What can I say - TB is one of my largest points of criticism, as I see it as a major cause for many issues that pop up throughout the system, and it is so deeply ingrained that you can at best implement band-aids such as the aforementioned Horde mechanic or the "Anti-Unnatural" Felling trait rather than addressing it directly.

The 2nd Edition could have finally fixed this. Instead, this is one of the few things they didn't touch.

Inquisitor Jex wrote:As for DH 2.0 I'm not liking the actions points concept, not to mention the lack of wounds; hello bookkeeping.

I dunno. At first I was sceptical, but the more I think about it ... it's not that different compared to the old "you have X actions", except that you basically have 4 Minor Actions now.
I'm intrigued enough to be willing to give it a try before issuing my final verdict.

Agreed about the rest tho. :/

 Lynata wrote:
looks like an unnecessarily cluttered mess that has sparked a ton of debate over on the FFG forums

Sounds like you've read the debate instead of the rules. I participated in it here and there and I can tell you it was mostly sound+fury.

Manchu wrote:Sounds like you've read the debate instead of the rules. I participated in it here and there and I can tell you it was mostly sound+fury.

It's true - I'm relying mostly on second-hand descriptions as I didn't want to shell out any money just to take a look at a playtest. That being said, I believe that I've got a pretty good idea on certain issues now, thanks to both the discussions on the forums as well as the free errata PDFs. Of course, it would be a fair point to say that I've only seen the controversial topics ... but even so, whilst I am quite open to the idea of action points, the new combat rules just fail to sound promising to me. Stacking damage modifiers based on existing injuries? While I like the thought behind it (and indeed, this is an important element of the houserules I posted above) I just think it could have been solved more elegantly...
Especially when you consider that the modifier may be bigger than the actual damage that would have been applied. I could see how a clever GM could work around weird results, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this level of abstraction.

I guess you could say it looks as if DH2 tries to be both simpler as well as more complicated simultaneously. But maybe I'm just disappointed that I see one of the most critical issues being ignored again - and indeed possibly made worse, given how armour protection has been lowered in comparison to DH1.

To be fair to you, reading the beta did not help a lot of people on this point. But it's actually a simple hang up. We are used to thinking in certain terms about damage; namely, that damage is a function of the weapon used to inflict it and more importantly that damage is a matter of peeling back HP. But in DH2E, this is not really the case. There is no more damage in that sense, the sense of Wounds/HP. Instead, damage is a function of narrative. That narrative is guided by entries on a table. The higher the entry's number, the more grave the narrative result. And that means the more things have already gotten bad for you in the narrative, the worse things will continue to get. You might say, DH2E is more focused on the role play than the roll play even while retaining a rules-heavy tone.

Ah, that's not really my beef with it. My own houserule I suggested earlier (largely stolen from the Inquisitor RPG) uses a more narrative approach as well in ditching hitpoints and instead applying injuries directly. And just like with DH2, existing injuries would mean that new ones would worsen the specific location's condition. I'm just saying I consider DH2's approach more clunky, less elegant: In Inquisitor, you only record the current injury level, since any new injury will start from that one. DH2 on the other hand forces you to record every single injury individually, together with a note on whether it was a normal or a critical one, because there's two different modifiers to them. So, more bookkeeping.

Also, ~20 different critical effects? I'm not sure this was necessary. The 10 effects in DH1 were too much already, simply because you'll end up skipping so many of them. Inquisitor manages to put every wound effect for every location on a single page - in DH1, you need to go from page to page to look them up all the time, and since DH2 has more effects, you have even more browsing pages involved, all of which takes away time from the game and its pace.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the level of detail, and I loved the wound tables when Dark Heresy first came out - but nowadays, ever since I've developed a "back to the roots" kind of preference for lighter rule systems like Dragon Age, I just feel they don't actually achieve much other than filling pages and stealing time by taking the GMs hand where otherwise he or she would be expected to come up with their own descriptions of how a weapon affects the target location rather than repeating the elaborate text in the book.

That's just minor nitpicking, though... at least compared to the Toughness Bonus issue.

Hey Lynata (or anyone with a good idea for this) how do Sound Constitution(s) work with your rule?

My idea was to add 'Wounds' with it, as in you have to lose those wounds before starting to use the table above (however TB still does not give you armour), what are your thoughts?

I'd have left out Sound Constitution entirely and have players buy normal Con if they want to become tougher.
I've never been a fan of special talents magically unlocking things that by their very description depend only on the basic physique. A good constitution is a good Toughness score. And if you want a bulging biceps you better buy more Strength.

However, if you do want to keep Sound Constitution, I see two options:
#1 the Wounds you mentioned (basically serving as "ablative armour" then) or
#2 add more "soak" between the wound levels (see below)

For #2 I'd perhaps suggest a mechanic where damage-to-injury calculation is modified by -1 (cumulative with each rank of Sound Constitution) after an attack punches past the first injury. Each attack that goes through armour will still cause at least one injury, but Sound Constitution may stop it from reaching the next injury level. In essence, it works like an additional point of soak as applied by Toughness Bonus, but it is applied only once and not for each "layer" between the different injury levels.

Depending on how many ranks of Sound Constitution you would allow them to buy, this could eventually allow people to get close to Marine levels of resilience, so I'd probably cap it somewhere around 2-3. Would be suitable for a Catachan tho!

Your idea is probably a bit more elegant and allows for less messy calculations (the more exceptions you insert into a mechanic, the more you increase both the time it takes to use it as well as the risk of mistakes).

Thanks

can anyone think of how to make the head weaker?
some things I thought where good are:
A. Double Damage too head (After Armour)
B. 1/2 TB for head (Round up or down?)
C. Knocked unconscious if takes more than TB Damage too head (After Armour)

any other ideas?

Another idea would be to houserule the damage tables entirely. In the Inquisitor game, the Head section simply had fewer crit levels than other locations, resulting in it not being able to withstand as much punishment. If I recall correctly, the head location had only 4 injury levels with the final one being an automatic death, whereas the other limbs had 5 and the final crit would still allow the character to test toughness to avoid dying right away...

However, this would begin to get a bit complicated for a simple tweak to the damage rules, almost developing into a complete write of the core rules. It's something I've got stuck in the back of my head as part of a thorough conversion using Only War as a base, but I suppose it may be too much to force into a standard DH game just like that?

From the options you listed, I'd probably go with double damage. Realistically, halving TB would be more accurate, but in the end it's pretty much the same effect and double damage may be a little easier to calculate (no rounding up/down).

Thanks Again!!!!

This is what I'll be using for my games
- Divide all Characters Starting Wounds by 10, rounding down
- No damage soak from TB
- All Limbs are calculated differently for the purpose of Damage
- When rolling on Critical Wounds Toughness Bonus acts as a buffer between Crit Levels, soaking a portion of the damage before a hit "jumps" to the next Critical (Note this still stacks), eg. Kaltos (TB 3), takes 2 Damage to the left leg, so gets a critical of 1 (1st, Soak), he then gets an additional 7 Damage to the left leg so gets a critical of 3 (Damage from before [1st, Soak], Soak, Soak, 2nd, Soak, Soak, Soak, 3rd)
- Take Double Damage too Head (After Armour)