[Games Anatomy] - Four Shades of Grim Darkness

It started with Dark Heresy. Well, that's not strictly true. In one sense, it started with Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, the old faithful engine still thumping away at the heart of all the games I'll be rabbiting on about today. In another sense, it started with Rogue Trader - the first edition of 40K has more than shades of the RPG about it, at least in the early-D&D sense of there being heroes and villains commanding battles 'twixt  their parties of hirelings and henchmen, and a focus on narrative and scenario rather than balance and reliable skill testing. Hell, in one sense of the word, it started with poor doomed Inquisitor. But for our purposes, it started with Dark Heresy.

The long-awaited Dark Heresy RPG plunged players into the lowest echelons of the Inquisition - not for them the flamboyant and sinister posturing of the Emperor's Left Hand, the joy and pain of scouring entire planets, or the capacity to requisition anything up to and including a battlefleet if they so will it. Their lot would be the grunt labour of the Inquisition - the finding things out, the investigating rumours too vague or ill-defined for a proper Inquisitor to waste their time on. Look, you know in 40K, you have the Inquisitor, and then you have that bunch of bullet-catchers, weapon-toters and wound counters with special rules behind him? Them's the PCs. That lot. It's more fun than it sounds. Dark Heresy is a creeping investigation game in the grim darkness of the far future; there's something going on, but you don't know what it is - only that it's probably going to be more than you can handle, and yet handle it you must, at least until your Inquisitorial boss turns up to take the credit.

Your actual party is comprised of characters - all human, in the core rules at least, which makes me a bit sad in my science-fiction places, but is very appropriate for a setting in which it's us against all of them - who belong to classes. The usual RPG framework. In this case, the classes range from Adept (paper-pushing logician and analyst) to Tech-Priest (the very lowest kind, who's still mostly meat and might have a whole mechadendrite to his name... just the one... and it won't work...) by way of Imperial Psyker (fleshed out with a hilariously gothic set of soul-binding side-effects) and Scum (those thieving gits with the stub guns and poor hygiene). Each class has its own internal levels, with names rather than numbers, and the uppermost levels of each start to resemble things you recognise from the tabletop game. The classes define the skills and stat increases available to characters, and advancement through the levels is made by purchasing more-or-less all the upgrades it offers.

Characters are further described by their statistics, most of which will be recognisable to anyone who's played tabletop 40K, and some of which will bring back fond memories for those of you who remember when Leadership didn't have to do everything; Intelligence, Perception, Willpower and Fellowship make an appearance to cover all those things that RPG characters sometimes have to deal with. Average values for a human are in the low 30s, and your character's planet of origin (hive world, death world, void-born on a spaceship) will modify a few of them up or down and add a few extra side skills to the ones picked up from your class.

Actually doing stuff in the game involves, most of the time, rolling percentile dice - that's two ten-siders, one acting as tens, and one as units - and comparing them back to your character's statistics. Rolling lower than a statistic indicates success, higher indicates failure. Now, bearing in mind that the average stat is 30-odd, this can make Dark Heresy characters seem dangerously incompetent. Indeed, when the game came out, I remember a good deal of low-grade grumbling about this. A few points of order, though.

Firstly, skills can be taken more than once - as a character becomes more experienced, their player can repurchase skills in order to add a +10 or +20 modifier to a corresponding statistic on rolls where the skill is being deployed. Secondly, it's a system which demands that the GM stay awake - routine tasks are supposed to come with a sufficiently heavy modifier in the player's favour, while the system as written describes how to resolve risky actions in perilous situations. In other words, the rules mechanise things for the characters when those characters are at their worst - strung out, doing things they're not really capable of, and struggling to survive - rather than doing what most RPGs do, which is mechanising the characters performing at peak efficiency and then having the GM impose penalties to represent that stuff. And thirdly, these are henchmen. Grunts. Minions. They're supposed to be a bit rubbish. The whole point of them's that they're sent off on jobs that don't warrant anyone competent, at least at the start, and only those who live long enough actually become remotely respectable agents.

Now, not everyone necessarily enjoys playing someone rubbish. That's fine. We can fix that. For starters, there's Ascension, a supplement which promotes the characters to actual Assassins and Inquisitors and Arbitrators and the like. There's also a couple of other variants on the same core system...

Rogue Trader, gloriously, takes the throttle off Dark Heresy and lets rip for the stars. No more henchmen here, hoo no. In Rogue Trader, the player characters are the titular Trader and associated officers - Navigators, and Astropaths, and Magos Explorators, and ship's Seneschals with dozens of soldiers at their beck and call. Oh, and did I mention you got a spaceship? Well you do. There's a whole chapter on designing a flying cathedral to rocket around the galaxy with, having adventures and making dodgy deals with aliens and smugglers and renegades, and generally being a dashing and heroic space privateer. Oh, and in one of the earliest supplements, Kroot Mercenaries and Ork Freebooters were opened up as options to player characters. It's still a bit early-D&D in that for non-humans, race is class (there's no Shapers or Mekboys to be had here, for instance), but it's a step forward from the anthropocentrism of Dark Heresy. Also, it means you get to talk like a Cockney football hooligan and shout WAAAAGH a lot, in a far more appropriate context than your local GW's 40K league.

The system is basically the same, although Rogue Trader characters start off with the kind of power only a very few experienced Dark Heresy characters might ever hope to reach, and access to a phenomenally broader range of equipment, and did I mention they get a spaceship? Basically, it's a whole different genre, a whole different kind of emergent narrative - this isn't sneaking around cultist temples in fear of your life, this is sailing your flying cathedral up to some alien world and giving them two days to pony up a hold's worth of shiny valuables or it'll be the cyclonic torpedoes for them. And then discovering they have defence lasers.

All that extra stuff comes at a price though. I've already mentioned the 'advance by buying every upgrade' thing and the 'buying several upgrades three times' thing, now let me mention the 'equipment section you could stun a rhino with' thing and the 'pages and pages of rules for combat maneouvres on land and in space' things. The 40K RPG is one of those modern RPGs that take great pains to insulate the players from bad GMing by not trusting the GM to make rulings, and having a hard rule for many of the things you might conceivably want to do - if you just know where to find it. There's a breadth of overlapping rules and capacities that make 'build optimisation' a thing, and unlike classic Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, the system also has a 'points buy' option for generating characters, so you're not saddled with random statistics, and there's a fairly strong encouragement to be giving out two upgrades' worth of XP per session come what may. This is not the sort of thing I'm into, though I don't begrudge anyone who is into it their fun.

My issue with it's that having all these reliable rules and definite combo-tasticness requires a very granular, very detailed system, which I can't say I've ever run as written. My house rule for Dark Heresy was basically "ignore the rules, just roll a d100 and tell me your stats and we'll work it out from there". Which is probably badwrongfun of some sort, but frankly I can't believe we need that many rules to tell us how to pretend we're kick-arse space pirates with a god-damn flying cathedral and a small army in the hold.

Other things I've never run include Deathwatch, the version of the 40K RPG which scales things up even further by forming a party of Space Marines who are so Space Mariney they've been pulled from their Chapters to form an elite squad of xenos-nobblers. It's probably because I don't really see the appeal in Space Marines as playable characters - as far as I'm concerned they're only interesting when they're not being very good Space Marines - but I have to admit that fleshing out the Deathwatch as an entity is a cool way of ensuring that people can play the flavour and colour of Space Marine they find most interesting, rather than shackling play to one Chapter or coming up with contrived reasons why a Blood Angel, two Space Wolves and a Raven Guard are in a bar when this psyker hires them to save the governor's daughter from Genestealers. Deathwatch is not something I'd be remotely interested in as a player, but it's something I could be prevailed upon to run for high-octane, kick-in-the-door tactical combat fun with a bit of character conflict on the side. GMort's played it and written an excellent run of posts about it, from a more 'build optimisation' perspective than I would ever be able to adopt, and they're a good read - even if I think his GM must be Father bloody Christmas, giving out all those mechadendrites.

Something else which I have lamentably not gotten around to running or checking out or at least playing in is Black Crusade. Black Crusade... is not something I know well enough to really anatomise, but I'll direct you toward Ruinous Powers, where Phil occasionally talks insightful words about it. All I know about Black Crusade is that it's basically Chaos: The RPG, In Space. And that that sounds awesome. Why haven't I rushed out and bought it? Because it's another hulking great £40-odd core rulebook, for a system which I already sort of own a core rulebook for in Dark Heresy.

While I really like the way in which the same rules are tailored for four quite different styles of game - the low-powered investigation; the adventure-on-the-high-seas-in-space; the squad-of-elite-asskickers-take-on-the-universe; and the gloriously corrupt villain campaign - I'm less keen on the idea of buying a separate thumping great rulebook for each one. I think I've been spoiled by World of Darkness, with its "this is a fully playable game" core system and its "this is how you make it into a game where everyone's an X" add-ons, which strikes me as an intrinsically more elegant way of doing things, rather than almost writing the same game four slightly different ways.

That said, I'd recommend at least one of them to anyone who likes 40K and wants to explore some of the odd corners of that universe, away from the stuff that usually happens on the battlefield - which one ultimately depends on which bits of the 40K-verse you get off on.

Dunno what I'll do next week. Floor's open for requests!