You know, pondering this in the clear light of morning, I think part of my problem isn't who powerful they NPC profiles are… because they aren't really. OK, the Commissar is impressive, but OK, yeah, he should be. The Guardsman just has a lot of skills and that Nerves of Steel talent. The problem is those skills and talents are exspensive. Nerves of Steel is 800 experience points (!) all on it's own. That's all the exp from two standard 4 hour sessions (using the abstract method).

I don't own Black Crusade (yet) but thanks to Amazon.com's preview feature, I've glimpsed some of the advancement costs in it. They are a lot cheaper. The most expensive skill advances are half what they are in Only War. So I wonder why the difference? Do folks with experience with Black Crusade find those costs too cheap? Does Black Crusade recommend fewer experience points for sessions? Or is Only War just pricing advances too high?

As far as I can see they both give the same amount of xp (500 for a four hour session with the abstract method), but the xp pricings vary a lot. But Black Crusade is not everything cheaper. It is true that characteristcis were a lot cheaper, when you are not aligned to the right chaos god or even opposed.
But the skills for two aptitudes are cheaper that being aligned to the right chaos god. Rest is of course more expensive. But you also had lots of unaligned skills that you could never get cheaper. Talent are the same for aligned and two aptitudes, but for the rest more expensiv in Only War.
But I think you also must keep in mind that the systems aligned, unaligned, opposed a lot different that the aptitudes. In Black Crusade it was nearly impossible to start aligned, so no cheap advances at the beginning of the game, there are in fact lots of skills, talents and characteristics that were unaligend all the time and never got really cheap and if you aligend to one god, two other were opposed.
I think therefore in Black Crusade it was on the hand a rather static how much you pay (all unaligend talents, skills and characteristcs) and on the other hand highly variable (all talents, skills and characteristics that were aligned to a god). So the prediction how much you could buy was depend on a lot of factors like how many corruption points you get, if you were aligned, if you even reached to aligned status and when you reached it etc.
In Only War on the other hand you have your static advanced depend on your specialisation and regiment and know from the beginning, which is cheap, which is expensive and can advance rather cheap in certein areas. I think that different must also keeped in mind and therefore I am not sure, if that really is a mistake or maybe done on purpose

Two things you should know about Black Crusade:

1. Due to how Alignment system works, the lion's share of these advancements is bought at the medium cost. If you buy enough advancements from one god's list, you can get the rest of the advancements on the list for the cheap cost but the lists of two opposing gods become expensive for you. Buying only aligned advancements is hardly ever an option, save for perhaps Tzeentchian psykers.

2. Black Crusade is not a game designed for long campaigns. Game Master's Kit introduced some rules for prolonging gameplay, but generally heretics burn out pretty quickly. Once your character hits 100 Corruption, it's game over for him, and you gain Corruption for almost anything you do. Gain certain Talents? Corruption. Succeed in a mission? Corruption. Perform blasphemous rites? Corruption. Get killed and burn Infamy (BC's equivalent of both Profit Factor/Logistics/Influence and Fate Points)? Corruption. Fail a mission? Corruption. It's a one-way train and it's going fast.

That's why it makes sense for heretics to advance more quickly than loyalists - with the aid of Chaos, they rise like shooting stars and fall right after that.

@ Morangias

I am enlightened. Thanks. However, I still think I prefer the fast advance scheme. Honestly, since my group only meets twice a month at the best of times, the slower advancement scheme is an issue for us. Going by what you say, if we played Black Crusade I doubt anyone would ever reach 100 Corruption… we wouldn't play frequently enough or long enough.

I guess if it's only an issue for me, I can always award more exp per session and start players with more exp or with more skills. Still, the extreme difference between having two aptitudes vs one or worse zero, makes it a crazy case. If I awarded 600 exp per session, one character might advance 3 skills while another was saving up to buy a single advance. All the NPC profiles have several zero aptitude advances (the afformentioned Nerves of Steel being just one). It seems like they wanted a flexible, free form system… but they also wanted a restricted, focused system at the same time. What we seem to have is a restricted system with the illusion of flexibility. We had that in Dark Heresy with Elite Advances. We just have clearer guidelines and they found a way to avoid the lengthy Advancement charts now.

Regarding aptitudes, I'd personally allow every player to switch a single aptitude for any other to give a certain accent to a character, as long as I assume my players won't abuse this. And of course, if you want more heroic - let's say more epic - campaigns, grant more XP in the beginning and give more per session.

Morangias said:

My Black Crusade game that has been going on since I started playing in the playtest would disagree with you. The campaign can go as long as you want, it depends on what the players and GM want, and therefore how much Corruption is doled out, and how often the characters reduce their Corruption (using the rules in the GM Kit/Screen).

I agree with Lucius, as my own thread shows - I think that Only War should use the same XP costs as Black Crusade, to allow for more variety in characters.

 @LuciusT

As Cifer said, I think if your group is playing more infrequently, a possible solution is starting them with higher XP and then continuing with the "slower" XP granting per session. This helps even out the playing field, so even if one person buys 3 advances with a session's XP and someone else buys just 1, it matters a bit less because the number of advances they already have means the difference is much less pronounced (having 8 advances to 5 versus having 18 to 15, to use random numbers). This isn't horribly hard to balance, either, since if all the PCs start at a higher level you balance accordingly, and you grant XP at the "normal" old pace that you're used to. The players still feel like they're achieving things, but no one is likely to severely outstrip another. I've done a couple (shorter) DW campaigns where we started around rank 3-5 that worked out well. 

HTMC said:

Except the difference is more extreme than that… We're not talking about having 8 advances vs 5 advances. We're talking about having 15/25 advances vs 5 advances. That's a serious difference which, IMO, penalizes players who have creative and interesting character concepts and supports min-max power gaming. That's flat out bad design for a role playing game, IMO, and I won't purchase the finished version of Only War is the system remains as it is.

I don't see the problem with NPCs having better stats than starting PCs.

Keep in mind, if you use the "Guardsman" profile for all NPC guardsmen in a campaign, they will NEVER become more powerful, and the PCs will only become more powerful in relation to them. There is no sense of character progression if you start the game more powerful than everyone else.

Xyklos said:

I have to admit, I do not understand this attitude at all. It is incomprehesible to me. I have no idea what kind of games you play that make you thing characters don't progress if they start out as pathetic losers and need two months of realtime play before they are even equal to the generic mooks on the line with them, much less anyone worthy of note.

Honestly, the only kind of adventures I see for pathetic losers are "Go clean the latrines, you worthless conscript." Yay, fun game.

I had the same problem with Dark Heresy.

LuciusT said:

Wow, aren't you a negative nelly?

If a starting party can't beat an equal-number group of NPC guardsmen in combat, they suck. The reason NPCs have a higher XP total is that they are supposed to represent the archtypical Imperial Guardsman. You know what basic NPC guardsmen don't have? Meltaguns, Hotshot Lasguns, Heavy Bolters, Hellhounds, Comrades, and Fate Points, to name a few. Player characters can, and usually do, have most of those things spread throughout the party.

You can't just look at a stat-block and declare that a random NPC is better than a PC, because PCs have tons of built-in tools that make them naturally better than non-PCs, regardless of their net XP total.

Xyklos said:

Yes, I am. :)

Yes, PCs have all of that but they don't have the skills and talents for an average Guardsman. That's what doesn't make sense to me. To my mind, PCs should have everything the generic NPC guardman trooper has and more. That makes them PCs. So either the generic NPC template has too much or the PC has too little.

I've always viewed fresh PCs as being slightly sub par (compared to the average) skill/talent wise, but superior in that they have fate points and party telepathy.

I say party telepathy, because in all seriousness, players never seem to properly "unhear" ideas that are proposed at the table, and are able to function quite well as a team.

Also, PCs gain XP per session and can spend it as they want. NPCs do not have that luxury.

So yes, fresh out of the box, "average ability" NPCs >(in straight stats) to PCs. And I'm fine with that.

Slightly sub par, maybe… though it isn't my peference. However, 2800 experience points worth of advances does not equal slightly in my book.

Honestly, however, I hate the whole "the PCs start are schmucks and get better" model. I generally don't play those kind of rpgs. I haven't played D&D since the early '90s and for good reason. I prefer games where my players make the character they want to play, not the character who - after 2 - 6 months of real time play could become the character they want to play. Frankly, I'm a professional working adult who games with other professional working adults and I don't have the kind of time to commit to a game to make that work. We play twice a month if we're lucky enough to get our schedules worked out. I don't like wasting the little time we do have playing mooks.

Yes, but as you point out, 800 of that is on Nerves of Steel.

Which, while useful, sure, is hardly the most efficient use of that XP.  A commissar could get Swift Attack -> Lightning attack and still have some left over (obviously, this is guardsmen vs. guardsmen, but the intent is give players 800 XP and they can buy something quite more useful than what the NPC guardsmen spent XP on).