Tag: games-workshop

I ended up spending this week working on the Dark Heresy port, particularly on the gear section.

I have to admit, I’m not really a fan of gear in roleplaying games. It just feels anal-retentive to have to list every fiddly little implement your character carries around, and to have creative ideas that you can’t implement because you just didn’t bring the right tool. I’m more about the skills and inherent properties, the things that are always true about your character. But of course this is Warhammer 40,000, and running Warhammer 40,000 without drooling over the badass toys is just making a complete mockery of the whole thing.

I did try to streamline it a bit, though. I assigned every weapon, armour and doodad a Req value between 1 and 10, and then assigned every Career a starting amount of Req. In between every mission, your Req refills and you can spend it on requisitioning new equipment. And the effects of different items have been simplified to the point where it’s hopefully easier to remember – a lot of things just give a +1 bonus to some particular move.

I note, not for the first time, that it’s very unclear who this port is even for. I mean, I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes Powered by the Apocalypse games is going to think it misses the point entirely by having so many over-specific rules, and anyone who likes Dark Heresy the way it is is of course not going to see the point of my converting it to an entirely different format. I guess in the end, it’s just for me, to make it possible to at some point run games in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that don’t feel quite so painful.

Of course, disliking pain might also be missing the whole point of Warhammer 40,000…