Deathwatch: The Emperor's Chosen

I kinda asked myself the same question when I got the email from DTRPG about this product today. My guess is that DH, RT, DW and BC are all finished products with a product line behind them, and they each have different development teams working on their own line of products. I've bought the Dark Heresy 2.0 Beta, and it is indeed very different from other iterations of the game. Having said that, it doesn't look difficult at all to convert the characters over to the new system. The stats remain the same, the % function is the same. The big changes are that they reduce the number of skills and broaden their scope, and combat damage is done very, very differently. Characters don't have hit points any more: every time your take damage that exceeds your AP+T, you consult a much-expanded hit chart, like the critical hit charts in DH1.0, with the excess damage moving you further down the chart towards more severe wound effects. (Damage and AP are revamped too - Power Armour only grants a modest AP bonus now, but the...See more hardest-hitting multi-meltas have a much reduced Pen value to compensate).

I quite like the new wound system, I've always wanted to see a wound system that resulted in characters suffering specific injuries, rather than the "I have 2 hit points left, I'm still good-to-go" mentality. You never know if your next wound is going to be your last, because you don't have hit-points: you have a punctured lung, broken arm, burns to your legs, and/or worse.

It also explains why a tabletop marine might shrug off 18 lasgun blasts, and finally be 'wounded' by the 19th: that marine has in fact suffered one 'wound' after another, but he had to accumulate quite a few of them before the effects knocked him out of the fight. As opposed to a crybaby IG conscript...

Regardless, I'm looking forward to DH2, but welcome expansions in the meantime.

My biggest disappointment with Dark Heresy 2.0 is how similar it is to 1st edition. Its essentially Dark Heresy using the Only War ruleset. The beta was fresh, new, and different. The second edition is too familiar, I was hoping for some fundamental changes.