I recently bought Rogue Trader and I like what I read so far. The background is great and I really want to play in the universe of WH40k. Prefering sandbox style games, this is much more to my liking than Dark Heresy. But I'm not entirely sure whether I want to use the game system or not.

A couple of questions to WH system veterans:

How long does an average combat last? Is a lot of book keeping and rules referring involved or does it play fast? (I really can not tell, the whole action mechanics seem similar to D&D 3E but I read somewhere the WH rules would be faster...)

How well does the system handle companions? I see scenarios where the Arch Militant takes a number of soldiers with him, the Explorator some drones etc.

How hard is it to create new creatures and NPCs?

I am thinking about using the Savage Worlds mechanics instead, but the RT mechanics seem to have a lot of great details I do not really want to miss. All those critical hit tables etc seem to be so much fun

Is it a good system for a game on a monthly basis or is it to complicated?

It's a well-tested combat system, evolved from the WFRP and Dark Heresy systems.

It involves as much bookkeeping as you feel is nessecary. My tactic for speeding up fights is carbon-copy minions with all-over armour.

When your players bring troops with them, the mass-combat rules on page two hundred and ninety-something are the way to go. Squads get more wounds and damage to save rolling for individual troopers. Currently the rules prevent players attacking squads and vice versa, so make sure each squad has a sergeant for the PC to challenge.

Finally, as a game to be played monthly or episodically it works very well. In the pursuit of profit, the players go somewhere and do something before heading back on their ship to find profit elsewhere. I'd reccomend tracking purchases or adventure suggestions during the month off though, use a web mssenger, forum or something similar. The players have a lot of freedom, and the game works better if they get to pick their objectives.

When my group was still active I ran Dark Heresy weekly. I find it fairly easy to create new gear, critters and other aspects for the game. If I did have any complaints it would be the character generation/advancement rules, but so much space in the supplements and accessories are based on these functions that to get the most use out of new books I stick with a fairly straight versionof the original rules in this department.

The system, for me and my group, works very well and the more you and your players understand it the faster any encounter be it combat, social or other will go so I would recommend having all the players read the summary section of Forsaken Bounty.

It is also compatible with Dark Heresy and to a certain degree WFRP 2E (and a little less so with WFRP 1E) which allows you to have access to much more data on creatures and aliens as well as combing the older WFRP books for ideas, spells, traps and gear to easily convert to DH/RT.

Although not the fastest combat resolution game out there, some of the easier cheats for mooks and sudden death criticals adds a new depth of feeling to the game and speeds up lesser encounters to get on to the meat of the adventure.

The only truly faster system I have encountered was DC Heroes, but that is a personal opinion.

I am sure you could run it with Savage Worlds, or even D&D 3E or other systems, but think you would lose some of the flavor of th distinct setting and system if you did so. Not that that has to be that way, I have heard of others using various systems from GURPS to Savage Worlds to TWERPS to play 40K games and in college we played one using a kit bashed version of DC Heroes for a few weeks and another one for a few sessions using the Star Wars D6 mechanics.

Id say start writing rule conversions as you see fit, put start the campaign using the RAW and if you feel it necessary, change over.

There's something of a learning curve on the combat system: starting off, your first few combats (even with relatively few combatants on either side) can seem to take forever (especially looking up hit locations and critical effects), but once your group gets the hang of the rules, well, even an 8-way brawl with plenty of psychic and tech weirdness can be over and done with in 20 minutes or so. The mook rules and sudden death crits are good tools to speed up combat, if you don't feel it quite justifies using RT's mass combat system.
The clunkiest part of the combat system is hit locations and crits, and there are a number of resources out there that help with that (the Index Terribilis , though intended for DH, ports over rather well). It's also one of the most fun parts of combat, so there's a good chance your group will decide they don't want to streamline it because it's just too entertaining.

Companions, servitors and hirelings are handled rather well, overall- thanks to Acquisition, they're easier to get hold of than in D&D3E, and given the setting and the way the system is written, it encourages people to actually use them as something other than ablative shields, and external carrying capacity (although both of those uses would fit the setting perfectly...).
Creating new creatures and NPCs is fairly simple- a main antagonist can be rolled up the same way as a PC, and the DH GM kit (I don't have the RT one yet) has a very quick/easy system for creating non-humans. On top of that, a massive chunk of Creatures Anathema is dedicated to creating believable villain NPCs, but the advice transfers to allied NPCs/creatures.

I've (reasonably) successfully run a short campaign over mere days, and I've run a campaign of similar length (in terms of content) over more than a year, with hiatus' greater than 4 months. Both worked well.

Having played quite a lot of very different RP-game-systems, I can say that this one is pretty solid and fun to play. It doesn't takes long to get into the combat system and with the rules for mass-combat even larger battles won't be that much of a problem. The only drawback of this system is, that it does only take one or two (un-)lucky shots or psy-mishap to kill one of the player characters or at least wound them gravely early in a gamesession. Rogue trader with it's far better starting gear and better skills of the individual characters makes it a bit easier to handle, it's much worse in Dark Heresy, but you still have to be carefull.

In our first adventure my young and fresh rank 1 Seneschall was nearly killed by the first hits she took since her starting gear (and her role in the party) doesn't include heavy armor, but well, she made it. But taking a -10 on all skills for the next few in-game-days didn't help very much. Of course that's how the game is played... noone said it would be easy and save to be the right hand of a rogue trader ... or live in the 40k-Universe...

All in all the Rogue Trader System is really great. It's pretty solid, easy to learn and fun to play. Just keep some common sense and you'll do fine.

Thanks for the replies. That sounds very encouraging.

The grittiness is of some concern to me, it seems that fate points are like a 'fix' for this. So maybe just being generous with those would help attaining a more cinematic feel.

I can't find the minion rules, though. I found the Sudden Death Critic Damage rule, is that it?

Yes, fatepoints are very helpfull. As usual you should not overstress them or be too generous with them. They are ment to save the day, when the players (or sometimes even important npcs) run out of luck or when the whole galaxies fate lies on this single one dice-roll, your wounded Explorator is about to do.

No, those aren't the Mook rules I was on about.. Well, sort of. They show up in Creatures Anathema for Dark Heresy, but pretty much boil down to "if the Mook takes 1 wound, it's dead". It's noted as being intended for use in campaigns where you want to make your PCs feel epic. When they should have a bit more of a challenge, you play using Sudden Death Criticals, and for major NPCs you use the same rules as the players.

As I never buy an RPG without its Creature book I've got Creature Anathema. And after some searching I was able to find those rules

The colorful minions variant reads like fun. I guess my players would have a blast shredding through their enemies inflicting one critical hit after another.

Though the disconnect between these minions dying horrible deaths and the Sudden Death guys would not feel right, I guess. Maybe I would just use the same rules for them once they reach 0 wounds. (or 1 wound?)

As I said above, those colorful tables are something I really like about the system

The mass combat rules using squads on the other hand do seem a bit odd. I would have expected something a bit more detailed. I can see handling squads as a single unit, but I would have preferred rules where characters can still attack that "squad creature", mowing down more than a single one of them per round.

anyways, thanks for pointing me towards these rules.

So, are there any common houserules used in WH based games?