[MarcoSkoll]

If anyone has any more thoughts on the above discussion about out of action characters having a slim chance of recovering, do feel free to chip in.

~~~~~

In the meantime though, blast weapons!

The concept of Area and Blast is manageable. Some weapons having up to blast 8 takes ages to resolve, but that's more of a problem with the weapon profiles than the basic rules. (And I've already been handling that with the RIA).

The change I've got earmarked is changing the scatter on a miss. Originally, it was D10 yards +1 for every 10 points or part failed by (with a cap of a quarter of the range to the target), but I think it's better as D3 yards + D3 for every degree of failure.

I feel the original modifier for the margin of failure is far too small compared to the range of values a D10 can throw up. A character can miss by a single point and have his grenade fly up to 11 yards wide*, or miss by 50 points and yet still land 6 yards of his target. (Which is still close enough for a super-frag warhead to still do damage).

*Admittedly though, there is the scattering restriction, so you'd only get this with the few characters who can throw grenades 44 yards or more, but the restriction itself is fairly daft. At 12 yards, no matter how badly the character rolls - he could need a negative target number and then roll something in the 90s -  a frag grenade cannot scatter more than three yards and thus will always score at least one hit.

Changing it to D3 yards for failure and each degree of failure means a narrow miss with a frag grenade will probably still do damage, but catastrophically missing with any weapon means it will almost certainly go very wide.
Putting more focus on the degree of failure allows the hard limit on scatter to be forgotten (as shots at longer distances are likely to miss by more) with no more than a note to the GM to adjudicate if anything really silly happens (which there already is, to be honest).

~~~~~

Part of the reason I'm thinking about this is to standardise indirect fire more. The rules for it have always been rather useless (almost every time I see people use grenades, they're throwing directly) and unnecessarily different. Once the degrees of failure are doing more to define how much a target is missed by, indirect fire can quite reasonably just be reduced to an additional to hit penalty.

Here's the current draft rules text:

Some blast weapons, such as thrown grenades or some grenade launchers, can angle their shots over or around intervening terrain. Such weapons are said to be capable of Indirect fire.

An indirect attack requires the character to declare a trajectory for the attack, such dropping a grenade through an air vent, throwing it over a building or bouncing it off a wall - as always, the GM should adjudicate if this is plausible.

Indirect fire is resolved as per a normal blast weapon (or thrown blast weapon) with an additional penalty decided by the gamesmaster to represent the difficulty of the shot (and any uncertainty in the target's position).

A relatively easy throw over a wall or around a door frame would require a penalty of -20.
Getting an attack through an open window or bouncing it off the side of a truck might be at -40.
A throw that requires ricocheting a grenade off a wall into a small thermal exhaust port could be -60 or more.

Note that indirect fire is linked fairly heavily with the principles mentioned in the Awareness section, and a GM should veto characters throwing grenades around corners without good reason.

The recommended penalties will be subject to revision, but the system should prove more usable than the original.

~~~~~

Psychic Powers.

On this, I'm borrowing from Koval's RIPPA as the core system, hence introducing Psy Rating - such that a psyker's power is not inherently the same thing as their control.

What I am having to do though is remove the Risky Action system, because that won't exist in IRE, due to extreme mathematical screwiness.

To explain, Risky Action percentages in 1st edition currently look like this:

	1st Action	2nd Action	3rd Action	4th Action	5th Action	6th Action
Speed 1	16.67%	X	X	X	X	X
Speed 2	25.00%	0.00%	X	X	X	X
Speed 3	29.63%	11.11%	0.00%	X	X	X
Speed 4	32.48%	19.75%	7.90%	0.00%	X	X
Speed 5	34.41%	26.12%	15.43%	5.49%	0.00%	X
Speed 6	35.82%	30.63%	21.92%	11.67%	3.76%	0.00%

The risk falls throughout the turn not because characters are less likely to reach later actions (this table accounts for that, and only counts the cases where the character rolls at least the necessary number of actions), but because every action you pass can't have rolled a 1 (but is more likely to be a 6).

Higher speed characters, despite apparently being more alert and agile, are also at higher risk. The statistics are because the more dice rolled, the more likely you are to roll a 1 - and while you are also more likely to roll a 6, the two things tend not to happen at the same time (after all, any die that's rolled 1 reduces your number of chances of rolling a 6) and thus won't cancel.

It also doesn't cope well with multiple risks in the same turn, and makes everything the same risk. (The only variation on this risk in the base rules is the Heroic ability, but the changed risk is still applied to the character rather than any actions).

To describe the system in one word: bonkers. And thus it's being gutted entirely and I'm replacing it with the Hazard system originally introduced in the RIA. (Whether it'll be called "Hazard" or "Risky" I'm not yet sure). For psychic powers, I intend to tie the Hazard to the Psy Rating the character is using (note a character will be permitted to use less than their full Psy Rating). Using more power from the warp should be more dangerous, after all.

There are parts of the RIPPA mechanics I will be leaving out of IRE though. That's not to say I think they're bad, but more that they're perhaps better left to an expansion. I'm leaving much of my own RIA material out of IRE for the same reason*.

I'm probably going to end up doing a fresh rewrite on the LRB psychic powers rather than stealing the RIPPA ones for that reason.

~~~~~

* I'm keeping the Hazards (for the above reasons) and at least some of the expanded damage rules - things like Rending & Tearing, although quite likely not all of them. Recoil, weapon jams, all but the most basic of the weapon and ammo types, all of that... that's going to stay in RIA.

[MarcoSkoll]

Having been skyping with Koval earlier, the subject of special abilities came up. Not every ability has been or will be update, of course, but there are some that are messy (for example, Catfall is mathematically something of a nuisance), and others where the IRE mechanics either invalidate them or provides a better option.

Lightning Reflexes (at least in its IGT version) is an example of something that can be done better in IRE, which has an integrated reaction system to base such an ability off. On the other hand, Heroic was an example of an ability (partly) invalidated by IRE. While it does improve a character's likely number of actions, the ability is probably most significant for averting Risky Actions (cutting the risk by on average about two-thirds), a system that's been replaced in IRE. As such, Heroic characters now get a chance to cancel one Hazardous roll per turn.

All the LRB special abilities have or will reappear (and, as said in the last post, all the LRB psychic powers) whether changed or not, but I've been expanding the list a bit. There's a lot of times players have written similar abilities, and standardising such things would help things at the table.

I'll have to appeal to people to list abilities they see often - although it's perhaps hard to believe, I can't remember every single Inquisitor character sheet I've ever seen off the top of my head.

So far I've got:
- Combat Stances: This is a skill group that can be used to represent different styles of melee combat (similar in concept to styles of Kung Fu: Tiger, Bear, Mantis, Dragon, etc).
- Bodyguard: New reaction options that can protect nearby characters. (The original version from the Boatswain article is a taboo subject around me).
- Marksman: Increased aim bonus
- Stealthy: Penalty to detect the character
- Just a Flesh Wound: An additional light injury level
- Iron Jaw: Toughness tests to resist stunning
- Feel no Pain: Increased resistance to system shock and unconsciousness, halve speed penalties from injury
- The various persuasion/threatening type abilities from PrecinctOmega's INQ2.0, as IRE will be combining this into things like Greenstuff_Gav's conversation rules to give the core rules some decent talking mechanics.

And some ideas I've nicked from Dark Heresy that I'm still working on Inquisitor-related specifics for:
- Hardy: This will be a recovery bonus, but I'm backwards and forwards between it being a fairly straight bonus to recovery tests, or allowing the character to heal three injury levels rather than just two.
- Paranoia: There's either an awareness or reaction bonus in this one. Possibly both - one idea I've had is that it will allow the character a chance, albeit reduced, at reacting to actions without being aware of them. (For example, it might allow a character to dive out of the way of a hidden sniper's shot).

I'm also revisiting the Fear system. The original system doesn't work in IRE anyway, as IRE doesn't have an obligatory combat state (the job of restricting a character's awareness, but allowing them to act and react one action at a time is replaced by the voluntary "Engaged" state), but I want to see it expanded.
As it is, the existing system only handles characters who it's scary to be in close combat with. That works reasonably well for an Arcoflagellant, Chrono-Gladiator or an Ork, but the ability often lacks a punch on things like daemonhosts (who very often have no intention of entering melee) or when it's supposed to represent an Inquisitor's reputation.

I don't want to clutter the game with too many Nerve tests when these characters are around, so I'm currently going with such characters' presences penalising Nerve tests in general. It seems appropriate that a character is more likely to dive for cover (screaming like a little girl) if a daemonhost is hurling witchfire at him than when under lasgun fire.

And, while I've not yet nailed down the rules, I will try and find a space for a Disturbing Appearance trait to allow all those badly scarred characters out there to be given something a little more appropriate than Fearsome. (All of those Inquisitors suddenly panicking and coming to a screeching halt when they realised how ugly the person they were about to smack with a power hammer was... yeah, that didn't work for me).

[MarcoSkoll]

Although no-one else has yet responded, I'm taking a look at the idea of recovering from out of action.

If the idea is going to be used, it will definitely need to be penalised as compared to regular recovery so that out of action is still a fairly serious state to be in and also to keep True Grit special, but not so much as to just be a complete waste of dice rolling.

My first thoughts were a flat penalty, but on reflection I'm not sure that would have the right effect. Something like -40 would be much more surmountable for a T70 character than a T50 character which, while probably realistic, would play back into the steep curve of resistance to system shock that things like the flat 10 point threshold have been trying to reduce.

A divisive modifier might therefore work better. (I've considered mixed possibilities, such as (T/2)-10, but I think these are somewhat messy).

The question though is exactly how often characters should be regaining consciousness. If a T60 character (fairly tough) suffers system shock in the early game, should he on average wake up in the mid-game, the end-game, or be most likely to not wake up at all?

My thinking is probably somewhere between the mid-game and end-game. That way a character who goes down in the mid-game will have a chance (although not a guarantee) of returning for the end-game and making a dramatic intervention, but a character who goes down late on will probably stay out of the game.
If it took longer than that, I think it would prove annoying (rolling for characters that have little chance of returning to the game) and potentially unbalancing (as it'd be very likely that only one player would get lucky enough to have characters return to the game).

That to me sounds like a moderately tough character should on average take about three to five turns to recover from system shock. I may have to adjust if it turns out that the IRE mechanics encourage more or fewer turns than the LRB though.

A reasonable starting point then might be for a character to use half toughness when recovering from out of action (meaning that a T60 character will recover on average in 3.33... turns), but automatically be stunned for the turn after recovering; that slightly extends the average and minimum durations a character will be incapacitated for, meaning even if a character flukes their recovery test first time, they won't immediately be back into the action.

Naturally, True Grit will get to ignore these penalties and will thus act much as it currently does.

There is the question of how stunning will stack with out of action, but that shouldn't be too difficult (either it ticks down while the character is out of it, or it doesn't).

~~~~~

On a broader note relating to stunning though, I'm considering whether it just shouldn't stack at all.
The original rulebook is unclear as to whether it should or shouldn't, but as far as I know, everyone does stack it - and under these circumstances, it's not that difficult for a character to get stunned for five or six turns, which isn't particularly fun.

What if a character instead just counted the highest result? For example, a character shot at by semi-auto fire takes two results of D3 turns stunned. When he rolls, he gets a 2 and a 3, and is hence stunned for the higher result - three turns. Two turns later, down to one turn remaining, a stray grenade inflicts a hit that causes another two turns of stunning, which brings him back up to two turns (as the new result is greater than what remains of the old result).

Hence, he recovers his wits four turns after the original hits, rather than the seven turns that would have occurred otherwise. This is still obviously a serious penalty (and taking multiple results is still bad, as it increases the likelihood of a high roll), but not so much as to have entirely eliminated him from the game.

Another alternative is a hard cap on stunning - for example, the "clock" could be limited to never go above three turns (later hits might reset that clock, but at no single time would a character be due to be stunned for more than three turns)

Either way, this would probably allow me to avoid some of my earlier proposed changes to the injury tables.

~~~~~

That said, I do need feedback on which way people think injury effects should go.

Core differences between proposed IRE changes and the LRB are:

- As IRE uses 3+ action rolls, speed penalties become more significant (typically costing a character two-thirds of an action rather than half).
- The fixed system shock threshold means high toughness characters will be more prone to system shock, but low toughness characters a little less so.
- Powerful hits will result in a much higher chance of system shock.
- A limit on extreme stunning duration.
- Possibly a chance of recovering from out of action.

This would probably limit the changes to the injury tables to swapping the Heavy Leg result for "Prone" rather than "-1 Speed", and perhaps using the new "levels" of system shock on the table.

So, some areas are getting a little meaner, some areas are getting a little softer; I think it will roughly balance out against the LRB, although whether that's what people want... I don't know.

[Van Helser]

I don't know if I am behind the idea of people recovering without the True Grit special ability. In my mind, True Grit represents those characters that take a horrific beating but don't know when to stop. These moments of influencing the final outcome of a game should be rare in the horrific reality of the 41st millennium where life is cheap and there is no hope.

A hard cap on stunning of 3 combined with always taking the higher result is the way I think that one should go.

System Shock... I think seeing how this stands up to playtesting is needed. My initial feeling is that by making everyone test at 10 damage, we are going to see a lot more dice rolling breaking up the flow of the game.

We do need to do something about risky actions. Being high speed making them more likely just doesn't seem right. Perhaps speed 5+ characters could discount each 1 rolled if they roll 5s or 6s instead of just 6s?

Beware I have just fired out the following as a stream of thoughts: Or by designating a level of "risk" to particular actions. Sprinting across uneven ground would be low risk, firing a plasma gun high risk. If a low risk action is the only risky action during a turn you have to roll two 1s (with no 6s) to fall foul of it. Two low risk actions would be treated as it is currently. Three low risk and your 6s wouldn't count. A high risk action is treated as it is currently, and attempting any other low risk action would mean your 6s count for nothing. Two high risk actions can't be attempted.

Ruaridh

[MarcoSkoll]

These moments of influencing the final outcome of a game should be rare in the horrific reality of the 41st millennium where life is cheap and there is no hope.

It's probably controversial, but there are some sane arguments for it.

While Warhammer 40,000 is the grim dark future, "hopeless" is not necessarily the reality for Inquisitor characters. They're momentous heroes and infamous villains, many of them more than human (or less than!).

Ultimately, the important question is "is it going to be more fun?". From my experience, characters getting put out of the game early on generally isn't wildly fun (from either side of the table - to the point that I often find myself not attacking because the game will be less interesting).
Yes, it's good when a player improvises through adversity and even better if they actually pull it off, but missing a character for several turns and then getting them back injured is still quite adverse, even if it's deliberately steering clear of dire.

I'm not sure about it myself, but that's why I think it's probably worth (some) play-testing. The V0.2 draft has a few such experimental elements  because I'd rather test slightly outlandish ideas and ditch them if they don't work, rather than dismissing them all out of hand.

If I had to guess, I suspect the ultimate answer will be to split the difference - no recovery while unconscious, but allowing characters to help allies recover from out of action (as, at present, the letter of the rules is that recovering from either system shock or unconsciousness is only possible via True Grit).

On the note of healing, but this time intentional first aid (as opposed to passive end of turn recovery), I think this should probably be changed to an Sg test. Being a tough bastard doesn't mean you'll know how to apply a proper tourniquet.

A hard cap on stunning of 3 combined with always taking the higher result is the way I think that one should go.

That's possible. If combining both ideas, the cases of stunning I can think of from 1st Ed that can exceed three turns in their own right aren't that common in game...

- Falling damage
- LRB Graviton guns
- RIA Photon Flash
- Stun toxin
- Choke (the psychic power, not the toxin*)
- Psychic Shriek
- Vortex of Chaos
- And probably some from articles, but even I can't remember every rule off the top of my head.

(* The toxin stuns one turn at a time, like Bloodfire or the Mesmerism psychic power, so wouldn't really count).

... but as I'll be revisiting some of those anyway, I'd say it's reasonably viable. Even if such attacks could no longer stun for more than three turns, they'd still have a considerably increased likelihood of doing so. Or, if necessary, certain things could be made specific exceptions.

System Shock... I think seeing how this stands up to playtesting is needed. My initial feeling is that by making everyone test at 10 damage, we are going to see a lot more dice rolling breaking up the flow of the game.

Dice rolling itself is not that time consuming. Deciding what you need to roll... that can be:

GM: "11 damage. Is that enough to cause system shock?"
Player: "I don't know."
GM: "Well, what's your system shock value?"
Player: "Erm... no, wait, that's his knockback... Ah. 12. How much damage was it again?"
GM: "11 damage. So no."

Alternatively, what you get is:
GM: "And that's 11 damage, take a system shock test."
Player: "34. Passed."

10 damage is still a moderately large amount of damage to take from one hit (at least after armour), so it's not like we'll be seeing it on every single attack. (And some characters are already testing at 10 damage or under anyway). And given it's already following all of the location rolling, damage dice, table consulting, character sheet updating and such necessary for having taken that much damage anyway, the extra dice rolling is very unlikely to be what affects the game. My concerns are more regarding how it will impact the hardiness of characters.

As far as the complexity, what I am open to is being talked out of the modifier for a low injury total (in which case, the current plan is to just turn all system shock tests into a flat +10 modifier*). For the same reasons as I talk about for out-of-action recovery, I'd like to see how the more complex version plays though, rather than going straight for the dumbed down version.

*Both because I want to make low toughness characters slightly less likely to faint at the sight of blood, and also to compensate high toughness characters for the fact they'll be taking more tests.

We do need to do something about risky actions. Being high speed making them more likely just doesn't seem right. Perhaps speed 5+ characters could discount each 1 rolled if they roll 5s or 6s instead of just 6s?

Well, that's where the RIA hazard system comes in.

Hazards are based on the units die of the D100 roll (or for those skills that don't require a test, a separately rolled D10). Something might be described as Hazardous (9+), in which case it'll trigger on units rolls of 9 or 10, for an overall 20% risk.

This is moderately tunable (coming in bite-sized chunks of 10%), but I'm even patching together a mini-hazard system (although I'm still hunting for a better name than "mini-hazard"...) that only triggers on rolls of 91-00 for when there's a need to juggle smaller percentages.

~~~~~

EDIT: Can I also note that I could do with more feedback if people want to be able to be playtesting this in July!

[MarcoSkoll]

So, Psychic Powers. Or, at least, an early draft of some of them.

As I've already said, my current draft is stealing many of the basic mechanics from Koval's RIPPA. This means that IRE psykers have a Psy Rating to represent their psychic potential (whereas Willpower represents their control. The concepts are loosely analogous to a character's Strength and Weapon Skill in close combat).

A character may not always choose to use all of their psy rating however, as drawing more energy from the warp is a dangerous thing. The Hazard rating for any psychic power roll is based on the Casting Psy Rating.
This is whatever proportion of their maximum Psy Rating the psyker is using for that power. Normally a psyker can choose how much power to use, although a poorly trained or addled psyker may not get a choice.

Using more Psy Rating slightly reduces the difficulty of the harder powers (effectively taking a brute force approach to casting, rather than a finesse one), but its more significant effect is to scale up the effects of the powers. A power's Effective Psy Rating (a character's Casting Psy Rating, minus any penalties*) has a dramatic effect on many of the re-written IRE powers.
* Stuff like psychic nulls, probably range (possibly -1 PR per 10 yards, if the power is Ranged, anyway), but I'm also considering whether certain powers will have PR penalties to represent the sheer level of energy needed to channel them.

For examples, here's the draft of how I've currently re-written the first page of psychic abilties, Miscellaneous and Biomancy (now called Biokinesis for pedantry reasons. Things ending in -mancy are divination).

Miscellaneous powers

Detection - Difficulty 0
The psyker scans his surroundings for the life signs, mental signatures or warp echoes of his enemies.
The character is immediately aware of everyone within D10 yards per level of Effective Psy Rating.

Gaze of Death - Difficulty 10 - Psychic bolt
Dark energies shoot forth from the psyker's eyes, scorching at the flesh of his enemies.

Code: [Select]

Type   Rng Mode    Dam
Psychic A  Semi(4) 2D6+EPR
Biokinesis

Blood Boil - Difficulty: 1/2 Target's Toughness -  Line of Sight & Ranged
The psyker reaches into his target's body, rapidly accelerating the target's pulse and pushing his blood pressure to extreme levels. In the most spectacular cases, the victim's heart and brain explode!
Roll a D6 for every level of Effective Psy Rating. For every result of 4+, the target suffers one level of Unnatural** damage to both the head and chest locations, to a minimum of one level.
Characters with a bionic heart are only affected on rolls of 5+. Characters without blood or a blood substitute are immune.

Choke - Difficulty: 1/2 Target's Toughness - Ranged
The psyker paralyses his target's respiratory tract and diaphragm, robbing him of breath.
Roll a D6 for every level of Effective Psy Rating.  The target takes a stunned result equal to one turn for every result of 3+, to a minimum of one turn. (For the purposes of determining stunning priority, all turns are added into one result).
Characters with bionic lungs are only affected on rolls of 5+. Characters who do not need to breathe are immune.

Enfeeble - Difficulty: 1/2 Target's Strength - Ranged & Persistent
The psyker drains the vigour from his victim, making him weak and incapable.
Until the power ends, the target's strength is reduced by D10 for every level of Effective Psy Rating.
Characters reduced to 0 strength or less fall out of action while the power lasts.
The strength of any bionics is not affected.

Hammerhand - Difficulty 5 - Persistent
The psyker hardens the flesh of his arm, forcing his muscles past their normal limits.
While the power lasts, the psyker's unarmed attacks instead do D5 damage per level of Effective Psy Rating.

Regenerate - Difficulty 20 - Persistent
Focusing his power on a cellular level, the psyker binds wounds and knits flesh.
The psyker may target himself or another character he can touch (within 1 yard). While the power (and physical contact) are maintained, the target gains the Regeneration exotic ability.
Any regeneration actions use the psyker's Willpower in place of the character's Toughness, and the power's Effective Psy Rating in place of the character's Toughness bonus.

Storm of Lightning - Difficulty 5 - Psychic Bolt
Bio-electrical energy jumps from the psyker's finger-tips, arcing from target to target.

Code: [Select]

Type   Rng Mode    Dam
Psychic 15  Flame D10+EPR
Warp Strength - Difficulty 5 - Line of Sight, Ranged & Persistent
The psyker invigorates the target, strengthening muscle, toughening tendons and hardening bone.
Until the power ends, the target's strength is increased by D10 for every level of the power's Effective Psy Rating.

** Unnatural damage is IRE-speak for "Do not pass Go, Do not collect £200". It completely ignores toughness and armour, dealing injury levels directly.

[MarcoSkoll]

Well, that's quite a lot of no response.

I know I'm being technical and verbose yet still only providing bits and pieces at a time, but I don't really want to commit to full rewrites of sections without getting some feedback on the core ideas. Even responses that were mostly swear-word riddled instructions on how to castrate myself and thus avoid the risk of passing on my rules writing skills would be more useful than nothing. (Not that I particularly want crude guidelines on self-emasculation).

~~~~~

Anyway, for the sake of keeping tabs on things, both for my benefit and to make it easier for people to follow, I thought I'd go for a summary/overview on the current state of IRE - what is (or will be) changed from 1st Edition and what isn't.

Going by rules section:

Basic Conventions
No real changes.

Characters
- Characteristic tests now use a "The Price is Right" approach to determine how much a test has passed by - you want to roll as high as possible under your target number.

While ditching the "roll low = best" mechanic takes a bit of getting used to and isn't absolutely essential for playing the game, it dramatically speeds and simplifies the maths, particularly in opposed tests. If a D100 roll passing on 23 means it has passed by 23, it's just less maths than having to subtract it from 67, and much simpler to compare to someone else's roll of 45.

Actions
- Action rolls have been changed to a 3+. This is mostly to interact with the new reaction mechanics.

- Risky actions, which were very statistically screwy and didn't allow different actions to have different risks, are ditched in favour of Hazards, which use the units die of a characteristic test (or a separately rolled D10 for actions which don't need a roll) to determine the risk.

- Because of the introduction of the Reaction system, being aware of a character reacting to them allows a character to attempt to change their actions. (Although, as before, this is riskier than using Pause for Breath, as failing the Initiative roll immediately ends the character's turn).

Reactions
This is probably the core mechanical change in IRE, although it does actually have grounding in 1st edition.

Reactions fall into two sets of two broad categories:
>> Out of turn Actions and Defensive reactions; overwatch and counter-attacks, for example, are cases of out-of-turn actions you'll already know. Parrying, dodging (both the close combat version and the special skill) and psychic nullifications are examples of what IRE calls Defensive reactions. (Defensive reactions in IRE are largely now opposed roll-offs though).
>>  Prepared and Reserved reactions; Prepared reactions happen automatically when triggered (overwatch is a 1st edition example),  Reserved reactions are declared when used, but require a reaction test (the IGT version of Lightning Reflexes is closest, but close combat reactions are broadly similar) reactions.

Reactions come primarily from actions the character has set aside to use (in whichever combination of these ways). This makes it easier to keep a cap on how much a character can do in a turn and, combined with the increase to action rolls, allows a natural fluidity where characters can act more quickly when they're not having to keep responding to their enemies. You'll naturally see games get to the meat of the action quicker, with fewer turns wandering around ignorant of each other.

There is also the Engaged state, which acts somewhat similarly to the close combat state in 1st edition, allowing characters to declare one action at a time, react for free, but at a considerable awareness penalty. The main difference from 1st edition is that the state is voluntary, and can be used for non-close combat purposes.

Aside from reactions giving a more dynamic sense to the play, standardising how characters act outside their turn will hopefully make the rules more robust and less prone to exceptions.

Movement
Movement hasn't had any ground shattering changes. Aside from updating Risky movement actions to the Hazard system, most things are loosely as they were. For the moment, at least, I've ditched the idea of using more Dark Heresy-like tests for jumps and climbing.

A few sections have been unified and simplified slightly in accordance with how I normally see things played - the obstacle rules have been rolled into climbing, I've ditched the note about stairs being difficult terrain (things are usually slow enough if you're measuring diagonally up them, anyway). And I've moved the Falling rules here rather than in the Appendix.

Shooting
- Fire Arcs have been broadened to 90 degree arcs. (45 degrees always felt too restrictive and 45 degrees is much harder to measure/approximate in game if you need to).

- Placed Shots have been rolled into aiming, and are now a form of called shot (where levels of aim can be used to modify hit location rather than hit chance). This makes it possible both for a character to plan a called shot (as opposed to only getting them at random) and works better with semi-auto fire (both the new and old mechanism, whichever we eventually stick with)
Similarly, resting a weapon is rolled into aiming, and is free as part of an aim action. (As there was no point to it before, given it provided a smaller benefit than aiming for that same action).

- Semi auto, Full auto and Flame weapons get new rules. Semi-auto and full auto are now hit bonuses (but with increased penalties for range) and there's an "exploding dice" mechanic for successive hits. Flame weapons now roll once per target, with more hits based on the success on the hit roll.
(Semi-Auto may go back to a similar system to 1st edition. Depends on how things play test).

- Blast weapons scatter D3 yards for failure and each degree of failure on the hit roll, in order to make the margin of failure more important than in the old system. Indirect fire is now rolled into this as a GM determined penalty depending on the difficulty of the throw/launch.

- There's a shooting specific Defensive reaction: Evade (the movement action has been renamed to "Weave". The old rules used the term "Dodge" as both an anti-shooting reaction and an anti-melee reaction, which both worked differently. "Evade" was the best term I could think of here).

- More in depth rules for Friendly fire, using the new hazard system. The closer a friendly character is to being in the way, the more likely you are to hit him instead.

Close Combat
This is one of the more considerable overhauls.

- Close combat builds into the reaction system, in order to standardise things. This means that parries and dodges are defensive reactions and thus now have to beat the hit roll to succeed, so no more dodging a master swordsman as easily as a knife wielding scribe. (The flip-side though is that successive parries are much less penalised, and that's if I decide to penalise them at all. High WS is becoming more important than wearing down a defender's parry chance with lots of actions).
As these reactions are now declared before rolling off, a parry may counter attack even if the attacker misses. (As it should be. The knife wielding scribe will definitely leave more holes in his attack than the swordsman, as opposed to the backwards effect as it currently is).

This means a serious close combat fighter is going to be pretty darn good at his job and is less likely to need three turns to kill a no-name NPC who won't stay still.

- Positioning is becoming much more important, allowing the special cases of arm's length and up-close to be discarded. A swordsman is inherently in trouble if he lets a knife fighter get too close.

- More standard combat actions. Grappling and staggering an opponent are options I'm working on, and characters can now try to use pretty much any gun in close combat (although the heavier it is, the less likely it is to hit!)

- I'm also extending the close combat weapon profiles slightly. The original three characteristics (two of which only really took about five different values) were very limited and limiting compared to the much more extensive ranged weapon profiles. As such, there's now special Reach characteristics (which modify positioning bonuses) and Attack Penalties (the slow nature of a power fist, for example, can now be represented in the rules).
However, this is should still be loosely compatible with old character sheets, as the Attack Penalties (at least in the current draft) are generally roughly the same as Parry Penalties.

Psychic Powers
This section is loosely based on Koval's RIPPA. Hence, it's introducing Psy Rating in order to allow the power and skill of a psyker to be separate.
For example, you might have an Inquisitor who is very skilled with his telekinesis, but weak - he might be easily able to pick a lock with the force of his will alone, but not be able to lift more than a few kilos - or a completely untrained rogue psyker who can summon huge fireballs but mostly in the wrong place.

The portion of their Psy Rating that a psyker uses determines both the riskiness and actual punch of the powers. This is necessitating a fairly broad rewrite on the existing psychic powers in order to integrate Psy Rating in more, but the results will hopefully be reasonably intuitive.

I'm also establishing Willpower as the standard to hit characteristic for psychic bolts. (Hence allowing psykers to be a crap shot, but decent at throwing a lightning arc).

Most of of the rest mirrors RIPPA (which itself borrows quite a bit from the 40kRP systems from RT onwards).

Injury, Damage & Recovery
There's less radical changes to this than I was expecting when I started the project. Having had more experience with the reformatting of the injury quick reference table I made some time back, I think it's made the original system rather easier to handle.



There are a few changes earmarked, though none of them are massive overhauls on the system:

- Injury results are cumulative, so an Acute wound now adds up to a bigger speed penalty than a Heavy wound. As it is, I know a lot of people played this way anyway.
(There's also odd side-effects from table not being cumulative, if you take the letter of the rules. For example, should a character with True Grit recover from System shock caused by the injury table, these levels have no persistent effects. Not that I expect players to abuse the system, but there's no sense in leaving holes that don't need to be there.).

- ... except Stunning, which now doesn't stack (a character just counts the highest result) in order to avoid characters missing the entire game. There's also a maximum cap on any single stunning result of three turns (although a character can be stunned for a longer total duration than this by taking subsequent hits).

- System shock has been standardised to a fixed 10 point threshold, in order to remove the near immunity of high toughness characters (and stop low toughness characters fainting on every single hit). Particularly high damage attacks now call for multiple SS tests.

- Recovery from out of action is now written in. Whether or not any characters will have a (small) chance of recovering themselves from out of action is still out for playtesting, but at a minimum allies will be able to assist unconscious characters. (Before, the letter of the rules was that only True Grit could overcome out of action)

- Injury tables are largely unchanged. The Heavy Leg result has been replaced with "Prone" rather than "-1 speed" - which matches the effects of the arm table better, and also reduces overall speed penalties a touch (which become more severe with 3+ action rolls).

- Some of the simpler of the core Revised Armoury damage effects have been put in here, like Rending (treats the target's Base Injury value as 1 lower) and Tearing (roll an extra die for damage, discard lowest)*, as I feel they add quite a lot of breadth to the damage system.
*Which I really just nicked from Dark Heresy, anyway.

Awareness
Nothing particularly drastic is going on here. I'm going to a greater length to explain the concepts of awareness, and also suggesting that the section is more guidelines than rules (which is how most GMs handle it anyway).

Conversation
Another new section, although it's mostly based on rules that the community have been using for years.
Improving the rules for characters communicating  talk more easily gives them choices other than just shooting each other.

This is built off Greenstuff_Gav's close combat-esque mechanics - that being that when in conversation, characters choose what they want to say an action at a time (being reasonably generous about what can be said in an action, so that short conversations don't take six turns!), allowing the  other character to respond.
Precinct_Omega's persuasion/threatening rules from his drafts of Inquisitor2 are also being borrowed.

Abilities
Primarily, this is a polish up to bring the original abilities into line with IRE changes, but I'm also rolling in many common traits that didn't show up in the first rulebook. There's not a lot drastic going on here.

Armoury
- As far as ranged weapons, I'm doing a bit of a "Revised Armoury"-lite here, in that long-arms such as rifles and shotguns now have a notable damage bonus over pistols, rebalancing a few things and cleaning up some of the more rule-intensive weapons.
However, the list of weapons and ammo is massively cut down from the RIA to keep it more accessible, and many of the more intricate rules of the RIA have been left out.

- The basic CCWs have been updated as much as necessary for the new CC mechanics.

I'm planning on revisiting chain and power weapons - power weapons in particular will stay nasty but they won't be capable of quite such extremes of damage as are possible in the core rules. The intent is to make it so that the weapons don't have to be routinely ignored for being overpowered.

Some of the changes to the Daemon weapon rules we discussed in Cortez's thread are making it in there, making it a less binary matter of "Is my Wp better than the daemon's? If yes, profit. If no, get possessed".
Characters can now reliably resist a fairly powerful daemon under normal conditions, but in vulnerable moments (getting pinned or stunned, for example), even a weak daemon can potentially find its way into its wielder's mind.

- Bionics might get a bit of an overhaul. I'm not sure yet.
My personal approach to them at present has been more armour, but a modest Base Injury value (independent of the character's). Hence, a knife is unlikely to do much more than scratch the finish, but anything powerful enough to do actual damage is likely to rupture hydraulics or shred circuit boards. That may not be enough to everyone's taste though to make it "official".

Vehicles
This probably won't make it into the next draft, but I think having a robust core system for vehicles (as opposed to the "OMG, everything explodes" version that Exterminatus magazine gave us) would be a strength.

NPCs
Again, this probably won't show up in the next draft, but this will be a section that includes simplified the rules for unimportant NPCs - goons that really don't merit a full level of detail.

~~~~~

That's the summary for now, but I may come back and discuss more pieces in detail again.

[Raghnall]

I am interested Marco, but I'm very busy at the moment. In particular, I like the pay rating mechanic, although I hope that is accompanied with an expanded list of powers compared to the LRB.

Proper feed back will come when I have the time, but I wanted to assure you that there is some interest.

[Drubbels]

Movement

Now that action rolls are on a 3+ and reactions are a thing, I feel like the Sprint action should be removed:

A character who might previously have spent all of their actions Running would now spend most of them Running, and some of them preparing Reactions. A character who might previously have spent all of their actions Sprinting would now simply spend all of their actions Running, with no regard for Reactions.

It seems to me that the intended use - to move faster than you ordinarily would, at the expense of awareness/versatility - is already achieved by the action mechanics.

Reactions

I've probably asked this before, but how exactly are Prepared and Reserved Reactions going to work? I keep forgetting.

Conversation

I've never really understood how the Persuasion mechanics are supposed to work - can a heretic dissuade an Inquisitor from doing the Emperor's Work by just rolling really well? Or is that not how it works?

[MarcoSkoll]

Now that action rolls are on a 3+ and reactions are a thing, I feel like the Sprint action should be removed

It's not an unreasonable possibility*, although at the moment I've marked up certain actions so that using them hinders the user's perceptions and responsiveness. Stuff like Sprinting actually now has an associated penalty for awareness and reactions.

*Although I have considered making Sprinting slower. 8 yards is a possibility, although I may tie that specifically into an Encumbrance system.
The original version was far too over the top (a Stormtrooper in carapace usually ended up being Speed 1), and is hence usually entirely ignored, but a better system could still encourage lightly equipped characters.
Perhaps unencumbered characters could sprint a full 10 yards, lightly encumbered characters only 8 yards and heavily encumbered characters not at all.

I've probably asked this before, but how exactly are Prepared and Reserved Reactions going to work? I keep forgetting.

Prepared reactions are declared as part of the character's normal action sequence, but their execution is delayed until outside the character's normal turn. They must meet all normal conditions of the given action (for example, if you prepare a shooting action, you must declare a valid target), and the preparation must be a character's last (successful) action.

For the examples from the rules text:
- “Inquisitor Shyloque will prepare to dive for this cover over here"
- “Magos Gruss will prepare to shoot Sgt Stone on semi-auto”
- “Quovandius will prepare to duck back behind the corner”

Note that preparing a reaction does not need a character to declare when or why they will use said reaction. The player can decide when to use it when the time comes (although the character will still need to be aware of something to react to).
Maybe Shyloque will dive when he sees Covenant draw his shotgun, or when Von Castellan suddenly comes around the corner.

In this way, Prepared reactions are very specific (much more so than Reserved reactions), but are paid back for it by being automatically executed. (The character has already passed their action roll, the execution is just delayed. But in fluff terms, because they're already expecting to do it, they don't need to think. Hence, there's no test to react).

~~~~~

Reserved reactions are saved up either by holding back action dice or using the "Wary" action (which is more intended to be used at the end of the turn, to soak up any excess actions without affecting the chance of earlier actions).

In contrast to Prepared actions, they're declared when used, but require a successful Initiative test on the character's part.

Reserved reactions are usually the more common type, at least in the testing I've done so far. While they're less reliable, their greater versatility tends to be more appealing.

I've never really understood how the Persuasion mechanics are supposed to work - can a heretic dissuade an Inquisitor from doing the Emperor's Work by just rolling really well? Or is that not how it works?

When they were first starting to spread through the community, I did sometimes see the Persuasion/Threatening mechanics go that way, but I did make a point of annotating them when I started copying them into my own event packs.

I see it that the GM should modify the persuade/threaten test (or the target's opposing roll) depending on the eloquence of the player's argument.

"Stand aside or I'll shoot you" isn't a particularly good threat when you're pointing a stubber at an Inquisitor in full carapace, so that would suffer a serious penalty to any roll - or the GM could veto it entirely in certain cases. A Space Marine with Nerves of Steel isn't going to be even slightly fazed.
A more credible threat like "You're surrounded on all sides from elevated positions" might do better, and something genuinely creative (more creative than I can think of right now) may even get a bonus.

In the case of your heretic, exactly the same thing would apply. The more reasonable what he argues is, the more chance he has of persuading the Inquisitor. After all, there are some pretty silvertongued heretics out there, and the lure of Chaos is insidious.

However, this isn't the be-all-and-end-all of it. On one side, the target can automatically choose to be persuaded should they choose, but inversely characters get to re-consider anything they've currently been persuaded by. Perhaps as they think it over, they realise the holes in the argument, or alternatively they force themselves to stop thinking about it and thus continue to bask in their own ignorance and dogma.

So, a heretic with a good argument might be able to stall an Inquisitor for a moment, but no matter how well he rolls he's not going to be able to turn them to worship of the Great Deceiver... unless he has the Inquisitor's willing consent.

[MarcoSkoll]

In the hope of more response on the proposed Psychic rules, I've taken the risk of writing large chunks up properly. This is far from a finished version, as I'm reluctant to fully develop these ideas in case they get completely shot down by you lot.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/i41pidn937g7z75/Inquisitor+Revised+Edition+Psychic+Alpha+V0-2-0-1.pdf

This also gives you something of an idea of the intended writing style and graphical layout of the IRE rulebook (the current cover and credits pages* are included for reference).
I'm no graphic designer, haven't the artistic speed to litter the rulebook with illustrations throughout, and want to keep the whole thing fairly "printer friendly", so there's a limit to how much can be done, but it should all be rigged up in a PDF with embedded fonts (most notably, the Inquisitor font, Vibrocentric), internal links, a proper contents page and searchable text.

*On which note, the credits include people who I feel have made significant contributions to IRE discussion (or whose work I've been plagiarising inspired by).  If anyone on the current list would prefer not to be credited or would rather be credited under a different name (I've been using forum names, given that people made the contributions publicly under those names), get in contact with me.

[Cortez]

So having read your initial rules ideas, I must confess that I'm somewhat confused.

The psy rating thing seems fine and what effect it has and how it is used (to increase the damage/lower the risk) all  seems fine. However I'm confused about this whole hazard thing and how you determine if the caster has rolled a hazard. Is this like the old risky action thing? What happens if the psyker doesn't successfully cast a power?

My other issue is that some of the effects on the penalty tables seem a bit extreme. e.g. 2d10 knockback seems a lot when compared with the other effects on the phenomenon table (considering it could easily blow someone straight into a wall or off a roof causing potentially high levels of falling damage). The Perils of the warp table has some nice, cool ideas but the penalties again seem rather severe to me especially when you consider that the chance of it doing nothing is the same as your character suffering damage to the head or being possessed by a daemon. Perhaps using a 2d6 roll would be better as the odds of rolling one of the more extreme effects would be far less. I'm also not a fan of the idea of a double penalty, taking a hit of -2d10 willpower and a roll on that table seems a bit too high to me at the moment, although this will depend somewhat on how frequently you roll a hazard. I'd suggest adding the -2d10 penalty to the table possibly as the '7' result if you change it to a 2d6 roll on the table.

The formatting etc. seems fine.

[MarcoSkoll]

However I'm confused about this whole hazard thing and how you determine if the caster has rolled a hazard. Is this like the old risky action thing? What happens if the psyker doesn't successfully cast a power?

Hazards are a system I've been using in RIA for a while (although they did get updated a bit in the last version), and which I think I've elaborated on several times in this thread.
It's based on the units digit of the D100 roll. A Hazard (8+) is therefore triggered if the units die is 8, 9 or 0 - essentially, a 30% chance. Unless specified otherwise*, Hazards apply both if the D100 roll passes or fails.

* One exception is the IRE friendly fire guidelines. Hazards are used to determine the risk to friendly targets, but if the shooter hits his actual target (and isn't using a flame or full auto weapon) he's assumed not to have hit his ally.

2d10 knockback seems a lot when compared with the other effects on the phenomenon table

The knockback results are various combinations of "stagger back D3 yards" and "fall prone". While 2D10 is quite likely to stagger a psyker, he's not in serious trouble unless he's right next to a ledge. It's not even hugely unlikely that 2D10 will be less than a psyker's knockback value and not affect him at all.

The only significant changes to knockback in IRE is that it's only used when an attack specifically calls for it (or if the GM thinks it'll be cool) - but that's much the way that it's used anyway, it's just formalising it - and trying to strip out some ambiguities like Psychic Impel talking about knockback; in that specific case, the power doesn't actually rely on or relate to the normal knockback rules in any way, so all it really needed to say was "target is thrown 2D10 yards away from the psyker and falls prone". (But it'll probably be something like D5 or D6 yards per Psy Rating in IRE).

I'm also not a fan of the idea of a double penalty

I felt Perils of the Warp (or, at least the Risky Action fail I personally used to call "Perils of the Warp") lacked something in first edition. It was far too common and far too boring.

As far as the common-ness, as I mused on in an earlier post, Risky Actions usually have a percentage around 20-35%, which meant that pretty much the most common cause of a psyker failing was completely out of the Psyker's control and had no relation to their skill level. Under the LRB, I have to give my "dedicated" psykers like Maya Avens or Epsilon-47 risky action reducing rules (Heroic, or variants on it that only count the re-roll for calculating risks).

The current IRE draft has Perils chances heavily reduced and the Psyker has a lot of control over it, both deciding the Hazard with their Casting Psy Rating and with the Wp test as a "save" that turns Perils into Phenomena.
With a moderately capable psyker using Psy Rating 3 and Willpower 70, the Perils chance is down to 9%. You need really extreme examples like powerful yet unskilled psykers with Psy Rating 6 and Wp 50 to get into the same ~30% chances as in 1st edition.

As far as effect, I felt that Perils just being Willpower loss just wasn't up to scratch. Compare the common Risky Actions - a missed jump or fumbled grenade is dramatic, exciting and actually moves the game forwards. A psyker losing a few IQ points isn't really any of those things, particularly when we know the kinds of things that can occur when the warp is abused.
However, I think Wp loss should still be a familiar part of Psychic Powers, but as I've scrapped the Psychic Overload for failing a power (psychic powers shouldn't either be success or your brain dribbling out of your ears*), I don't want to see Wp loss relegated to just being one possible result on a table.

Whether the penalties will be too harsh in practice, I don't yet know. But between the considerable reduction in the number of things that'll cost a pysker Wp and the strong possibility I'll be putting in the "Psychic recovery" house rule that's sometimes used, I don't think the default Perils effect is going to be the side of things I'm going to have trouble keeping in check.

* I'm hoping that players are less likely to spend time worrying about whether they'll take a stab at a 40% chance power and thus play faster. (Although they might then fret over what Psy Rating they use. I don't know yet). Also, it helps when balancing things like Hexagrammic Wards.

Perhaps using a 2d6 roll would be better as the odds of rolling one of the more extreme effects would be far less.

Well, that's really the reason I've not been happy with any of my attempts to make a 2D6 table work. Rolling a bad result is one thing. Rolling a rare bad result is a real kick in the teeth.

There may be ways to make a different combination of dice work within the limitations of the D6 and D10 Inquisitor uses, but I'm not sure what at the moment.

[Cortez]

Thanks for clearing that up Marco, and yes I was reading the knockback rules entirely like the psychic impel rules for some reason  .

With the much reduced chances of failing the test, the double penalty wouldn't be too much of a burden although I'd still prefer a 2d6 table to a d10 one though.

N.b. I've never been a fan of the whole risky action thing, as it always felt too arbitrary and seemed to dis-proportionally disadvantage high speed characters vs low speed characters.

[TallulahBelle]

Firstly hi guys sorry iv not been around iv been deathly ill and on a cocktail of meds that are probably as scary as anything in first ed inquisitor.

Ok quick comment on the psyker thing ypu say that some psykers may not be able to control their power draw because of injury/ability how will that be represented? I know adding more rolling is going to ruin the flow somewhat BUT would something like a 'channelling' mechanic work either the psyker makes a control test and eother gets the desired power or full power or on a failure gets less than what they desired potentially with some modification based on in game events.

For example a psyker with 3 or four things that are anti psyker (hex wards, prayers etc) would find it harder to get their full potential whereas a psyker stood in front of the portal opened in the big battle report that attempted to ascend a demon prince in white dwarf/in a cult ritual room with an active circle  would find it hard to use anything but their full potential.

Or if annother roll isn't wanted maybe something like a power dice mechanic with the psyker making an actions test style roll and using the amount of successes to determine their level of fine control (based on an abstraction of psy rating in the same way that Speed is an abstraction of I)

Just the warp is inherently dangerous and unpredictable ndda psykers 'control' is a very tenuous thing at the best of times so attempting to fine tune their power should at least to my mind be something seperate from the pass/fail have I cast machine empathy.

Iv been playing allot of paranoia which had sme influence on allot of 40K especially powers and some of the weapons (the plasma genarator pretty much being the initial version of the plasma cannon) being something GW were producing models for and supporting as 40k was being shaped and they handle mutant powers in a similar way. Using the full strength of your abilities as well as granting potentially more impressive effects on the game world also is easier because you aren't having to do anything BUT focus on manipulating the psyckic energies whereas if your attempting to do something low powered (to avoid notice or detection) ypu have to have one eye on the rev counter as it were.