In this (the first and maybe only) episode of 'My players break everything' I relate the terrors from beyond, well... the freeway, they all live across the freeway, so that counts.

Starting off I tell them about the maw, and that they are going after the bounty. Lisa interupts. 'Wait a second, so in the bad part of space (the maw) there's a worse part of space (the battleground) and we find the bounty to be in the worstest part of the worst part of the bad part of space. This doesnt seem fishy to anyone?' there are nods of agreement. I try to explain that the 'badness' comes from the warp, and outside of the warp space is relativly calm... except in the debrie field of coarse.

They get their tech priests to make some inane magnetic repulsor by grinding magnets and sending them out from the ship to push other things away... I dont even know. It made quite a bit of sense in theory, but I'm just not up on the practicality of it. So they took the ship into the feild (took some damage, but I judged less than if they had tried without -5 profit). Then they used their ship to grapple onto the bounty and pull it out (+3 profit). the contract said the captain had to be the first to set foot on the vesel. "I've got a mechanical leg! lets toss that at the ship!" one airlock space toss and foot retrieval later I have the crew argue the semantics of it 'they mean board the ship'. So they dock the ships together, Captain Ken walks over sniffs the air, and turns back. 'Send in the red shirts'. Heck, they even know what to call the expendable cannon fodder. I cant see any reason why they shouldn't so in they go. Salvage stops a few hours later with missing crew. So the PCs decide to turn off the life support (and argued that there should be an off switch for the life support near all the major exits... like turning off lights when you leave. I tried to explain that these things arent' EVER meant to have people leave them. People live on them. inbreeding jokes comense). So they get their red shirts to go to the bridge and rip into the life support system (in a more computer savy and less ripping way). 3 days later the ship is now dead dead dead, they turn the life support back on and wait another 2 days for it to heat back up.

Question for you all: How easy hard should it be to turn the life support system off and on? I figured it would cause tremendous damage to the system because it was never meant to be turned off, but a few hours of tinkering with it and their red shirt tech priests could break it well enough. then another few hours (days later) to jerry rig some sort of program to make the systems work again. Was this so wrong?

Well the ship should now be dead. But they arent about to board themselves 'Send in more red shirts'. I'm assuming they were armed or whatever, but they were really just testing the waters for the PCs. They get lost too, so the PCs send a third batch to the bridge to check the video logs, now the ship wouldnt be wired up for watching people any more than most cities are. But there should be enough for them to find a few vid feeds of what happened. I described the scene of the dead getting up and killing everyone.

I did blunder and describe it as 'human like things' at first because I was franticly searching the pages for ... well, lots of stuff, they kept coming up with questions I was constantly looking for awnsers like 'how big is the bridge? How much energy does the engine put out? Can we electrocute the coridors? Did their food spoil?'. I blame myself for this in part because I usually read an adventure twice, then write down the main points of interest, and forseable snags (such as 'lets not board the ship') and how to deal with them or at least split the event tree in a way I can weave some things back in later. I didnt do that this time. I was going straight out of the book after one read through. My bad.

So after finding that undead roamed the ship (or mostly lie around till people pass by) the 3rd group of red shirts get eaten in plain veiw of the PCs (assuming they have some visual sensors trained on the bridge). They decide to find someone, accuse him of treason, and perform experiments on him such as 'lets see if its airborn. send bob on, yank him back, then we'll kill him. if he comes back to life then we're screwed.'

It's not airborn, so they want to send snake bots through the ship to explore. I try to explain a little bit about 'bots' and forbiden technology. They settle for servo skulls, which agitate the bodies, but dont really awaken them like people do. They send in 'remote controll dragonflies' I'm not sure what kind of stuff they would or wouldn't necisarily have, but there's a good chance they could have something similar, so I let them do that (since the purely mechanical dragonflies arent pestering the undead.) They find the navigator, or an NPC does because their tech guy was rolling so badly that by the end of the game they just gave him an echa sketch so he could pretend to help while NPCs did the scanning. (since I figured there would be dozens of them, and my players are in no hurry to do things themselves). Anyways. Navigator... with the halo worm in his third eye. They fit a plasma gun (the ship's prety big, they might have a few) onto a remote controlled car (or something similar, seems another thing you would find in a city sized spacebound comunity), and blasted the thing off his noggin. then they have their red shirts burn the bodies just to be safe.

They now want to not just salvage the ship, but fix it up and take it with them. I rolled some dice. got their tech priests to spend several months finding spare parts from the battlegrounds, another few months fixing the ship to warp capable. (I was never sure how badly damaged the thing was, surely it must have been in bad shape, but if there is still air in most of the ship surely there's enough of it left to make spaceworthy again)

6 months later they need another navagator (one to fly their newly ducktaped bounty), they are very fearful and very reluctant to leave it their. And even more reluctant to leave it in the hands of the expendable 'dead when you look away for a second' red shirts. So they vote Lisa off the ship 'You've doomed me!'. and leave to get a new navagator. Much to their surprise everything goes as planned and 2 weeks later they return with a new navagator and fly off into the sunset.

the report card... I wasn't sure how to represent that since '10 profit' is the base bonus for mission acomplished assuming a successful salvage. but getting the rescued crew to help is +2, (they killed the crew before they knew about them) and I was assuming that recruiting them to help also was recruiting them into your own crew as slave labor or the like. Now the imperium doesnt value human lives like we do. Selling people (or even just their contracts) is semi commonplace, there are worlds which list 'people' as their primary export. They arent THAT valuble. not 1/5 of a starship valuble. especially not in the low quantities (I'm thinking maybe 10% survivors at most). So how much is the 10 bonus for the salvage supposed to actually be worth? How much would a new ship of the Bounty's light cruiser class be worth?

In the end I gave them -25 (for taking their ship into the feild, no salvage since they kept the ship, repair on the other ship for being in the feild, replacing crew members lost, 6 months of supplies used up, hiring a new navigator... there were a few bonuses... scanning the feild for other salvage, moving the ship out of the feild for easier salvage, and I think I may have forgoten to hire a new crew for their new ship... but as I said before I'm not sure how much a new crew would cost) but they walked away with a ship and grinning like the cat that ate the cannary.

So. Now that you've read my account. I'm curious how everyone else would have changed things, railroaded their players, judged the value of their actions, the cost of a ship even.

I'm not really angry at them for 'breaking' the game. it was still a lot of fun. And though I am curious about how feasable some of the stuff they did would actually be and how other GMs would deal with that sort of stuff... I'm mostly just confused by the value of 'profit' and how to judge their actions.

Wow.... I would have probably been in tears half way through the game if that was me. But then my definition of fun differs from most people.

Uggh, first thing I would have done is have the NPC senior staff timidly voice advice ("Are you sure sir? The ship will take heavy damage.") Preventing the two ships from latching together would prevent the players from flooding the ship with NPCs unless they thought of blowing holes in the debrie field to make traveling easier. Even then they might not be able to make a big enough hole to send the Sovereign Venture through. After that, it's hard to say; I'm not that great of a GM.

One thing that struck me about your post was the players interpretation of "The Rogue Trader must be the first to set foot on The Bounty" clause. Any dashing space adventurer would do nothing less than valiantly lead the charge, blaster drawn and vibro-rapier swinging. But some players aren't going to jive to this, because character survival is more important to them that adventure itself. Assuming the Trader threw his cybernetic foot over the threshold and considered the matter over and done with, their are a few complications.

Detaching your foot, throwing it through the airlock, and declaring "Ship's mine, let's go!" is a fundamentally cowardly act. Thats not going to sit well with a lot of people. A starship is also a closed environment, and thats Rumor's favorite place to breed. It won't take long for the story of how the Trader "claimed" the bounty to spread through the entire ship. Are the 500+ crew members going to trust an abject coward in command of their ship? Are they going to keep following his orders, especially if those orders involve sending wave after wave or crew members into dark and certain danger? How long is it going to take before sedition spreads through the ranks and the Trader has a mutiny? A Rogue Trader has to be respected and/or feared by his crew. A Trader who claims salvage in the manner describes above is not going to remain either for long.

Another thing I would have done differently, would be to make shutting down the life support more complicated. Both the Worm and the surviving human crew have a vested interest in keeping the air breathable, and would likely both try to stop the sabotage, or repair the damage.

I agree with Attila IV - the life-support systems would have been the number one priority of both the Worm-possessed navigator and the surviving crew. I would probably have put the main life support controls either with the survivors or right near the bridge, so that any tinkering would elicit a violent response from those who could hear it.

It is also worth noting that the Navigator wanted nothing more than to get aboard a space-worthy vessel. As soon as the two ships were linked together, a swarm of undead should have started their way up the mooring-chains and data-connectors - with a deadly navigator sneaking aboard and stowing away in the tumult, animating the corpses of your players' recently deceased crew to add numbers to his undead horde.

You could even have had the navigator stow away aboard their vessel (or simply have the worm have survived... that new navigator looks mighty tasty!)

If your players won't go to the fight, take the fight to your players.

Going to your last question, Profit is a measure of the wealth and influence a Rogue Trader and his retinue accumulate. It is the RT's treasury and it is the prestige that goes along with his name. To put determining it into perspective, what did they do to rake in cash and develop a positive reputation verses their expenses?

• Damage their own ship- That's going to cost a bit at the shop
• Repaired the Emperor's Bounty- Hard to say, on one hand repairing and recruiting crew for the ship will be a monsterous expense. On the other hand, it is a second ship and all the benefits that entails.
• Take heavy casualities reclaiming the Bounty- That's going to cost a bundle to get new hires plus if word gets around that the captain just randomly sent crewmen to their death, he's not going to be particularly popular.

So with that, I'd say where you put them is about right. At best I would say they would break even but even that would feel like a bit much.

Attila - A lot can depend. I mean a captain's place is on his ship right? sure that doesnt make for good storytelling and they aren't going to be getting holo vid offers for their adventures, but having mostly shipbound captain IS a valid argument. Cowardly yes... but then they used the nearest guy mumbling about it as a test to see if it was an airborn contagion so they can definatly claim fear.

They seemed to think that their tech sorcery thing with the magnet would work wonders, and I did take the damage down from 8 profit to 5 profit lost to represent it's effectivness. I did warn them that the damage to the ship would be costly, but between 'magnetized particles pushing debrie away' and 'shooting things with the guns' and 'lets toss his boot at it!' I'm not sure they heard everythign I was saying.

I tried to explain that shutting down the life support was a ship crippling event, at the time I was more trying to preserve the mystery of what was going on than the life support, since the dead didnt care about the life support I figured on letting them rip it out. I dont see the worm having THAT much a vested interest in the air, I mean everything it wants is dead right? But I did miss the oportunity to have an invading mass of undead.

Cygnus - I dont see the worm's desire to keep the life support on, like I said. But I was trying to flip through the book I forgot about the worm's real motive at the time so forgot to have him try to invade. Besides, there was only one or two entrances onto the ship at most I bet, they didnt exactly mate the two ships. But yeah, I definatly should have taken the fight to the players.

Psion - I didn't count the new ship as part of the wealth, maybe I should have? I just counted how much out of pocket expenses would be used in repairing it. putting them at -25 just means it's a down payment on the ship. I costed them -6 for their treatment of the red shirts, their losses couldnt have been more than 10,000 people, which is nothing really... but the cost mostly comes from the increased wages that any skilled labor is going to demand after seeing how disposable the captain and his inner circle treats everyone, and also damage controll to keep the peasants in line. I'm figuring they needed to hire some people with whips to keep the unskilled labor in line if they started to hear about this.

Again, not knowing how much a ship costs I have no idea how much they really gained or lost on that. Or even if the ship is even capable of being anything but a ramshackle wreck ever again.

Thanks for the help guys. I think the lessons I learned were 1) dont give them a city sized ship and resources 2) dont give them NPCs to push around.

Omnicrazzy said:

Yeah, figuring out how to make our troupes responsibly manage those attributes are something the forum has been discussing...

Ignoring the point that you should have had a crippling battle on the player's own ship I see some possible endings that you didn't consider.

The navy or inquisatorial spies on the player's ship report that the Rogue Trader wasn't the first person aboard, and take back the salvaged ship. You can then describe how this bankrupts them and they trader dies (comparatively) penniless.

Also, there probably would have been a mutiny over how incompetent it seems the players were.

Basically, the players did a terrible job of it, and really, should have just plain lost.

If I intended for them to come back to this game I might do the mutany, but he did board the ship first (after I said that the whole boot thing wasnt going to work) he just turned back after claiming the ship from the hanger. So he fulfilled his obligation. Mutany thou... maybe. I was thinking bankrupcy (and being forced to sell the new ship) due to all the repair costs for both ships and everything else... but I think they were going to just become pirates and run off with their debt anyways. Which would be a whole new game... chased after by the navy.

Who can say? I dont think we will be revisiting the RT part of w40k soon.

It was mostly a test run to see how it goes between Dark Heresy sessions.

Lol, that is one of the funniest things I've read in a while.

What state of mind were your players in? Sometimes if people are just TRYING to break things, this happens. I find it hard to believe that's their standard operating procedure.

But if their character personalities were cowardly and conniving, then they RPed well. They were clever and backstabbing. It was a party of ROGUE traders, rather than rogue TRADERS.

I am very interested to see how RT justifies the classically bad and unrealistic 'bridge crew away team' trope. On a ship with as many men as given in the previews, the RT could easily offer triple pay to 2000 crew and send them in with a couple of lieutenants to secure things. That's actually how it would happen. However, if the men start getting slaughtered without the RT there to lead them they will lose morale and fall back.

I find it really contrived that the PCs (all important personnages) are the first to jump off the ship. I mean, you can be a navigator! Imagine what would happen if the navigator went on an away mission and was killed! The ship is stuck where it is.

Rogue Traders, Arch Militants, Seneshcals, Explorators, Astropaths, Void Masters, Missionaries, all these are expendable. But lose your Navigator and you are up warp creek without a prayer.

If the players want to break the game they will. They need to be in the right frame of mind just as much as you in order for the game to work.

Hellebore

It seems I am going to have to go against the grain here and defend the players.

The magnet thing.. I have nothing to say there it iwas entirely up to the GM to say if it would work or not. He could simply have said it wont work. But honestly I view it as thinking outside of the box so would have allowed it to have some effect (as the GM did).

As to being the first on the ship, come on that is so blatant a attempt to shoehorn the players onto the bounty that I understand the players balking at it. Besides the captain was the first on board, he just immediately left again. Another take on that is look at the description of boarding actions in BFG and think about how big the ships are and just how many enemies could easily be there. Taking the bridge crew to board a potentially hostile vessel is at its face laughable. Of course they were going to want to bring/send in the redshirts it only makes sense. Though the way they did it could lead to a reputation for cowardice.

As to shutting down the life support. When resistance was encountered it was actually a good idea. Remember at that point they did not know what they were fighting. It would take time to restart the life support but it should not have caused any permanent damage.

Sending in the lone crewman to see if he becomes a zombie... yah that was a silly idea.

As to trying to keep the ship instead of scraping it for salvage is an understandable reaction, remember the name of the game in rogue trader is ambition. However with a little time to do some financial calculations their accountants/adepts should have been able to tell them if they could afford to do so (how much profit it would cost). Another way of dealing with that problem was simple and at your fingertips. Just say that they had a writ of salvage not of ownership/operation and if they brought the whole ship back it would be seized by the imperium.

Maybe it is just me but I like it when my players start to take the reigns and do things, it shows me they are engaged in the game. Weither or not it works for them is another matter

Sigh, the Magnet was honestly a daft idea, the debris chucks would have had so much mass that any magnets would have had to be huge and the ship would not have had the kind of manufaturing capability to produce anything with a reasonable effect. Also I am unsure how much of a ship is actually made up of Iron or Steel, we have no idea if Adimantium is a magnetic alloy so again wouldnt work.

How did they salvage parts from a debris field described as basically well farmed and where did they get the means to haul parts out of an Airless environment inside a debris field and load them into a ship with one gun cutter. I dont think you have quite gotten the scale of things in your head or the head of your players. 40k vessels are huge, insanely huge things you cant take them everywhere becasue structural damage is almost impossible to repair without a proper ship yard.

How did he detach his Bionic leg? The thing is wired to his nervous system, its not a bolt on atachment. Where did this Bionic Leg come from, its not on the bloody character sheet?

The Navigator and the worm are immune to damage until you activate the Geller field, something that the boarding parties would have no idea how to accomplish. In fact the ships Machine Spirit would have denied the turning off of life support to the boarding parties. The technically skilled people are the PC's that is why they need to go on board, they are the only ones with the autorisation and technical skill to make a difference. The crew can cut the thing up where they are told to and they can operate thier designated work station but it would be unlikely they could have done most of what your players asked them to.

No they do not drive around ship in remote controlled cars.

I've forgotten things but basically your players were taking the piss and you were letting them away with it. They refused to play in the spirit of the game and acted completely out of character for the Rogue Trader given in Forsaken Bounty.

When they start with this stuff you need to start pointing out flaws in thier logic and deny some of thier insane requests like Dragonfly scouts, why do you think they use servo skulls, that is about as small as they get, you cant fit all an anti-grav unit in something as small as a Dragonfly.

Kaihlik

Kaihlik said:

Although quite a cheesy approach he used with the leg, it coul very well be a bolt on attachment. In fact it would make sense if it were, because it coul be easily replaced in case the bionic was damaged.

Just sayin'...

The fact that the character doesn't even have a Bionic leg makes the first point irrelivant tbh but I dont imagine Imperial Bionics to be especially easy to attatch or detatch. If you have seen Full Metal Alchemist I expect there to be alot of pain when you connect just like in that as the electronics make contact with your nerves so even if you could easily take it off I doubt you would want to. Although it may be practical for replacements or much more likely repairs I dont know that it would be easily doable, IIRC bionics tend to be surgically implanted as the nerves have to be connected up to the relivent sensors and servos to make it work properly.

Kaihlik

Kaihlik said:

Well, to try to make a point here I'll have to raise the question of Zeph Mathuin in the Ravenor omnibus. His left arm was severed sometime during his lifetime, and instead of a bionic, he has a socket which he can attach a rotary cannon to and fire it with his nerve impulses instead of pulling a conventional trigger mechanism.

While firing a heavy weapon is a different story than manipulating a cybernettic hand, the line of thought still seems to indicate that the Imperium of man isn't beoynd bionic mechanisms that can be attached and detached frequently. Just imagine that the leg stump has a grafted metal socket at the end of it with fibre optic ports (or some other means of data-feed) that connects to the bionic leg when it is attached, making the leg's actuators, motivators and pistons respond to the signals from the human brain that are converted to fibre optic signals that are then fed through the stump socket to the leg.

Of course, cybernetics and bionics within 40K can vary in terms of sophistication, and there are probably several different models of bionic legs with different methods of how they work and are attached to the patient, I wouldn't refuse the notion completely of a bionic leg which can be detached and attached again. Especially since you can't standardize a prosthesis (even in the real world), each "fake limb" must be custom made to fit the wearer and the type of injury the wearer had suffered (som people have their legs severed below the knee, others above it etc.). So given the right price and skilled craftsmen, im sure that a bionic leg could be custom made to be detachable like in the method i suggested.

Another reason for this would be exactly how the amputee lost his limb in the first place. If it was due to an industrial accident, then maybe a "permanent" bionic might be more appropriate (what are the odds of the exact same accident occuring again?). If it was due to the person getting his leg bitten of by a tyranid carnifex on the battlefield, then maybe a detachable variant might be more appropriate since the amputee in question obviously will be in similar situations again and need to be able to get fitted with spare bionics as fast as possible.

I wouldn't pursue the matter further if it was completely off-topic, but since the question was raised due to something the thread starter mentioned happened and debate arouse from it, I felt it would be prudent to get it all out there anyway...

This is an example of what I call "nuke'm from orbit" syndrome. You give the PCs a huge ship and they are going to use it. I've run games in different systems where the PCs basically refused to ever leave the ship.

What I'm planning on doing to prevent this from happening when I run bounty:

0)The Rogue Trader is just starting out. He has very limited resources.

1)The ship they are on isn't their ship. They have been hired it to help them salvage the Bounty. They are responsible for any damage or losses, and that comes off the top.

2)The crew believes that this area is cursed/haunted and won't go over to the Bounty unless they get a share of the salvage.

3)There is no easy way of taking the ship in to the area. Area was mined long ago. (Mines only target large ships.)

4)The ship they have hired isn't completely on the up, and up. They are basically wreckers. A mere step above pirates. The RT needs to convince them he isn't someone to be trifled with or they may "readjust" the deal.

http://www.n-the-florida-keys.com/Wreckers.html

As for where to go from here. The worm want to head home as seen in the next adventure FFG has published online. So face with the PCs efforts it might just lay low, and take over which ever the PC head home on.

Thoughts to player proofing Dark Frontier:

0)The stranded humans will warn the PCs that while the Fortress tends to ignore a single shuttle, guncutter, or salvation pod. Multiple small craft tend to get the native's notice, and bad things happen.

1)The PCs are obviously the best prepared for assaulting the tower. Sending in mooks will fail, and make things harder next time.

2)The crew of the Sovereign Venture wants nothing to do with the system, and will mutiny. If the PCs try to force them to have anything to do with the Xenos ruins once the tower is down. This goes double if the PCs used them for cannon fodder in the past.

3)The other towers are attempting to establish the energy web, and time is limited. The PCs can't leave and come back.

Dalnor Surloc said:

I thought that syndrome was when players frequently interject the quote: "I suggest we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." in a tounge-in-cheek manner, when discussing what they should do about the threat they are facing. (something our group is afflicted with, but nobody seems to mind )

Still, the nuke from orbit approach seems a bit odd. I mean nuking the hell out of a threat would be expensive for a Rogue Trader. It's not that he or she can just stop at a local space station and expect to get new nukes, munitions, ship ratings etc. for free. Meaning that such an approach might prove to cost more than what the eventual treasure found might bring in.

@ Varnias Tybalt - Ok I conced the point, it is probably do-able if not necissarily likely. I have yet to get around to reading Eisenhorn or Ravenor (which as a DH GM I realise is Heresy). I certainly wouldn't have allowed them to do it as a) He doesn't have a bionic leg, b) I doubt it is the norm to have it detchable and would require it so specify good or best quality bionics and c) He doesn't have a bionic leg. I know I mentioned that one twice but it is a pretty **** good reason.

Kaihlik

"Nuke the site from orbit" and it's sister "Let's get to the minimum safe distance and warp out of here" can ruin any number of space opera campaigns. I've found the best way to deal with this is to let the characters suffer the consequences of such actions. But I think Rogue Trader may have a built in mechanic to prevent characters from staying out of trouble. A Rogue Trader who nukes things when a challenge presents itself, or flees from trouble, is going to see their Profit rating dwindle away to nothing. But Endeavors, with all the risk and gain they present, are the only way that number is going to go up. Endeavors and the possibility of greater Profit is likely going to motivate players to keep their character's lives risky and in the thick of danger. In two more days we'll know for sure.

Kaihlik said:

Of course, you have to actually have a bionic leg in order to be able to have it being a detachable model. My arguments were purely concerning the nature of bionics in general, and I agree to it being a b*tch-move to just detach it and toss it over to be on the safe side. But if you don't have a bionic leg or foot, then your only way of resorting to such b*tch-moves like that would be to use the (t)rusty old meat cleaver and... well... You get the picture.

Then again, if I were the GM I might allow such a shennanigan, if only for the sheer sadistic pleasure I would take in having a Rogue Trader captain chop of his own foot because he is too much of a coward to actually board an unknown hulk himself.

However such a stunt would in my opinion be perfectly legal in the eyes of the Imperium. Remember that the Ecclesiarchy isn't technically allowed to have a "standing army of MEN at arms", that's why they use WOMEN at arms instead. Bureaucratic rule-bending is so very 40K to be dismissed, so if a Rogue Trader is expected to be the first person to "set foot" on a drifting hulk in order to claim it as his own, then no Arbites Judge, Inquisitor or Administratum clerk has any right from stopping him chopping off his own foot and throwing it aboard the hulk in question and claim it as his own. No matter how cheesy a b*tch-move it might be, and not matter how much respect he would lose in the eyes of his crew. (Just imagine an insolent rating being reprimanded by the captain and saying: "Alright, alright, I'll do it. Just don't toss a severed foot at me!" )

Oh and by the way: Make sure to read Eisenhorn and Ravenor. Although I think the first has a rather anti-climactic ending, the entire story up to it is really good. The second im not finished with yet, but so far it has not left me wanting, and I have found several segments to take inspiration from when designing scenarios. They are THAT good!

Attila-IV said:

I never really ran a space opera game before so I never had to deal with those problems before... yet. Although yes, the concept of Profit should provide an interesting alternative to just thinking of what other consquences their actions have. While I wish they explained it in greater detail, it looks like FFG came up with a decent enough incentive for the players to balance risk taking with playing it safe.

If I'm honest, I would have point-blank refused some of the ideas those PC's came up with. Presumably they're acquainted with the 40K-verse if they've played Dark Heresy, right?

1 - Life support - I'd have refused this on the grounds that it's designed to stay running. Short of destroying the ship, it ain't gonna happen

2 - A bionic leg - "If it's not on your sheet, you havem't got it", a maxim I use a lot. Same goes for facy stuff - if you didn't discuss the idea of a detachable IMPLANTED bionic at the start of the adventure, you can't pull it off

3 - Techno-jiggery-pokery - Seems like a naked attempt to search the ship without any danger, right? I'd have RP'd the Tech-Priest's refusal to profane the holy form of Plasma Gun and Servo-Skull in such a way

It is to be expected that PC's will try to keep out of trouble and will want to come up with ideas of how to do that, but I think this really was an abuse of thier resources, particularly insofar as what they expected to have aboard thier ship

Well... I'm not entirely sure of the state of mind of my players. I didn't mention it, and I'm STILL not sure if he was serious about actually doing it IC but there was joking about the senchal (I'm just calling him tech guy) rigging the whole ship to explode should he not return. An attempt to make himself less expendable? an attempt to piss everyone off? 'knowledge is your primary motivation, not killing people' 'Oh it's an experiment in human nature!' I just shake my head. 'The tech priests fix all the inept rewiring and think you're crazy, they only tolerate you because the captain thinks you might be useful'.

I dont think they were purposfuly trying to break things as much as just save their skins, but they wanted to make fun of the system too. And being a kind and forgiving GM I let them. If it made any sense to. I mean I couldnt think of any good reason they couldnt, so they did.

llsoth said:

Thanks for your comments. And I feel the same as you mostly, that thinking outside the box should be rewarded. I was trying to get them onto the ship by limiting boarding operations via the debrie feild as the book suggests, but once they rammed their ship into the feild anyways it just made no logical sense as you pointed out. Ideally they would have turned around after landing a shuttle anyways, but I would have had some exploded reactor that they set off bathe the area in harmful ratiation for the time being or something. So they couldnt leave imediatly.

Later in the game after they were thinking up solutions I was furiously flipping through the book looking for references to the worm's strength to see how well various things might work. I wasn't trying to stop them from doing anything creative but Lisa said 'You're trying so hard to stop us from making everyone else do everything (not true, but it could be seen that way) I guess we should stop dinking around and go do it ourselves' (not an exact quote, but my memory fails me. It was to this effect. and I belive she was joking to some extent). My imediate reaction was 'NO! that would be stupid!'. I'm all for getting them mixed up in the action when it makes any sense. But from what they already displayed of their motivations, and for all the reasons that you and they listed... the captain and his inner circle just dont go waltzing on board a hostile ship all by themselves. By this point they KNEW it was hostile, and they had the means to deal with it without getting killed. If they had tried to do a 180 and take charge now I would have raised my eyebrows at them in the most dissaproving fashion.

Anyways. thanks for your thoughts, and I dont blame you for taking their side (I'm glad someone did). Cause really, if I didn't take their side myself I wouldn't have let them done any of that right? GMs word is law. Oldest rule in the book. I do villify them a little bit for humor value, but aside from their forgivable excentricies and sillyness they are a good bunch. I just need to figure out ways that actually make sense to get them involved in the action.

Kaihlik said:

The magnet idea wasnt to magneticly push the debrie (we've got no idea what's magnetic and what's not) but to create an expanding field of magnetic debrie of our own that IS highly magnetic and once it works its way into other things can be used to give them a push. like working iron chips into a piece of paper so that you can push the non magnetic paper around. It didnt work that well, but it did save the ship from a little damage.

I didn't think that a ship of this size would only have one shuttle/gun cutter. it makes more sense that it would be stocked with more than that, even if they are on the down side of an unlucky streak. You need to understand that these are like giant floating cities. There's not going to be only one bus out of town. That the feild was really well picked over was a fact, when they tried I looke Captain Ken straight in the eye (he was the most reasonable and least argumentative of the bunch) and said 'it would take time for sure. it might not be possible. how long are you willing to spend looking for a halfway decent warp core to get parts from? a year? 2?' and his response was essentially 'As long as it takes' I rolled some dice and ... well... rolling a 0 critical sucess goes a long way. I rolled a 0 on my d10 for time and decided that 0 was an unreasonably short time and gave them 2 months before lucking out. crazy. But these things do happen. And with the necisary parts, they could make some patchwork repair on the ship. I've read plenty of books where they do just that, rogue star, shadow point, space wolf, Cain, eisenhorn... Sure the fault usually is with the frame or the hull or something rather than the drives, but the ships are meant to take massive abuse and be strung back together. Given enough time they could make things space worthy enough to limp back to a dock. At least if the damage isnt too extensive. And the ship had air on it, it's not like it was cracked in half (though I suppose I could have declared it to be so. I didn't really care that much and if they want another ship and roll well enough then I dont see why I should stop them after making them jump through the right hoops)

Bionic leg... hmm... sure it wasnt on the sheet, but all good pirates have a peg leg right? it really wasn't something worth taking an issue with, and not being attatched just means its lower quality than most. This would haunt him in the future if we planned to continue. But throwing his leg on didn't work anyways and the scribes bickered about wether it would fulfil the conditions so he had to board anyways. Is such a semi bionic detatchable feasable? Maybe. I havent seen anything to suggest that it's at all done, but then I havent seen anything to say it couldn't be. And they were bickering about everything else and dont have a very clear idea of the setting. It didn't seem like a big deal, I'll let him have his mecha peg leg.

The worm took a moment to charge up its red glow to become imune to damage. I played this wrong from the start. Heck the navagator might not be 'dead' and so wouldn't have liked the system turned off... but by the time I remembered that I had been portraying them all as lifeless husks up untill they sensed life force near and got up to chew on people. It was too late to change things, and so catching it while it was sleeping only made sense that it's warp shield wouldnt be ready to take a plasma bolt.

The machine spirit wouldn't have a lot to say about taking the life suport offline because while your computer can whine and complain and stop you from logging out or shutting down, I can just pull the power cord. A little snip snip a little reconection and tech wizardry and you've damaged stuff enough that it shuts down. Starting things up again would be needlessly complicated, but given unlimited time and manpower they do just that.

Also I was having a hard time explaining the state of technology to them, that computers are not as advanced as we have, mostly DOS level, that even rudimentary AI are forbiden, that human brain mater is a primary 'computer' component. and dispite that there are things that contradict eachother. The ship's machine spirit is clearly an AI but it's so necisary to the ship's function that it's allowed, or maybe just ignored, or ... I dont even know how they get away with it. Most of the engin seers just think of any computer system, and the AI in particular, as just the divine entity that makes a machine. The machine spirit. It's complicated and I didn't want to get into it with them. They were being way too argumentative about what logicly would be in place and not, and I had to pick and chose what I was going to try to explain to them based off limited time. I just told them that computers as we know them dont exist and left it at that. It never came up and I didn't want to further confuse them. It's just too complicated.

I suppose it never ocured to me that on a ship that's got a minimum (that means skeleton crew) of 100,000 people (and I'm thinking closer to a milion with families and such) that the 3 of them would be the only ones with any skill. I was using the BFG bridge descriptions with comand pits and dozens of people doing who even knows what highly specialized tasks are required to keep a ship running in the absense of Shodan style all knowing AI (which it turns out they may have anyways, but again, not something I'm going to bring up while I'm flipping through my various source books looking for descriptions of the technology and trying to follow their various physics lectures, naval procedure and maritime law (apparently anyone still alive on board a ship is in charge of it so you cant salvage. "the lower deck crew are little better than slaves. They are as much part of the ship as the guns. The 'squishy parts of the ship' as the tech priests would say". but since they were all dead by that point I thankfuly didnt need to argue with them about killing them all and let that drop) and even at one point one of them who had read... something. I dunno. said that plasma was a 'lost' technology and that even scraps in the debrie would be valuble (especially the bleeding warp core seen from the bridge as I read from the book) and that was a small mini campain of it's own trying to get them not to salvage THAT instead. I eventually had the tech priests blow it up when told to 'turn it off'.) How many sentances was that in parantases? You know what parentasies are SUPPOSED to be? little asides (like this!) muttered under your breath or noting that things could be gone into more detail if you wanted to (but we dont). They are supposed to be short. Mine was nearly a paragraph. I forgot what this was an aside to. And for what we were doing a paragraph long aside was short. I had to deal with that, yes, all of that, while trying to find a description for what sort of mooring lines a ship had and how many connection ports there were because they didnt want to just shuttle people back and forth anymore. Read over that paragraph again, I never finished my though about the Shodan style AI because I was mentaly arguing with my players about everything else. Can you blame me that I wanted to just drop the more complicated bits about computer tech in 40k? I think this paragraph initially started with my interpritation of having only 3 skilled people on a ship that may have had a million people, it's own tech priests, it's own shops and stores... where was I? Oh well, I dont care where I was. what was your next paragraph I wanted to think about?

Remote controlled cars. How long have they been around? I think 50 or so years. They are toys. Remember, city sized ship. Families. Toys. I cant think of any reason why they cant have something similar. I did have the plasma gun they mounted onto it (and also radio controlled via the vox network) melt the thing down but it did it's job of getting the gun to the bad guy without waking him (again, wake in the 'I sense life!' rather than the noise bit)

They did take the piss out of a lot of stuff. And I did let them get away with it where I thought it made some sense. They didn't play in the spirit of the game but that's a minor complaint while we were all having fun (except for being unprepaired and stretched too thin, to explain things to them but that was a large part MY fault). I did point out the flaws in their logic on a lot of things and that they simply havent read that much of the game world but there was too much that just made sense. You know, I could just give Lisa a link to this forum and let her explain things. And now that I'm not trying to find a description for how much heat the halo devices can take before they melt I can properly pay atention to her and I bet she will make MORE sense. Any lapse of logic on her part would be an in game logic and that would just be because she hasnt gone to eclesiarchy seminary and doesnt know that many technologies count as 'forbiden lore' even on the ship they were flying around on. They didn't grow up in this insane world, dont blame them for not getting everything. You can blame me for lots of that, I mean I described what they so in the vid feeds as 'human like things'. Not my best moment. But I was distracted.