Couple of questions

By Gurkhal, in Deathwatch Rules Questions

A few questions came up during the last meeting and I'm taking them here to see if some answers can be given.

What is the Req cost for different kinds of vehicles available to the Deathwatch? Our group couldn't find the numbers for this one.

What strength is necessary for flipping over vehicles? This needed for an crazy Techmarine with an insane servo-arm.

How many psychic powers does a Follower with Psy Rating start with and how can it gain more?

A few questions came up during the last meeting and I'm taking them here to see if some answers can be given.

What is the Req cost for different kinds of vehicles available to the Deathwatch? Our group couldn't find the numbers for this one.

What strength is necessary for flipping over vehicles? This needed for an crazy Techmarine with an insane servo-arm.

How many psychic powers does a Follower with Psy Rating start with and how can it gain more?

The book seems to mention it has a section on purchasing. But unless it's lying its as well hidden in the book as a vindicare assassin against a black wall in a fog cloud several miles wide.

Generally deployment of vehicles, I'd take that out of the players hands and give them to the GM to determine whether the players need them for this assignment. If for example they are going on a recon mission, you wouldn't seem right allowing them to take a Land Raider so it would be useless. In which case I'd revert to perhaps allowing them a fixed complement of say jet bikes etc. Massive citadel assault? Ok you can have some predator tanks.

Flipping a tank, quite a lot. Consider that in current RL warfare, the British main battle tank the Challenger 2 weighs approximately 60 tonnes as a sense of where this will be going. With some digging through various sources, the weight of a rhino APC is approx. 30 tonnes unladen and a land raider, 72 tonnes.

With a combined SB and TB of 20, the max lifting weight is 4.5kg or 4.5 tonnes so we're not even slightly there with what we have so we need to go theoretical and into dubious mathematics before my first cup of tea. The chart caps out at that point but theoretically at that stage it seems to rise by roughly 900kg of extra lifting weight per one point of SB/TB added. Assuming this pattern continues (which it may not do so please do your own research on this), the estimated combined SB/TB would need to be something like 40-50 to effectively lift a Rhino and would give you around 30 tonnes of lifting power and enough to start hauling it up. This is not however taking into account the extra capacity inside or what the vehicle is armed with which may add a little more. However, with lifting for each degree of success on the test you add one to this anyway so assuming the difficulty is low enough and their DOS high enough, you can drop this down to maybe mid 30's or low 40's.

With followers, as per the rules for them in First Founding on improving them (p112), they are pretty much fixed at their current statline when the player purchases them. However with the permission of the GM, they may be allowed to upgrade them to the next tier by paying the extra XP costs between the tiers. So if they had a lesser follower which costs them 500xp, they may be allowed to pay an extra 500xp to move them to Standard or another 500xp after that to move them to Greater. At which point once they level up, the GM goes back through and adjusts their character sheet accordingly. Alternatively the other way is that the GM can upgrade them as appropriate throughout the campaign and if they stick around long enough and the player interacts with them sufficiently it may be worth granting bonus advancements as a reward for good play. Now as I can't find the section on this again, suggest that the number of powers that the follower gets be quite limited. For some reason I seem to think that the safest rule of thumb would be a number of powers up to their PR. They really shouldn't have too much as otherwise it would take a shine away from the PCs.

What is the Req cost for different kinds of vehicles available to the Deathwatch? Our group couldn't find the numbers for this one.

Vehicles have only Renown requirements. Look at the textbox in p.171 of Rites of Battle: "Kill-team acquiring vehicles".

What strength is necessary for flipping over vehicles? This needed for an crazy Techmarine with an insane servo-arm.

Servo-arm work differently from the usual way . Reading description on corebook p.177 : power armor is upgraded with gyro-stabiliser, arm has static Strength value which can't be modified by other equipment and/or abilities and basic servo-arm can lift one side of Rhino. If you can lift something at least to 45 degrees - you can flip it, I think.

How many psychic powers does a Follower with Psy Rating start with and how can it gain more?

Strictly speaking, each level of Psy Rating is a separate Talent, just like every single individual Psychic Power. A Greater Follower can pick 11 Talents, so technically, if you choose nothing but levels in PR and powers, the Follower could have a Psy Rating of 1 and 10 separate psychic powers (note that the prerequisites for picking each power still apply), or a PR of 10 and one power (or anything in between, but I guess you caught my drift :P )

Of course I think creating such a follower would be pretty much silly, but all depends on your play style. I wouldn't even think about allowing it in my games, but some other groups I know could accommodate and handle such a character easily ;)

If you want to improve a Lesser or Standard Follower, the rules are on p. 112 of FF. There's no rule for further improving Greater Followers - in fact, the book repeatedly discourages readers from creating too powerful Followers, and if you absolutely must break the game, there are plenty of other ways to do that with less math :D

Edited by musungu