House Rules
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HERE ARE a few bits and pieces that we've bolted on to the main game rules to try and squeeze a bit more believability into them. You can click the contents below to jump straight to that rule or just scroll down.
This is the 'long version' of the rules, as it is accompanied by explanations of the thinking behind the changes. If you prefer you can get the rules without all the prattle here, but be warned: some of them look very weird without the arguments to back them up! Have a browse, see what you think. But first, a boring bit of waffle explaining why we felt all this was necessary:
As we understand it, Inquisitor is a game about storytelling, about heroes and villains and the grim darkness of the future where there is only war blah blah. We say: amen to that. However, the most vital element of any story is believability, and when you lose that the whole thing feels somehow hollow and unsatisfying.
The thing with Inquisitor is that, whilst it's near-perfect in many ways considering what it sets out to do, some of its rules can be a bit, er, eccentric as to how they represent things. More recoil on a shuriken catapult than an autogun? You can shoot a needle rifle in one hand with no penalty at all? This level of oddness is something we take for granted in a lot of other games (40K anyone?), but Inquisitor is so detailed and so close to realising the illusion of a living, breathing game world, that the things that are 'wrong' with it stand out all the more.
Luckily, in Inquisitor you're encouraged to improvise and change things - so we did. Some of the changes look like we're being really picky, to be honest, but surely this is the whole point of Inquisitor - it's a game for picky, detail-obsessed people! It's strange, then, that a game so adaptable and flowing has a few such counter-intuitive rules in it. And so, prepare youself for the complete anticlimax that is our list of house rules. Enjoy it. Please?
Semi-auto shooting
Rather than -10% per shot, the penalty for firing on semi auto is the weapon’s weight (e.g. -15% for a stubber, -25% for a shuriken catapult etc.). Each shot fired below the maximum reduces the penalty by 10, to a minimum of -10.
Heavy weapons are very stable, and so halve any penalties after modifiers.
All bolters (though not bolt pistols, storm bolters or heavy bolters) count as the same weapon for this rule; in other words all models of bolter work out their penalty from a maximum of four shots, even if that particular model can only fire two.
In this rule's favour is the fact that weapon weight becomes a far more relevant part of the game, rather than the "suffer the penalty or you don't" that it is at the moment; and it relates recoil to the size of the gun rather than rate of fire, which makes marginally more sense than the 'proper' rules. In some cases it doesn't even make a difference at all; many weapons seem to have weights that are close to ten times their semi rates, which is probably a coincidence but quite a happy one.
On the other hand, it's going to be a bit harsh on things like plasma guns, with their semi (2) but monstrous weights. You could always make an exception and stick to the normal rules for them, seeing as they're hard enough to aim even on Single, and they wouldn't have much recoil anyway. Short of giving every gun an entirely new 'recoil' stat though, we think this is the best alternative to the normal rules; fewer weapons lose out unreasonably under these rules than under the proper ones. Oh I dunno, I only work here.
A bit of ad-libbing with pinning can be good, to capture some of the innate psychology of firearms. There's no hard rule for this, but we often give a penalty to pinning tests for semi-auto or full auto shooting (-10 is a decent benchmark). Depending on how scary the weapon is or how many shots are fired, you might want to alter this a bit; a bolt shell is scarier than a lasgun shot, whilst having your position strafed by determined assault cannon fire is going to be rather more distressing than a couple of stubber rounds!
Some ballpark figures: -10 for a stubber or autogun on rapid fire, -10 for a heavy weapon on semi, -20 for a heavy weapon on full auto, no extra penalty for a lasgun, -10 for a shuriken catapult on full auto. That sort of thing.
There are quite a few suspect entries in the armoury, but shotguns seem particularly hard done by in the Inquisitor rules; they do the same damage as, and are less accurate than, a stubber, and for some obscure reason make up for it with a rate of fire increase. What? The result is that shotguns, traditionally a hugely popular sci-fi weapon, are incredibly weedy and don't feel anything like a shotgun should.
For this reason shotguns, sawn off shotguns and pump action combat shotguns do 2D6+4 damage rather than 2D6+2. In addition, shotguns firing normal or manstopper rounds count double damage for knockback. However, they inflict half damage at ranges above 20 yards, and the pump action shotgun loses its semi (3) mode.
Stub guns, on the other hand, are far more accurate over range than they should be - which is ironic considering that in their previous 40K and Necromunda incarnations, they were less accurate than any other pistol. A far longer range than a revolver, which they are effectively the same thing as? As long-ranged as a bolter, whose shells have their own propellant?!? Something's gone wrong there. For this reason, stubbers have range E, not F.
Basic weapons fired in one hand
Characters firing a basic weapon in one hand suffer an extra -20 to hit penalty, unless their strength in that arm is double the weapon's weight. This reflects that it's not just the weight that's a factor, it's the balance; a rifle is just completely the wrong shape for gunslinging.You might well be able to lift it easily with one arm, but if the centre of gravity is a yard away from your hand you'll still have trouble pointing the thing with any speed or steadiness. It's the old 'two men can lift an ork, but one man can't lift half an ork' thing. The weight/ to hit penalty rule is excellent, but the weights of some of the guns just aren't high enough - and the above rule seemed so much easier than messing about with those!
We brought this rule in after someone pointed out that if they wanted, even with half strength for using one arm, many characters could fire a NEEDLE RIFLE in one hand without any penalty at all, and someone else created a character and then raised their strength to 60 solely so they could fire an autogun in each hand. This is, as you will no doubt agree, stupid - it just feels totally wrong. We considered saying that characters must use two hands to shoot basic weapons, but that rather defeats the 'you can do absolutely anything' RPG-esque attitude of Inquisitor, so instead we just made it a lot harder!
Dodging
Try using Initiative instead of Weapon Skill for dodging. Do not add the +20 from the rulebook; instead add +1 per point of WS over 50, up to a maximum of +20. This reflects the way better fighters will be more able to predict attacks.
Most characters' Initiative and Weapon Skill stats are fairly similar so this won't have too much effect on them, especially those with a WS of 70 or higher (as most Inquisitor characters seem to have...); but it does allow characters who are very nimble to zip about dodging things with their excellent reactions, even if they're not particularly good fighters.
Characters with a good Weapon Skill still have a massive advantage because of their bonus, which means that they fare much better when attacked multiple times in the same turn; this rule just means that fast but relatively unskilled characters aren't quite as easy for sluggish opponents to pin down, which is entirely as it should be!
This one's a bit radical, so bear with us: Weapon Reach does not count when parrying - only when rolling to hit.
This is because the size of the weapon seems to have been taken into account by the parry penalty already - a sword and a short sword are exactly the same shape, so why else would the short sword have a worse parry penalty? By counting Reach for parries you're effectively penalising smaller weapons for their size twice, giving an unrealistic (and not much fun) advantage to weapons like staffs which already have an excellent parry penalty.
Consider a man with a knife attacking a man with a sword. If the guy with the knife manages to get inside the sword's Reach and actually roll a successful hit (the difficulty of which is represented by the Reach penalty to hit), the size of the sword will if anything then be a handicap, not a bonus! This rule also has the pleasing effect of people attempting parries more often rather than just automatically dodging everything, which is far more dramatic - and this, after all, is the whole point of Inquisitor.
If you have two weapons and manage to counter attack after parrying with only one of them, you can use the other to make the counter. If you do this your opponent suffers -20 to parry or dodge. If they have two weapons as well they can parry the counter with the one they didn’t use for the initial attack, in which case they do not suffer the penalty.
Don't really need a load of boring prattle to explain this one, it just kind of makes sense!
Hit location
There must have been some serious evolution taking place over the last 38,000 years to result in a 45% chance of catching someone in the vitals with a gunshot. The groin is both too easy to hit and too tempting a target, given its location in the middle of all the limb locations and the fact that it's easier to cripple someone by shooting them in the groin than the chest (?!?). All that means that everyone goes round aiming all their shots at the groin because it's so easy and effective, and while this is funny for a couple of games it soon becomes uncomfortably implausible.
For this reason, you might like to try this alternative placed shot rule: only add or decuct 10% for a placed shot, not 20%. HOWEVER! You can go off one end of the chart and back on the other, Pac-Man-style. For example: if you roll 07, you can subract 10 to get 97, making it a head shot.
The maths behind this is as follows, if you care:
Under the normal Placed Shot rules, you have a whopping 45% to hit the groin (5% for the location itself, and 40% for the +/- 20 either way). This, and the fact that there are no other worthwhile targets anywhere near the groin on the chart, leads to the Magnetic Pants theory of target aquisition detailed above.
Under our rule you have a 25% chance to hit the groin, which is still incredibly generous by real life standards. However, you have exactly the same 25% chance to hit the head as you do under the normal rules.
While you mathematically have a lower chance of hitting more central locations, this doesn't really matter since under the +/- 20 system, the chest and abdomen both have more attractive alternatives (the head and groin respectively) and so rarely get hit anyway; these rules actually result in more hits to those locations, because shots that would otherwise get Placed to the head or groin end up directed at them instead. The only real drawback of this rule is that you have a slightly greater chance of getting stuck with a limb hit, but on balance it's probably the lesser of two evils.
Then there's the disproportionate chance of a close combat head hit. Adding +20 to the hit location roll in close combat is a good idea on paper, until you stop to consider that suddenly you've got more chance of hitting the head than anything else (25% for the head as opposed to 15% for most others), which you could half-heartedly explain away with stuff about aiming to hit it and overhand swings, but is pretty unsatisfactory really. So: only add +10 to location rolls in hand to hand combat. This means you have a 15% chance of hitting the head, which is the same as for all the other upper body locations and therefore both more fair and more realistic.
The penalty for a Heavy leg wound is -1 to movement rates and -10 to Dodge in Close Combat, rather than -1 Speed.
This is both to get a bit more variety into the effects of injuries, and also because being hit in the leg isn't really going to make you any slower at shooting your gun (you could argue that the pain is distracting, but that's not very heroic!); on the other hand it would make you noticably less agile, which isn't very well represented by the loss of a Speed point.
Sometimes it's fun to include a level of really, REALLY nasty injuries that isn't quite covered by the normal damage tables. If a hit inflicts an amount of damage (after armour deductions) equal to half a character's Toughness, that's Fatal Damage. What this means is that the location has been absolutely blown apart or ripped to shreds by the hit.
If it's the head you're dead anyway so it doesn't matter (although you can imagine the the head is severed and sent flying somewhere); if it's the groin, you're bleeding VERY badly and so add 2D6 to your injury total per recovery phase istead of D3; if it's the chest or abdomen; you're dead; and if if it's a limb, the limb is torn off. Also, because your injury total is now equal to half your Toughness, you'll aways suffer system shock too.
This rarely occurs except when very weedy characters are attacked with power weapons but it's fun all the same!
When testing to recover injury at the end of a turn, do not count the bonus for having a Toughness of over 50. If a character uses an action to heal themselves, count the bonus as normal.
This is because the benefits of a high Toughness already mean that the character is more likely to recover in the first place; giving them a massive bonus as well makes high Toughness characters far more powerful than they should be, regenerating at a ludicrous rate. It also means that they don't have to worry about bleeding, since the +D3 Injury points for bleeding will be more than cancelled out by the -D3+God knows what for their Toughness. This basically means that being shot is actually a problem - gasp!
In all honesty this isn't really a problem unless a gaming group is infected with Space Marines (as ours was for a bit). Nothing is quite so soul-destroying as landing a square-on lascannon hit on a marine and then seeing him regenerate ALL of the damage seconds later, even more so when you're chasing a Consciousness number of 75. If most characters you've got are only getting +1 or +2 to their recovery rolls then this rule is unecessary. It just seems as though high Toughness characters get too many benefits sometimes...
The Psi-Track power
We've found that it's too tempting to just use characters with this ability as infallible long-range scanners, which ruins the game a bit. For this reason we say that the psyker can only initiate a Track on someone they have detected by some means (including the Detection psychic power).
This one didn't come up for ages, because no one's got a bow and almost no one ever uses their knife. However, looking at the weapon chart, an improvised weapon is actually a better weapon than a knife; D3+3 damage for the improv weapon versus D6 for the knife. That means, essentially, that you're better off carrying around a frying pan than a combat blade, which is just absurd. For this reason knives and bayonets do D10 damage instead of D6, which is the same damage as a short sword, although the sword still has a much better reach and parry penalty. Bayonets can be used in any turn, not just when charging; essentially it's a Reach 3 knife. We also recommend that throwing knives do D10 damage and throwing axes 2D6.
This got us thinking about the primitive weapons in the book; bows, muskets etc. 2D3 damage, for a bow? That can't be right. Alright, it's not as good a weapon as a gun, but if you shoot someone in the face with a crossbow it's going to do more than stun them. The disadvantage of these weapons comes from their dreadful rates of fire, accuracy and armour penetration, the first two of which are already accounted for by the rules; giving them unrealistically low damage just to rub it in isn't really necessary. For this reason, where the primitive weapon chart lists a D3 for damage, call it a D6; however, armour counts double against them (heavy clothing = 4, flak = 6, mesh = 8 etc.).
A quick one: hits to the arms count half damage for knockback.
