Dark Heresy headache

Every game I do a port of is, in some way, a pain in the ass. If they weren’t actively painful to play, I wouldn’t need to do a port of them. But man, Dark Heresy is a pain in the ass.

I’m at something like my fourth attempt at it, and this time I think I might be on the right track, but only by throwing away most of my initial goals and trying to save what can be saved. See, the main reason why I make these ports is that game systems are too fiddly, too packed with rules and calculations. A system should be simple to use, without requiring constant flipping back and forth through a doorstopper of a rulebook. So for each of my previous DH attempts, I tried to streamline things down to something easily memorable.

And they all fell flat, because that kind of thing is actively opposed to what Warhammer 40,000 is. W40K is all about the clutter, all about the detail added to detail, about the neurotic beancounting and rote memorisation of things that don’t, when it comes right down to it, really matter much. That’s what the setting is, a giant glorious mess of people fighting to the death over trivia. Simplify it too much, and you might as well be playing a different game.

So I had to take a step back, and resign myself to actually make use of all the fiddly little rules, all the “take +1 to Crotcheting except on the second Monday after New Years” modifiers, but to try to somehow carve them into something that was modular enough that you could at least grasp the situation at hand. Shorten the combat rules to, at least, two pages instead of twenty, and make the talents more or less independent of each other rather so you could focus on the next thing you wanted to be able to do instead of obsess over your “build.”

All of which amounts to the fact that my cleaner-and-simpler version is at 107 pages and counting. Though in fairness, a lot of it is repetition, since one way to make it unnecessary to flip back and forth through the book is to write out the full information everywhere you actually need it. But still, Emperor have mercy…