Second Dark Heresy Campaign Started

Started the group’s second Dark Heresy game last night and I thought it went well. This second game is a once a month group aimed at letting some folks play that don’t have weekly time slots open. The characters are less random, they are all part of an Imperial Guard unit and that gives the group a better sense of purpose and a more cohesive feel over all. Although all the characters are guardsmen and started from the guardsmen skill package I took about half of them and shifted them right after the creation set of skills and put them into other classes to give the group more variety. While the characters remain in the Imperial Guard, one will pull all new skills from the cleric class, one from the mechanicus, one from the adept and one from the assassin. No psyker in the group, I thought about it and it just didn’t fit so for now we will live without one and see if it slows the group down at all. Judging by last night the mix is about right, everyone’s specialty was called on at least once and nobody seemed sidelined at all.

We used semi-experienced characters, all started with 1500exp worth of skills and we are also going with everyone just adding +30% to any roll unless I tell them to lower the chance due to difficulty. I am still not entirely sold on the damage system in the game, it is one place I fear that the d10 dice system in the game handicaps it a bit. Most weapons do a d10 damage per hit, from swords to Lasguns and it all feels a bit samey to me and the variation you get per die roll is pretty big. I am not sure however I am comfortable enough with the system to start tinkering with it yet. Hit points are a bit odd as well with Toughness not really coming into play much on them so we have the adept, who is useless with weapons in terms of skill having a pretty high amount of hit points while one of the scrappier characters has much lower hit points despite being tougher. I may ultimately change hit points to being a derived stat from toughness.

Still enjoying the flavor the game, the 40k background is a fun one with lots of possibilities for how games go, I won’t run out of ideas for the game anytime soon anyway.