Why wasn't it, or isn't it (or is it in fact), possible to do the exact same game as WFRP but for the 40K universe, without focusing solely on the shelf stackers of the Inquisition? I mean isn't it more or less the same thing?

THe assumption appears to be that in fantasy the world is more unsettled so some degree of 'class' mobility is possible.

Whilst in 40k, the oppressivly overwritten Imperium is such a beaurocratic mess that you can never leave your starting profession, not even if you become an inquisitor.

There are a few problems with that:

One: Its not strictly true according to the novels. Hab prole laborers become guardsmen, streetgangers become guardsmen. foresters become guardsmen...ok, it might only be true for the guard

Two: it really doesn't make sense for the 'Inquisition'

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;281976Why wasn't it, or isn't it (or is it in fact), possible to do the exact same game as WFRP but for the 40K universe, without focusing solely on the shelf stackers of the Inquisition? I mean isn't it more or less the same thing?

This was my basic argument throughout the entire process. Essentially, it is perfectly possible, but the choice was made against it for purely game-theory-ideological reasons.

RPGPundit

Or wait to see what rogue trader has to offer for the career paths.

However incase with the fiction it's seldom that most people ever get out of their station in life to do anything truly heroic.  Most worlds are more oppressed and constrictive then the WFRP Fantasy setting.  In most ways while the technology of 40k is increased the social freedoms have decreased.

So generally in 40k there are only a couple paths you either stay in your chosen near death like life or you get luck and get picked up by the imperial guard as parth of a tithe or in Dark Heresy's case an acolyte for the inquisition.

You would never for example go from pauper to bartender to bouncer to noble suddenly that just doesn't happen in the setting.  Likewise you would never go from one career and then into being a Space Marine.  Space Marines are grown from birth you are born a Space Marine and you Die one.

So really the whole career system in WFRP doesn't really make sense in 40k if you look at the galaxy as a whole and not one isolated world.  But like I said first, if you want more freedom wait a few more months until Rogue Trader comes out.  It'll have a wider range of choices for your Dark Heresy characters to roll into or as starting points for a Rogue Trader game.

Quote from: RPGPundit;282020This was my basic argument throughout the entire process. Essentially, it is perfectly possible, but the choice was made against it for purely game-theory-ideological reasons.

RPGPundit

Nah, it was made for purely monetary and marketing reasons.

Quote from: kryyst;282024You would never for example go from pauper to bartender to bouncer to noble suddenly that just doesn't happen in the setting.  Likewise you would never go from one career and then into being a Space Marine.  Space Marines are grown from birth you are born a Space Marine and you Die one.

So really the whole career system in WFRP doesn't really make sense in 40k if you look at the galaxy as a whole and not one isolated world.  But like I said first, if you want more freedom wait a few more months until Rogue Trader comes out.  It'll have a wider range of choices for your Dark Heresy characters to roll into or as starting points for a Rogue Trader game.

Nah, I can think off hand of more than a few examples of people 'retiring' to a bartenders life, of slave miners turning into bounty hunters and from thence to acolytes...  maybe its not quite a freewheeling as WHFRP, but then again, we are supposedly portraying the above average sort... you know, player characters.

I think, personally, the class structure would be less offensive if your characters prior life had more influence as well, such as we see with, say, the Tanith guardsmen, who universally have more background than normally seen in the fiction and who, as a regiment, exercise those backgrounds regularly to be better than average grunts.

I can't see them actually doing a rogue trader game since even 40K long abandoned the whole notion of rogue traders (without really explaining what one was) along with the idea of 40k being a small skirmish scale game.

Quote from: Spike;282050Nah, I can think off hand of more than a few examples of people 'retiring' to a bartenders life, of slave miners turning into bounty hunters and from thence to acolytes...  maybe its not quite a freewheeling as WHFRP, but then again, we are supposedly portraying the above average sort... you know, player characters.

I think, personally, the class structure would be less offensive if your characters prior life had more influence as well, such as we see with, say, the Tanith guardsmen, who universally have more background than normally seen in the fiction and who, as a regiment, exercise those backgrounds regularly to be better than average grunts.

Well the Inquisitor book does provide alternate backgrounds that do ad other features to make more distinct characters beyond whats in the core book.

However I still stand by my original point that a bartender in a scum hole isn't going to really provide all that much skill wise to a starting character even if they started out as a ditch digger, then became a waiter, then a bar wench, then a bartender then a bar owner etc.... It's really a blip on the grander scheme of things.

Sure some people may turn bounty hunter then acolyte. But the Scum career pretty much covers all of those.  The point of DH is that this is your characters new lease on life, their jumping point.  It's not about the beginning grind.  That can easily be tied up in a background description because it's pretty much unimportant mechanically.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;282122I can't see them actually doing a rogue trader game since even 40K long abandoned the whole notion of rogue traders (without really explaining what one was) along with the idea of 40k being a small skirmish scale game.

Let me put this clearly.  They next big rule book for the Dark Heresy/40k RPG line is Rogue Trader due in 2009 Roguetrader RPG.  

It'll be a stand alone game but also an extension of Dark Heresy.   Following that will be Death Watch which will be the 3rd big rule book game covering the space Marine Chapter, which probably is a 2011 release.

I don't think Rogue Trader will be as open ended as it seems.
A friend and I have discussed this on many a car drive (from Florida to Georgia). I don't think that the career method would totally work in the Warhammer 40k setting. First, there are very few careers in which a player can just get on a space ship and go off player. If a campaign were to take place in a single planet, then I could see a Fantasy-esque game taking place, then I could see a game working. Another problem is the party diversity. The Imperium of Man's xenophobia would prohibit multiple races in the same group. Furthermore, even within an all human group, there would be problems justifying diversity: A Space Marine wouldn't hang around someone of the Scum career. Neither would an Arbitrator without an Inquisitor to glue the party together.
I'll be honest, I think the Inquisition is pretty damn functional way of keeping a party together in the 40k university. Rogue Trader may be pretty good as well.

Rogue Trader's career system will be similar to DH's.  You pick a career archetype and progress through it.  It's not going to be of the WFRP career hoping style.  If you come from DH then you'll transfer into a rogue trader career scheme.

Which is fine if they'd allowed a lot more room for the characters background other than class to play a much bigger role in character creation.  Right now its pretty fucking notional for the most part, it doesn't even properly give you skill... it just lets you roll on certain skills that require training as 'untrained'... which is a:Weak shit and b:monkeys up the character creation process a bit.

Let us not talk about the fact that many of the 'career progressions' don't actually match up with how the setting supposedly works.  Stormtroopers and Commisars don't get promoted up through the ranks, they come from teh Schola Progenium, just like Sisters of Battle do.  Temple and cult assassins are recruited as children and raised to that life and so on... I mean, if they honestly felt a straight jacket class system was the only way to go to fit the setting then why the hell did they ignore the actual... you know... setting?

I personally don't care which way they went, but they needed to pick one, this half assed middle of the road shit? As Miyagi says: Squish, just like Grape.

Quote from: kryyst;282170Rogue Trader's career system will be similar to DH's.  You pick a career archetype and progress through it.  It's not going to be of the WFRP career hoping style.  If you come from DH then you'll transfer into a rogue trader career scheme.

That's kind of cool.
 
Black Industries original idea was to publish a trilogy of games: Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch. I don't really see Deathwatch's appeal as anything more than really cool one-shot dungeon crawls. Rogue Trader has a lot of potential. I think of it as as very Battlestar Galactica in structure and format. Rogue Trader's relationship to xenoforms is not as rigid as that of the rest of the Imperium, so different races could be brought into the mix more rationally than something set deep closer to the Throne at Terra.
I'm such a Dark Heresy junky. I can't wait for the Creatures Anathema book to come out.

Quote from: Spike;282172Which is fine if they'd allowed a lot more room for the characters background other than class to play a much bigger role in character creation.  Right now its pretty fucking notional for the most part, it doesn't even properly give you skill... it just lets you roll on certain skills that require training as 'untrained'... which is a:Weak shit and b:monkeys up the character creation process a bit.

How much effect do you want a background to really have for a starting level character?  Seriously?  I can't comprehend what your ranting about with any kind of logic.  You want to play a developed character, then start your characters out with 1500xp.  Also using trained as untrained is actually a rather big deal because it's the difference between a) not being able to do something and b) being able to do something, which can be the difference between a) dying and b) living.  

QuoteLet us not talk about the fact that many of the 'career progressions' don't actually match up with how the setting supposedly works.  Stormtroopers and Commisars don't get promoted up through the ranks, they come from teh Schola Progenium, just like Sisters of Battle do.  Temple and cult assassins are recruited as children and raised to that life and so on... I mean, if they honestly felt a straight jacket class system was the only way to go to fit the setting then why the hell did they ignore the actual... you know... setting?

Commisars are an odd inclusion I get why they put them in but they don't jive as a background, they should have been a fully independent class.   Stormtroopers I fail to see the problem stormtroopers are a specialized member of the guard same as a sniper or heavy weapons member is.

Assassins by the description can be either the classical temple assassins or just people who have taken to doing assassinations as a living.  Where it does break down isn't in the mechanics but the rank names.  One is clearly a structured order fitting for a temple assassin it's not so fitting for just a trained killer.  However the inclusion of any of those examples hardly breaks down the system or the setting.

Leaving aside the simple fact that I've always found the D&D style of class structure and more importantly 'less than zero' to 'hero' progressing remarkably unnatural and 'immersion breaking', thus finding more of that philosophy added to WH of any sort without much rhyme or reason?

Right now I find two starting characters of the same class, regardless of background virtually identical in terms of mechanics.  Obviously the player can bring a lot of differention to the table, certainly, but lets pretend that a lot of players are not that interested in developing non-mechanical differences that are entirely unsupported.  Given the powerful straightjacket of the existing classes, its actually more important that character background take a role. The existing structure has more akin to a 'race pick', and a very weak one at that.  Oh... feral worlders are half orcs, woo woo...  its bullshit.

While it is certainly possible to start at 1500 or more xp that answer is bullshit too.  If the genre of the game is 'highly competent recruits to an inquisitor's retinue', as... amazingly.. it is, the mechanics should support that.  Why, then, are we recruiting 'guardsmen' who haven't even gone through 'RIP' in canon terms, or 'boot camp' in modern terms?   Character creation should at least produce 'common man' levels of competence as a default, which we simply don't get even with the 400 xp we start with (honestly, if starting characters have to be given XP to get them up to default speed, maybe you should either rethink your default or beef up creation a little. Seriously.)

By Canon, Stormtroopers are predominantly seperated from traditional guard, just as the Commisar's are.   And presumptively, they would never appear in the game until fully qualified... which currently means they've already filled their class tree... sort of like the Commisars.

Now, you may think 'less than zero' is fun. Bully for you. I think, however, as a default you'd find you are in the minority and its more appropriate that you have the ability to strip things out of the game to 'lower' the starting level, rather than forcing the rest of us to kludge up to what should be the default... by the setting even as presented by the game book.  

Don't be fooled by the page count of the class trees, its an insultingly simple character creation system and it produces insultingly simple characters as a result.