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I feel like the inverse is a bit cooler. Like a Black Crusade campaign where your warband finds itself on board the Terminus Est, and you get orders from Big T himself. You can really build him up and make the players feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. A Kharn or Ahriman who is killable and doesn't transcend the campaign in some way is really functionally no different than just any other berzerker or sorcerer, in which case there's no point in using them.
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Jan 22, 2014 06:44
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Rockopolis posted:Is that a reference to that Jet Li vs Jet Li movie? Its a reference to this front page article (We have a front page?!) that details the many alternate universe deaths of Jet Li.
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Jan 22, 2014 06:54
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Verr posted:/\/\/\/\//\ - Exactly what I was trying to say. Especially never do this if they're playing Deathwatch. When I played Deathwatch, basically, the more balls to the wall insane we were the more success we had and we slowly came to realize it. Carefully overlap fields of fire and advance with cover and suppression? Kill maybe 20 dudes. Go screaming out of an arcology on top of a Rhino? Accidentally destroy an entire armored column of traitor Guard and defeat Tau vehicles by flinging the Techmarine at them. Basically, throwing Kharne or whatnot in front of a Deathwatch party, even if they should have absolutely no chance to kill him, is absolutely asking for them to attack him (and possibly murder him). Throwing a mighty foe of renown at a Deathwatch team and expecting them to retreat is like putting a juicy steak in front of a German Shepard and expecting him not to eat it.
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Jan 22, 2014 07:46
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Hell, you have problems getting even imperial guard to run in the situation, given commissars are probably even more stock-stupid and immovable than a lot of marines.
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Jan 22, 2014 19:13
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For DH marines, it will depend on the players, their mission, and their relationship with the inquisitor in charge. If you've just finished an inquisitorial investigation and it's a heroic sacrifice that produces an outcome of benefit to the Imperium, it's probably fine. Throw your life away doing something that wasn't in the mission profile, your Chapter might get sent a strongly worded letter. If you're in the middle of an inquisitorial mission and throw your life away causing the mission to fail, that could be a black mark against your chapter and a more formal instruction to instill some more discipline in their battle brothers before suspicious eyes get turned in their direction. Of course if your players don't care about such things and are more interested in being Super-action-hero Marines rather than Warrior-Monk Marines, you don't want to be putting them in the position of choosing unless you're prepared to accept all outcomes.
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Jan 22, 2014 19:34
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Ronwayne posted:Hell, you have problems getting even imperial guard to run in the situation, given commissars are probably even more stock-stupid and immovable than a lot of marines. An important thing to remember is that the whole 'unwinnable battle with a single boss foe' thing doesn't work very well in WH40KRP because the system is very lethal, cutting both ways. Players, when presented with a battle that looks interesting or like part of the plot, are much more likely to at least try to attack it before they consider scampering away. Due to how damage and all works, if the players are lucky (or have any heavy weapons) or unlucky, this initial clash is going to end with someone dead. You don't really get the time to slowly realize you're outmatched and run away.
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Jan 22, 2014 20:02
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If you set it up right, you could use your players' desire to fight Kharn against them. Have the players hear he's nearby but their immediate superior warn them to avoid him for Reasons. That way he could become an obstacle throughout the mission.
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Jan 22, 2014 21:52
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The tension between personal glory and mission success is integral to Deathwatch. Using nasty fuckoff enemies is a good way to set that up.
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Jan 22, 2014 22:12
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MaliciousOnion posted:If you set it up right, you could use your players' desire to fight Kharn against them. Have the players hear he's nearby but their immediate superior warn them to avoid him for Reasons. That way he could become an obstacle throughout the mission. Well, that implies the players have a choice. I was speaking more of the assumed GM:"Here Kharn, roll init, wat do?"
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Jan 23, 2014 01:59
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Many of the Chapters have demeanor flaws that make it really hard to withdraw from a fight even when it is a totally sound choice. Not everyone is going to be an Ultramarine, so you might end up accidently killing your players on fights they should clearly avoid. I would agree with MaliciousOnion in that having such powerful enemies operating in the background to be avoided and to add tension, but if you purposely hamstring your players into an encounter you might be signaling their death sentence if they are role-playing their characters properly. Since I've gone "all-in" when it comes to learning the 40K RPing games I recently picked up the Deathwatch supplement "The Jericho Reach". One issue I've always had in role-playing is once I become involved in a game I take it on myself to learn as much of the setting as possible I was this way back when Forgotten Realms was the prime setting for D&D. Add in the fact that I've always been a big fan of the 40K fluff, and supplements like this are automatically anathema to my wallet. This book has all sorts of neat ideas for missions, and some of my favorite are the ones involving the Tau simply because the Tau are for all intents and purposes "good-guys" and having some missions where the Tau act in a far more noble manner their your Imperial allies seem like some good ways to gently caress with your more honorable chapters like the Space Wolves, Ultramarines, or Salamanders. For some reason they added a slew of new Tyranid stats at the end, but don't really mention anything from the Tau or Stagmartians despite covering all three battlefronts of the Jericho Reach in detail. Some of these are almost comical in their power to the point where giving them stats seems pointless because I can't see a kill-team fighting them without some specialty setup by the GM. My personal favorite is the Hierophant a Tyranid Bio-Titan who's every single ability WILL kill any Space Marine outside of a dreadnaught or a supremely lucky Terminator in one shot. To top it off the thing has a TB of 32, 12 Armor, and a Warp Field. I feel at some point someone sat down and just went "gently caress it, you ever wonder what the numbers would look like?". Don't forget a Fear rating of 5.
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Jan 23, 2014 03:41
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Uroboros posted:Many of the Chapters have demeanor flaws that make it really hard to withdraw from a fight even when it is a totally sound choice. Not everyone is going to be an Ultramarine, so you might end up accidently killing your players on fights they should clearly avoid. I would agree with MaliciousOnion in that having such powerful enemies operating in the background to be avoided and to add tension, but if you purposely hamstring your players into an encounter you might be signaling their death sentence if they are role-playing their characters properly. Yeah, really enough chapters have problems with backing down from fights in general, plus the ones who have specific enemies like orks or demons or whatever, that you'll have a lot of trouble with your players not prioritizing the most crazy dangerous thing on the battlefield. Like, that's the job of space marines, to go after the most nutso challenging thing in the theater that isn't an overwhelming horde of individually punkass enemies.
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Jan 23, 2014 04:06
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Oh, on the subject of ridiculous foes, in my Deathwatch Game we got our first ever burnt fate point to survive death and it was due to the D5 ignores toughness and armour damage from landing the killing blow on an Avatar. Plunging arms down to the elbow into the molten god and quenching the blasphemous energy that powers it. Currently the character is unconcious and trapped in their armour as the cooling iron locked around them like Han Solo trapped in carbonite, except with half their limbs burnt off. Three members were in the -8 or -7 range as well. I figured the Avatar's heat would flicker and weaken as it took more damage and as it was getting low each hit was leaving rapidly solidifying chunks of metal that'd bob below the surface again or get thrown out. Like, a kraken bolt round ripping through left a cylinder of solidified iron behind or a melee hit threw out flecks of hard metal.
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Jan 23, 2014 04:50
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Pharmaskittle posted:Yeah, really enough chapters have problems with backing down from fights in general, plus the ones who have specific enemies like orks or demons or whatever, that you'll have a lot of trouble with your players not prioritizing the most crazy dangerous thing on the battlefield. Like, that's the job of space marines, to go after the most nutso challenging thing in the theater that isn't an overwhelming horde of individually punkass enemies. It's a funny problem in some ways. In lots of settings the people the players are portraying should be willing to die doing what they're doing, but we don't expect them to actually do it because it's a game and the character 'needs' to be there next week. I wouldn't describe it as 'calling the bluff' but there's a dynamic there when you show the player a situation in which their goal brings certain death and they go for it anyway. Edit - All I know about the next game I want to run is that I want it to combine temporary characters with a permanent game. A game where the players are part of a general adventure/plot (having some overall organization to which they belong would be a good way to do this) but where the actual player characters are cycled out very frequently, like say every five sessions. Maybe do it as a capital ship stuck in a wild part of space, trying to make short trips through warp storms. A situation like homeworld/robotech where the ship is big enough to be sort of self sustaining but still very limited and isolated. As the players level up they could play increasingly important members of the crew, starting at the bottom and eventually playing as the haggard but proven bridge crew on a dying vessel. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 04:52
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That's a good point, and it reminds me that I need to go add some more buff enemies to my Only War game. More casualties!
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Jan 23, 2014 04:57
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How would one go about role playing as a Bone'ead, the Ogryns that get brain implants? I think RAW, Good Cerebral Implants make them slightly smarter than the average Guardsman.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:14
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Take a cue from Dyne in my Only Heresy game. He's the squad medic or some poo poo.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:43
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Clanpot Shake posted:Take a cue from Dyne in my Only Heresy game. He's the squad medic or some poo poo. As well as the smartest character in the kill squad, if memory serves. That's right, the smartest.
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Jan 23, 2014 18:44
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Yeah, I'm pretty certain he has the highest intelligence of all of us. IRL too.
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Jan 23, 2014 19:54
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My friends and I are going to start up a game of Rogue Trader and I wanted to ask if there were any critically important fixes that I should include. I've got the errata, so that'll clean things up. There's enough content in just the base book to keep us occupied, we don't have much knowledge of the 40k universe to start with so the extra options in the supplements will just bog us down. There's three I think? Battlefleet Koronus for ships, something with more aliens... anyway, we'll be more than happy to wet our feet with the base game. But beyond the errata is there anything rules-wise that I should import that'll make the game go smoother?
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Jan 23, 2014 23:07
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I'm currently making a tzeentchian space hulk labyrinth thing, where you roll 1d100 and pick the room your players walk through. I'll post what I have when I'm done, as right now it looks like there will be around 50 rooms. Some of the neater things I've put into this maze are a nazi ufo wedged inside of a pit. An impossible puzzle room that locks all the doors once you enter, but then once you even attempt it all doors unlock, bound to cause frustration. And a massive forrest, within resides a peaceful, immortal, stone giant, who can provide shelter for the group. Other suggestions would be rad.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:07
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An unrelentingly hostile chihuahua. A heretical bake sale. Two tzeentchian daemons arguing over the correct interpretation of a rule in a game they are playing. The pieces look disturbingly like the PCs. Space bees. Giant space bees. Giant space wasps. Giant space spiders. Giant space wasps vs giant space spiders.
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Jan 24, 2014 00:00
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Put Kharn in one of the rooms
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Jan 24, 2014 00:41
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Uroboros posted:
Good lord RPG design rule number 37 says if it has stats the players can kill it. If you don't want your players to be able to kill it then don't stat it. Any Titan scale thing shouldn't have stats in anything other than an Ad Mech game and even then it's not a good idea. The players shouldn't be able to even think they have a chance against a Titan unless they have some kind of plot device. On a tangential note has anyone run a DH game with a more free form character gen system? My current group has found the existing character classes too restrictive for the type of characters they tend to play so I was think of just giving them a single list of Xp costs and letting them build a character that way. I know there is a chance of munchkinism but I trust them to not go too overboard. The idea is that they are all relatively experienced Inquisitors already. They get called in by the sector head of the Inquisition to find and retrieve an Exterminatus ship that's gone missing. Start the fun
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Jan 24, 2014 00:55
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Can always try to make the beefy things puzzle bosses. Freeform DH? There's always Clanpot Shake's Only Heresy game, where he uses the Only War rules to run an Inquisitorial kill-team. I'm thinking of Ogryn naming conventions, maybe naming them like old-school tanks; give them a fancy High Gothic or historical name, then a diminutive. Like Macharius/"'Little' Mac" The Maze should have Mirror Universe or Bizarro versions of the PCs or NPCs. Not necessarily hostile, either, just different (or Bizarro!) "Me am Inquisitor!"
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Jan 24, 2014 01:10
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Foxtrot_13 posted:Good lord RPG design rule number 37 says if it has stats the players can kill it. If you don't want your players to be able to kill it then don't stat it. You say this but have you looked at the Bloodthirster stats in Tome of Blood 
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Jan 24, 2014 01:30
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A room with a door that opens onto itself. A déjà vu room where everything that happens has happened before in the game. A room where what people say is always heard as the opposite. A room with an infinitely detailed model of the hulk. A room that looks just like the PC's home. A room that is a paradise islands in the middle of a blue sea. A huge hangar filled with doppelgangers of the party, all dead, piled as high as the ceiling. A déjà vu room where everything that happens has happened before in the game. A room of mirrors that reflects everything but the party, or something instead of the party. A room like in Willy Wonka where it gets smaller at one end.
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Jan 24, 2014 01:58
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An exit. Gotta have hope, after all.
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Jan 24, 2014 02:25
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Foxtrot_13 posted:Good lord RPG design rule number 37 says if it has stats the players can kill it. If you don't want your players to be able to kill it then don't stat it. An aside, but this is usually true, however Exalted managed to make a major NPC so completely overloaded on stats (not just stats but lots of "and also all powers listed in X, Y, and Z books") that it was indeed impossible to kill him. The point being is that Exalted is a spectacular piece of poo poo that manages to shatter longstanding truisms of RPG on the brutal, sharp knee of its feces kneecap.
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Jan 24, 2014 02:53
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Mechafunkzilla posted:You say this but have you looked at the Bloodthirster stats in Tome of Blood Speaking of statting up big things, how's this for a battleship in Rogue Trader? Extrapolated from an Avenger(a poor man's battleship) and some parts directly from BFG like turrets and void shields: Speed: 4 Manoeuvrability: +5 Detection: +10 Hull Integrity: 100 Armour: 22 Turret Rating: 5 Space: 100 Ship Points: 80 Weapons: 3 port, 3 starboard, 1 prow, 1 dorsal Gets a special engine that puts out 100 power for 20 space, quad void shields for 11 power and 4 space and instead of rolling for complications it automatically gets the results of "holy gently caress this thing is expensive to run" and "you stole their battleship, what did you expect?" Holy gently caress this thing is expensive to run: When the players use the battleship during an aventure, it reduces their profit factor by 1d5 just from running costs. In addition, all components are one step more expensive to install and repairs/installations take twice as long. You stole their battleship, what did you expect?: Everybody gets the Enemy: Imperial Navy talent and they will try to take it back through any channels available to them.
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Jan 24, 2014 02:55
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Asehujiko posted:A Chosen with a lascannon can make mincemeat of it before closes into melee range. Or that Halo Eversor that does 300+ damage a turn. As long as it isn't their main ship, that's pretty decent. I say this because 1d5 profit factor is so goddamn much. Like, they would need to make at least 6 profit each adventure to even make their trip worth it. If they aren't getting 6 profit jobs, they'll look for other jobs, because the rogue trader is an basically just a CEO on steroids.
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Jan 24, 2014 03:14
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Asehujiko posted:Speaking of statting up big things, how's this for a battleship in Rogue Trader? I'd say make it even slower, even worse at turning, even more heavily armoured and make using it anywhere that Imperial citizens see it start costing profit factor. The ship shouldn't be that much more expensive to run than a grand cruiser, but if the Imperium knows that you've got one of their battleships and aren't giving it back you're heading towards unfriendly independent power status, and they're going to start cutting your contracts. And then send the fleet after you. Or possibly a nearby strike cruiser or battlebarge. Or perhaps a single boarding torpedo with a gift from the Eversor Temple. After all, replacing the internal fixtures and fittings is cheap compared to laying down a whole new hull.
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Jan 24, 2014 04:26
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Aren't there actual battleship stats in one of the supplements?
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Jan 24, 2014 04:29
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VanSandman posted:An unrelentingly hostile chihuahua. While space bees are the better known, and more common type, it is known to some of the least fortunate inhabitants of icy deathworlds that Frost Bees are the real killers. As large as houses, and with rage to match, Frost Bees are true terrors. Over eons of evolution (mostly to avoid their only predator - themselves!) they have adapted to live in the coldest of environments, swim underwater for years, and even survive being frozen solid in blocks of ice. One of the worst aspects of the Frost Bee is that no part of it's carcass (inevitably slain by the Frost King) can be used for anything. Their highly acidic blood breaks the corpse down in moments, then itself degrades, preventing its use as a chemical. It goes without saying that this blood is also a moderate nuerotoxin.
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Jan 24, 2014 14:03
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I made the trait navy only because not everybody is aware of the navy's monopoly on battleships and even if they are they might not want to be the one to rat out the owner of a rogue battleship. Speed and manoeuvrability are from BFG, there it is 25% slower than the Avenger and just as manoeuvrable, being only 10% larger. I could make it only cost 1 PF to run for an adventure, which becomes 1d5 if the Navy finds out about it and starts putting pressure on every contact they can find.
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Jan 24, 2014 14:28
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What's the profit factor for returning the (salvaged, repaired, and upgraded due to our immense loyalty and dedication to the Imperium, Long Live the Emperor) battleship to the Navy?
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Jan 24, 2014 16:34
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I'd say low on the actual Profit Factor since you're basically giving it to the Navy out of what passes for the goodness of your hearts and since the Navy probably wouldn't be tremendously inclined to buy one of their own (very, very valuable) ships that they view as theirs by right but it'd certainly be Peer: Navy all around and I'd say worth quite a bit more in terms of other benefits...a new fate point for everybody, a ceremonial gifting of master craftsmanship technology or archaeotech as a token of appreciation, a writ allowing the Rogue Trader's vessels docking and repair/refitting privileges at Naval outposts in perpetuity, and if not directly profitable I have no doubt that such a thing would open up any number of profitable ventures to explore following protracted wining and dining with the Admiralty.
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Jan 24, 2014 16:46
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Funktastic Dog posted:Other suggestions would be rad. A room with three doors that have symbols on them. Above the doors is written "Through two: death, the other: life. Choose wisely" and then a completely meaningless riddle. All three doors actually open into the same space and the real exit, a door with "Pathetic. Choose HARDER." above it. A Pink Horror leading a group of Blue horrors in a life drawing class. The model is a constantly shifting mass of things, they are all drawing fruit. A kitchen, fit and equipped for the finest restaurant. Otherwise empty. A theatre with an empty stage being watched by cultists. They get extremely upset if the party make too much noise. A room full of mime artists. A fully operational space-superiority fighter, with signs of very recent use and battle, in a barely large enough room with human sized doors. The party palace, a shop run by Eddie the Excitable. Sells a wide variety of party supplies but nothing of any obvious worth to the party. Eddie knows nothing about the ship around him and is quite insistent that he lives on the planet Fortune. If he moves through any of the doors out of the shop, he vanishes. Water. Something is stopping it flowing out of the doors, but you can't work out what. Some showers. Just perfectly normal showers, unless anyone is aligned with Nurgle, in which case they burn like powerful acid. Whatever the party dreamt about last night as shoebox dioramas.
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Jan 24, 2014 17:17
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A door that opens to reveal a brick wall. On a spaceship.
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Jan 24, 2014 17:20
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A door that opens to reveal a smaller door.
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Jan 24, 2014 17:22
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Spiders...lots of spiders. Edit: drat beaten ages ago. Ummm...uhhh...Dr.Weir? I feel like introducing him as some sort of Chaos servant who was the first human to actually turn to the Ruinous Powers, I think that'd be pretty awesome. TheArmorOfContempt fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 18:25
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