Sinister Sacrilege: The Third Session

When we last left our brave Acolytes, they had successfully fought off an attempt at Tyranid incursion aboard a Black Ship and were now landing on Holy Terra as the 13th Black Crusade erupted around them. Ignoring that major event, they were tasked to keep hunting Tyranids! In case another ship carrying more of the troops that had the Genestealer Cult had made it to Terra. Hilarious hijinks and a lot of bad rolling later, you get this. But our brave Psyker does a lot better at summarizing than I would do, so I turn once again to the GM's perspective on things.

First off, as I've written elsewhere (although maybe not on this blog?) I really like leveling up and advancing and getting shiny new toys. One of the chief complaints with Orpheus that I had was that once you started, it was incredibly hard to really get better, and you were pretty much at your peak from the get-go. Contrast this starkly with DnD 4e, where you're constantly improving both in stats, skills, and if you have a cool DM, equipment. I think Dark Heresy strikes a good balance, since your stats are mostly maxed although you can spend to improve them to a certain extent, but you are constantly learning new abilities (and again, if you have a nice GM getting cool equipment). However, this is besides the point. Since I do like leveling up and stuff, I suspect that it rubs off on my GM style in how I reward my players. The DH rulebook recommends something like 200xp for every 4 hours played, whereas I last session awarded 500 xp for about the same amount of time played. I know in my position I would want to get to the higher ranks quicker, to be able to start to do really cool things, thus I was pretty generous with my doling out (plus, killing a heretic is something like 50xp, I feel that killing a bunch of Genestealers is thus worth a lot more). Unsure of the money thing, I just gave the same amount, 500tg to do with as they wanted (and as I suspected, a lot of them bought armor). I also found the cool set of Drama Cards, which I adjusted for use in Dark Heresy, and I actually want to give them out, since although they can make my work slightly harder in some cases, they're really cool effects and I look forward to seeing how my PCs make use of them.

I suspect in certain ways being generous like this makes life as a GM harder. PCs are better equipped and harder to kill and have more ways to get out of traps, jump rails, etc. But on the other hand,  I feel like it leads to a lot more interesting gameplay with your PCs trying different things. For instance, I gave Max grappling hooks since he asked nicely, and they ended up doing a wall-walk with the Psyker to get on top of the building. I think the group I play with prizes cleverness and imagination over straight killing of things, so giving them more skills and equipment to do this leads to more interesting events. And on the plus side, it gives me an excuses to throw harder enemies at them, which is more fun from my perspective.

The one thing I'm unsure of is how much people like drops vs. buying their own stuff. It's definitely easier for me to let people just buy what they want (and given the Inquisitorial background this makes perfect sense) but I also don't know if people in general prefer to find their own things. I know with the last D&D campaign I played it was much more about person specific drops, but in D&D it's also much more about armor and main weapon, whereas in DH you have a lot more choices and things you could get (such as gun sights, grenades, special ammo, etc. as well as a large range of weapons). If anyone has any insight on this, let me know.

To switch topics, I also tried out something new that somewhat worked. Dark Heresy pretty much boils down to either investigation or combat. The problem with investigation is it is often not controlled in any way. There are ways around that, but things like "you need to find the control panel before the ship blows up" have their own downside as well. Instead, what I decided to try was to punish failed investigations, something that doesn't happen in a normal session. Emma (who would be quite the sadistic GM given her suggestions to me, such as one of the first questions after a session being "Did anyone die? Any serious injuries?) wanted to have her own spiders inserted into the plot (specifically large, radioactive spiders that paralyzed people) so I created the Extreme Mobile Mutant Arachnids. Basically what happened was the cargo hall the PCs were investigating was, well, large, and I assume places like that have vermin. How it worked was whenever a PC would do an investigative roll, if they failed the roll by more than 2 degrees, a pair of EMMAs would spawn and attack, with an additional EMMA for every additional degree of failure.

They were meant to be more annoying then truly deadly, since they were fast but also very low toughness and weak attacks, and the paralyzing could be treated with a simple medicae test. However, for whatever reason the PCs had difficulty killing them, and they also investigated far far less than I expected, and went the more combat route (see: Rome pointing a gun at a Guardsman's head to wake him up). However, I think it worked well and I might adapt the idea for the future.

Also, strangely enough, my rolling was unnaturally luck for my NPCs whereas the PCs suffered from an unending string of bad luck. For instance, the Chimera driver managed to stave off spasming from a psyker attack despite having low Willpower, and an on-fire Guardsman managed to critically avoid getting hit a second time with a flamer... twice (that's two 5% rolls) and given how awesome that is, he put the fires out with his amazing dodge. Meanwhile, Max managed to jam his gun twice in one session (again, that's two 5% likelihood rolls) and various other bad things happened, like Rome diving into a glass window and bouncing off and Kory failing to read a basic written document. Despite these setbacks the PCs still emerged triumphant.

Finally, one complaint about the DH as a system. DH relies on a lot of situation modifiers, especially in terms of combat. I'd been struggling to keep all of them in mind during combat, but given how many different things could be in effect, this was at times hard. Luckily Kory in a move of brilliance wrote out all of them (an impressive achievement) which will hopefully help the others remember them, and between us we'll actually get all of them. I do think in general it's a cool idea, and if you're playing DH a lot I imagine it'd get a lot easier and simpler, but adding a lot of modifiers in general can be a chore and can slow down gameplay. But as I said, hopefully the group working together can alleviate this, and maybe it gives a reason to pay attention during other people's combat turns.

Because I missed last week, we're doing a second session tomorrow night, so expect another update then.

-HTMC