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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta

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Average Rating:4.0 / 5
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by louis-olivier f. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/13/2013 13:04:22

Beaucoup plus proche des autre jdr de 40k, très semblable à only war Les armes semble maintenant plus proche de leur fluff et les point d'action des combat sont parties ce qui rend les combat plus simple.

Dommage d'avoir ramener les Wounds, le système des blessures était intéressant aussi dommage d'avoir retirer les ultilisation de stat alternative pour les compétences



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by Marius F. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/02/2013 00:00:00

If you are new to the Warhammer 40K this book in it's current state gives you a limited view of the setting. All the setting stuff is taken out, but there is a lot of fluff text in the system sections that teaches you something about the setting. From this limited view I like the setting.

This book is mostly about the rules. The rules are presented in a dare I say American way, that is it is super verbose. It spends a lot of pages explaining the rules. Having example for a lot of the rules taking up even more lines, some of the examples have flaws in the math making them more confusing then helpful, but I guess that will be fixed in the final version.

The system hold promise, but I'm disappointed with the amount of choices. I made six characters in order to run the scenario in the back of the book, and I really felt that it was difficult to make all six unique. Some of them ended up a bit too similar for my taste. This might be that the character creation process leaves very little room for customization. You get only a small amount of points to spend as you want.

The system really need more equipment options for all categories, en especially for non-weapons. In addition it needs more elite advantages. The three that are in the book is way to few.

One final note I like the system for influence and subtelty, but I'm very sceptical of the economy system. In all my campaigns as player and gm money has been a important factor. Getting enough of them to afford to get or do something. In this system all you need to do is roll the aquisition dice. And I wonder how the players will feel about it. Is it going to be that they all want the best aquisition character to get them stuff, or will all of them try to get some knowledge of it?



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by samuel a. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/15/2013 12:25:33

It was fun and easy to use, though there are still some bugs in this system I look forward to the final version



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by Daniel M. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/09/2013 12:42:25

Very excited to start playing this soon. Love the changes to character creation, talents, skills, just about everything. And FFG is being very inclusive and thoughtful about the Beta process which gives me high hopes for the finished product. This new edition addresses a lot of issues I had with 1st ed, specifically that the power creep had gotten to a point where 1st rank characters felt too strong. I like Dark Heresy to be about investigation with combat being either a climax or a result of poor planning on the PC's part. 2nd edition looks like it tones back on that power scale while still allowing room to become very powerful in later ranks.

On a quality note: excellent product; high quality, very crisp and readable at any zoom level. Thoroughly bookmarked, searchable, and easy to navigate; loads quickly on my machine.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by Alexander M. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/04/2013 16:27:13

pros:

  • reorganization of skills, looks streamlined. No stat looks ignorable for any character class. intrigued to see how it plays out.
  • drastic re-org of talents, much easier discovery of short/long term goals, flexible dependencies instead of "you must be a militant 5... or a pilot 1... or a AD INFINITUM"
  • new character creation process. no artificial class boundaries, easier expression of character concept. Like dnd-next, you get a lightweight layering "origin/background/class" and then buy a few tweaks with starting XP.
  • best darn "adventure at the back of the book" I've ever seen -- instead of your usual plot-rails, it's a template where you tune each faction's heresy-quotent, and then let the faction heads persue their goals and react to PCs. And even a "loyal" faction has an interesting effect on the scenario, as disastrous plans can spring from good intentions.
  • combat rounds have replaced "full/half/react/free" with an action point system, akin to XCOM, that might possibly be excellent... I've cautious optimism about how it'll play out.
  • psi is mostly rogue-trader style power rolls, except fettered/push is a continuous gradient now, and powers are organized into trees like the talents chapter.
  • counting degrees of success/fail has had the math streamlined, which looks like it'll help a bit -- but we've been using fading sun's even faster success metric anyway.
  • damage is more gritty: gone are the HP where you only start taking crits when you hit zero; any hit past the TB+armor of a named character is going to roll on the tables'o'pain for some flavor. As a FATE/narrative GM, this is a win at my table. (righteous fury no longer needs any to-hit or damage rolls, it's just automatically a HOLYCRsquish roll on the crit tables.)

cons:

  • vehicle rules are about 8 pages of clumsy looking mechanics; I'll toss half of them to make it an abstract system.
  • like rogue trader, finances are abstracted to availability and influence tests, plus a group's subtlety score for how alert the sector is to there actions-- I like thrones for in person shopping, and abstract for campaign altering stuff, but it's the subtlety thing that smells gamey. Instead, I'm following the spirit of the concept by having influence and subtlety be per faction.

  • character sheet doesn't take advantage of the concepts introduced, so I'm busy creating a refactor of the characteristic/skills sector over on my ashnazg.com/blag -- and mine won't have an page-wide inkwash! Common publishers, think of the poor printers you're killing for no reason!


Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by Sean P. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/02/2013 14:02:53

This is tough to rate because perhaps it deserves to be rated all on it's own - but on the other hand, it's tough to rate it without the context from where it came from. Also tough to rate because I haven't actually played these Beta rules yet. But there doesn't appear to be any reviews here at this point, so I'll put down my thoughts.

Let's start with this, the WarHammer 40k setting is off the hook. It's dark, rich, grim, complicated, gritty & deadly - but that's been true for a long time and has little to do with this 2nd Edition Beta of the Core Rules.

Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Beta is a widely unexpected rewrite of the rules. Unexpected in it being released at all, since FFG had not released a 2nd Edition in the history of its WH40k RPG product line. Even more unexpected in that the changes are radical enough that the numerous Dark Heresy sourcebooks it sold to its customers the last five years are not mechanically backwards-compatible.

In doing so, FFG has taken a huge risk of alienating the significant fanbase. FFG books are beautiful, well done & a bit pricey. How would you like it if a publisher purposefully chose to make the last 8-10 books you bought from them to be mechanically out-of-date? Exactly. So that's the backstory, the context if you will...and you'll see a big flavorful dose of it on the FFG forums.

So...the 2nd Edition Beta in and of itself? IMO, it's got some intriguing ideas and a decent number of question marks. "Action Points" replace the Half/Full Action scheme and immediately stood out to me as probably offering players more control over their PC's actions in a combat round. Action Points committed to an attack are multiplied by the weapon's Rate of Fire to derive a new key metric called "Rate of Attack". The Degrees of Success/DoS (which is calculated differently in 2nd Edition) on the attack roll are the number of hits, up to the Rate of Attack. The target's DoS from its Evade roll ("Dodge" in v1) subtract from those hits. This is v2's combat core mechanic.

2nd Edition eliminates Hit Points and replaces it with a scheme where you track the # of times a character's been successfully hit. The large majority of the time, and significantly more than in v1, successful hits will result in "Wound Effects", that are much like v1's Critical Wound tables. Past successful attacks cumulatively make a new successful attack more dangerous on that Wound Effect table. The pro of this is more realistic effects from being wounded sooner, rather than a PC showing absolutely no effects from his 4 separate previous wounds and then suddenly being dead. The con is a concern, the way the Wound Effect tables work, that it's much (Much much?) harder to kill someone with the first shot.

There's a new vehicle section, that v1 lacked. The psyker section has vast changes from v1: psyker levels are now 1-10, manifestation test is d100 against Willpower now, no more Minor Powers and no more Phenomenon of the Warp table - straight to the customized Perils table for the Discipline of the power being used. Character generation is very different; they've added a tenth characteristic called "Influence" that's much like the section of the same name in the Dark Heresy Sourcebook Ascension. A new Acolyte group metric called "Subtlety" is introduced. Stats are calculated differently. There's changes everywhere, really.

It's a surprising complete rewrite but there is some intriguing stuff in there. Personally, I think it costs at least one star for not being backwards-compatible with previously published material - and I could see some good customers with a shelf full of books dinging it more than that. I haven't played it yet so I can't be sure it all actually works but, IMO, it looks pretty well done - so I don't see giving it 2 Stars. So that leaves 3 or 4 stars - I optimistically gave it 4 stars.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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