This week, I have been working on my Dark Heresy port. I’ve decided that I’m mostly satisfied with how the rules work, but they need to be easier to look up. Since the system is so based on slight upgrades to existing abilities, it leads to a lot of flipping back and forth through files to figure out what a character is even capable of. That won’t do.
The approach I decided on is to make each player’s character sheet less of a copy-paste from the rules and more something you build up according to the rules. That way, you can ignore all the rules that don’t affect that particular player, and concentrate on what applies to them, personally.
So I’ve been writing the basic moves up like this:
When you show healthy paranoia, roll +Perception. 10-14, you achieve a Minor Success. 15-19, you achieve a Basic Success. 20+, you achieve a Major Success.
• Minor Success: if you are in some sense in danger at the moment, you sense an eerie feeling of menace, but no details of the nature of the threat.
• Basic Success: the same, but if you are in fact in danger, the GM also gives you a hint as to how and why.
• Major Success: you learn precisely what the danger is.
• Absolute Success: you not only learn what danger is threatening you, but also the most promising way of avoiding it.
Examples: Stopping to smell the air, glancing behind you, thinking back on what danger signs you might have missed.
Then a player will start out with a move that looks like this:
When you show healthy paranoia, roll +Perception. 10-14, if you are in some sense in danger at the moment, you sense an eerie feeling of menace, but no details of the nature of the threat. 15-19, the same, but if you are in fact in danger, the GM also gives you a hint as to how and why. 20+, you learn precisely what the danger is.
Examples: Stopping to smell the air, glancing behind you, thinking back on what danger signs you might have missed.
Then, if that player takes the Awareness (Known) Talent (which bumps up the results of a successful move to show healthy paranoia), the move gets altered to this:
When you show healthy paranoia, roll +Perception. 10-14, if you are in some sense in danger at the moment, you sense an eerie feeling of menace, and the GM also gives you a hint as to how and why. 15+, the same, but you learn precisely what the danger is.
Examples: Stopping to smell the air, glancing behind you, thinking back on what danger signs you might have missed.
And if the player further takes the Awareness (Trained) Talent, which adds an additional result on a roll of 20+, the move again gets rewritten to this:
When you show healthy paranoia, roll +Perception. 10-14, if you are in some sense in danger at the moment, you sense an eerie feeling of menace, and the GM also gives you a hint as to how and why. 15-19, the same, but you learn precisely what the danger is. 20+, you not only learn what danger is threatening you, but also the most promising way of avoiding it.
Examples: Stopping to smell the air, glancing behind you, thinking back on what danger signs you might have missed.
You see what I mean. At every turn, the player’s sheet only contains the information that will apply to that player themself. This would absolutely not work if we were still using pen and paper like some sort of savages, but of course these are modern times and everything is stored in easily edited .txt files.
I do worry that this will make it more troublesome for the players to choose new Talents, since now the information on what a move actually does and the information on how it is altered by a Talent will exist in two different places. But I’ll see what happens when I have a chance to run a session with the new PDF.
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