Quote from: Hubert Farnsworth;282876Firstly how many of us have time to write our own campaigns and adventures from scratch?

Who said anything about doing it yourself?  As I pointed out, there's sites out there, Dark Reign in particular, chock full of material better done than the "official" examples.

QuoteIn fact most of the published adventures are not badly written - quite the opposite from a literary POV - but several are unplayable because the character levels they are written for (starting PCs with a few hundred to a couple of thousand XPs) are completely outclassed by the opponents and challenges included.  

If an adventure written for a game is unplayable, it's a badly written adventure.  Don't play semantics with me, I don't have the patience for it, so you'll only disappoint yourself.

QuoteYour second point is so general to be meaningless - yes any fan can fix a problem - however for those of us who have jobs and lives in the real world it would be nice if you could invest £100 or $200 in a set of books and have a game that is playable without massive houseruling.

Again, so don't do it yourself, and don't spend money on shitty books.  

This is a problem with it's own solution, you clearly just want something to bitch about.

Quote from: RPGPundit;282867Except its not the same, and you know it.
The closer comparison might be like playing someone akin to a regional employee without agent status; in DH its not like you're playing a "young, rookie" inquisitor, much less a trained and authorized agent with experience; the group's NPC inquisitor is the equivalent of the "Field agent", your character are at best the equivalent of the 3rd world banana republic cops the guy might comandeer to do some of his dirty work.
Not only do you NOT play the inquisitor in the game, you can NEVER get to be the inquisitor in the game.



I've read the book; your analogy above is disingenuous.

RPGPundit

You're confusing scales.  By the book, many of the Inquisitors don't even do their own field work, and have massive networks of operatives scattered across their assigned sector.  Each individual inquisitor is essentially it's own intelligence agency, entirely autonomous to each other's agencies, and answering only to segmentum-wide Lord Inquisitors, or even Terra itself, depending on the influence of a given inquisitor.

And besides which, if that premise really bothers you so fucking much, there's nothing whatsoever in the actual rules preventing you from just doing something else with it, or you could always just wait for Rogue Trader or Deathwatch, but I'd be patient unless you're just looking for an excuse to rage, on account of right now they're on a pretty tight staff at the moment, and releases for Warhammer RPGs are generally sparse and well spread out.

Oh trust me, I'm not in a hurry to see them release two more incomplete micro-games that butcher the setting that could have been the best Sci-fantasy RPG ever.

RPGPundit

I'm the one just looking for something to bitch about?

Its you who is taking contradictory positions just for the sake of it.

Funny how every 40K thread seems to end up this way.

I blame the heretics.

Damn it! I had this huge post, and now it's all erased. Crap.

I'll just say that I would have preferred it if the publisher had devised a single volume showcasing the entire Warhammer 40k universe in one tome, and then created supplements from there. It would have opened up so many more possibilities. I also enjoyed the career system from WFRP 2e much more than the career system in Dark Heresy. Basically, I'll happily plunder Dark Heresy for ideas, though I'll probably never play it as written.

Quote from: kryyst;282309WFRP characters and DH characters have pretty much the same number of skills/talents.  You have no issue with one but a HUGE problem with the other.  You are contradicting yourself.  

I like the little digs, they are fun late at night.

Sorry it took me a week to get back to you but I've been busy so I didn't have a convienent chance to actually provide a 'backed by the research' rebuttal.

This is simply not true and easily proveable.

I picked an utterly random WHFRP career (charcoal burner) and counted the skills (seven, with a total of 11 choices available in either/or catagories).

I compared this with the 'highly educated' career of the Adept. Five skills. Pretty close. Then to the Assassin Career: Two Skills.

TWO!

Mind you in both the 40k careers, one of the skills was essentially 'Language:Common', unlike the fantasy career, where I assume language was a given.  

So... No. You do NOT get the same number of starting skills. Took ten minutes of actually looking in the books on my way out the door this morning.   Hell, if you add the 400 xp starting acolytes get (which, mind you, is one of my complaints about the failure of the system design...) Assassins are STILL short a skill from a basic starting career from fantasy, and that's being generous and allowing the ability to speak the primary language of the setting (low gothic) to count!

Less.Than.Zero.

Totally forgot about this thread.

But yet again you are off base.

If we look at WFRP racial package and compare them to DH backgrounds they are about the same each get a few skills and a few traits.  

If we look at careers though the average WFRP character starts out with 7 and 2 or 3 talents.  DH characters on the other hand average about 3 or 4 skills and 4 talents on average.  WFRP characters get 1 free advance and DH characters start with 400xp.  Which means if you work it out WFRP start out around 1050xp DH characters start out with around 1150xp.

In your Charcoal Burner vs Assassin example.  The DH assassin only has 2 skills, but gets 5 talents where as the Charcoal burner has 2.

The quantity of skills/talents for starting careers in both games is a wash.

Disagree. First of all most of those "Talents" are assumed abilities in WHFRP, namely the ability to use common weapons.  Its assumed that people can whack shit or shoot shit with their base attributes, and 'talents' only apply to more unusual weapons.

In DH, EVERYTHING is an unusual weapon, including bashing a guy with a rock (Melee weapons: primative)... that require their own talents.

Thus the number of starting talents is inflated to 'fix' this.

Fair enough All WFRP characters have access to Common Weapons Ordinary so they can uses hand weapons and a few ranged weapons.  So at best your arguing over the equivalent of 100xp - Bravo.

Quote from: kryyst;283579Fair enough All WFRP characters have access to Common Weapons Ordinary so they can uses hand weapons and a few ranged weapons.  So at best your arguing over the equivalent of 100xp - Bravo.

But WFRP and DH XPs do not have a 1:1 exchange rate

All advances in WFRP cost 100 XPs whether they are to attributes, skills or talents

Advances in DH cost between 100 XPs and 2,500 XPs depending on who is advancing what.

Give a WFRP character 6,000 XPs and they can complete the whole Troll/Giant/DaemonSlayer or Soldier/Sergeant/Captain progression.

6,000 XPs for a DH character just gets you to the start of level 6 and still leaves you 45 gaming sessions from what we now are supposed to call ascension to a medium level functionary in the Inquisition.

Back in the days of WFRP1 characters completed the whole epic Enemy Within campaign and retired as princes of the empire with fewer XPs than you need to make name level in DH.

Even the award guidelines are different: 100 XP per session for WFRP and 200 XP/session for DH.

There are also at least 100 more skills, talents and traits in DH than in WFRP - by a quick count 240+ in DH and IH compared to 140+ in WFRP (both counts excluding knowledge, lore and performance skills (of which there are properly many more in DH than in WFRP) - all making for vastly more complexity.

Sure DH should be more complex than WFRP - but DH is just Basic or at best Basic/Expert WH40KRP - how many skills, talents, traits etc will we need to remember or scrabble around our small mountain of helpfully unindexed and perversely organised books to find when Rogue Trader and Death Watch come out  - 400?, 500?

As it is I can't fit all the info for a 2,000 XP DH character on the standard two-sided sheet and am looking at a massive excel spreadsheet to keep track of a character.
scratch.

It is a mess and we really need to go back to WFRP and rebuild it from the beginning.

Quote from: kryyst;283579Fair enough All WFRP characters have access to Common Weapons Ordinary so they can uses hand weapons and a few ranged weapons.  So at best your arguing over the equivalent of 100xp - Bravo.

But WFRP and DH XPs do not even have a 1:1 exchange rate

All advances in WFRP cost 100 XPs whether they are to attributes, skills or talents.

Advances in DH cost between 100 XPs and 2,500 XPs depending on who is advancing what and when.

Give a WFRP character 6,000 XPs and they can complete the whole Troll/Giant/DaemonSlayer or Soldier/Sergeant/Captain progression and be equal to the toughest critters in the Bestiary.

6,000 XPs for a DH character just gets you to the start of level 6 and still leaves you 45 gaming sessions from what we now are supposed to call ascension to an actual full-time functionary in the Inquisition.

Back in the days of WFRP1 characters completed the whole epic Enemy Within campaign and retired as Princes of the Empire with fewer XPs than you need to make Sergeant or Veteran Guardsman in DH.

Even the award guidelines are different: 100 XP per session for WFRP and 200 XP/session for DH.

There are also at least 100 more skills, talents and traits in DH than in WFRP - by a quick count 240+ in DH and IH compared to 140+ in WFRP (both counts excluding knowledge, lore and performance skills (of which there are properly many more in DH than in WFRP) - all making for vastly more complexity.

Sure DH should be more complex than WFRP - but DH is just Basic or at best Basic/Expert WH40KRP - how many skills, talents, traits etc will we need to remember or scrabble around our small mountain of helpfully un-indexed and perversely organised books to look-up when Rogue Trader and Death Watch come out  - 400?, 500?

As it is I can't handily fit all the info for a 3,000 XP DH character on the standard two-sided sheet and am looking at using a massive excel workbook to keep track of all the skills, talent and weapon options.

It is a mess and we really do need to go back to WFRP and rebuild it from the beginning.