Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey Dakka, so in the near future, I'm going to be the GM for Dark Heresy. It's my first time doing anything with Dark Heresy and I would be grateful for any advice or pointers on running the game. I want to try to make it as smooth and as fun as possible for the players.

Thanks my fellow Dakkans

(It's Dark Heresy 2nd Edition btw)

I can't speak for 2nd edition, as I've only run 1st edition. I know a lot of what gave me trouble in 1st has been changed (psykers, psykers, and fear tests). I recommend you use miniatures for combat sequences. If you have one or more Necromunda sets, those are great as they are multi-level and modular. Explain to your players about the situational bonuses on skill checks (the whole +10 to +60 they can get). My players got discouraged looking at their characters and thinking "I have a 34% in that skill... there is no way I can make that check" until I explained that easy tasks had big bonuses on the roll. A lot of times I wouldn't tell my players if there was a specific bonus to a particular test. I would just have them roll and tell me what they got. If they missed the check by a small amount, I could say "Well, you had a +10 bonus on that, so you succeeded!" This helped to avoid my players getting frustrated at having a low probability of success on a test. For routine skill use ("I'm getting in the car and driving across town") I often wouldn't have them roll at all; just when the use of the skill was directly tied to the outcome of the investigation.

squidhills wrote:
I can't speak for 2nd edition, as I've only run 1st edition. I know a lot of what gave me trouble in 1st has been changed (psykers, psykers, and fear tests). I recommend you use miniatures for combat sequences. If you have one or more Necromunda sets, those are great as they are multi-level and modular. Explain to your players about the situational bonuses on skill checks (the whole +10 to +60 they can get). My players got discouraged looking at their characters and thinking "I have a 34% in that skill... there is no way I can make that check" until I explained that easy tasks had big bonuses on the roll. A lot of times I wouldn't tell my players if there was a specific bonus to a particular test. I would just have them roll and tell me what they got. If they missed the check by a small amount, I could say "Well, you had a +10 bonus on that, so you succeeded!" This helped to avoid my players getting frustrated at having a low probability of success on a test. For routine skill use ("I'm getting in the car and driving across town") I often wouldn't have them roll at all; just when the use of the skill was directly tied to the outcome of the investigation.

Thanks! I guess I am fortunate that most of the group that's going to be playing play call of chtulhu. They are pretty used to getting shat on by the dice gods.

Get comfortable with the system.. as for running the game.. just do what you can.. if you mess things up .. just fix it there and move on..
Remember the players are your heroes of the story.. Just have fun.. I do agree with miniatures, vinyl maps and markers work well too..
Maps help cut down on something I call the teleporting elf syndrome; where someone jumps into any battle no matter where they are in the game..

Now for the bad part... prices for DH since the announcement of Fantasy flight and Games Workshop break up has gone crazy so If you need a book
or your players are looking to buy the main book .. they may get sticker shock..

Do your players know the 40k background ? It is a pretty special universe, you should really explain it to them before.

Don't do like how I did my first DH game:
I let my players buy grenades, one (a priest) had a flamer (I gave him as a special favour, as we were DMing one DH game every week alternately, he wouldn't have enough money/xp to keep with the others).

And the setting were the dark alleys of a hive city, full of mutants.
They killed like tens of mutants without any problem, throwing grenades, shooting bursts of automatic weapons at point blank range and burning them.
So there wasn't enough challenge in this part of the adventure.

You should really restrain grenades, especially in narrow places if your bad guys aren't armored.

My second error was to put ennemies with too much armor: my group had great difficulties to pierce it, and the fight became long and annyoing.

As others said, fear is pretty strong in DH, be careful.

The last one: know what the comptencies of your players are ! My players didn't always know every rule, and I had only 1 book. So, reading every comptency they could take for every character made the characters making pretty long.

(Eventually: I gave them a sheet with all the "combat actions" they could do in a fight, as described in the rulebook. They needed it at the beggining, to know that they couldn't aim and run and shoot, in the same time, etc...).

Dark Heresy is, I think, very simple and intuitive, except maybe for the fight, once you learnt it ,but there are a lot of info at first, so try to prepare yourself, for when one of your player ask you about his competency during a fight, you don't have to look in the rulebook !

They're familiar with 40k universe. A while before I got involved with this RP group, they did a Black Crusade oneshot and apparently had a lot of fun with it.

Thanks for the heads up on the "Do Nots" I'll definitely keep that in mind.

Using enemies with high armor is fine, as long as your players have the resources to mitigate the armor. My first adventure arc involved the players hunting down a Genestealer cult cell (they didn't know that's what it was at first). There was a real live genestealer in the final boss fight. Those guys have high armor and toughness, and the collection of lasguns and shotguns the party had would do exactly feth-all to the thing.

So I made sure that several of the encounters leading up to the boss fight involved the opportunity for the players to obtain weapons capable of harming the 'stealer. One person found a dueling las pistol which had a -4 armor pen (so it negated the 'stealer's armor completely). One person obtained a single magazine of armor piercing rounds for her autopistol. There was even a mono-knife (not a full on sword, just a knife) for anyone with a hankering for melee combat. The genestealer still had 6 points of toughness to fight through (and a truckload of wounds) but 6 points of TB is managable if the players work together and take the thing on as a team.

They won. It still hurt like heck, with a few characters getting reduced to critical wound territory, but the party succeeded.

Also, my group had a 0% understanding of the 40K universe before we started playing. I gave each player a handout that explained what their character would know about the universe, based on their backgrounds (so each player got a different handout). Then I dropped them in the deep end. It's been a lot of fun as a GM, because I can put a clue in the game that the players spend actual time deciphering, instead of taking one look at the clue and immediately knowing who/what is behind this week's conspiracy, like a bunch of 40K fans would do.

squidhills wrote:


Also, my group had a 0% understanding of the 40K universe before we started playing. I gave each player a handout that explained what their character would know about the universe, based on their backgrounds (so each player got a different handout). Then I dropped them in the deep end. It's been a lot of fun as a GM, because I can put a clue in the game that the players spend actual time deciphering, instead of taking one look at the clue and immediately knowing who/what is behind this week's conspiracy, like a bunch of 40K fans would do.

Yeah, I recall when I did a DH game with some players having full knowledge of 40k, and some were newcomers. They managed to understand what was happening too, but unlike the others, they did not got it immediately, it was funny.

Thanks for the advice everyone! Just finished the first session and everyone said they loved it.

Glad to hear it!