Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Tomas]

Honestly is anyone going to give a fuck about a license? I am gonna care about whether the psyker can do the job not about hers/his credentials.

 

[Peachcurl]

Honestly is anyone going to give a fuck about a license? I am gonna care about whether the psyker can do the job not about hers/his credentials.

You should care, because as pointed out earlier, a lack of credentials MAY imply lack of protection against death-by-demon.

 

[Storyfag]

Good points, but still not impossible odds to beat. Not all psykers can detect other psykers. Could also have a blank present whenever interaction with other psykers in the crew becomes necessary. Or not interact with them directly at all. Claim piety as a reason, or whatever.

I would imagine an Astropath would be able to detect another psyker even at a distance. Psychic communications are their thing, after all.

 

[Vermillion]

Why Rogue Trader Psykers are super strong and viable! CLICK NOW TO LEARN MORE!

So Let's start with a our designated retard. Our Rogue Trader started with an above average Willpower and has been hounding the GM to let him become a Psyker ever since. The GM, fed up, allows him to take the elite advance with the justification that many of his "lucky" rolls were in fact his nascent psyker powers.

The Rogue Trader now loses an entire rank of his own class so that he can gain Psy rating 1. Compared to the local Astropath, his psy rating is frail and phimotic. However, it doesn't end there! The Rogue Trader STILL needs to spend extra EXP compared to a Psyker or Navigator in order to raise their own willpower AND he has take ANY increase to his PSY Rating as an Elite Advance, meaning it's STILL costs extra EXP to increase the Psy Rating.

We roll our Dice and the GM awards us 3 insanity and corruption points. Also we're enemies with the Ecclesiarchy and rivals with the inquisition, completely neutering our role as the face character for these factions.
So time the rend the veil with our brand new Psyker! How does he compare to our Astropath? Let's see:

Well for starters as long as we stay at fettered strength we should functionally identical, ignoring the 3 Careers levels difference in psychic strength or the their inherentally higher willpower. We also lack all normal protections against daemons or perils that astropaths get.
So to make up for our MASSIVE handicap, we'll have to act on fettered or PUSH at all times. As we have only one Psy rating, unfettered is usless to us because Tabletop has us round up. What this mens is that we either can effectively use the baility at PSY rating 1 OR we have to PUSH. We can raise our Psy rating alllll the way up to meaty 5, so since we're a big boy, we're gonna do that ALL the time. So we'll be making checks on Psychic phenomenae with a +10 to +40 on all rolls +10 for EVERY. ACTIVE. PSYCHIC. POWER. Keep that in mind when we start looking at our Psychic powers.

Focus Power test:

As previously establihsed. We fucking SUCK at being psykers. We're only allowed ONE Discipline OR if we somehow already had a PSY rating, we're only allowed ONE CHANCE to swap our Discipline and lose our ability to get powers form our old one. So our Rogue Trader decides they still want to be able to do EVERYTHING because they're the HERO. So they choose obvious chaos path.
He gets to choose 1 Psychic power: He doesn't like being a support, it's why he decided to stop being a Rogue Trader in first place. He always thought of psykers as OP cheat characters so he grabs one of: Mental Force, Aetheric Appendage, or Desperate Transmogrification.
Buying up more powers with EXP, he acquires Spiteshards, Shielded by the Warp and Warp Spasm, or Shifting Lines of Fate.

The Rogue Trader and his companions come head to head with a Traitor Imperial Navy Officer. After breaching his ship they arrive at the Bridge where they face off against him and his fellow traitor command squad.

A pretty basic bitch encounter, especially for a party that's already Rank 3-4, especially since the Max rank is 8.

Rogue Trader fuckwit is pretty excited to use his new powers. He uses mental force to directly attack an enemy.

Thanks to his Fettered Psy Rating of one, he runs directly up to the navy officer to unleash his 1m range attack. Somehow not dying from all the overwatch attacks by the renegades. He begins his focus power test: Thanks to his 39 Willpower and 1 Psy rating, he needs to roll a d100 UNDER 44 in order to use the ability.

Success! He didn't kill his own team this time, because his power failed! Frustrated, he spends a fate point to reroll.

After fudging his rolls while the GM was getting drunk, he succeeds on his focus power test. It hits automatically and I'll say Navy Officer failed his dodge because he sucks. Due to the unstable quality.

We roll an 8 and nothing happens. Because the attack is primitive, we double the effective armor of the Navy officer!

With an effective 6 armor and toughness of 3, the Navy officer can negate up to 9 Wounds! We deal 1d10+1 Impact damage!

With our roll of 7, all our damage is negated! And now the Rogue Trader is going to burn a fate point once he eats all the attacks of the various renegades around him. Desperate he uses trump card to escape.

With nothing to lose he pushes his Psy rating up to 5 and we'll assume that he succeeds. Now going forwards, for the rest session, his ass on psychic phenomenae is up to the mercy of the GM. Also we're rolling on the Psychic phenomenae table.

Whatever we rolled, know that it starts at 40, and even if we roll the minimum, the GM is allowed to flip it.
Let's not forget, we also need to roll for how many insanity points we won.

1d10+5 roll 9 give 14 insanity. Reminder that 100 insanity means we retire the character permanently and this was one encounter. If I'm not being clear, RT Fuckwit has been dealing with some major traumas, luckily this means he's already immune to Fear Rating 3 so only his companions are suffering for his poor choices.
His next turn he decides he needs to heal, or else he'll be burning a fate point.

He pushes again to ensure he actually succeeds at using the ability and we roll phenomenae again. He succeeds while the GM isn't looking and heals 1d5+5 wounds.

Healing 8 wounds and gaining 8 corruption which if you have any sense of pattern recognition, you'll realize he probably already has a high corruption score. So after mutating his legs together

He's quite happy to gain another 5 wounds out of the deal. Rather important because he moves even slower than before, escaping the retributionary gunfire is going to be quite difficult.

No longer caring to be remotely safe with the Warp, the Rogue Trader decides to go all in with warp fuckery.

With a Focus Rating of (39 Will + Psy of 5x5) 64 and a roll of 25 he gets a whopping 3 degrees. Raising his strength and toughness by 5 + 3d10

Increasing his stats by 25. This gives 66 Strength and 60 toughness. Truly this is the power he wanted. Thanks to his mutation, his starting 9 wounds had been increased 14 and now his toughness bonus had been effectively doubled. Truly he has become immortal. his turn up, he eats another round of mixed gunfire from the Renegades and the Navy Officer.

Now he could use his newfound strength to enhance his melee attacks, something Rogue Traders are actually good at but he's a Psyker damnit! Using melee would be admitting his build was at fault and besides, he knew that he could have reached the same effective stats permanently for less XP by just getting some augmentations. So we'll use mind bullets instead.
Pushing for Psy rating 5 while sustaining a Psyker ability means we're rolling phenomena with a +50 now.

If you think I'm just being an ass by making him push. Even with it he still almost failed anyways. Also he is definitely rolling perils.
Unlike his other powers, because he pushed he gets a full range of 50 meters. Since he barely manifested the power, he doesn't get more than 1 attack dealing 1d5+5 damage with a pen of 10. Completely negating the armor of his target who still fails the dodge. The Rogue trader does

9 wounds to the Naval Officer. Bringing him down to 3 wounds, grievously wounded. The Renegades and officer perforate the rogue trader with more bullets, killing him.

Ortho is the Deathworld Arch Militant. He had a mediocre Ballistics score of 35 but as Arch militant

They choose one class of weapon to get an effective bonus of 10 on. They always intended to focus on heavy weapons since they get them at Militant 4 alongside bulging biceps which lets them use heavy weapons without needing to brace.

He naturally decided to specialize in solid projectile heavy weapons because he's a fan of 80s action movies. Having Braced on previous of the Rogue Trader dying, he's ready to unleash his heavy stubber.

Because everyone in the bridge is well within the range of his weapon, he only needs to make an ordinary difficulty test to hit.

Declaring a full auto attack, he gets a +20 Bonus to his ballistic skill. Thanks to his arch militant ability he gets an additional +10. He hasn't been slakcing though, his class is specialized in guns and he's raised his skill all the way to expert raising his base 35 to 55.
This means, he needs to roll under a 95 in order to hit. Weak, I know.

Rolling a 28 for 6 degrees of success, he scores a pathetic 6 hits on his enemy, each hit dealing 1d10+5 with additional +2 per hit thanks to his militant ability for a final damage of 6d10+42.

With two 10 rolls, we now roll for righteous fury.

Since we use ALL the original modifiers, these still hit despite being high rolls. So we roll damage for TWO more hits.
That's another TWO 1d10+7 hits.

We roll 7 and 8 for a total of 15+14 giving us 29 extra damage on top of our original 83 damage. In one turn our Militant just did 112 damage. Reminder that ever enemy he's fighting has a MAX of 12 wounds.
I limited him to Rank 4 because he's forced to waste these wounds all on one character. If he was rank 4 he would have "independent targetting" which would let him hit EVERYONE within 10m of his original target, meaning he could theoretically have killed EVERYONE in this encounter with one action. Instead he overkills a Renegade by 99 wounds, expending 10 rounds of his 200 round mag, laughing like a maniac as he see the results on the crit tables.

Did this while mostly drunk so if I made any mistakes that's on me. Should put to bed the psyker discussion.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

People quoting lore as if any of that shit will matter heh

 

[Vermillion]

People quoting lore as if any of that shit will matter heh

I just want my hyper-lethal tabletop experience.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I only want the game to implement hidden corruption count for all dialogue checks, not something labelled. And then by the end you find yourself manipulated by the Big Bird Demon That I Need to Google to Spell It's Name

 

[mediocrepoet]

Why Rogue Trader Psykers are super strong and viable! CLICK NOW TO LEARN MORE!

So Let's start with a our designated retard. Our Rogue Trader started with an above average Willpower and has been hounding the GM to let him become a Psyker ever since. The GM, fed up, allows him to take the elite advance with the justification that many of his "lucky" rolls were in fact his nascent psyker powers.

The Rogue Trader now loses an entire rank of his own class so that he can gain Psy rating 1. Compared to the local Astropath, his psy rating is frail and phimotic. However, it doesn't end there! The Rogue Trader STILL needs to spend extra EXP compared to a Psyker or Navigator in order to raise their own willpower AND he has take ANY increase to his PSY Rating as an Elite Advance, meaning it's STILL costs extra EXP to increase the Psy Rating.

We roll our Dice and the GM awards us 3 insanity and corruption points. Also we're enemies with the Ecclesiarchy and rivals with the inquisition, completely neutering our role as the face character for these factions.
So time the rend the veil with our brand new Psyker! How does he compare to our Astropath? Let's see:

Well for starters as long as we stay at fettered strength we should functionally identical, ignoring the 3 Careers levels difference in psychic strength or the their inherentally higher willpower. We also lack all normal protections against daemons or perils that astropaths get.
So to make up for our MASSIVE handicap, we'll have to act on fettered or PUSH at all times. As we have only one Psy rating, unfettered is usless to us because Tabletop has us round up. What this mens is that we either can effectively use the baility at PSY rating 1 OR we have to PUSH. We can raise our Psy rating alllll the way up to meaty 5, so since we're a big boy, we're gonna do that ALL the time. So we'll be making checks on Psychic phenomenae with a +10 to +40 on all rolls +10 for EVERY. ACTIVE. PSYCHIC. POWER. Keep that in mind when we start looking at our Psychic powers.

Focus Power test:

As previously establihsed. We fucking SUCK at being psykers. We're only allowed ONE Discipline OR if we somehow already had a PSY rating, we're only allowed ONE CHANCE to swap our Discipline and lose our ability to get powers form our old one. So our Rogue Trader decides they still want to be able to do EVERYTHING because they're the HERO. So they choose obvious chaos path.
He gets to choose 1 Psychic power: He doesn't like being a support, it's why he decided to stop being a Rogue Trader in first place. He always thought of psykers as OP cheat characters so he grabs one of: Mental Force, Aetheric Appendage, or Desperate Transmogrification.
Buying up more powers with EXP, he acquires Spiteshards, Shielded by the Warp and Warp Spasm, or Shifting Lines of Fate.

The Rogue Trader and his companions come head to head with a Traitor Imperial Navy Officer. After breaching his ship they arrive at the Bridge where they face off against him and his fellow traitor command squad.

A pretty basic bitch encounter, especially for a party that's already Rank 3-4, especially since the Max rank is 8.

Rogue Trader fuckwit is pretty excited to use his new powers. He uses mental force to directly attack an enemy.

Thanks to his Fettered Psy Rating of one, he runs directly up to the navy officer to unleash his 1m range attack. Somehow not dying from all the overwatch attacks by the renegades. He begins his focus power test: Thanks to his 39 Willpower and 1 Psy rating, he needs to roll a d100 UNDER 44 in order to use the ability.

Success! He didn't kill his own team this time, because his power failed! Frustrated, he spends a fate point to reroll.

After fudging his rolls while the GM was getting drunk, he succeeds on his focus power test. It hits automatically and I'll say Navy Officer failed his dodge because he sucks. Due to the unstable quality.

We roll an 8 and nothing happens. Because the attack is primitive, we double the effective armor of the Navy officer!

With an effective 6 armor and toughness of 3, the Navy officer can negate up to 9 Wounds! We deal 1d10+1 Impact damage!

With our roll of 7, all our damage is negated! And now the Rogue Trader is going to burn a fate point once he eats all the attacks of the various renegades around him. Desperate he uses trump card to escape.

With nothing to lose he pushes his Psy rating up to 5 and we'll assume that he succeeds. Now going forwards, for the rest session, his ass on psychic phenomenae is up to the mercy of the GM. Also we're rolling on the Psychic phenomenae table.

Whatever we rolled, know that it starts at 40, and even if we roll the minimum, the GM is allowed to flip it.
Let's not forget, we also need to roll for how many insanity points we won.

1d10+5 roll 9 give 14 insanity. Reminder that 100 insanity means we retire the character permanently and this was one encounter. If I'm not being clear, RT Fuckwit has been dealing with some major traumas, luckily this means he's already immune to Fear Rating 3 so only his companions are suffering for his poor choices.
His next turn he decides he needs to heal, or else he'll be burning a fate point.

He pushes again to ensure he actually succeeds at using the ability and we roll phenomenae again. He succeeds while the GM isn't looking and heals 1d5+5 wounds.

Healing 8 wounds and gaining 8 corruption which if you have any sense of pattern recognition, you'll realize he probably already has a high corruption score. So after mutating his legs together

He's quite happy to gain another 5 wounds out of the deal. Rather important because he moves even slower than before, escaping the retributionary gunfire is going to be quite difficult.

No longer caring to be remotely safe with the Warp, the Rogue Trader decides to go all in with warp fuckery.

With a Focus Rating of (39 Will + Psy of 5x5) 64 and a roll of 25 he gets a whopping 3 degrees. Raising his strength and toughness by 5 + 3d10

Increasing his stats by 25. This gives 66 Strength and 60 toughness. Truly this is the power he wanted. Thanks to his mutation, his starting 9 wounds had been increased 14 and now his toughness bonus had been effectively doubled. Truly he has become immortal. his turn up, he eats another round of mixed gunfire from the Renegades and the Navy Officer.

Now he could use his newfound strength to enhance his melee attacks, something Rogue Traders are actually good at but he's a Psyker damnit! Using melee would be admitting his build was at fault and besides, he knew that he could have reached the same effective stats permanently for less XP by just getting some augmentations. So we'll use mind bullets instead.
Pushing for Psy rating 5 while sustaining a Psyker ability means we're rolling phenomena with a +50 now.

If you think I'm just being an ass by making him push. Even with it he still almost failed anyways. Also he is definitely rolling perils.
Unlike his other powers, because he pushed he gets a full range of 50 meters. Since he barely manifested the power, he doesn't get more than 1 attack dealing 1d5+5 damage with a pen of 10. Completely negating the armor of his target who still fails the dodge. The Rogue trader does

9 wounds to the Naval Officer. Bringing him down to 3 wounds, grievously wounded. The Renegades and officer perforate the rogue trader with more bullets, killing him.

Ortho is the Deathworld Arch Militant. He had a mediocre Ballistics score of 35 but as Arch militant

They choose one class of weapon to get an effective bonus of 10 on. They always intended to focus on heavy weapons since they get them at Militant 4 alongside bulging biceps which lets them use heavy weapons without needing to brace.

He naturally decided to specialize in solid projectile heavy weapons because he's a fan of 80s action movies. Having Braced on previous of the Rogue Trader dying, he's ready to unleash his heavy stubber.

Because everyone in the bridge is well within the range of his weapon, he only needs to make an ordinary difficulty test to hit.

Declaring a full auto attack, he gets a +20 Bonus to his ballistic skill. Thanks to his arch militant ability he gets an additional +10. He hasn't been slakcing though, his class is specialized in guns and he's raised his skill all the way to expert raising his base 35 to 55.
This means, he needs to roll under a 95 in order to hit. Weak, I know.

Rolling a 28 for 6 degrees of success, he scores a pathetic 6 hits on his enemy, each hit dealing 1d10+5 with additional +2 per hit thanks to his militant ability for a final damage of 6d10+42.

With two 10 rolls, we now roll for righteous fury.

Since we use ALL the original modifiers, these still hit despite being high rolls. So we roll damage for TWO more hits.
That's another TWO 1d10+7 hits.

We roll 7 and 8 for a total of 15+14 giving us 29 extra damage on top of our original 83 damage. In one turn our Militant just did 112 damage. Reminder that ever enemy he's fighting has a MAX of 12 wounds.
I limited him to Rank 4 because he's forced to waste these wounds all on one character. If he was rank 4 he would have "independent targetting" which would let him hit EVERYONE within 10m of his original target, meaning he could theoretically have killed EVERYONE in this encounter with one action. Instead he overkills a Renegade by 99 wounds, expending 10 rounds of his 200 round mag, laughing like a maniac as he see the results on the crit tables.

Did this while mostly drunk so if I made any mistakes that's on me. Should put to bed the psyker discussion.

Thanks for confirming it's possible, stopped reading all the boring shit.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I only want the game to implement hidden corruption count for all dialogue checks, not something labelled. And then by the end you find yourself manipulated by the Big Bird Demon That I Need to Google to Spell It's Name

Tzeentch. Not that hard.

 

[Storyfag]

Tzeentch

Bless you!

 

[Sykar]

In that case it's damn you!

 

[Peachcurl]

Good points, but still not impossible odds to beat. Not all psykers can detect other psykers. Could also have a blank present whenever interaction with other psykers in the crew becomes necessary. Or not interact with them directly at all. Claim piety as a reason, or whatever.

I would imagine an Astropath would be able to detect another psyker even at a distance. Psychic communications are their thing, after all.

Would be odd then to have any psyker escape notice. I.e., the earlier mentioned Milo from Gaunts Ghosts.

 

[Storyfag]

ERYFKRAD Sykar I'll have you know a German got my joke and you two didn't.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

ERYFKRAD Sykar I'll have you know a German got my joke and you two didn't.

Disgusting, he can keep it.

 

[Sykar]

ERYFKRAD Sykar I'll have you know a German got my joke and you two didn't.

Nein!

 

[Camel]

Tzeentch. Not that hard.

 

[ArchAngel]

Honestly is anyone going to give a fuck about a license? I am gonna care about whether the psyker can do the job not about hers/his credentials.

You should care, because as pointed out earlier, a lack of credentials MAY imply lack of protection against death-by-demon.

Death of psyker or corruption of the same that might cost lives of others?

 

[Peachcurl]

Honestly is anyone going to give a fuck about a license? I am gonna care about whether the psyker can do the job not about hers/his credentials.

You should care, because as pointed out earlier, a lack of credentials MAY imply lack of protection against death-by-demon.

Death of psyker or corruption of the same that might cost lives of others?

Psyker and party may hurt/die as an immediate result, corruption is something that accumulates (see Vermillion post further up)

 

[Utgard-Loki]

can't wait for the sister of battle romance, where shortly before you have your first time, she confides in you that 5 years ago the entirety of the imperial guard barracks on cuckusaurus XVI ran a train on her.

 

[Ibn Sina]

can't wait for the sister of battle romance, where shortly before you have your first time, she confides in you that 5 years ago the entirety of the imperial guard barracks on cuckusaurus XVI ran a train on her.

Sounds loreful.

 

[Vermillion]

Companion Sheets

I don't know if I was speedreading or if they updated these but most of the character sheets state what their gameplay role will be. Also we get some quotes to give us an idea of each character.

Sister of Battle sounds like a pseudobard
Rogue Psyker is support/psy damage and some shooting skill
Seneschal is your basic melee tank
Mechanicus is tech support and beast master (mechanical)
Doesn't say for the Eldar but it's pretty obvious she's ranged DPS
Navigator also seems buff focused but has the obvious lidless stare attack
And we already know our Rogue Trader has special orders that can give extra turns or do other stuff.

Likely what will differentiate them is that while the Psykers and Navigators will have their inherent powers to rely on, the martial characters will likely make that up with more weapon prof options. Example being how the Sister of Battle gets a crowd pleasing flamer to match the psyker's fire power. Right now exactly what they'll do is a bit vague since more than half the party has "buffing" as one of their specialties.

 

[Trithne]

How large of a party are we expecting? They haven't shown the Spess Wellf, but I'm guessing we don't bring a squad of 8 into missions.

I'll end up bringing the Ranger all the time anyway because I'm a sucker for Eldar.

 

[Sykar]

can't wait for the sister of battle romance, where shortly before you have your first time, she confides in you that 5 years ago the entirety of the imperial guard barracks on cuckusaurus XVI ran a train on her.

Well if the guard tried it would probably have ended like this:

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'll end up bringing the Ranger all the time anyway because I'm a sucker for Eldar.

Going by these lore snippets, seems like Pasqal and Abelard will be my goto companions.

 

[Camel]

can't wait for the sister of battle romance, where shortly before you have your first time, she confides in you that 5 years ago the entirety of the imperial guard barracks on cuckusaurus XVI ran a train on her.

Knowing Owlcat writers the Sisters of Battle will be in a lesbian romance. But you will be approached by a gay Imperial Guardsman.

Spoiler

How large of a party are we expecting?

Party of 4 judging by the gameplay trailer.