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I'll preface by saying I'm not sure if this question belongs here. The asking help page indicates it's borderline acceptable, so I'll just post this here and see how it goes.

A slight problem we've noticed in our Dark Heresy campaign is that the books define a ton of interesting and fun-looking items for purchase, but they are often too specialized and too expensive to warrant investing in. Acolytes only have so much money, after all, so they tend to invest in more generic and well-rounded equipment. While the game is still fun, it feels like we're missing out on a lot of content.

We've been discussing a possible house-rule to try and address this. Our current idea is: at the start of each mission our Inquisitor assigns the acolytes a sum of money, proportional to the difficulty and importance of the mission. The money can be "spent" renting equipment from the ship's armory. The ship stocks a wide variety of equipment, allowing players to restock their ammo and supplies, and usually acquire one or two mission-specific tools without having to use up their personal savings. Going on a stealth mission? Rent some silenced weapons and chameleoline cloaks. Going into a warzone? Pick up a rocket launcher "just in case". The availability of all equipment is naturally up to the GM, but anything more common than "Rare" is probably in stock.

Once the mission is complete, acolytes are expected to return the borrowed equipment. Obviously, expended ammo and grenades are not expected back; these are chalked up as necessary expenses. Though if the players fail to return at least, say, 50% of the rented equipment's value then they are fined the difference. Wasting valuable equipment is frowned upon.

My questions are: would this house-rule address the problem described above? And would it introduce further problems? I can immediately tell that game's economy would be disrupted; what else might be upset by these changes?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Hi stphven, and welcome to the site! Good first question, and a pretty inventive way to deal with those problems. Check our tour if you haven't already, and when you reach 20 rep, you can join us in chat via the Stack Exchange menu in the top left. \$\endgroup\$ Aug 16, 2014 at 7:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ This is fantastic first question imo - welcome to the site :o) \$\endgroup\$
    – Wibbs
    Aug 16, 2014 at 9:43

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That Seems Fine

There are already ways to go nonlinear with wealth in Dark Heresy through play, such as loot, secret caches, stealing, bartering, 'off the books' merc work, etc. This is not one of them.

Allowing players to 'try out' some of the funky gear in the books without being locked into having a Dual Chainsabre or a full-body hazmat suit on their sheet for the rest of the game is utterly thematic, and unlikely to break any of the mechanics in dark heresy worse than they are already broken.

It's my opinion that gear is too restricted in the first place in Dark Heresy - I can see why they did it, but part of the fun of being an inquisitorial acolyte is the abundance of stuff that your average guardsman or imperial citizen can't really get his hands on, or at least not in those sort of quantities. Certain death, sure, but you get the toys.

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