Deathwatch

I can send you some of my tailored sheets and a mission if you want?

I want to play, but currently am offput by the buy-in cost for the books on a game I'll probably only get to play occasionally.

Yeah, but I have a group who (when we manage to get together) plays D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, Deadlands, assorted WoD (Masquerade and Apocalypse mostly), Spirit of the Century, and also occasional boardgame nights. If I buy into one of the 40k roleplaying games I'll drop 80+ bucks on a game I'll be lucky to run 2-3 sessions of per year. The return doesn't work very well for me at the moment. If I can find a set of the books as a bundle deal at some stage I'll unquestionably snag them - but currently it's just an itch I know I shouldn't scratch.

I know what you mean Thor - its not as popular as D&D etc. Its quite setting specific whereas dnd can be 'generic high fantasy-land' 40k cannot.

It seems hard to GM, with the 3.5 edition D&D mentality of EVERYTHING HAS RULES the RP-ness and DM fiat is hard to accommodate. Also distancing and actually running the game is difficult. I recommend a SARNFU system (squeezed, adjacent, reach, near, far, unreachable) So melee range is adjacent for a sword, but reach for a spear, pistol etc, near is close firefight, far is further (lol) and unreachable is you can see it but not hit it (as in it's too far away to accurately target)