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So I'm getting ready to run a Rogue Trader game (IRL, kids, sorry), and I'm very specifically choosing friends who are aware of RPGs but aren't gamers (or at least my normal crop of gamers), and especially avoiding people who know about the 40k ephemera since I am stripping out as much of the "blind emperor-god BURN THE HERETIC power armor DAKKA DAKKA" nonsense as possible and running it as more of a Firefly/Mass Effect/Star Wars type game. Lots of hives of scum and villainy, lots of moral choices, lots of space stuff. I put together a worksheet, since a lot of them haven't played RPGs before or at least haven't played anything other than D&D, so some of this may be a little foreign, and the rule book is both expensive (meaning I only have 1 to pass around) and slightly confusing. Thoughts? Specifically, other examples from pop culture you would use in addition to/instead of the ones I picked. Also, the final paragraphs about picking classes. Does it make sense? Sound mean? Any ideas to gussy it up? I also want to have handy reference cards for their activities, so I made this flash card for reference. Figure I can print it out, laminate it and have a useful prop forever. I am aware not all of these are exactly right (specifically, "Adjust Speed" is vastly simplified from the full action) More to come. I like to plan stuff. Since I'm scaling back the scope of a rogue trader's ship to more Millenium Falcon/Serenity sized, and the crew sizes to about 30 from 18,000, I'm planning on naming the NPCs (I've got about twenty, in the Battlestar Galactica "nickname as name" style, like Sawbones (the ship's medic), Lists (the ship's Petty Officer) and Knockout (a beautiful and deadly shock trooper). While the NPCs won't be as competent as the PCs, they should each have 1 or 2 skills that are useful, and I've got their character sheets on 4x6 cards, and I'll let the PCs take 1 NPC at a time on 'away missions.' For the opening mission, the PCs will be on another ship that is on a salvage mission in a huge ship graveyard from a former conflict, when it gets into a conflict with a surprise super-capital ship from a band of evil void-faring marauders (think Reavers from Firefly or the Geth from Mass Effect) thought long-since-banished. The party will escape in pods, only to bump up against a ship that is completely intact, as its crew dissolved in a warp-accident and it showed up days-late to the fight twenty years ago. The lone survivor is the now-quite-mad Astropath, who they will have to deal with before rechristening the ship whatever they want and limping their way back to Port Wander. I went to rubberstampchamp.com and had a stamp made, so when I want to enter an NPC I can have a standard format and space to do it in, and I want to see if you guys think I'm designing the adventure right, or if there's something I'm missing. 
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Feb 9, 2012 01:30
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Sarx posted:Just played in my first game of Rogue Trader tonight and it was awesome. I'm not terribly familiar with the 40k world, but with our whole group rolling our characters homeworld, motivation, class etc. randomly we ended up with a pretty awesome group. The adventure was fairly straightforward - the party is a no-fame crew on a salvage barge cruising the remains of a big space-battle site looking for salvage when a capital ship from a long-thought-defeated enemy flotilla-nation drops in out of warp on top of them, cripples their ship and then warps away, leaving homing mines to finish the job. The NPC captain orders to abandon ship (staying behind himself, because 'Captain' and all) and the PCs make for the escape pods. But before they do, the Missionary gives benediction to the NPC captain, then the Arch-Militant shoots him in the head (  !) because "It's faster," and they escape.The party along with a few other escape-pod-ees find a derilect hulk floating in the ship graveyard that looks intact except the main bridge is lasered straight through, and they board. Suitably creeped out, they descend into its bowels to power everything on, and then the Navigator informs them there is a "warp presence" on the ship. They head up into the crew quarters to find the lone, long-gone-insane Astropath, who has the Inspire Fear and Command powers, and (in a 5-on-1 conflict), gently caress him up royally, but not before the Rogue Trader character falls unconscious in a gibbering, catatonic mess from Fear (3) and failing by 7 degrees, followed by rolling a 70 on the insanity chart (hitting 140 on the meter) and the Seneschal shoots the Missionary in the leg from the Astropath's Command ability. They limp back to Port Wander after renaming the ship the Valkyrie and were docking as we ended the game. All in all, I would say the "playing the game" part went well, though they are suddenly intensely aware that the highest Tech-Use in the party is just 27. The "Character Creation" part didn't go so smoothly, but that was certainly exacerbated by having not enough books and only 2 people remotely familiar with the game. EDIT: I want to mention, I had created about 20 NPC names for various "fill-in" roles on the ship, and the Missionary noticed he could trade crew size for morale. He rolled a 3, and so I handed over the list of NPCs and had him scratch off 3 names. We retcon'd this as the Missionary discovering a nascent mutiny and venting those three dudes into space. Man-Thing fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Mar 15, 2012 |
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Mar 15, 2012 17:18
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Sanzuo posted:I'm running a game with some people who have never done a 40k game before. Mind if I totally rip off your premise? PM me your email and I'll send you scans of my game notes. Check my other post in this thread for a list of resources I put together for actually running a game (handouts and players aids and whatnot) Man-Thing fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Mar 17, 2012 |
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Mar 17, 2012 21:44
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Update! Game 2 went smashingly. The party showed up in Port Wander, sold their "two tons of Nephilim" I conveniently stowed on their ship (giving them a starting Profit Factor of 45). I asked the Seneschal "what is Nephilim used to do," since I had no idea and was perfectly happy having be effectively Unobtainium. He decided it was used for mech-grafts like bionic legs, so they went down into the Gilt Processional to find a sawbones who could purchase it (they walked in as he used an Ork Choppa to hack off a dude's leg and slam another bionic one on there), and completed the sale. They then followed, pretty much, phases 1 and 2 of the starting adventure out of the back of the book, except for a few great twists: 1) The Missionary went to the Imperial Church guys and said, "Hey, whassup, what do you guys need?" and I came up with a plot hook for them to deal with. 2) The Arch-Militant went running around left-clicking on everyone with a "!" over their head and got a cool bounty to keep his eyes out for. 3) The Seneschal, convinced he will be double-crossed (I replaced the old faithful family retainer with a crime lord who rules the Undercity of Port Wander), made every effort to publicly and loudly buy a map to the wrong part of the Koronus Expanse, since they know they're being followed, then quietly bought the right maps. During the flight, they were looking for a way to get up morale, so they decided on a boxing tournament. The "captain," who started as a figurehead whose first in-combat action was to faint dead-away with fear in the face of danger (this is a PC, mind you, just one with a terrible WP score), entered, but instead of using his WS, I let him use his TGH skill, and we all justified it as "the captain is wearing out the arch-militant's hands on his face." The Captain won, exhausting the other fighters (it was two rounds, 1v1 winner advancing), and showed that, no matter how many times you get punched in the face, "Never Give Up, Never Surrender!" (yes, he actually said that) I can't tell you how happy this makes me, because the guy playing the Captain/Rogue Trader is usually the weakest RP'er of the bunch, and it's clear everyone's having a blast now with this goofy, motley crew. This game really does feel like Firefly sometimes.
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Mar 23, 2012 00:05
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So question about pinning: Our group's Missionary uses a flamethrower, which apparently just werfs flammens, so the opponent makes a dodge roll, rather than him making an attack roll. When an Explorer is pinned down by surpressive fire, they take a -20 to their BS checks. Does a flamethrower completely sidestep this, by not making BS checks? We houseruled it on the fly to give the other guys +20 to their dodge roll instead, but if someone could quote chapter-and-verse what the actual effects are in Rogue Trader, that'd be  .
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Mar 28, 2012 17:58
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