I know this game is about politics and not so much of personal combat, but when an explorator can by rank 2 strangle to death a greater demon without breaking a sweat something feels wonky in the personal combat department.

Strenght 100, enormous size through mutation and power armor, unnatural strenght x2 grappling is just brutal, and if the eforementioned explorator feels remorseful he can instead just slam dunk to the face with a powerfist for odd 2d10+40 energy damage. And not only that, it overshadows the arch militant and pretty much anyone else in combat, defenses not being shabby either and the bugger even gets to dodge. All this by rank two.

When you add the roleplay opportunities of a tech priest on the mix, the fact he doesnt have a dull moment in either the endeavours nor ship to ship combat and the hilarity of playing a walking near-robot trying to interact in a social enviroment, explorator just seems all purpose-overpowered.

And unlike other rpg systems in this one you wouldnt be the only uncharismatic killing machine, no. The whole frikking setting endorses a cult of tech worshipping steroid pumped obliterators of all!

I'm thinking of adding all the fellowship skills and talents to the arch-militants ranks just so there would be a reason to take it. >.<

How exactly did he get strenght 100?!

death world
scavenger
tainted
-mutant
press-ganged
vengeance
explorator

Pay 200 exp to get the mutation "Hulking" to give you +10 str and hulking size, put your max 20 points in character creation to strenght, (agility, toughness, intelligence and weaponskill being the 4 other maxed stats) and now you already got a healthy 60. Make your free aqcisition be a power armor (neglible - extremely rare and you dont even need to roll for it) and now you're up to enormous with strenght 80. But the fun doesnt stop there, you make one of your starting bionics be good quality synthetic muscle grafts for 200 exp at start and already you have unnatural strenght x2! For the purposes of this lets assume the first thing he buys is charateristics advances to strenght for 1600 exp to max it and rest into... erm... toughness or something. Infact it isnt even required to be rank 2 to get strenght 100, you're 500 exp short. =P

Grapple is a weaponskill test to grab hold, bonuses to that are far too easy to come by as a tech-priest, and against a man sized opponent you have 2 degrees of succes automagically, one from unnatural strenght and as many as you win your bloated strenght test with.

Now all you need to do is to find yourself some greater demons and start strangling them for win and fun!

Ps: with a mining helot upgrade and machinator array you can get 120 strenght and like 80 toughness under few ranks/aquisitions. But I think thats as close to maximum without consorting with chaos.

That is indeed rather nasty.

However, certain things that you might have overlooked.

1) Size Enormous. How does this character walk around the dynasties spaceship? Enormous is....well, enormous. He should have massive problems walking down corridors, getting through doors, travelling in vehicles, etc. Enormous is the same size as a saurian Carnosaur e.g. a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Think about that for a moment. How does he interact with other people, aren't others scared silly by his huge size?

2) Power Armour. If you feel this is a problem, have it destroyed by some nasty critter (tyranid deathspitter). Its not like he can just get another suit. He'd need a suit made for a man of his dimensions, i.e. it would have to be custom built for him. Much harder roll.

3) Power weapons. Give him an enemy with a good dodge roll, a power weapon and swift attack. That will carve him up good. Even better, give him a couple of these enemies. If he grapples one person, there is nothing to stop the other one ripping him to pieces, especially since he can't dodge while grappling.

4) He is the size of a Tyrannosaur and is wearing power armour. If you were the bad guys, wouldn't you just deploy heavy weapons? Its not like you wouldn't see him coming. You'd get that lovely bonus to hit him and a lascannon or missile launcher (Krak of course) will really mess him up.

I agree that he has a killer attack and is nice and tough against thugs and scum, but his sheer size is more an impediment than a bonus. He should always attract the most gunfire and the most deadly traps. After this keep happening to him he might at least start leaving the power armour back home.

Looks like this character is focused on combat alone, nothing else. So whats wrong with him being so powerful ? He won´t typically be useful in interactions anyway, intimidating everything in sight to the point where politely asking/bartering for something is a pointless exercise.

I know it all depends on playing style, but its not a well rounded character. Its possible to make killer chars in every rpg....well, i don´t really see the problem ? Hes exceptional at what he does, but won´t ever get to the inner workings and reasons of adventure progression.

So let me get it straight... The Adeptus Mechanicus recruited a mutated explorator from a death world? My friend, READ THE RULEBOOK. PG 27 has a nice table with "suggested" origin worlds. That is for a reason, and that reason in the case of the Adeptus Mechanicus (who, by the way, are not worshipped but FEARED. It has something to do with turning people into mindless cyborgs without will, those called Servitors) means they won't go out of their way to augment some strange human who can't even survive by himself (let's see... he eat as much as what, fifty people? How the hell does his heart provide enough pressure for the poor thing to keep the blood pressure?), whose idea of "apporting something to the Machine God" is strangling daemons, who is frigging TAINTED, who has a vendetta and has been PRESS-GANGED in one of the omnisiah greatest works (a spaceship... Only titans are more respected, and that's because you can appreciate the scale better, and there's nothing bigger in a battlefield)... I mean, a technophilic having to be forced to work in a filled-by-lost-technology environment?

That is not munchkinism. That is so more echelons above it I can't even see it... But rest assured: a Psychic can just burst a major vein in the brain of that aberration quite easily. And from very afar. So imagine what a demon can do.

The aforementioned axplorator also has 50 intelligence minimum, all the tech savvy skills (because he hardly doesnt need any combat skills at all) and might even take unnatural intelligence in character creation from cortex implant. So on the "only good at one thing" I call sheningans, he might not be int capped but can still do and fuction as ye olde regular tech-priest.

And the atrocities that is the characters foundations are nothing short but a novel writing later defined on incinerate detail by a skilled powergamer. And when youre handed 5 pages of justification and background with plothooks the temptation to say "no" gets slightly lesser.

Its okay, he was "toned down" to merely have the brute mutation, thus not being the size hulking outside his power armor, taking both unnatural intelligence and unnatural strenght and focusing on other stats in equal measure.

Still the bugger managed to strangle the big bad evil guy due to some unlucky dodge rolls on the first session.

Had to make the usual "but he was just a pawn of an EVEN BIGGER bad evil guy" turn.

Silly overpowered explorators. >.<

The question is, why is he trying to overshadow the Arch-Militant and everyone else in combat? Surely that's not the point of the Explorator, and it kind of goes against the whole ethos of a group dynamic.

The problem with powergamers is a munchkin in a game means frustration for everyone, unless the aforementioned munchkin is the only PC covering that particular role (social, knwoledge, psy, tech, combat...).

I'd like to add, for that player's sake, that in Rogue Trader you don't need to be a techpriest/explorator to access to most of the cybernetic augmentations (you are out of the "machine" category, which looks to me is what he is aiming for...). House ruling, you can even mount a mechadendrite with a weapon MIU and a weapon mounted in your power armour (and since it's a hulking-size power he would be able to mount normal pistols, not only compact), so he could have rolled an Arch Militant.

Not to mention, your player won't be able to sneak around in cities. Where that a Dark Heresy campaign and you would just be drowning him with ambushes or cities where all the heretics had flew.

And by the way, he still has been press-ganged... that doesn't means "I was forced to board that ship by my superiors", but "this ship's people came to my world and abducted me, taken me from eveerything I cared for, and exploited me making me work as nearly as a slave".

Lascannon it, maybe twice if necessary...

It might be cheap, but it removes all manner of annoying things.

This seems more of a GM not knowing when to say NO!

You could always throw an Eversor or Vindicare at him from Ascension and watch him die quick enough.

I think this character is not that much of a problem, we all know it is possible to build more or less specialist uber chars, but a handful of good ideas will always get him/her in one of the soft spots, should that be necessary. As other pointed out, he is a mutant and, when wearing his power armour, approximately the size of a dreadnought. So he should be put against enemies like Dreadnoughts or things similar in power.

Nevertheless, I have always considered the point buy system the ultimate open gate to powergaming and munchkinism. And finally, a slight mistake in your example: Choosing a mutation costs 200xp, upgrading an implant from common to good quality another 200xp, upgrading an implant from good to best quality another 200xp, sums up to 600xp. As you only have 500xp at character creation, you cannot start with both a chosen mutation and BQ muscle graft. (Admittedly, that won't change the fact you can still get an absurdly high Strength)

For starters say NO! Unless everybody playes a power gamer your games is better of without him. One of my players had a silly idea of making an archmilitant who was so nasty that he started with an avarage BS 100+ for each roll and guns that would vaporise everything in its path. Your Explorator would have died before he could move an inch. I told the player NO and NOT in MY campaign you don't. Now he has a much more sensible voidmaster who is not making me want to tear out my hair.

Point is. Munchkins can always create horrible things and RT 's have enough loopholes to make a munchkin very happy. Saying NO is the only way.

Not only that, a muchkin group forces the GM to play munchkin to keep them interested (so they don't end the whole adventure without losing a single wound, no matter how much tyranids you throw at them...), which in the end means you all devote more time to study the rulebooks than to play the game...

I find it quite easy to fix that as a GM, using 3 simple steps.

1. Read horribly powergamey/munchkin character sheet;

2. Look into the eyes of the player as I tear the sheet up into little pieces; and either

3(a). Hand him a new sheet and tell him not to be silly

3(b). Tell him this isn't the group for him

Pretty simple really. Thankfully though, none of my players are like that. They, you know, come up with non-powergamey characters that are primarily based around their personality and character rather than "lol, I can has 100 strength to hit things lol".

I've had the same problem with one of my players (brute + all xp going into Str and To for ridiculous stats). The way I've dealt with it is that he is usually the first thing attacked as he is see as the greatest threat, massive slabs of muscle wandering around with massive guns, or if he is around people tend to be a minuses due to his mutations and I can imagine that things will slowly get worse for the mutant. He is finally, i think, getting the idea that his character attracts the wrong king of attention, just by being around

Yawn. Has nothing on a Weapon Mastery Heavy Weapons Archmilitant with a Best/Good Quality Twin-Linked, Motion Predictor, Targeter, Suspensor Autocannon/Assault Cannon which does damage approaching half a thousand at ridiculous ranges. Not impressed.

Ikkaan said:

Casamyr said:

Signoftheserpent, there are some facts of life:

First, no matter how perfect a game is, unless the players don't have a choice in the mechanical aspects of their characters (for example, the original Zelda for NES, or the SNES one...) there will be always possibilities of min/maxing characters into peaks of concrete parts of the game, because there will always be an "optimal build for...".

Now, why does a munchkin break a game completely? Because if you have five players and a GM, all six of them have the same right ot enjoy the game. That means if one of them has enough combat capacity to make the other four players completely irrelevant, of those four the ones who made combat characters will see themselves redundat and useless. And if the GM scales up the encounters to the munchkin character, the other characters will simply see themselves unable to do anything against those enemies. Thus, a munchkin forces the whole group to play the way he plays... and when he suddenly realizes he is, again, on par with everybody, he'll try to regain his "advantage"... or leave the game, because "it's boring".

Strangely enough, most muchkins are centered around direct combat in the physical variant. Meanwhile, social munchkins can make things... very very nastier (the players remembering well played Setites in the old World of Darkness should see my point easily... the true power, as the chaos sorcerers like to say, is not to lead a company of chaos space marines. Is to pull the strings of the leader of that company...).

As I said before, if he is the only figting character, then by all means, he is welcome. But you know, if your group is made by three social and/or mental specialists, and a bodyguard with spying capacities, making yourself a character only able to fight will mean you will act only in 1/5 (that is 20%) of the game sessions. And most of your "play" will consist on rolling dices. So if you want the spot and to be a big badass, go play some single-player shooter, because (without trying to offend) you will enjoy it much more.

PD: Edit: just left to the date of the post is the "edit" option, signoftheserpent. Please avoid double posts, they are confusing ^^.

signoftheserpent said:

I'm afraid I disagree with this point here. Combat isn't really the main focus of Rogue Trader, it's commerce, bartering, and trade (albeit on an interstellar scale). If you're going to create a character who's awful at bartering, scares most businessmen and is generally no good at negotiating, you can't complain that he's no good at a game with 'trader' in the name.

Argus Van Het said:

I just don't believe there are people who deliberately set out to break a game and/or spoil everyone else's fun. There may be people who look at the mechanical processes involved in the game and seek to use them to best advantage - ie to create the best Explorator. But to single them out by use of the term munchkin, while they may present a problem to the rest of the group, is disingenuous and unfair. If the rules allow someone to create a character that's overpowered then the answer isn't to say the player is working against the spirit of the game (assuming the GM hasn't laid down any ground rules as to what's allowed and not allwed and given good reasons for doing so), but to address why the rules exist that way in the first place.

Anything else is just confrontational. You can't have the GM then respond by setting the player's character up to fail because that's unfair to the player. You could come out and say the character is overpowered, but then you would have to admit the rules are somewhat to blame for allowing the possibility. As much a part of the rpg equation as roleplaying there is roll playing - there are rules and dice rolls because it's a game as well as a drama. I think some people tend to forget this.

What do the designers think about these issues? Are they deliberate? Are they unfortunate and unforeseen (playtesting should include precisely these sorts of characters as a means to test the system to breaking point). Maybe this sort of character is entirely acceptable.

Dvil said:

At least part of the problem here is the use of point buy stats, which I don't think have any prospect of being balanced in a game of Rogue Trader. With rolled stats, you hardly ever have more than two stats rated higher than 15 above base, and this character has more than one max stat.

Also, being Enormous is a pretty massive disadvantage in a fight, (and in many other circumstances) since it means you take two extra hits from every attacker with a Full Auto weapon.

signoftheserpent said:

On the other hand, it's a role playing game. The role the player has chosen for himself is of a huge combat monster who will be identified at a glance as a very dangerous dude.

If you walk around with a big shoot me sign all the time it's hardly the GM's fault that you're going to get shot, is it? It's like in chess, big pieces are big targets,.

How do the players in your group handle similar combat situations where there's one participant who is clearly a bigger threat? Why should the GM be expected to play the NPCs under his command any worse? If you can't take being the focus of combat, dont make yourself the focus of combat.