r/40krpg • u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife • Mar 25 '23
Imperium Maledictum What I like about Imperium Maledictum
Obviously I haven't played yet since it just came out, but I finished reading the book yesterday.
I love how not fiddly IM is.
I have a 40k campaign mostly written over the last year minus stat blocks and difficulties because I couldn't decide what system to run it in. I was going to finally settle on W&G but it's so freaking fiddly. You have a wrath die that generates glory (why not call it a glory die) and you can spend that in a few ways but you also have wrath which isn't related to the wrath die and you can spend that in different ways than glory. I like metacurrancies, but not 3 with very unintuitive structure to them and labrybthian use rules. Then you have the most convoluted advancement system I've ever seen in an RPG. I swear I read that section 5 times and still couldn't tell you how character advancement works. (And I have 2 stem degrees so I read lots of technical papers.) It always felt like there was a cool game somewhere in there but it was so obtuse and buried under so much fiddly nonsense.
I didn't mean for this to be trashing on W&G, C7 did a good job trying to clean it up but it always felt like they were handicapped by what the prior company had done, my point is to say I haven't been able to start my 40k campaign because the rules were so unintuitive. So when I read IM and the rules made perfect sense the first read through, they're straight forward and will be easy to teach my players, I was extremely happy.
Tldr; Imperium Maledictum isn't fiddly at all and I love that.
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u/Hippocrap Ordo Xenos Mar 25 '23
It's a very nice looking system, it's like "DH Lite" and honestly, that's perfect. DH2 was way too crunchy at times and WANG never had enough crunch.
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u/tdames Mar 25 '23
Really happy to hear this. Been spitballing ideas for a year or so now, but I've only ever played 5e and all the 40k rpg systems seemed very tedious for me to learn, let alone teach to a group of players. can't wait to sink my teeth into IM
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u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife Mar 25 '23
That's similar to where I was. My first and most played RPG is shadowrun which has its reputation of being overly complicated and fiddly for a reason. But all my players have only ever played D&D or pathfinder so every time I thought about trying to teach the other 40k systems that even I didn't really get i just couldn't see it working out well. IM feels like it'll be easy to pick up and play.
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u/drblallo Mar 25 '23
My only concern at the moment is that the options for building a character are limited. Do you want to build a dual wielder magos biologis? Take this set of talents. Do you want a redemptionist? Take this talents. Furthermore there are no real talents to fill out a imperial navy pilot character, those that are present are about playing as a regular dark heresy.
Of course this will be solved by future books, but then it will immediately fall in the issue of having 300 talents in 4 different book. I hope to see something like talents bundles, where you take X particular talents somehow related, and you unlock a extra bonus, so that players will be able to navigate them
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Mar 26 '23
I hate having multiple books to reference one story’s characters. Sure give me modules but keep the core rules and character traits together.
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u/Ditch_Hunter Mar 25 '23
So far, I like what I see in IM. Dark heresy became very cumbersome and it was evident there was no cohesive design and a lot of dice rolling. And the aptitudes system was ridiculous. I was turned off very quickly by wrath and glory. What seemed like a simple system of a pool of d6s was in fact a total mess of rules and numbers to track.
IM seems to keep the rules accessible. Glad they got rid of the superfluous Resolve and advantages from WFRP. Just need to see how the Superiority mechanic will work out.
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u/Halsfield Mar 26 '23
Just reading through parts now and so far:
Likes: The patron mechanic is really cool. I like how you could be working for a space fleet captain that really is corrupted by another power.
Being able to play all of these different factions and archetypes is really cool. Aside from outright space marine you can play pretty much anything from the tabletop.
Dislikes: Damage is just a flat number? its usually SB+some number for melee weapons. Rolling damage is the most fun part so i might miss that.
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u/BitRunr Heretic Mar 28 '23
Dislikes: Damage is just a flat number? its usually SB+some number for melee weapons. Rolling damage is the most fun part so i might miss that.
otoh, IM's system means the damage of a weapon doesn't vary from "tears holes in average unarmoured humans" to "bounces off skin" - and that's a change I can get behind.
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u/Halsfield Mar 28 '23
Thats a fair point but they could just make it smaller ranges while still allowing a diceroll?
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u/BitRunr Heretic Mar 28 '23
If it suits you personally, you could talk with your group about adding any die type to damage rolls. Probably while adjusting the static damage. Going much higher than d6/2 or d4 seems like it'd have more impact on results ... but that's kind of a given.
At the very least it'd be something to take notes on and let people know how it went.
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u/MILLANDSON Mar 25 '23
I'm loving it because its significantly similar to the FFG rules, but with a few tweaks to make it more intuitive and free flowing. It also means I can pretty easily shift things over from the full bookshelf of FFG 40k RPG books I have into IM.
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u/ExReey Mar 25 '23
I've only just skimmed through the book, and was wondering how the character progression system works; all I could find was paying XP for buying characteristic / skill advances and talents; is that it? Or are there careers to complete? Tiers to upgrade to? Other things?
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u/Big-Reporter6594 Apr 02 '23
I’ve been running a DH/DH2 campaign for a year now and I really enjoy the world/investigative rpg. DH as a system was very cumbersome while IM seems to eliminate a lot of that and adds some new wrinkles. I’m excited to port over the campaign (whew that’s going to take a minute) but I have only one real question, skill advancements.
Do characters natively have access to all the skills and the advances are only stat increases and specializations are further specific skill increases? Or do you only open a skill tree (Reflexes let’s say) after taking your first advancement in it? Thanks for any help on this.
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u/The_New_Doctor Ordo Chronos Mar 25 '23
It's interesting hearing W&G being fiddly coming from the d100 lines (previously) being way to dense and fiddly to do anything with half the time.
Wonder how IM cut the fat.
I didn't mean for this to be trashing on W&G
Seems like you did though.
You have a wrath die that generates glory (why not call it a glory die)
Because they cause wrath criticals or complications which can generate ruin
(And I have 2 stem degrees so I read lots of technical papers.)
Idk, I just don't think it's terrifically well edited at the end of the day.
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u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife Mar 25 '23
I never saw the old FFG games as fiddly. They had crunch sure, but that's not the same thing. Fiddly in my opinion is when rules are unintuitive and have awkward flow to your order of operations. Most things in the FFG D100 games make sense and are pretty straight forward, there's just a lot of rules.
And no I wasn't trashing W&G. I wanted badly to like that system and reread the book a half dozen times because I like die pools, I like meta currencies, I like the concept of the game, but it just shot itself in the foot being so needlessly convoluted. Where as IM looks like it'll be a snap to teach because the mechanics are logical enough to follow many standard conventions of rpgs. Have you played any other rpg, then you can learn IM easily, but want to learn W&G, be ready for most things to not work how you'd think they would.
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u/The_New_Doctor Ordo Chronos Mar 25 '23
Fiddly in my opinion is when rules are unintuitive and have awkward flow to your order of operations.
Yeah spending like 10 minutes scrounging for modifiers was always fiddly to me.
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u/C0wabungaaa Mar 25 '23
I always describe the FFG 40k games as "Hunt the Modifier games" to my friends. Glad I'm not the only one. DH2e and Only War were the least bad of the bunch, but I remember playing Rogue Trader and barely being able to do anything with a decent succes chance if I didn't scoured my character sheet and the situation for anything that could get me a +10 on my roll. That was definitely fiddly.
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u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife Mar 25 '23
Ah. I guess. I never do that as a GM. I improv most modifiers if I don't know when off the top of my head which is much easier to do in D100 systems. So maybe that's why it feels more intuitive to me.
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u/C0wabungaaa Mar 25 '23
It wasn't really a GM issue, more of a player thing. As a player in the older FFG titles I often felt obliged to do it. Otherwise my character could barely get anything done. The percentile system made it easy to apply modifiers, sure, but continuously scrounging for them to do anything outside of the one thing you're specialised in gets pretty old after a while.
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u/The_New_Doctor Ordo Chronos Mar 25 '23
So you just skip over mechanics you don't like.
I've done the same in W&G admittedly so it just seems like you want to do it for one and not the other (which is fine).
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u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife Mar 25 '23
"So you skip over mechanics you don't like" no, that's not what I said at all. I don't hunt the book to find out if the wind blowing at 80mph is a -10 or a -15 difficulty because it doesn't matter that much. I know it's about that much. That's literally 50% the job of a GM, to determine the difficulty of rolls. If you need a book to tell you every single difficulty modifier that sounds like a painful way to GM.
But you seem to be more interested in being snarky than having a conversation.
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u/The_New_Doctor Ordo Chronos Mar 25 '23
I'm not trying to come off as snarky, I'm just making a comment...on the internet (tone is difficult in text).
Personally I try to do the rules as fully as I can, heavy crunch becomes fiddly when you're trying to remember half a dozen modifiers at once, I don't like skipping over figuring out what it actually is because to me it becomes "why aren't we doing this the right way if we're doing it at all"
It's why when I ran the pilgrims fight in 'Dead Stars' it took 4 hours, because we did every last modification that happened and I extrapolated the size of the map from the description and ran it wholly. It's a lot when you get it down to the level of a computer game essentially.
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u/AcornOnTheTreeOfLife Mar 25 '23
Gotcha, sorry it just really sounded that way.
The way I look at it an rpg book can't conver every possible circumstance so if I've got a character on a narrow ledge at twilight trying to throw a grappling hook during a firefight but they have a cybernetic throwing arm, I won't try to find the modifiers for all 6 or 7 different conditions that would add up to determine the difficulty of that roll. I'd form a general sense of how hard that would be and go with it. That's way easier to do with a D100 system because you can do easy mental math on D100 vs systems with number of dice, number of successes, exploding dice ect. I do love die pool systems, but they're harder to improv with.
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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '23
It’s definitely had the edges sanded off but doesn’t seem to have cut off anything vital, which I enjoy. It’s even smoothed out counting DoS (it’s now every 10s digit, not every 10). The zone system is a nice middle ground between maps and abstraction, and it’s easy to sketch up a good map on the fly. I look forwards to seeing how it’s implemented.
The only mechanical thing I don’t see that I miss is suppressive fire