Thanks for the detailed answer. I’ll give it a look.

How does this compare to something like Appsmith or Budibase?

None of what you’ve just said connects back to your previous comment in the slightest. You started by saying that they cut too much from the TTRPG and that the world was too shallow, and then when I asked you to elaborate you just went on about augmentation systems.

At this point I’m not convinced you actually know what it is that you don’t like about it.

I’m really not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the game at release, or after they patched in all the intended content?

Outside of what I assume you mean by the “scripted gameplay” of the main story there are dozens upon dozens of side quests and weird little points of interest to discover (well over a hundred, easily). A lot of them help to elaborate on the setting in interesting ways. What exactly were you expecting that the game didn’t deliver on?

That’s OK, this little nugget will gladly accept more smooches on her behalf.

OMG I wanna smooch her little noggin!

This was a triumph…

I’m actually OK with games costing a bit more to sell if they cost a lot to make; god knows, the devs deserve to get paid properly. But, one, that money won’t actually make it to the devs, and two, any time Randy Pitchford is for something it’s really hard not to automatically be against it, on the assumption that he’s so consistently wrong about everything, and just such an unbelievable piece of shit, that just assuming he’s in the wrong is the safest bet.

Seriously, why do they let him talk? The man is a walking PR disaster.

Then again, we should all be asking how the hell he’s not in jail for possession of child porn, so I guess this is a pretty minor thing in comparison.

Please give this game a try, it really is a lot of fun. They’ve come up with some really uniwue gameplay that feels unlike anything else out there, and their understanding of the setting is spot on.

Who are definitely real people and not his sock puppet accounts.

Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.

For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.

And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.

So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:

• Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition
• Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space
• Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS
• Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS
• Only War - You’re guardsmen, you do war stuff.

Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.

Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.

It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.

What little I know of MtA lore is nuts. Canonically, the Technomancers (who are basically the Illuminati) faked the moon landing to convince the world that the moon (actually Arcadia, realm of the Fae) is nothing but a dead rock in space. By doing so they leveraged the power of mass unconscious belief to distort reality to actually make Arcadia nothing but a dead rock in space.

Its an amazing system if you want your games to feel less like Skyrim and more like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

But, y’know, with magic and horrifying chaos monstrosities.

As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.

WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.

What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.

High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.

Seconded.

Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media, period.

Yes, even including the original trilogy.

Our most recent scheduling we had to put off by a week because one player was going to a concert.

Then we couldn’t schedule for the following week because a player had their mom’s birthday. And the weekend after that would be Easter.

Then the player who was going to the concert remembered that they forgot to buy tickets. Which they told us about on the Friday before the Saturday we were originally planning to play.

Pro-tip: If you marry said friend, they have to seat you together anyway.

This is the correct answer.