I want playable Ogryns and Ratlings. They could also skip adventure in corebook and include vechicle rules instead.

Kasatka said:

I doubt your source is correct, I've read the Raid on Kastrel-Novem, in both the Valkyrie Sky Talon and the Tauros descriptions is states that they drop from very low altitude. This is the case for everything dropped by a Sky Talon, even supply pods. This is also probably the case for almost everything dropped by a Valkyrie, even troops.

I suppose there is room for 'giant' grav chutes in other regiments considering they aren't detailed like the Elysians are, but I seriously doubt it. Grav chute technology has, as far as I know, always been something rare and difficult to make, hence only specialists like Storm Troopers and the Elysians getting access to them. I don't think there even exists a grav chute that would be big enough to prevent even something as small as a Sentinel from being crushed when its dropped. How big would it have to be? How much power would it need? Most importantly, would it be worth spending resources on just so you could high altitude drop something as large and easy to hit as a vehicle? Nothing about a giant grav chute sounds plausible, even for 40k.

From Forgeworld

"Drop Regiments do not have access to many of the heavier armoured units deployed as standard with less specialised Imperial Guard regiments, and their Sentinels often fulfill this role as well as their more common scouting missions.

Elysian pattern Drop Sentinels have a more compact design to allow them to be accommodated within a Valkyrie Airborne Assault Carrier, or carried beneath a Sky Talon. The Sentinel also features an integrated Grav Chute mechanism to decelerate the Sentinel's fall during the final stages of an aerial drop. Complete resin and plastic kit including a choice of Multi-Melta or Heavy Bolter. Model designed by Will Hayes"

So yes they can have Grav Chutes.  I look at it this way, if we can air drop a Humvee with large parachutes they should be allowed to drop a stripped down Sentinel.
 

Lightbringer said:

Lots of playable abhumans - that's my one wish for this game. I'd be ecstatic if all of the abhumans from the White Dwarf article that introduced the Afrielis got full write-ups. Oh, and Lightbringer - I found you rules a while back & want to say that they are fantastic!

Santiago said:

Agreed. I've learned this myself from things I've had to write for work. It is so easy to overlook a blatent error that you have written! I do think that a better proofreading job should be done, especially if cut/paste is being used. I seem to remember reading a couple of skill descriptions in Deathwatch that referred to the "Explorer" using the skill! I find it very jarring when I'm reading something & an error jumps off the page to slap me in the face! That being said, I'm not up in arms, or anything. I love these lines & have wanted 40K Roleplay since the first whispers of it in the early '90s. I can't wait to see what lies ahead!

All I want is rules for the men of Tanith.

It would be also nice for FFG to give us more news about OW. I would like to have something at least once in 2 weeks.

 i want rough riders nothing like hitting a blasphmer with a dinomite tiped lance

RichardX1 said:

That'd be awesome….

Stuff I'd like to see:

d% rolls as the only resolution mechanic.

Better, clearer and more precise rules for degrees of failure and success.

A bit of skill consolidation. Particularly for stuff like sneak, conceal, shadowing, and for the various advanced group skills. Do we really need separate occult, warp, and daemonology skills?

Talents build around the concept of increasing chance of success, rather than adding new abilities and myriad forms of rules exceptions.

Fixed (non-random), location-specific damage causing cumulative penalties and armour degradation.

An end to class, toughness, armour, damage, psy and cyber power creep.

More levels of less restrictive, lower-powered jobs with fewer requisites and fewer types of requisites.

Some kind of limitation on the amount of times characters can use "powers", and a single mechanic for doing so.

Mass combat rules.

Vehicle combat rules.

Space combat rules.

Atmospheric flight combat rules.

Rules for designing all manner and sizes of units and vehicles.

Squats, Ogryns and Ratlings as playable races.

Economy based on rank, renown and contacts, rather than money.

An initial power level of 2-3 hits and you're down, but not dead, and a power curve that doesn't rise much beyond that, ever.

An end to wonky math. Pretty much nothing and no-one should ever hit more than 70 in a characteristic, and 95% in a skill check.

Starting characteristics ranging from 30-50, rather than 20-40, and characteristics should either be point buy or picked from fixed distributions. Rolling dice for this is silly.

Squad-based event resolution. Squad combat rules, and rules for problem solving as a unit.

… And piles more stuff. But I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the system, my group has already done much work on all of the above and much more, Zweihänder promises to do a lot of the above, and if all else fails we do have a back-up system we really love. So… Perhaps the only really relevant thing I have to say, is that I'd like to see is OW returned to being a DH supplement, rather than the 5th republishing of the same 300 pages in a 400 page book. Many spalts = good. More than one core = bad.

Simsum said:

1. As the “only” resolution mechanic? So you mean whenever you roll dice, it’s a % result, be it on a chart, damage for a weapon, how many Insanity/Corruption/Whatever points you gain? No other mechanic whatsoever beyond a d100? I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but it’s worth clarifying.

2. What’s unclear about the DOS rules from BC? Test success = 1 DOS. 10 above needed requirement = 2 DOS. 20 above needed requirement = 3 DOS. And so on.

3a. BC already has a lot of skill consolidation. Things like Shadowing and Wrangle have been wrapped into other skills, and things like Concealment/Silent Move have been combined into the ‘Stealth’ Skill.
3b. Given that knowledge of the Warp, the occult and daemonology are not the same things, yes, I’d say we do need all three. More Lore skills is a good thing.

4. Why?

5a. The game is about the Imperial Guard, not the Imperial Navy.
5b. The game is about the Imperial Guard, not the Imperial Navy.

6. Squats? Really?

7. Why? And why is the math ‘wonky’?

8. How is rolling dice silly? And all the games allows for rolling and point-buy. Why should one method be dictated over any other?

9. If you think that each core is just 3/4ths reprint of DH then you are very much mistaken.

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

This forum software is just ridiculously user-hostile… But to the point. Or points, as it is.

1. That is what I'm saying, actually. But I guess I should have been more explicit about my desire to eliminate a lot of the dice rolling. I'm not suggesting you should score d% Insanity Points whenever you gain Insanity Points, but rather that I see no reason to involve dice in determining the amount of Insanity Points you gain.

2. What's unclear is on the GM side. My approach to GM-determined modifiers, is to assume the default chance of success is 100% before GM-determined modifiers. And my players understand modifier hunting is a virtue. So for us, the Whiff Factor the system is infamous for is a non-issue. But I've been using the system on and off since its WFRP1e incarnation, and was playing RPGs years before that. Others, as you might have noticed, come to the 40K lines slightly less prepared and have a great deal of problems with this. So it should be addressed. Arguably it's the one thing that most needs addressing, at least based on what people say online about their experiences with the system.

More than that, though, I'd like to see DoS/F expanded into something more. Create a solid framework for the kinds of things that go right/wrong on DoS/F's. Typical advantages and complications. That sort of thing. Because as is, the rules offer basically nothing to encourage GMs to let the mechanic shine. The best descriptions of how to use it outside combat, are examples in the modules and a couple of random spalts. And those aren't even good examples, they're bare-bones. And of course, they offer nothing in the way of a framework a GM can use to handle DoS/F's in a consistent and interesting manner.

3a. True. But I'd still prefer something along the lines of 10 Basic Skills and 10 Advanced Skills. Speaking of which, assuming the Characteristics baseline gets upped by 10 points, I'd like to see Untrained Skill Use become "-20% on the roll" instead of "Target Score before modifiers is Characteristics/2 rounded up". The alternative method is a single modifier with no dependencies. The RAW method is a different value for every Characteristic, derived from whatever the Characteristic's value happens to be at the time. In other words, using the alternative you need to remember one value. Using the RAW method you need to remember one rule and determine the actual value every time you use it.

3b. For us it's not a great big deal. I'm a pretty restrictive GM. In the games I run character advancement depends on in-game opportunities and have in-game restrictions. And just as importantly, we're a fairly large group. The PCs can cover a lot of areas of expertise.

Even so, 50 different shades of almost-but-not-quite the same thing is very little flavour for a lot of GM complication. Everything every player invests in should pay off, so everything PCs can do needs to come up from time to time during play. The Skill Groups create a fantastic mess of stuff to keep track of, devise interesting challenges to, and avoid challenging if the players happen to lack the right slight variant on stuff they can do. If there were less of them, or they at least were a fair bit less similar, this would be a good thing. But as it is it's too much of a good thing.

4. Because I forgot to mention I'd like to see the "new, not improved" abilities be separated out of the Talent category. Create a new category for those things. You could, for example, call them Abilities. This is really just about consistency, transparency and trying to make the system itself more intuitive/less confusing.

5a. The system needs a core rulebook.

5b. The system needs a core rulebook.

6. This weekend we're starting a new campaign, set in the RT era and based on the RT-era fluff. Squats will be a prominent feature of the campaign. Also, I have a seriously underused Squat warband. And overweight, cigar-smoking drawf bikers from Hell are just insanely cool.

Besides, if other 40K fans can ask for silly space elves, why can't I ask for silly space dwarves? At least silly space dwarves aren't boring.

7. Because it works better with the DoS/F mechanic. As for why the math is wonky, I can only speculate that the system in all its various iterations didn't go through a lot of clean-up, and the various groups of people developing and play testing it over the years never really questioned whether they were using the material as is, or running it on top of piles and piles of assumptions and unstated house rules they - quite naturally - developed alongside the game.

I assume you meant to ask how the math is wonky, though. The answer is that the power curve is extremely fragile. Stuff doesn't scale up well, or consistently within the boundaries of the system. Characteristics start too low and end up too high. Skills far more so. Wounds too. Characteristic bonuses likewise. And the further you move along the power curve, the greater the difference between those numbers almost always end up being around the table, which further complicates play/makes the game more fragile.

8. Because the dice gods are fickle, and this system isn't geared towards short lived PCs. Random Characteristics work great for 5-min PC generation dungeon crawler type systems. This isn't such a system. And not having random generation be the default doesn't mean you can't do it anyway.

9. I exaggerated for effect, but it's less of an exaggeration that I wish it was. Numbers-wise, how many of the people who buy one so-called core book in the line do you think buys just one? It's just a guess, but I'd be very surprised if it was more than 1 in 10. And assuming I'm even in the very distant neighbourhood of the right number, that makes the apparently endless stream of "cores" kind of a shitty thing to do to us customers.

I'm pretty sure I really want about half of OW. And equally sure I already have 3 more copies than I want of the other half of it. And I really, really doubt the majority of customers don't feel the same way.

Without full disclosure on all relevant data - much of which no doubt doesn't exist, and the rest of which are confidential if FFG has any sense at all - we can't demonstrate how right or wrong either of us are. So we can argue a lot about this, but it seems extremely unlikely anything useful would come of it.

My only wish is that things won't be so hamfistedly rigid as in Dark Heresy.  I hope Specialties are just the starting points.  I know others try to claim that's not how the military and IG work.  But that's patently not true.  There is plenty of room for moving around.  In both real world militaries and the IG books, people DO move from specialty to other things.  Whether a Heavy Weapons trooper becoming a Sergeant or a Sniper getting promoted to officer (I'm pretty sure both of those happened in the Ghost novels alone). 

Yes, you get assigned a role, but you're not stuck there forever.  Possibly for life (Given the short life of most Guardsmen ;)  ) - but not forever!  And some malleability and such makes for a much more interesting game with much more interesting characters than boring, rigid trees.

And as always, I argue Elite Advances are NOT the answer, they are a bandage over a gaping wound, not a solution.  For one, even in the rules they require GM approval, so an otherwise great GM who is By the Book may not allow them.  that doesn't make them bad.  So much better to have things reasonably freeform from the get go.  Starting Specialties, not permanent role (Though some probably more permanent than others, Psykers, Tech Priests, and Commisars - but even those should be able to go through very different routes.  A more Melee OR Shooty commisar who is either a good leader OR intimidating.  etc.)

Forget the Baneblade; it's a wuss. Give me a Stormhammer, and a fair sea to sail her by (what? She's already got half the gun turrets of a full-blown destroyer. Why not the seafaring analogy?).

 If I could have one wish for only war… its that the players get a squad character sheet, much like all the players work together to make there ship in rouge trader and the all share it.  Less focus on the individual players and more on the squad.