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Kai Tave posted:Both of those sound pretty rad, and I've been following frajaq's Scintillan Queens game over in TGR and it looks like fun times run by a cool dude. That's literally the reason I'll never do a Rogue Trader game ever. I was actually thinking of doing a balls out pirate outlaw RT game full of xenos and poo poo with stuff from Hostile Acquisitions but RT is just too open for me. Even if Deathwatch and Only War aren't as interesting if compared to Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader, they're much easier to write as a GM.
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Apr 9, 2014 06:28
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Schizotek posted:I've been waiting for like a month for some sort of 40k rp game to get opened for recruitment in the GR, but you goons suck and havent started one yet. So is there any particular game like DH or OW other goons are aching to play? Or should I roll to see which one I make? Ascension. There's no game of it running and everyone wants to play it but nobody wants to actually run it because they're cowards.
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Apr 9, 2014 06:29
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frajaq posted:That's literally the reason I'll never do a Rogue Trader game ever. I was actually thinking of doing a balls out pirate outlaw RT game full of xenos and poo poo with stuff from Hostile Acquisitions but RT is just too open for me. Even if Deathwatch and Only War aren't as interesting if compared to Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader, they're much easier to write as a GM. I think Dark Heresy is the game with the potential to have the best balance of open-ended player-driven gameplay while also providing the GM with an excuse to have someone show up and tell the players "Oh poo poo, you guys need to go investigate this thing over here right now." Which is kind of a shame for me personally because I think that Dark Heresy is kind of disappointing compared to the game I hoped it would be when it first came out which was more "Eisenhorn/Ravenor and Co." and less "40K Call of Cthulhu." There's Ascension I suppose, though that actually seems like it swings a bit too far in the other direction.
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Apr 9, 2014 07:17
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Waci posted:Ascension. There's no game of it running and everyone wants to play it but nobody wants to actually run it because they're cowards. Ascension can be pretty fun, agreed. I played a famulous protege/spyrer assassin, which was all kinds of crazy.
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Apr 9, 2014 12:25
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I did some more thinking about my vaporware Squats  Rogue Trader game, about how and why a doomed final stand might show up.The Shadow in the Warp; if it messes with Warp travel, you need to fight the Hive Fleet away from the Homeworlds to buy enough time for evacuations. And once you're under the Shadow, fighting the Hive Fleet, there's no escaping, you Exploring new worlds in Rogue Trader is mostly about finding old starcharts and Navigator logbooks, isn't it? How do you go about finding new or uncharted systems? Are they something a Navigator can see from the Warp? I was going to say you can figure out where you are and where nearby stars are in realspace with astronomy, but that doesn't really map to the Warp and nearby is in astronomical terms. Maybe I can just seed worlds with xenos Warp charts to reveal more of the map as the game goes on?
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Apr 9, 2014 14:19
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I'm not big on RT, so I could be wrong, but I -think- Scholastic Lore: Astromancy (or maybe Navigate (Stellar or Warp) ) lets you determine (at least enough to not jump into a star) where you can find a system, and from then you can go there and see if there's any planets or other interesting salvage in it.
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Apr 9, 2014 14:48
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I really think Rogue Trader improves a lot in terms of player engagement if at the start you say "Here is a map of the area. Here are three big landmarks. Everybody put down one cool place that they've heard of somehow, either through mysterious contacts, warp fuckery, or ancient family records. Go."
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Apr 9, 2014 14:53
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Werix posted:I keep telling #acolyte that my SWAT4(0k) game will be up early to mid next month, which for those you sane souls that don't hang out in #acolyte, is a OW homebrew where the players are going to be an Arbites SWAT team. Personally, I'd like to see some more Rogue Trader, since it is so rarely seen, and rarely survives past like three pages. Would it be possible to see your notes on this homebrew? I love the Arbites and have wanted to run an Arbite game myself some day and SWAT is a pretty awesome fit for OW.
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Apr 9, 2014 17:34
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Rockopolis posted:I did some more thinking about my vaporware Squats Sometimes your warp transit comes to a screeching halt when you bump into an unexpected gravity well. Or a planet pops out of nowhere because reasons.
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Apr 9, 2014 18:00
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Empty systems should be common, but useful systems should be rarer. Empty, useful systems that have favourable warp-currents should be even rarer than that. There might be a nice little world just 20 Light Years over that way, but if you're sailing against the wind to get in and out it's probably easier to just use the one 50 LY over there unless you're really pressed for space (or have use for a system that no ship wants to visit).
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Apr 9, 2014 18:12
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Realistically speaking every sector contains tens of thousands of stars. The breadth of the Imperium probably contains a hundred billion. Sectors are tiny dots making up a tiny portion of the galaxy and inside of them a tiny portion of their systems are inhabited. Out of those maybe a million are populated. While the understanding of the scale of space depends heavily on the writer I find realistic numbers work well. They imply the vast majority of the galaxy is unexplored wasteland, there's ample room for mystery even inside an imperial sector, and you're unlikely to run into anything worthwhile by randomly hopping systems. So while you could do that - at least if you have warp charts of the area - it's probably not a worthwhile endeavor and you're indeed better off looking for old maps and logs and documents. Which makes for better plot hooks anyway.
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Apr 9, 2014 19:25
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Elukka posted:Realistically speaking every sector contains tens of thousands of stars. The breadth of the Imperium probably contains a hundred billion. Sectors are tiny dots making up a tiny portion of the galaxy and inside of them a tiny portion of their systems are inhabited. Out of those maybe a million are populated. While the understanding of the scale of space depends heavily on the writer I find realistic numbers work well. They imply the vast majority of the galaxy is unexplored wasteland, there's ample room for mystery even inside an imperial sector, and you're unlikely to run into anything worthwhile by randomly hopping systems. So while you could do that - at least if you have warp charts of the area - it's probably not a worthwhile endeavor and you're indeed better off looking for old maps and logs and documents. Which makes for better plot hooks anyway. Not quite unexplored territory, more like Ork-infested. At least that's what I remember.
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Apr 9, 2014 19:31
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I don't think every place is ork-infested. It'd be pretty boring if they were the sole dominant species of the galaxy. Some places got humans, others got orks, others got different xenos and there's a lot of nothing in between everything. It's also a convenient excuse for why you can have an ork incursion or whatever right in the middle of the Imperium - they were hanging there in the middle of it all along, because the Imperium doesn't actually control most of the galaxy, they're just spread out all over it.
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Apr 9, 2014 19:36
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You also have xenos races that control multiple systems in a small area, ones that humans just never bothered to eradicate, or found it too much trouble to eradicate.
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Apr 9, 2014 20:37
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Night10194 posted:Would it be possible to see your notes on this homebrew? I love the Arbites and have wanted to run an Arbite game myself some day and SWAT is a pretty awesome fit for OW. You'll see it when everyone else does. The classes are mostly reskins of OW classes and I've got them done. Where I'm differing is in equipment. You're an elite arbiters team, you don't need to requisition gear, you have an armory to choose from. Right now I'm building the armory, trying to get weapons that are fun to use and fit with the arbites vibe(mostly sp and bolt weapons, no plasma or melta, limited heavy weapons). Funny enough, most of the gear is coming from dark heresy books, particularly book of judgment, which is the arbites book, so makes sense, but also a few from Inquisitor handbook. Also custom guns, like pepper spray(pistol with spray and shock) and beanbag rounds(negates pen, adds privative, adds shocking) among other goodies.
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Apr 9, 2014 23:45
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I think that's one of my favorite parts about the Arbites. They're badasses and all, but at the end of the day, it's still their job to arrest you instead of shoot you if possible. Shocky sticks for all!
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Apr 10, 2014 01:21
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Really? I got a far more ah, Russian view of them. (I.e. 100 hostages+12 suspects=112 bodybags=successful mission)
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Apr 10, 2014 06:15
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Ronwayne posted:Really? I got a far more ah, Russian view of them. (I.e. 100 hostages+12 suspects=112 bodybags=successful mission) Depends on what they're suspected of, I'd say. Remember the Arbites doesn't deal with dudes peddling drugs or stolen property. They're called in for the big poo poo, more like the FBI. That means you need people who can be put to the question.
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Apr 10, 2014 06:21
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The Arbites are clearly meant as a
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Apr 10, 2014 06:56
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Arbites operate more on the scale of ensuring planetary security. So they might get involved with pursuing drug peddlers if, say, the drug in question was creating social unrest that threatened the planetary government or the planet's ability to meet a production tithe for the Administratum.
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Apr 10, 2014 07:18
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Sure, and the real answer to "what do the Arbites do?" is "whatever they deem necessary to bring the EMPEROR'S LAW to bear against the criminal scum who break it." Still, it's a fair point that your average capital-A Arbites isn't really going to be messing around much with the low level stuff unless it's in pursuit of a bigger collar. It's actually a bit like the Guard and the PDF...every planet has its own local law enforcers who handle the smaller stuff and poo poo jobs and are probably underfunded and under-equipped, and then you have the Arbites who get the fancy helmets and armored riot wagons and robo-mastiffs and who deal with things like hab-sector wide riots and kicking down the doors of "untouchable" nobles suspected of dabbling in Chaos and dragging them off for interrogation. Really, an all-Arbites game is a lot like Dark Heresy with more shotguns, more direct authority, and a lot less planet hopping.
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Apr 10, 2014 07:42
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Kai Tave posted:I think Dark Heresy is the game with the potential to have the best balance of open-ended player-driven gameplay while also providing the GM with an excuse to have someone show up and tell the players "Oh poo poo, you guys need to go investigate this thing over here right now." Which is kind of a shame for me personally because I think that Dark Heresy is kind of disappointing compared to the game I hoped it would be when it first came out which was more "Eisenhorn/Ravenor and Co." and less "40K Call of Cthulhu." There's Ascension I suppose, though that actually seems like it swings a bit too far in the other direction. If you want to run it as an eisonhorn and co game, have everyone start at rank 5 or higher, point buy, with about 3-5,000 thrones in spending money. Everyone will come out of it pretty well equipped with backups and have very competent and capable characters.
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Apr 10, 2014 07:43
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I can recommend the start chapters of Book of Judgment for the canon take. In reality, Arbites developed from campy police worship and (most importantly) Judge Dredd. However, their function is to protect Imperial Law, not planetary law. As the BoJ aptly puts it: If a huge riot breaks out in front of an Administratum compound, and citizens maim each other by the dozen, it is not an arbites matter. However, if an errant brick sails over the compound wall, and clips an adept on her way to work, the arbites gates draw back, and a squadron of twin-bolter toting bike officers roll out, find and incarcerate the poor sod who did it. This is why they also have a lot of non-lethal gear: The prime directive with regards to rebelling citizens is to keep them repressed and working - though, of course, if one suspects heretical, daemonic or xenos infestation, the gloves come off.
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Apr 10, 2014 11:43
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Re: Exploring Is there a systematic way that people find new worlds, without prior charts? Hell, where did the charts come from in the first place? Isn't that what the Explorator Fleets do? How do they do it? Or are the charts another relic of the Dark Age of Technology?
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Apr 10, 2014 12:31
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Yo Rockopolis, I turned the matter over with my hardcore RT-nerd friends, and they had the following take on it: Everyone can find new stars, provided they have a powerful enough telescope. Most, if not all, starships are properly equipped to visually survey stars at range. If they determine the system is unexplored (here you need charts, trader hearsay and help from the adepta, or just to pick one you know to be further away than settled space). After that, it's just a matter of going there, and the only limit here is the light of the Astronomican. Once there, you can start looking for planets and other salvagable objects. Navigators are quite able to travel to destinations they are not personally familiar with, see "Going into the unknown" on page 183. As for charts, they are written out by private individuals inside both the adepta and private houses, but if you can find a relic chart you're on the golden green, of course.
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Apr 10, 2014 12:42
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I always assumed it was a slow, methodical way. Starting in a system you know, you find the nearest star that looks interesting, then make a short warp jump to it, using a Navigator who is good at making maps. you see if anything is interesting in the system, which takes a couple of months to fly around and scan for interesting deposits of ore and the like, then if there is nothing worth having (Dammit, another mountain of gold! there were ten of those in the last system) you jump on to the next likely candidate. Most explorer ships/Rogue traders without maps would probably search five systems a year, tops, but with the number of ships out there, new worlds can be found at a semi-decent rate.
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Apr 10, 2014 12:46
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Unless decent telescopes are a lost technology, searching for habitable planets should be a pretty trivial affair with even a relatively quick in-system turnaround. Hell, Ork presence probably produces a fairly reliable atmospheric signature you could pick up from the system fringe.
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Apr 10, 2014 14:37
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This is 40k - all of these things are probably true depending on who you're talking about and where. In the Rogue Trader game I'm running, part of the Necron refit of the players' ship gave them a fancy Star Trek style stellar cartography holographic chamber.
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Apr 10, 2014 16:11
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When it comes down to arbites game, I'm going to have a mixture of different missions. Some will involve capturing a dude to interrogate, while others will include VIP hostages to rescue. Others will be straight up "kill all the bad dudes" and others will be hostage situations where saving them is nice, but the big goal is to just ghost the guys. That's why my heavy weapons Arbite is also going to have Webber(And maybe heavy Webber) training, so on the missions where having a heavy stubber isn't practical, he can be the guy shooting nets at chumps. Other players can buy Webber training, but he/she will be the only one to start with it.
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Apr 10, 2014 16:56
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Okay, thanks. My hangup was over the whole Warp Navigation, because the Warp is so much weirder and doesn't map to realspace very well. So, the Navigator can just peek into the Warp and say "Oh, it's over there, and we will get there when we get there.", not "I don't know. Argh!  "And you can make jumps without a Navigator, you just auto-fail at detecting and avoiding trouble, and at best you will end up "in a neighboring region". What does that mean? Same star system? Same constellation, subsector? The Warp Antenna and the Runecaster are both for helping Navigators, but they might give Navigator-less ships some help? A Warp Gate map would be an interesting alternative, if combined with the other two items. Rogue Trader: RT-1 Maybe combine a few of the above for use with a Living Ancestor in the Squats game. Haha, the reason the Warp is mostly a collection of star systems and not much between is literally because open space is so boring that the Warp doesn't bother keeping track of it.
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Apr 10, 2014 17:00
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The Navigator is seeing a completely different map to the rest of you. Imagine a paper map with tears in it screwed up into a ball, only in three or more dimensions. Oh and with with mobile reefs, weather that can be actively malicious, occasional giant monsters, and assorted places that going too near to will give you a really bad headache. You can do the little jumps without one, maybe to the next star over, because it's all flat enough on the small scale. Like sailing to the next island which isn't even over the horizon.
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Apr 10, 2014 17:09
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Heavy Stubbers are a kind of underappreciated weapon. For an Acolyte team that expects heavy combat and can't afford stuff like heavy bolters ("It costs 160 thrones to fire this weapon for 6 seconds!") they make a pretty good squad support weapon, since they'll pierce most normal human protection pretty easy and put the hurt on once they're through.
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Apr 10, 2014 18:57
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With Arbites, you can give them missions with 'non-traditional' objectives. "There are 8 armed rebels holed up in sub-section 14 of the western halls of archives. Three of them are armed with flamers. They must not be allowed to torch those records. We recommend you detonate the flamer fuel tanks while they are with their hostages instead of in the stacks. Oh, yes, they have 20 hostages, local law enforcement may be trying to rescue them. They cannot be allowed to interfere with your mission. The Emperor protects."
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Apr 10, 2014 19:06
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Night10194 posted:Heavy Stubbers are a kind of underappreciated weapon. For an Acolyte team that expects heavy combat and can't afford stuff like heavy bolters ("It costs 160 thrones to fire this weapon for 6 seconds!") they make a pretty good squad support weapon, since they'll pierce most normal human protection pretty easy and put the hurt on once they're through. Yeah. Book of judgment has stats for a bulldog stubber, which fits, since it is like a 50rnd stubber with a reload of one round, which is how I would imagine a paramilitary force to be armed. My real problem is trying to figure out some other heavy weapons to put in the armory that makes sense. Maybe a heavy flamer? Perhaps a rocket launcher, but it only has krak rounds to minimize collateral damage? Basically a dude with a heavy stubber or Webber is what I envisioned, but I want to give the heavy a few more options, without the insane scenario of "cops with Las canons" happening. Since they are supposed to be the guys brought out during civil disturbances (when not working with swat) maybe I need to home brew some heavy crowd suppression weapons. I like the sound of a heavy pepper sprayer.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:38
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They need a Sea-dog water-cannon tank.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:41
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Heavy automatic grenade launcher? For crowd dispersal?
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Apr 10, 2014 19:56
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Stun Grenades/tear gas and rubber bullets/sandbags for the stubbers? Having a heavy pepper sprayer that functions as a non-lethal flamer would be awesome. I imagine your dudes would be like that security officer at UC Davis just hosing down protesters with his giant pepper cannon. Also, whenever my party would get caught by Arbites it was shock mauls all day erry day.
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Apr 10, 2014 20:07
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Rockopolis posted:Heavy automatic grenade launcher? For crowd dispersal? This is a good idea and would work well on dispersing crowds or for murderizing dudes if necessary.
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Apr 11, 2014 03:30
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Yeah, launchers would be my immediate suggestion, with things like flashbangs, choke gas, krak/frag, and maybe some more exotic rounds for special situations.
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Apr 11, 2014 03:45
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Rockopolis posted:Heavy automatic grenade launcher? For crowd dispersal? Possible. Only thing is one of the specialties is literally the breacher(Breach, bang, clear) spec from Hammer of the Emperor, so I don't want the heavy stepping on his toes too much. Night10194 posted:This is a good idea and would work well on dispersing crowds or for murderizing dudes if necessary. I'm going more for a Swat 4 feel, hence the working name of Swat 4(0k), so I don't see much large crowd dispersal work going on. However, I also give the heavy a free backpack ammo supply to use with their weapon each deployment. The idea is so they always have one for their heavy weapon, but it is left unspoken but implied that if they have a non-heavy for their primary weapon for a certain deployment they can still use it with that(think autogun or the automatic shotgun with the ammo supply).
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Apr 11, 2014 03:49
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