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I'm preparing to GM a game of rogue trader, a game as notorious for its poor rules as it is famous for its player agency. I am very familiar with the setting and have DMed base 100 40K roleplay before but never this game. Does anyone have experience or advice adapting a similar combat rule set like only war or deathwatch to RT? Or a set of fan rules?
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Jul 10, 2023 17:40
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 20:04 |
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First rogue trader session went great, we did a tutorial endeavor getting the ship spaceworthy again and then completed the first part of Into the Maw. The players seemed to really like the mix of light roleplay, tactical combat and abstract endeavors. They particularly liked controlling the entourages and minions they created and ordering them around in endeavor time. They unprompted decided to bring a color guard carrying the house and ecclesiastical standards when they went off to the first tactical encounter. Roll 20 and token stamp are working fine but I have a couple of questions: I've seen you can purchase 40K tile sets on roll 20 but I don't understand how to open the map building tools. I've just been pasting in maps but that's not flexible enough long term. How do you guys handle scale? One square equals five feet simply isn't large enough for rogue trader mass combat or planet side encounters, but I'm not sure how to scale it without messing up movement rules.
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Jul 25, 2023 16:54
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Anyone have a good way of generating tactical maps and star system for RT? My campaign is about to leave the starter rails and while I have lots of adventures and endeavors and unknown star systems hidden on the map via roll20 I don't have tactical map assets appropriate for the wide variety of settings the players could go to in RT.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:15
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Oh no my players hated starship combat. Not only did they not like it, it ran 50 minutes over our stop time when I said it would only take 30 minutes over. They thought it was too random and swingy, and a lot of characters had little to do. I think there's some merit in the system in that it wants the players to think strategically about how they maneuver the ship and line up good shots and stack bonuses on an important salvo. Chip damage is very unreliable in this system, you want to find yourself dead astern of an enemy frigate at point black range and pour a huge salvo into him, saving all your party's rerolls for that moment. They were really discouraged when the enemy got the first damage through on them and their chip damage at medium range was inconsequential. I'm not sure whether to give them an opportunity to grok the system or just fall back on narrative starship combat.
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Aug 7, 2023 18:16
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Fair enough! You think I should just jettison it? Nobody plays this game for the elegant rules.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:44
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RT session 4 went well again. I've started running warp travel between sessions, so there's always something interesting ready to go whether they drop into a new system or crash into something in the warp. The party misjumped and ended up at Comenina instead of Damaris, which would have been just a footnote if I hadn't had time to prepare. Instead it turned into an encounter with Spooky warp phenomena and demons on a derelict ship in orbit, followed by exploring ruins in the jungle. The players were expecting more moral hazards and warp threats on the planet and so arrived completely wrong-footed for a jungle expedition. The system in general is very, very deadly. My players have started wearing sealed carapace armor everywhere they go and even then the missionary nearly got his head ripped off by a tiger last session. There are so many cogito-hazards in the expanse they stopped taking bodyguards with them but that wasn't smart wandering through the jungle alone. I can see why D&D lets you get stabbed in the face multiple times without consequences. As a GM deadly combat keeps the players on their toes but can result in extremely swingy fights. The players keep shooting psykers off the board turn 1 which is canny but means I can never manifest any cool powers. At least the arch militant was very pleased with himself nailing the witch in the head from 40 meters away on the first shot of combat. But then when the players get in trouble they're immediately in serious trouble. I need to use cover and darkness better to both protect the explorers and important antagonists.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:48
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1secondpersecond posted:I'm looking for some offbeat ideas for monsters/creatures/enemies. The obvious thing to me that you are missing is the creatures behaving in strange ways time-wise. Like for example you kill it several minutes ago, which results in its projection dying inexplicably several minutes into the past/future. Or for another example, it sees you in the future and reacts in the past accordingly. In my experience players love it when monsters behave according to logic that is at first strange but the players can figure out within twenty minutes or so. Also don't be afraid of doing things and never explaining. The sina qua non of cosmic horror is never explaining anything. Make weird things happen, refuse to explain them. Players will feel like they've accomplished something just by escaping intact. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 03:27
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That's a really cool idea!
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Aug 20, 2023 13:52
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It's fun to change things on the fly as well, to follow the Yes, And rule. For example last session my players correctly guessed who was behind the mysterious contacts in their game, so I just had him show up directly at the next negotiation. You never know what your players will fixate on. Rolling up some mundane loot like a medpack might have them using it sessions later where they could have easily acquired the same thing but it never occurred to them. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Sep 1, 2023 |
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Sep 1, 2023 17:11
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LeafyGreens posted:Hi all, first time posting here but was just hoping for some advice as a relatively inexperienced DM who is going to be running a Strixhaven campaign with 5e. For Strixhaven particularly I'd point out that the setting is really weird -- the school is built on a wilderness planet that's covered in mana whorls that distort the surface and ancient ruins and weird peaceful giant nephelim type things. Outside the college the sorts of fantastical abilities that are commonplace at Strixhaven are going to be important just for survival. There isn't really any peaceful countryside. It's not as hostile as Zendikar or Ikoria but it's not settled. Harry Potter tends to treat things like the ability to fly or teleport as a neat toy, but in Strixhaven those are their only means of transport in the wilderness. Going out without magical travel abilities would be a difficult and arduous undertaking. This is all to say they may treat the fantastical as practical; you wouldn't go out without purchasing a teleport scroll from the Quandrix guys, because that's basically fantasy AAA. You could get in real trouble without one.
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Sep 2, 2023 18:04
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My players have finally gotten back out of port after a long overhaul and the map is opened up. The thing is, their new plan involves setting up a triangle trade where they'll smuggle weapons into one place, export finished goods to a new settlement, and take furs (and eventually drugs but they haven't finished analyzing the local flora) back to civilization where they can buy more weapons. Setting all this up won't be too complicated for them but it's been very complicated for me since it involves a lot of travel, negotiation, combat encounters with prowling pirates or marauding jungle beasts, and possibly some random mishaps as travel in Rogue Trader isn't very safe or reliable. I'm having trouble putting it into a coherent structure with a hook, middle, and wrap-up for each part of the adventure. In some places if the players are clever and do a good job explaining what they're going to do and roll well to achieve their objectives they won't need to for example get into a fight with alien beasts or get caught by nosy Imperial authorities trying to sneak a regiment's worth of heavy weapons onto their ship, but that means I'm not really sure how long any particular part of the endeavor will last or when we're going to have an encounter. Should I just make them have combat encounters or should I stick to the concept that clever use of their resources will let them achieve their goals without traditional combat? It's been two sessions since we've actually done turn-based combat since they're pretty risk-averse as a party. In fact they've missed a couple plot hooks because they insist on wearing full environment suits on alien planets and they have been almost comically cautious about shielding themselves from glowing relics. How do I organize all this stuff and pace it in an engaging way when I am not really sure where the encounters are going to be since the players are often trying to avoid encounters and use their resources intelligently?
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Sep 3, 2023 06:57
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Mederlock posted:
Oh man I just realized a space tiger ripped that guy's helmet off and I completely forgot to introduce the effect of the drug plants after that happened. I did consider having them take fatigue for trying to trek through a jungle in sealed environment suits. It must be awful.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:50
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Does anyone have advice on calibrating the challenge of encounters? The players keep winning too easily.
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Sep 3, 2023 23:48
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Nephzinho posted:Give enemies more actions relative to the players so they feel overwhelmed or out matched. Having them rescue their hapless crew and servants is a good idea, I'll have to do that. Also putting them in an overwhelming situation where they have to fall back and rally help would be interesting. I'll have to put them up against more intelligent enemies; so far it's been mostly orks and death world fauna. To be clear for everyone this is Rogue Trader, so the PCs are leaders of a large space operation involving warships, transports, thousands of crew and hundreds of soldiers. However they are fairly squishy humans in a nasty setting, so it's a balancing act getting them involved in fights that they can take on personally. Too difficult and they'll take off and nuke the site from orbit, too easy and they get bored. For example today they were fighting charging jungle beasts, but they discussed just dropping napalm on the jungle. I essentially put them up against three T-rexes, two of which they cut down with heavy weapons and the third ran away after they lit it on fire. The PCs didn't take a scratch but had the monsters gotten even one more round to charge they could easily have downed two PCs in a single turn. I can cut them off from the ship but I don't want to play that card too often. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Sep 4, 2023 |
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Sep 4, 2023 02:12
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LeafyGreens posted:Trip report from our first Strixhaven session, my group loved it and they appreciated all the weird magical stuff I was able to describe on campus (thank you everyone for your help!), but mostly they just enjoyed messing with all the NPCs and voting on who was hottest. Zanther Bowen got the most fans but I was playing Grayson as a rival rich boy with a stick up his rear end that they immediately fell out with in character and yet they love him too. 
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Sep 4, 2023 04:54
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We have a huge combat session coming up. The players escaped from a chaos cruiser last session and then ended up in a time anomaly mini encounter. They foolishly activated a mysterious device and now they'll discover they're stuck in a time loop... after the chaos cruiser appears and party wipes them. The last session ended with all the alarms going off as the cruiser warps in right on top of them. The chaos cruiser boarding their ship and killing them all will be the big setpiece opening next session. When the player who touched the time machine dies they'll abruptly reset to just under 30 minutes before the encounter. So if you had free license to blow up the evil catholic enterprise and wipe out the beloved bridge crew, what encounters would you create? Right now I've got a firefight on the bridge against a chaos space marine boarding team and an undying dragon for one of the expanse big bads with a sorcerous obsidian ball lodged in his chest, a firefight on the gun decks against unending hoards of chaos minions, and the boarders blowing up the navigator's spire to deepen the sense of disaster -- with no way to steer the ship in the warp there's no escape. What other calamities can I visit on my players to give the sense that the ship is falling apart and the pirates are carrying the day as they're rushing from one combat to another?
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Sep 21, 2023 13:41
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trapstar posted:What is the best way to go about intentionally deceiving your players for story/narrative purposes? What are some good plot twists basically? I have been playing Expeditions: Rome and a neat trick they used was letting the player figure out the plot and maneuver the big bad into a situation where he'll be exposed and ruined while the player will be rewarded -- only for him to be murdered and all the evidence exposed by his brother who was ruthless enough to murder his own brother and take credit for exposing his crimes in order to hide his involvement.
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Sep 21, 2023 13:46
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Nephzinho posted:This is your chance to introduce a BBG that wipes the floor with them without repercussions, so that the next time they see them they're terrified and know not to gently caress around. This actually gave me the idea that if they kill the undead guy his boss will show up through a portal in his chest - who is one of the big bads of the expanse. It's 40K there are a lot of big bads
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Sep 21, 2023 21:54
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That's a really good idea but probably not for this particular encounter! Great way to give the players hints about undiscovered people, places, and things on the map. And also insanity points. They're a lot more scared of insanity points than Orks.
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Sep 22, 2023 00:54
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Vargatron posted:How do y'all plot your campaign storylines? I used to be real meticulous about plot points but I've switched over to a bullet point outline and don't really plan head further than 2 or 3 sessions. I have a general ending I'm aiming for, but the last time I really tried to plan a story out, the party killed a big bad way too early and threw that in shambles! Can't believe they rolled so drat high on their grapple checks... I spent a couple weeks building a map with ideas from adventure books, my own ideas, and stuff from random generators. Now I make my players tell me where they're going at the end of each session, so I can flesh out the location they're going to and make sure I have tactical maps and NPC stat lines ready. At the start of a session I have about a two page bullet outline and the materials ready but I don't plan more than a week ahead generally.
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Sep 22, 2023 13:56
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This discussion reminds me of something I've been working on without much success: integrating character back stories into the campaign. I have a confessor who has pursued the cult leader who left him scarred and deformed across the galaxy, but there are so many dang cults and sorcerors in the setting already it's hard to point him in the right direction. On the other hand, I think it makes the setting smaller if every plot points back to the PC backstories, and one of the great strengths of the Koronus Expanse setting is just how huge and densely carpeted with story hooks it is. So what's the happy medium?
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Sep 22, 2023 20:05
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I had a nasty surprise this session when one of my players announced he was firing his shoulder-mounted autocannon! He's been running around purchasing things outside of sessions and now has a truly ludicrous arsenal; he's way out of whack with the other players. He also announced that due to a special rule it counts as twin-linked. He pretty much single-handedly ruined the combat encounter, which the players were supposed to lose, and turned a fight with overwhelming odds into a three-hour slog the players actually won. Kind of wrecked the whole session. How do you approach this kind of egregious power-gaming without bringing the whole session to a halt? Or do you just bring the session to a halt and say you're not putting things on your character sheet between sessions?
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Sep 25, 2023 03:34
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He didn't just purchase an integrated auto cannon. He bought best quality power armor and a storm shield. And the cannon is a 6000 year old relic. He clearly just went through various source books and picked the most broken build and equipment he could find and then somehow successfully purchased all these things while nobody was looking. Other players are playing by the rules with acquisition and are somewhere on a reasonable power curve. And then there's this guy. He's got the armor and damage potential of a necron lord and I'm kicking myself for not shutting it down during the session.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:35
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So we had that chat and it seems that since we're running this through roll 20 he had the impression that merely posting these purchases in the chat log during shopping were sufficient notice. I thought he was purchasing a cannon for his Skitarii vehicles and an MIU shoulder mount for his grenade launcher. It didn't occur to me that he wanted to mount an auto cannon on his shoulder and he didn't bring it up over voice. So I guess he was more bending the rules than breaking them. I've been pretty encouraging of players to roleplay as powerful leaders with lots of resources, but I had no idea there was an obscure rule that integrated impact weapons gain the Storm keyword, which doubles their damage, or that he thought mounting a heavy weapon on his shoulder was kosher. He did admit that the tech specialist also being the tank and the DPS was problematic, and one-shotting space marines at rank 2 wasn't ideal. In the end we retconned out the cannon and I think we'll revisit heavy weapons once he gets the spider leg harness he's building.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:36
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Night10194 posted:Is he a Techpriest? If so, yes, they can mount heavy weapons directly on their Machinator Array. Also, the Techpriest being that way is just, uh, that's how FFG built Techpriests. They're tanky and extremely powerful as far as mundane characters go. FFG loving loved Techpriests and they kept getting more and more powerful toys. Yeah I think allowing tech priests to acquire bionics without spending xp is a glaring problem, but not one I was aware of when I started this game. So for now we'll have to play it by "GM says not yet" instead of a transparent advancement system.
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Sep 26, 2023 22:06
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Post-crisis Stellaris is a great kitchen sink setting. You could have anything from psychic energy beings to genetically engineered plant humans to nanobot swarm characters.
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Oct 10, 2023 22:34
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You could lean into the magic- technology element. This piece of jewelry lets you teleport, or this machine makes perfect copies of people, and nobody remembers how any of it works. It's practically magic.
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Oct 11, 2023 12:37
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Golden Bee posted:You just gotta call on people. It’s bullshit that anyone can’t figure out roll 20 with a tutorial video. It’s extremely intuitive. We've been on roll 20 for twelve sessions and I still can't figure out how to get tokens into the built in initiative order correctly. Today somehow an Eldar boss and a star system ended up in the turn order for a fight with some demons on a derelict starship.
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Oct 16, 2023 02:47
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Wow that's helpful advice. At least everyone had a good laugh seeing a star system they discovered two sessions ago show up in the initiative order. Now... any advice on getting dynamic lightning to work? It doesn't help that half the party has thermals and light amplification implants.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:27
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There's a forum where people post their rogue trader adventure ideas. One posted a lengthy description of a dead alien fortress system, thick with automated defenses and the broken hulls of human and alien explorers. They are all lured by the endless transmissions beaming into the void, mostly static, but occasionally spinning tales of alien dramas, dynastic feuds and vast treasure troves. The Imperial navy has left warning beacons at the edges of the system warning explorers not to believe the transmissions. The system is named Eta Beta Omicron. If you know the Greek alphabet there's a joke there. I wonder how many people got it.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:34
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So over the course of the next few weeks my players are going to discover they've become embroiled in underworld politics by the rogue trader's ambitious and not too wise aunt. Their endeavors and profit factor are going to get goosed, the local mafia and merc groups are eager to facilitate purchases. The worst part is that if they bother to do the math on their smuggling and colonization efforts they'll find the help has arrived too fast to be credible -- Aunt Leonora's partners in the criminal underworld have hired the Cabal of the Crimson Woe to move arms, drugs and people across the borders of the Expanse for of course a percentage of the souls being moved. This has attracted the attention of the rival Cabal of the Splintered Talon, who don't appreciate the new revenue stream for their enemies. The thing is, the party is clueless about this. Aside from accepting their aunt's help and being sworn to secrecy about it they don't know about this. They're a pretty risk averse bunch and I expect their unwitting support from the dark Eldar will be something they see as a serious problem to solve. What would be some good clues to ease them into this plot development? I'm hoping to have them look into their mysterious support and the dark Eldar reveal will be worse than they suspected.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:23
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Drone posted:I'm putting together a concept for an open table hexcrawl that I'll almost certainly never have the time to actually run ( It might be a good idea to make it explicit for the players that you're here at the sufferance of the natives and if you're too rude they're capable of running you off.
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Oct 27, 2023 13:22
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), but it's a fun little downtime exercise anyway. Thing is, I'm pretty sure my core conceit is problematic and I'd really like that to not be the case.
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My RT players have figured out they can do this and while it's kind of charming it's gotten to the point where they're destroying valuable assets and infrastructure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyyoaBa7DaE&t=27s
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Oct 29, 2023 20:56
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Without Burke you wouldn't have the thrilling finale!
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Oct 30, 2023 00:26
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyyoaBa7DaE&t=16s My RT players figured out they can do this one too. Today we nerve-gassed a bunch of apostates and had a theological debate on whether cannibalism is allowed by the Imperial Creed.
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Nov 6, 2023 00:21
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Oh the consensus was that the Emperor didn't explicitly forbid cannibalism, but that hunting and eating the Emperor's faithful begets rightful retribution. In this case delivered in the form of a Rogue Trader crew with nerve gas mortar shells.
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Nov 6, 2023 03:56
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Finally feel like I ran a good combat encounter. Gear mattered, healing mattered, terrain mattered, psychology mattered, timing mattered. The party had to make the difficult choice to charge up a stairway that they knew was defended against them or let some fell creature prepare for their arrival as they called in reinforcements. They decided to charge and the daemonhost at the top of the stairs rolled really well and went first, fried half the party's NPC troopers with a blast of warp fire, and put the arch-militant into critical damage. When it was all over between the demon and our Confessor they'd burnt down half the library of forbidden knowledge, left a pile of corpses at the top of the stairs and mooks were jumping out a third story window to escape.
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Nov 12, 2023 23:27
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In general I think it's good to offer choice. You can put your players in a situation where they have to choose to do something with their haul or give something up in order to keep it. For example in my game the players will need to choose soon between looting a planet of treasure or rush to the aid of a ship they've already captured as their rivals close in. Leaving the planet will mean that their rivals capture all the remaining booty, but staying will mean their prize crew and a prominent bridge officer NPC will be slaughtered and they'll lose their new ship.
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Nov 13, 2023 13:55
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I'm going to be running a game again soon with a group of familiar people, each with at least some RPG experience. One way I like is a survey that asks in the abstract what kinds of gameplay players enjoy. It lets you get a sense of what you should spend your time on in the sessions so that everyone enjoys your game. Some people love mowing down trash mobs, others are looking for combat that will challenge a power gamer, while others may want to focus on an epic story that cuts out the fiddly mechanical details, or want to focus on intrigue and social interactions. Knowing in the abstract what players want will help you decide on the concrete. A party that loves crunchy combat will want to do classic Forgotten Realms dungeon crawls a lot more often while a party that wants narrative freedom might be more interested in a sky pirate Eberron adventure.
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Nov 13, 2023 22:31
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 20:04 |
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So I'm doing this intrigue plot and a good way to introduce it I think is to have the rivals of the party's unknown dark Eldar allies kidnap their seneschal, whom they left on Footfall to do an endeavor on autopilot. The dark Eldar want to know what's up and why the dynasty is helping their rivals from the other side of the sector move into the expanse. They also don't like the dynasty paying in slaves, which raises their rivals profile in the dark city. However the RT and his crew don't know anything about this, since their aunt hired the Eldar to help the dynasty move colonists and goods and into the expanse (and remove obstacles) without telling anyone. The Crimson Woe is happy to have a rich flow of slaves in exchange for the easy services of moving some humans and cargo through the webway, and the Splintered Talon is eager to learn their entry and exit points so they can seize a shipment of humans for themselves and cut off the crimson woe's foray into the expanse. Fortunately for the seneschal he doesn't know much of value so they'll just slowly flay him (which can be fixed with bionics) rather than kill him or worse, move him to the dark city. This is dark Eldar playing out their rivalries among humans, so both factions will be using human and Eldar mercenaries of the desperate and unsavory type that can be found on Footfall. Most of the people involved in this struggle will not even know they're working for Eldar. I've never done an intrigue plot with multiple layers of proxies before. It's especially weird on footfall because the player's military force is significant on a small human habitat, and the Eldar can't actually compete on this field. The challenge will be locating the seneschal and figuring out just what is going on as the kabalites and their pawns are just one of many criminal factions on footfall. Once the seneschal is located they can have hundreds of troopers descend on his captors so combat isn't really the challenge. Has anyone organized an intrigue plot in a wretched hive of scum and villainy? What kind of NPC archetypes might be useful? How would you keep it interesting for the players, who are essentially the Imperial authorities here, with more access to military force than their rivals on the station? Do you create a crazy guy cork board to keep the factions and possible social and combat encounters straight?
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Nov 14, 2023 14:35
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