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I dunno if it's because they're British or what, but 40k writers barely ever know anything about guns. Totally tolerable when everything can just be chalked up to dumb space materials.
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Apr 15, 2014 01:32
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Yes. In fact in one of the Rogue Trader supplements, you can buy slightly modified boltshells that fit in a shotgun. I assume they just file the rim down
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Apr 15, 2014 01:54
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Though I always ran it that Marine bolters were .998 like they say in DoW II and Human bolters were .75, but that's really just flavor to justify one doing much more damage and being huge.
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Apr 15, 2014 02:02
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Human-sized bolt rounds probably just have refined fyceline as opposed to the "depleted deuterium core"(which I am guessing is supposed to be metallic hydrogen or something absurd) of an Astartes bolt shell. It'd explain why the bolters in Deathwatch are rolling two dice to the other books' one, I guess.
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Apr 15, 2014 07:05
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Sour Blossom posted:Human-sized bolt rounds probably just have refined fyceline as opposed to the "depleted deuterium core"(which I am guessing is supposed to be metallic hydrogen or something absurd) of an Astartes bolt shell. It'd explain why the bolters in Deathwatch are rolling two dice to the other books' one, I guess. Don't Space Marines get bonus damage with Bolter weapons due to 'training' traits or whatever? I don't have my DW book on me, but I remember something like that being on the character sheet itself (maybe under the Astartes Weapon Training trait).
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Apr 15, 2014 07:10
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Sour Blossom posted:Human-sized bolt rounds probably just have refined fyceline as opposed to the "depleted deuterium core"(which I am guessing is supposed to be metallic hydrogen or something absurd) of an Astartes bolt shell. It'd explain why the bolters in Deathwatch are rolling two dice to the other books' one, I guess. Eh the difference in the latest weapon stats about Human sized and Marines sized bolters is only 4 damage actually. Bolter Basic 100m S/3/– 1d10+5X 4 24 Full Tearing 7kg Very Rare Legion Bolter Basic 100m S/3/– 1d10+9X 4 24 Full Tearing 10kg Extremely Rare
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Apr 15, 2014 07:15
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It's about the difference between a human bolter and a human heavy bolter.
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Apr 15, 2014 07:40
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One of the weapon stats I really don't get in Black Crusade is the downgrade in the Astartes Shotgun In the Deathwatch Errata the stats are: Astartes Shotgun Basic 30m S/2/– 1d10+9 I Pen 4 Clip 18 Reload Full Reliable, Scatter Pretty decent, same damage as a bolter but no Tearing, but you do even more damage at Point Blank Range. But then on Black Crusade the weapon stats are: Legion Shotgun Basic 30m S/2/– 1d10+6 I Pen 0 Clip 10 Reload 2 Full Reliable, Scatter Why would they do this?
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Apr 15, 2014 07:51
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Because you are mixing humans and astartes so they want to make astartes guns deal more damage, but not TONS more. Basically, they were dumb.
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Apr 15, 2014 07:53
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I want to mention Werix is a goddamn champ for taking that nerfed legion shotgun and soldiering on anyways.
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Apr 15, 2014 09:29
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It's ok I house ruled that he uses the deathwatch stats instead now. Even I found sad as a GM when the most damage he did was 3 or 4 against regular high lvl enemies while Buster Clementine the hillbilly warlock did 14d10 damage with Bolt of Change
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Apr 15, 2014 09:42
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I have not gotten a chance to one-shot a vehicle either. Killing 4 space marines as a human PC in the space of 72 hours is pretty good compensation, though.
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Apr 15, 2014 10:04
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VanSandman posted:Looks like I'm definitely going to be running a game of Rogue Trader. I blame SpiritOfLenin and excessive ambition for this turn of events. Anything stupidly overpowered that I should avoid giving my characters? Any alternatives to profit-factor, since I hear that's a bit borked? Profit factor works just fine as long as you use the expanded rules in Into The Storm. Make sure you include a rule "The player characters have to be the first one down onto the surface of any planet". Otherwise they'll just apply manpower to every problem. One of the great things about 40K is that commonly-produced Imperial tech is only a little bit worse than specialized Eldar kit, so it doesn't break the game even if the crew is kitted out in elite poo poo. The MAIN barrier to any piece of awesome tech should be a cool story related to getting it. They'll treasure it much, much more if they had to fight off a planet of feral aliens for it.
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Apr 15, 2014 11:01
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Thanqol posted:Profit factor works just fine as long as you use the expanded rules in Into The Storm. Alternatively, make sure that whatever the issue is on the surface, manpower would only make the problem worse/won't solve the problem without personal intervention/there's something that you don't want the masses to see or take for themselves. The last one is almost always true.
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Apr 15, 2014 13:40
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frajaq posted:It's ok I house ruled that he uses the deathwatch stats instead now. Even I found sad as a GM when the most damage he did was 3 or 4 against regular high lvl enemies while Buster Clementine the hillbilly warlock did 14d10 damage with Bolt of Change Speaking of this game, y'all need to post because I was having fun reading that one.
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Apr 15, 2014 19:29
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Thanqol posted:Profit factor works just fine as long as you use the expanded rules in Into The Storm. This is good advice and I will follow it. Does anyone have any decent homebrew rules for a titan? I kind of want to give them one eventually if they play nice with the Mechanicum.
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Apr 15, 2014 19:42
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I have to ask, after Buster Clementine and the apparent desire to use a shotgun: Are you running an insane heretic hillbilly game?
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Apr 15, 2014 19:44
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Night10194 posted:I have to ask, after Buster Clementine and the apparent desire to use a shotgun: Are you running an insane heretic hillbilly game? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3586726
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Apr 15, 2014 19:46
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VanSandman posted:This is good advice and I will follow it. Though you would have to adjust a lot of how it works I think the Adeptus Evengelion system would be quite helpful.
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Apr 15, 2014 20:39
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What is that 'MANMODE' thing I see by a bunch of those peoples' character sheets in that campaign log?
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Apr 15, 2014 20:41
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VanSandman posted:This is good advice and I will follow it. There's a wolfhound in the Deathwatch books. It's really hard to hurt (twin void shields, 45-50 AP etc), and its default weapons include the Plasma Blast Gun, 3D10+26 E, Pen 10, Blast 16(!!) when fired on Maximal. A perfect tool for accidentally annihilating half your allies.
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Apr 15, 2014 20:44
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Night10194 posted:What is that 'MANMODE' thing I see by a bunch of those peoples' character sheets in that campaign log? Common houserule in #acolyte. You have to pick a core archetype, none of the fancy ones in the supplements, and align to a god at chargen (or choose to be unaligned). You can never unalign (or align if you're not), and you get the god's mark for free. As a result, you have to spend all your exp according to your god's true/allied/opposed costs. I made a solid Khorne character good at fighting AND social stuff but holy moly did I have to bring years of optimaxing experience to it. Tangentially, in Black Crusade, all the animal mutations are scrunched up together at the top of the mutation chart, so if you roll low consistantly, you're going to have to pick the Addiction mutation quite a bit if you don't want to play a furry. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Apr 15, 2014 |
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Apr 15, 2014 22:02
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My Rogue Trader game has ended up exploring abhumans beyond their standard portrayal in 40k, so offering my notes if they give anyone ideas or they have any ideas for what I could do with these. Beastmen - Found in the most heavily polluted sectors of hive and forge worlds, beastmen are so visibly devolved from human form that they are considered unacceptably deviant by the Imperial Guard. Beastmen typically live in tribes and clans guided by shamans who listen to the will of the [machine] spirits, keeping the tribe hard at work at the sacred tasks entrusted to them by the spirits. The result is a compliant and highly motivated workforce by Imperial standards, and the Adeptus Mechanicus often ascends beastmen heroes into their heavier cybernetic battle units. Shades - The evolutionary opposite of ogryn, shades are tall, frail, long-limbed abhumans from low-gravity worlds and void stations. Due to their marked frailty over normal humans and difficulty working productively in normal gravity, shades are only rarely conscripted into the Imperial military to any great degree, though a small number of shade Imperial Guard regiments do exist and are specialist fighters in low-gravity environments. Delphi - The delphi are one of the strangest breeds of abhuman deemed acceptable by the Holy Inquisition, descended from humans in environments with so little light that their heirs are completely blind. How delphi compensate for this mutation varies from delphi world to delphi world, but "eyes" that see in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, echolocation, and extraordinarily keen senses of hearing are all on record. As with shades, delphi are a rare sight in the Imperial military and often deployed as specialist units where their unique abilities prove invaluable.
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Apr 16, 2014 04:23
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I'm finding it's really fun to write DH stories as if my party was stumbling into another 40k gaming group's session. Like a DH adventure wherein the Acolytes are the complication to an NPC Rogue Trader's endeavor and must exploit the tensions between his chief advisors and criminal partners to get to the truth of what he's up to and get him to bribe them and their master to just let someone else take the fall for his fuckery. And, of course, DH vs. BC characters as bosses and masterminds for the heretic plots they unravel.
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Apr 16, 2014 06:42
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What, no Squats? I was thinking that they might treat high gravity worlds as normal gravity and all normal gravity as low gravity. Speaking of, further thoughts on Squats-game; I think it would make the game less aimless if it started right after the Homeworlds get devoured, with the player's ship crammed full of refugees and dropping out of the Warp into...(the game). Gives the players a lot more pressure if they know their ship contains a significant fraction of all the Squats in the Galaxy. It'd fit the "big disaster, everything is going to poo poo" theme of the setting. Is it worth it to drop the whole "you have a fated meeting with Hive Fleet GW Retcon" metaplot? I don't know that I can fit both into one game. If the game lasts long enough I guess I could do Behemoth -> Kraken. At the rate I keep  thinking about Squat-game, Rogue Trader III is going to be out.
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Apr 16, 2014 14:39
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Cythereal posted:My Rogue Trader game has ended up exploring abhumans beyond their standard portrayal in 40k, so offering my notes if they give anyone ideas or they have any ideas for what I could do with these. I love Shades and you should play up their role in zero-gravity environments. They could be exceptional ship-to-ship boarders, the marines you send in to capture asteroid dens, things of that nature.
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Apr 16, 2014 14:46
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I dunno, tight spaces, close combat and long delicate limbs don't go well together in my mental image. Extra-vehicular on the other hand, that I can see. Fighting in void suits on the surface of airless moons, hanging off the surface of a ship protecting the boarding harpoons during ship-to-ship combat, leaping between shepherded asteroids with the thrust provided by a grav-chute...
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Apr 16, 2014 14:53
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Dark Heresy's Second Edition officially announced
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Apr 16, 2014 15:14
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Rockopolis posted:What, no Squats? Squats were described as having the same origin as ogryns: high-gravity worlds. I decided to keep the latter. Some other abhuman ideas I've thought about using are gillmen (amphibious humans), maskers (humans who evolved to breathe a different atmospheric composition and thus must wear masks in normal atmospheres), and starspawn (humans from zero-gravity environments who have started getting really weird). I always figured that in an empire the size of the Imperium, there are probably more species of abhuman than there are species of alien in Star Wars. Even the wolves of Fenris might qualify...
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Apr 16, 2014 16:25
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I think "Abhor the mutant" will have dealt with any greatly different sub-species. Those that will have survived will have been the ones who showed no interest in rejoining or interacting with their "roots" and are just treated as any other minor xenos. They'll probably all be the results of incomprehensible dark-age bio-engineering anyway, a few thousand generations isn't enough for any major evolutionary changes to naturally occur.
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Apr 16, 2014 16:38
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goatface posted:I think "Abhor the mutant" will have dealt with any greatly different sub-species. Those that will have survived will have been the ones who showed no interest in rejoining or interacting with their "roots" and are just treated as any other minor xenos. I take a different tack, that decisions about abhumans are the purview of a minor ordo of the Inquisition, and that their criteria are actually fairly simple. Are they compliant? Are they still very similar to humans visually - enough so that a normal human with a rare genetic disorder could pass for one of them? And most of all, are they useful? Acceptance or extermination of abhumans is more pragmatic than dogmatic. Ogryns are big, dumb muscle, easily controlled. Useful shock troopers. Ratlings are talented marksmen and cooks, and easily intimidated. Useful in auxiliary roles. Shades are of very limited value to the Imperium, but low gravity worlds have their advantages for industry and agriculture, and specialists at low-gravity combat can be useful. Delphi are pushing the limits of acceptable abhuman, but their unique abilities are useful so they get a pass. Beastmen are outright unacceptable by Imperial standards, but the Adeptus Mechanicus likes them and pressured the Imperium to stay its hand.
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Apr 16, 2014 17:06
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I like this concept for why the Imperium would or wouldn't keep Abhumans around. It also gets at something else about the Imperium: For all that it can be suicidally, insanely devoted to its rhetoric, just as often, it's willing to bend its own rules when someone is useful or following the party line would be entirely too troublesome. Plus, you know, the three you set out are pretty cool.
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Apr 16, 2014 17:53
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Pondering RT, I think I'm going to declare that any transport ships can carry approximately 6 times their listed tonnage in cargo, which puts them somewhere in line with a modern supertanker. So a 9 MT cargo hauler can actually carry over 50 MT of packed grain, and it might be possible to feed a hive world with only one ship arriving every week as long as they're good at recycling. I'm probably not going to bother with how it gets into and out of orbit. Does the Imperium do space elevators?
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Apr 16, 2014 17:57
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frajaq posted:It's ok I house ruled that he uses the deathwatch stats instead now. Even I found sad as a GM when the most damage he did was 3 or 4 against regular high lvl enemies while Buster Clementine the hillbilly warlock did 14d10 damage with Bolt of Change And thank you for that. As for how I'm balancing the other shotguns in swat game they are going to have like full auto and only a one round reload. Also one is going to be a cut down shotgun that can be taken as a Secondary.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:07
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Werix posted:And thank you for that. As for how I'm balancing the other shotguns in swat game they are going to have like full auto and only a one round reload. Also one is going to be a cut down shotgun that can be taken as a Secondary. I've been finding that the Reckoner Auto Shotgun I wrote up for my DH group's Arbite has actually been working really well for her. The changes to Scatter in BC finally make it worth a drat to have Scatter, thankfully.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:34
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I believe one of the main qualifiers for Abhumans is genetic stability. Ogryns are significantly different than humans, but they are a stable subspecides - Ogryns breed more Ogryns, not new and terrifying kinds of abhumans. Mutations that are fueld by Chaos instead of by adaptation are unstable across generations and sometimes even within an individual. So a race that exihibits any sort of wildly rampant mutation draws a lot of suspicion. I think this is one of the reasons that Beastmen tend to get the short end of the stick. In theory they could fill some sort of niche, but the Beastman mutation isn't entirely stable - they share an overall shape and traits, but as a subspecies they have weird variations and drifts (in that some are goats and some are dogs and it's not always clear who breeds what). So where they are spared outright purge, they get shunted into penal legions, etc. because they aren't trusted in the way that Ogryns or Ratlings are. Basically the Imperium hates mutants because Chaos causes mutations, so they are often the visible symptom of corruption. This makes all mutants suspect until they can be examined and the ones that are actually just evolutionary paths weeded out.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:46
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goatface posted:Pondering RT, I think I'm going to declare that any transport ships can carry approximately 6 times their listed tonnage in cargo, which puts them somewhere in line with a modern supertanker. So a 9 MT cargo hauler can actually carry over 50 MT of packed grain, and it might be possible to feed a hive world with only one ship arriving every week as long as they're good at recycling.
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Apr 16, 2014 18:51
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goatface posted:Pondering RT, I think I'm going to declare that any transport ships can carry approximately 6 times their listed tonnage in cargo, which puts them somewhere in line with a modern supertanker. So a 9 MT cargo hauler can actually carry over 50 MT of packed grain, and it might be possible to feed a hive world with only one ship arriving every week as long as they're good at recycling.  Big ships are about as dense as smoke, small freighters have more reasonable masses in the millions of tonnes but then the "heavy lifters" they carry to load and unload their cargo have a hilarious payload of 40 tonnes which is like half a bulk freight rail car.I haven't found the need to calculate exact masses for things but I'm assuming bulk lifters have way more payload than is listed and that any planet that sees a decent amount of trade has a fleet of superheavy lifters for loading and unloading visiting starships. The basic idea is that it's not an issue on the average imperial world, but that a ship without outside help is not going to load millions of tonnes of cargo very quickly with just the lifters it carries on board. They're still capable of it, it just takes a relatively long time.
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Apr 16, 2014 19:09
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Night10194 posted:I like this concept for why the Imperium would or wouldn't keep Abhumans around. It also gets at something else about the Imperium: For all that it can be suicidally, insanely devoted to its rhetoric, just as often, it's willing to bend its own rules when someone is useful or following the party line would be entirely too troublesome. Yeah, like Navigators are suuuuuuper loving mutated and touched by the warp maybe even more than psykers, but the Imperium would fall apart without them. So there's a lot of precedent for it.
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Apr 16, 2014 19:10
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 02:03 |
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Navigators are also stable mutations! They don't just erupt into piles of tentacles and poo poo or birth seething horrors of teeth and eyes (just the normal three).
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Apr 16, 2014 19:17
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