So my weekly gaming group has been checking out Dark Heresy, a tabletop role-playing game set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and published by the well known game designer, Fantasy Flight Games. The characters play as acolytes to an Inquisitor for the Imperium. For those of you who aren't familiar with Warhammer 40K, Starcraft is the best correlation (mostly because it ripped the idea off, blatantly, back when the first one came out).
We've enjoyed the fluff, and story, but we've had a great deal of issue with the mechanical aspect. The basic rules run off a percentile system with your target numbers defined by your characters attributes, leaving most beginners with a 65% chance of failing at any given task. The real problem is that modifiers for the game are capped at +/- 30. This means that shooting a dime at a range of a mile without a scope is penalized by a tiny amount, and that kicking in a basic wooden door with three people helping you still has a 25% chance to fail miserably.
So we grabbed some errata off Fantasy Flight's website and doubled the possible modifiers, allowing us to fail by fewer degrees, if not necessarily succeed. These larger caps seem to have fixed most of our issues, but we're still experiencing difficulty on a couple of fronts:
1) We have a tenuous grasp of the fluff in some cases. The Imperium has a contradictory dogma to say the least. The object of most missions is to root out "heresy" in whatever location of population you're assigned to investigate. But the definition of heresy in a simultaneously cosmopolitan and totalitarian society is basically left up to the characters, both PC and NPC. And while that freedom to think is not a bad thing by far, those unfamiliar with the setting are left wondering what they're supposed to be fighting.
2) Role-playing cliches abound, one of the most well known being the direct relation between the quality of a female's armor and how much skin it shows. In world of Dark Heresy three things have led one of my female players, Rini, to declare the entire system "a boy game." First is the penchant for making all the male characters hideously disfigured and then conveniently allowing the females to avoid losing limbs, eyes, acquiring scars, or having a cup size smaller than a C, no matter how tight the body glove. Yes they have a body glove. Second, crafting skills, although poorly defined, are listed as requiring strength for many tasks which I would deem don't make a lot of sense. Like applying a laser sight to a lasgun. I've watched an entire company of Infantrymen wrestle with their red dot sights, trying to muscle them on until one of them realized the screws weren't retracted and then the whole lot of them had a brain-wave. So strength just doesn't mesh with my perceptions of reality. And third, the one I attribute more to Rini than to any flaw in the game itself, the dire possibility of failure. Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense to fail at tasks that you can do easily in real life, such as kicking down a door, with or without training. But you are playing a fictional character who is distinctly not you. In real life, you possess nearly no combat ability, few if any contacts on other planets, and you don't work for the government, nor believe in a distant God-Emperor. So roll the dice, and pray the Psyker doesn't roll 9's.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Rules of Warcraft, coming Wednesday...
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