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

[Yosharian]

nothing like guns doing 1d10 + 5 damage a hit when the average total HP a character gets is 8

Huh. You don't gain HP/level?

 

[Stoned Ape]

nothing like guns doing 1d10 + 5 damage a hit when the average total HP a character gets is 8

Huh. You don't gain HP/level?

In tabletop, damage is mitigated by toughness and armour.

An average guardsman might have a T of 3 and be wearing Flak armour with an AV of 4, so he would take (1d10+5) - (3+4) damage from a bolter round, and thus probably survive one or two hits with his 8 wounds (unless he's unlucky or gets crit).

You can increase your number of wounds as you level up, but not to a huge extent.

You can also use a fate point to re-roll a dodge attempt to avoid getting hit, or use one to mitigate 1d5 damage, or burn one (lose it forever) to avoid being killed.

 

[SmartCheetah]

Does it actually make sense lore-wise to have a sole space marine travelling with bunch of randoms. Maybe if he had such orders or something?
Same story with SoB. I dunno much about those factions so I'm just curious.

 

[Stoned Ape]

Does it actually make sense lore-wise to have a sole space marine travelling with bunch of randoms. Maybe if he had such orders or something?
Same story with SoB. I dunno much about those factions so I'm just curious.

Could be that he's failed the chapter in some way and has taken a death oath to perform some kind of heroic task in order to repent.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Oath

I think that there are plenty of reasons one of the Adepta Sororitas might be asked to work with a Rogue Trader. In certain situations I believe a Canoness can even become one herself.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

It makes much more sense for a SoB, especially since in the PnP Rogue Trader you have missionary as a class (in fact it was one of my favorites to play) and SoB would be subordinated to a higher ranking Ecclesiarchy priest like that. As for Space Marines in general, there are some bits of the lore that indicate that they sometimes go on solo missions (for example in the book Brothers of the Snake there was a story about a marine who was sent to do a one-man patrol mission on some backwater planet to see if everything was alright there). Marines also sometimes go on various pilgrimages or even personal quests. Also there were fairly old books (I think they were called Rogue Trader and Rogue Star), they followed a Rogue Trader dynasty that took part in the invasion of Tau space and they had a special arrangement with the White Scars chapter which sometimes worked very closely with them - could be something like that too.

I guess in both cases there will be some bit of context for why they join the crew, ie the most usual cliche would be that you encounter them as sole survivors of some incident and they decide to stick around for some reason, probably relevant to the plot.

 

[Peachcurl]

Could be that he's failed the chapter in some way and has taken a death oath to perform some kind of heroic task in order to repent.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Oath

I think that there are plenty of reasons one of the Adepta Sororitas might be asked to work with a Rogue Trader. In certain situations I believe a Canoness can even become one herself.

For instance, in the second Calpurnia Novel, cases are described where Sororitas travel with Rogue Traders to recover holy relics.
Protecting some sort of pilgrimage or small-ish crusade that goes outside current imperial space may be other reasons.

About the space marine: I think there is a trilogy (?) of space wolf related novels, where a small team / squad of space wolves act as protectors for a certain Navigator house, because of some contract between the house and chapter. i.e., the house provides navigators to the space wolves, the space wolves provide protective services of various kinds. A similar contract with a rogue trader may be possible. Or even part of the Rogue Trader's charter.

 

[hello friend]

That's really interesting because lots of people say Legion is one of the strongest books. I read a list of the 'best' books in the HH (because holy shit some of them are bad) and tried to use it - it suggested Legion as a must-read. Because I got to Fulgrim and bloody hell that was a struggle to get through.

But I found the opening of Legion to be utterly uninteresting and just.. bizarre. I dunno, maybe I should give it another try.

I desperately want to read the HH because I find it to be a fascinating story - and I fucking loved the initial set of books - but I keep getting stuck at the weaker books and giving up

Just go one by one and the moment you start getting annoyed at how bad a book is, drop it and move on to the next one. You can usually tell pretty early if a book is awful.

 

[Vermillion]

nothing like guns doing 1d10 + 5 damage a hit when the average total HP a character gets is 8

Huh. You don't gain HP/level?

Getting HP requires buying Wounds as a talent (think dnd feats) and the maximum you're ever allowed ingame (meaning you're a mutant or space marine) is 30. Instead survivability is from stacking AP which acts by directly lowering the damage you receive by your armor total. IIRC Power Armor would might you 8 to 10 AP in the chest depending on its quality and Ork Mega armor or Terminator armor would give around 14 or so. Since tanking hits isn't exactly a realistic option you have cover, which depending on the quality can give you another 6 to 14 AP. Finally you can get natural armor from cybernetics and your Toughness bonus (tens digit of toughness) decides your natural AP value. Getting exposed is a death sentence, which is why melee enemies are so threatening. All weapons have an inherent penetration value, which changes how much of your AP they ignore in damage calculations.

Plasma weapons will generally have enough to ignore your armor. enemies take a test to make a hit on you, single shots are hard but burst fire and automatic boosts their hit rate at the cost of extra ammo. Depending on their degrees of success, they can get as many hits as the bullets they fired (so possible 3-6 1d10+5s coming your way). Iirc as a human you can acquire a total of 1 parry and dodge which would allow you to negate 1 melee attack and 1 ranged or two melee attacks a turn. Greater demons like Bloodthirsters usually have around 50-60 wounds and 20-25 AP I think. It's the opposite of the WoTR fantasy, if you want to take those down, you need Lascannons and their 10d10 damage dice. Weapons had damage types which change the effects of rolling on crit tables for when you or an enemy crits or you're taking damage greater than your wounds.

The only way to restore HP are rests, successful medicae tests which can kill you; Psykers which can turn you into a chaos spawn, mutant, or raise your corruption; or through rare talents or cybernetics which grant you natural regeneration. The way crits worked in fantasy flight, crits could theoretically do infinite damage if you kept critting when calculating damage. Players are heavily reliant on Fate points for rerolls, magically recovering HP, adding bonuses to their roll or burning (losing permanently) their point to negate dying.
The game was built to encourage a player simply building a new character (in Dark Heresy) rather than getting overly attached to their original, because of how lethal combat is. In Rogue trader you start the game as equivalent to a mid-high level Dark Heresy Team but at max level the Dark Heresy Team would usually overtake you. Honestly have no idea what they plan to change in the system, the fun of the game is what happens from the players fucking up.

 

[Galdred]

Does it actually make sense lore-wise to have a sole space marine travelling with bunch of randoms. Maybe if he had such orders or something?
Same story with SoB. I dunno much about those factions so I'm just curious.

Could be that he's failed the chapter in some way and has taken a death oath to perform some kind of heroic task in order to repent.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Oath

I think that there are plenty of reasons one of the Adepta Sororitas might be asked to work with a Rogue Trader. In certain situations I believe a Canoness can even become one herself.

From what I recall from an older iteration of the lore, a few Space Marines could be assigned to a Rogue Trader for a limited time as a repayment for a favor to the chapter or something.
I wonder how they will manage the rules for wonky psychic accidents. I never tried them in the 40K version, but they were fun in the Fantasy one.

 

[Reinhardt]

People complain everytime a jrpg got his MC being a young teenager who somehow will manage to effortlessly beat army of trained soldier, of course we are doing the same thing. The sassy black women is really just the equivalent of this trope for progressist, and about as much grounded into reality.
The thing is beside being a utterly uninteresting trope who has been artificially made for the sole purpose of pandering, the art in itself is atrocious, but again, given owlcat's previous work, nor surprise here.

It's not the same thing. The jrpg main character is a young teenager because the main people who play those games are meant to be young teenagers. Are black trans people the main people playing these games?

It is. You pander to young teenager by giving them a chance to play a heroes with awesome and cool power, because they don't have such in real life. You pander to progressist by giving them strong smart sassy balck womxn, because such thing does not exist in real life either.

jrpgs are more realictic, because teenage boys are stronger than wommynz. look at kwa national soccer wommyn team. teenage boys kicked their ass hard.

 

[Vermillion]

Does it actually make sense lore-wise to have a sole space marine travelling with bunch of randoms. Maybe if he had such orders or something?
Same story with SoB. I dunno much about those factions so I'm just curious.

Could be that he's failed the chapter in some way and has taken a death oath to perform some kind of heroic task in order to repent.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Oath

I think that there are plenty of reasons one of the Adepta Sororitas might be asked to work with a Rogue Trader. In certain situations I believe a Canoness can even become one herself.

From what I recall from an older iteration of the lore, a few Space Marines could be assigned to a Rogue Trader for a limited time as a repayment for a favor to the chapter or something.
I wonder how they will manage the rules for wonky psychic accidents. I never tried them in the 40K version, but they were fun in the Fantasy one.

Psychic phenomena would mostly be particle and sound effects depending on how interactive they make the environment. Most Perils of the warp should be fairly easy to straight port over. It would be funny for phenomena to happen and a player have to deal with their lasguns and auspex suddenly being unusable while their psyker pingpongs down the halls, or for the player to watch as their psyker explodes into a daemonhost and instant gib the party because they didn't realize rain of blood forces all psykers to roll perils. Basically, I really want them to go all in on how punishing the gameplay can be. Encourage the player to fight like a Viet Cong to survive.

If they do it right, a lot of players will be encouraged to use the Rogue psyker because she should have more psychic options than an Astropath companion. Experienced players will hate her because she's a walking timebomb and will prefer a more reliable Astopath companion. Likewise a Space Marine companion should be at first enjoyable for being a meat blender in melee and range but should ultimately be favored for other characters because space marines should ruin all your attempts to be diplomatic or sneaky. Getting money in this game should be through playing both sides (loyalist and Xenos) against one another so that you profit in the end. Naturally certain imperial companions should take exception to that.

 

[Aconitum]

Does it actually make sense lore-wise to have a sole space marine travelling with bunch of randoms. Maybe if he had such orders or something?
Same story with SoB. I dunno much about those factions so I'm just curious.

Could be that he's failed the chapter in some way and has taken a death oath to perform some kind of heroic task in order to repent.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Oath

I think that there are plenty of reasons one of the Adepta Sororitas might be asked to work with a Rogue Trader. In certain situations I believe a Canoness can even become one herself.

From what I recall from an older iteration of the lore, a few Space Marines could be assigned to a Rogue Trader for a limited time as a repayment for a favor to the chapter or something.
I wonder how they will manage the rules for wonky psychic accidents. I never tried them in the 40K version, but they were fun in the Fantasy one.

Psychic phenomena would mostly be particle and sound effects depending on how interactive they make the environment. Most Perils of the warp should be fairly easy to straight port over. It would be funny for phenomena to happen and a player have to deal with their lasguns and auspex suddenly being unusable while their psyker pingpongs down the halls, or for the player to watch as their psyker explodes into a daemonhost and instant gib the party because they didn't realize rain of blood forces all psykers to roll perils. Basically, I really want them to go all in on how punishing the gameplay can be. Encourage the player to fight like a Viet Cong to survive.

If they do it right, a lot of players will be encouraged to use the Rogue psyker because she should have more psychic options than an Astropath companion. Experienced players will hate her because she's a walking timebomb and will prefer a more reliable Astopath companion. Likewise a Space Marine companion should be at first enjoyable for being a meat blender in melee and range but should ultimately be favored for other characters because space marines should ruin all your attempts to be diplomatic or sneaky. Getting money in this game should be through playing both sides (loyalist and Xenos) against one another so that you profit in the end. Naturally certain imperial companions should take exception to that.

I feel that if they keep perils of the warp as they are in the books, people will just savescum when they get some of the worse effects, but I don't really know what could be done about that.

 

[Vermillion]

I feel that if they keep perils of the warp as they are in the books, people will just savescum when they get some of the worse effects, but I don't really know what could be done about that.

They already savscum for everything in crpgs's don't they? The goal should be to make failure not be the end of content. Failing to hack a door open should result in the mission changing to find some way to blow the door open. Beyond that, this is why they need to implement fate points. If most companions have 2-3 fate points at start, or if certain major campaign quests award fate points to companions under a certain amount, players might be more willing to spend or burn them to get the results they want. Roll Perils "swallowed by the Warp!" burn fate point? Yes. They game acts like you got Temporal Incontinence instead and the Psyker just disappears for 1d5 turns.
Even if they make player Psykers more forgiving, I want them to go all out on NPCs. I want a player to see an ally psyker's head get blown off by an Ork Warboss and breath a sigh of relief that the area is now safe.

The biggest issue is that there's no guarantee that Owlcat will design their story/quest structure to account for unlucky rolls. It will just be a fail state like a particularly shitty GM instead of a narrative tool. One thing they should do is not give EXP for every skill check but instead keep it only for quest completion and boss/major character kills. This is because leveling in Rogue Trader RPG works a lot different than other RPGS. IIRC it acts more like a currency, as soon as you have enough EXP to buy a new skill or Talent, you can do it immediately. Leveling up is more from reaching certain thresholds of EXP spent and all that does is increase/change your options of skills/talents to buy or give you the opportunity to go into a specialist class.

 

[ItsChon]

IDK who this Vermillion guy is, but he's doing a better job of shilling for this game than Infinitron ever could. I'm genuinely excited. And this game is going to be turn-based? Holy shit, we might have something on our hands here, as pozzed as Owlcuck is.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

May the Emperor's light shine upon Vermillion for his faithful service.

 

[Harthwain]

IDK who this Vermillion guy is, but he's doing a better job of shilling for this game than Infinitron ever could. I'm genuinely excited. And this game is going to be turn-based? Holy shit, we might have something on our hands here, as pozzed as Owlcuck is.

I'd rather say he makes it sound like a genuinely good RPG system. The game itself will be made by Owlcat, so I would temper my expectations as we're not guaranteed to get really good implementation (and this is true for all adaptations of tabletop RPGs in general).

 

[Cyberarmy]

The game itself will be made by Owlcat, so I would temper my expectations as we're not guaranteed to get really good implementation

Yeah we are not really getting the game he's speakiing of.

 

[Jorus]

Second Warhammer game that lets me fall to Chaos? Count me in.

 

[Aconitum]

I feel that if they keep perils of the warp as they are in the books, people will just savescum when they get some of the worse effects, but I don't really know what could be done about that.

They already savscum for everything in crpgs's don't they? The goal should be to make failure not be the end of content. Failing to hack a door open should result in the mission changing to find some way to blow the door open. Beyond that, this is why they need to implement fate points. If most companions have 2-3 fate points at start, or if certain major campaign quests award fate points to companions under a certain amount, players might be more willing to spend or burn them to get the results they want. Roll Perils "swallowed by the Warp!" burn fate point? Yes. They game acts like you got Temporal Incontinence instead and the Psyker just disappears for 1d5 turns.
Even if they make player Psykers more forgiving, I want them to go all out on NPCs. I want a player to see an ally psyker's head get blown off by an Ork Warboss and breath a sigh of relief that the area is now safe.

The biggest issue is that there's no guarantee that Owlcat will design their story/quest structure to account for unlucky rolls. It will just be a fail state like a particularly shitty GM instead of a narrative tool. One thing they should do is not give EXP for every skill check but instead keep it only for quest completion and boss/major character kills. This is because leveling in Rogue Trader RPG works a lot different than other RPGS. IIRC it acts more like a currency, as soon as you have enough EXP to buy a new skill or Talent, you can do it immediately. Leveling up is more from reaching certain thresholds of EXP spent and all that does is increase/change your options of skills/talents to buy or give you the opportunity to go into a specialist class.

I still think that the psychic phenomena and perils are not well suited for video games. Especially Owlcat's video games, which were long, filled with trash encounters and focused on companion interactions. I would want people to see the psyker as someone very dangerous, but also potentially very valuable. I wouldn't want them to be seen as sorcerers with annoying gimmick that players will try to game. And if they just toned them down, they wouldn't feel like psykers anymore. That's why I'm interested in how Owlcat implement psykers.

 

[ItsChon]

I still think that the psychic phenomena and perils are not well suited for video games. Especially Owlcat's video games, which were long, filled with trash encounters and focused on companion interactions. I would want people to see the psyker as someone very dangerous, but also potentially very valuable. I wouldn't want them to be seen as sorcerers with annoying gimmick that players will try to game. And if they just toned them down, they wouldn't feel like psykers anymore. That's why I'm interested in how Owlcat implement psykers.

I think we have to assume OwlCat won't be stuffing their game full of "trash encounters", as RTwP map/encounter design is very different from TB map/encounter design. That being said, your point about companion interactions is correct, and I'd have to assume that psychic phenomena being hyper perilous will likely be restricted to debuffs/damage dealing encounters, if it exists at all, with perhaps the big shit being relegated to specific story events that are hand picked.

 

[Grunker]

I feel that if they keep perils of the warp as they are in the books, people will just savescum when they get some of the worse effects, but I don't really know what could be done about that.

They already savscum for everything in crpgs's don't they? The goal should be to make failure not be the end of content. Failing to hack a door open should result in the mission changing to find some way to blow the door open. Beyond that, this is why they need to implement fate points. If most companions have 2-3 fate points at start, or if certain major campaign quests award fate points to companions under a certain amount, players might be more willing to spend or burn them to get the results they want. Roll Perils "swallowed by the Warp!" burn fate point? Yes. They game acts like you got Temporal Incontinence instead and the Psyker just disappears for 1d5 turns.
Even if they make player Psykers more forgiving, I want them to go all out on NPCs. I want a player to see an ally psyker's head get blown off by an Ork Warboss and breath a sigh of relief that the area is now safe.

The biggest issue is that there's no guarantee that Owlcat will design their story/quest structure to account for unlucky rolls. It will just be a fail state like a particularly shitty GM instead of a narrative tool. One thing they should do is not give EXP for every skill check but instead keep it only for quest completion and boss/major character kills. This is because leveling in Rogue Trader RPG works a lot different than other RPGS. IIRC it acts more like a currency, as soon as you have enough EXP to buy a new skill or Talent, you can do it immediately. Leveling up is more from reaching certain thresholds of EXP spent and all that does is increase/change your options of skills/talents to buy or give you the opportunity to go into a specialist class.

I wouldn't want them to be seen as sorcerers with annoying gimmick that players will try to game.

you are delusional if you think this is not exactly what they’re going to be

 

[Aconitum]

I still think that the psychic phenomena and perils are not well suited for video games. Especially Owlcat's video games, which were long, filled with trash encounters and focused on companion interactions. I would want people to see the psyker as someone very dangerous, but also potentially very valuable. I wouldn't want them to be seen as sorcerers with annoying gimmick that players will try to game. And if they just toned them down, they wouldn't feel like psykers anymore. That's why I'm interested in how Owlcat implement psykers.

I think we have to assume OwlCat won't be stuffing their game full of "trash encounters", as RTwP map/encounter design is very different from TB map/encounter design. That being said, your point about companion interactions is correct, and I'd have to assume that psychic phenomena being hyper perilous will likely be restricted to debuffs/damage dealing encounters, if it exists at all, with perhaps the big shit being relegated to specific story events that are hand picked.

It's not just about the hyper perilous effects. The lesser effects work well on the tabletop, where the effect of "you emit a foul smell" provides some RP opportunities, but I doubt they would do anything in a videogame. And even some of the lesser debuffs and maluses will become tiresome with the abundance of combat in computer games (especially if you have to stop yourself from abusing quicksaves), even if Owlcat reduces their frequency for a TB game. Maybe they can somehow balance that out with usefulness of non-combat powers, like mindreading and telepathy.

 

[Herumor]

Second Warhammer game that lets me fall to Chaos?

What was the first one? Dawn of War 2 with its corruption mechanic?

 

[Reinhardt]

chaos is ghey

 

[Reinhardt]

i hope we can just hire bunch of bodyguards instead of speshul snowflakes.