Hello all!

Long time lurker, first time poster...

Anyways, I play as a techpriest in my local group. I love the Adeptus Mechanicus and have almost every 40K book there is to have on the subject. Lately, my favorite Tech-Priest character ascended to Ascension! YAY!

HOWEVER, happiness for me aside, I am increasingly worried that my character may be accidentally overpowered. At rank 4 he took the Secutor route and became an Adept Militant. Having ascended, I am a Magos Militant. But I am worried about what my choices have added up to. . . am I too dangerous for the rest of the group or the health of the game?

Concerned stats/issues:

Toughness 90: 40 w/ good roll (GM let us put our rolls into which ever stat we wanted), +30 from Rank Advancements, +10 from Machinator Array, +10 from mining helot augmetics.

Strength 72: 32 base, +20 rank advancements (XP expensive!), power armor's +20.

Inherently these stats aren't bad, but when combined with the gear and the Mago's abilities:

Power-fist (residue from being a normal acolyte) with Best-quality Muscle Grafts gotten for free by an Ascended Magos = 2d10 + (3x STR)! Ouch!

Power-armor (Magos starting gear) with Magos' armor-monger ability = 10 AP! With 90 toughness!

To add more AP (which the rules are unclear on) I met the prerequisites for Exemplar of Metal and so have the Machine (7) trait!

I also have a servo arm and a breacher drill, each of which is rather devastating in combat.

Needless to say, I have some disadvantages:

Last mission, my group delivered me to the Cult disguised as a vending machine; it was the only thing we could think of to get me in there.

I dodge about as well as an "anvil on a high-gravity world" as I have heard it so eloquently put.

And I have a Fellowship of 04...lol.

Is my character a danger to the group? Or is he just bein' a real Magos Militant?

Our Tech Priest isn't nearly as beefy as yours, but he didn't take the alternate rank.

He's got some 5 or 6 mechadendrites, a metal arm of some kind, recently got brain implants, has Dragon Scale Armor (And like, an 80 tough or something like that), Machine trait 1, and a nasty, horrible Great Omnisian Axe. He also recently acquired two new servoskulls and a guard servitor of kinds.

He also dodges about as well as you do, so, just like with you, Meltas and full power Plasmas are still really scary...as are great power weapons.

I want to use your character against my party That will be one tough combat. I think people would be preparing Lascannons just to have a chance to damage you.

I think when you're this tough things that can challenge you in combat are things that are a threat to a whole planet.

I, personally, think it's fine. An magos militant should be an absolute monster in combat. I predict, though, that you will find that to be less of a boon in an Ascension game. I wouldn't worry about balancing with other players, they will, most likely, all have certain things that they are good at, and will have their moments to shine.

Purely out of curiosity, how often do you get the chance to use that breacher? I can't see anyone in their right mind getting close enough to you to get hit with that.

I also have a servo arm and a breacher drill, each of which is rather devastating in combat.

As long as you remember that you can use only one attack action per round, it all sounds fine. You're pretty hard to destroy, though not exactly impossible - most enemies look towards alternative ways of getting rid of throne agents and a building collapsing on top of you might probably slow you down. Other than that, enemies incapable of figuring out they shouldn't get into melee with you fully deserve what they get.

By the way, that powerfist of yours would deal quadruple original strength bonus. The Unnatural Strength doubles your strength score's tens digit for the purpose of calculating the Strength Bonus and the power fist uses two times your strength bonus for calculating damage. Since they don't both affect the same score (SB versus weapon damage), they aren't affected by the addition of multipliers rule. Another example of this happening is one of the Daemons from Disciples who has both Unnatural Toughness and Daemonic. With a toughness score somewhere in the sixties, he gets a 12 TB and reduces damage from non-holy weapons by 24. Ouch.

My players would have no problem defeating you... several krak missiles, a truck and ten tonne of concrete will sort u out

Ur not OP esp since u cant sneak or dodge or talk to anyone but a techpreist!

Yea, I have to say that whilst you are tough to kill, you aren't OP, because you are awful in other areas. As long as the others are as good in their areas as you are in being tough, it's all good.

I thank you all for your input, and I am glad to know that it isn't OP, but OP isn't the only problem.

The initial problem I see with my character is thusly: in order to threaten me, the GM (just tonight) gave the enemies a Lascannon in one encounter and a Plasma Cannon in another. Admittedly, the fact that they have access to these weapons is part of the plot, but he said he wouldn't have USED them (we would've just found them during our investigation) except for me. This caused two issues:

Encounter 1:

a) I took cover behind a LOS-blocking pillar as my surprise action. Result: Guardsman in my group got a face-full of laser and spent a fate-point to reroll dodge.

b) After shooting with a boltgun a bit, the pillar I was hiding behind disintegrated from a lascannon blast and I relocated behind an altar-slab, which proceeded to block all the shots (losing 1 AP for every lascannon blast that hit it *groan*) until our Vindicare ate the lascannoner and his gun with a well-placed shot to the powerpack.

Encounter 2:

a) It's a frakking Plasma Cannon! It blew almost all of us up. I spent all 3 fate points and burned one, while our poor interrogator actually "died" horribly through all of his fate-points, and lived only because we were fighting in a Medbay and some GM fiat, which is forgiveable.

I kind of feel bad about all this; I could tone him down but I love the little guy to death; I even bought a techmarine fig and attached a powerfist, servitor-servo-arm (breacher drill) and one of his mechadendrites just so I would have the appropriate miniature.

b) After shooting with a boltgun a bit, the pillar I was hiding behind disintegrated from a lascannon blast and I relocated behind an altar-slab, which proceeded to block all the shots (losing 1 AP for every lascannon blast that hit it *groan*) until our Vindicare ate the lascannoner and his gun with a well-placed shot to the powerpack.

"Block" the shots? I can't see a simple altar to have more than, say, 10 AP, which is pretty much nothing for a lascannon to burn through. Sure, it'll be damaged relatively slowly (though I could see a rule that every [cover AP] points of damage, the cover is reduced by 1 instead of just 1 for every shot that does at least [cover AP] damage), but it won't protect you that well either.

The initial problem I see with my character is thusly: in order to threaten me, the GM (just tonight) gave the enemies a Lascannon in one encounter and a Plasma Cannon in another. Admittedly, the fact that they have access to these weapons is part of the plot, but he said he wouldn't have USED them (we would've just found them during our investigation) except for me. This caused two issues:

So, did they have time to get armed? If so, it's just normal roleplaying - the enemies are using stuff that is at their disposal when it becomes necessary to do so.

I know most games try to balance encounters so that everyone has something to do and noone gets overwhelmed, but Ascension tends towards very asymmetrical characters - just try to find an encounter that evenly challenges a Vindicare, a social Interrogator and a Sage. In many cases, standing back and trying not to get killed is all characters can do.

I understand the problem having played White Wolfs Scion for a while (where characters can be asymmetrical in the extreme). It really can ruin things a bit when some characters become so out of the ordinary in some situations that the only thing to do is to send that character in and then sit and wait until he fixes things. You risk a situation where only one player is active at a time (both in and out of combat), because the others are so far outstripped that there is no point in them showing their faces.

The game won't suffer from a little of this, some character shine in different areas, but if it goes to far it really does become a problem. But it should be a lot easier to fix in DH. Is your character the only one with power armor? If so, maybe its time that the other characters starts searching for the same thing. Or perhaps some power-fields if power armor does not fit the characters style. Luckly there are loads of stuff in 40k that could be used to even the field a bit.

You will still be a lot tougher than the rest of them, but as long as the rest can get on roughly the same level you then things become a lot more fun.

Remind your GM about krak grenades and other small anti-tank weapons. (The kind a well armed xenos/chaos group might have.)

One way to tone down a Magos is to not let the machine traits armor stack with armor.

I will get back to you all when I ask the "Rules Questions" people if the Machine trait stacks with armor. I would like to know definitively!

Magos Militant Arcturus said:

I got an answer back:

It does indeed stack, but the armor would need to be re-sized for such a large, Exemplar-of-Metal-esque person!

Yep. They stack. You are huge, mighty, murderous, slabby and **** hard to hurt! You are also vulgarly obvious and about as subtle as an Ork in a bomb storage bunker... The character has very obvious strengths and weaknesses. I don't see a real problem with him as-is. It requires anti-tank weaponry to hurt you (or merely anti-vehicular weaponry out of the power armour) but you can lose Fellowship contests with dead guys! You already covered the "how to hide MechaGodzilla?" angle in your earlier post. So your character is a near-unstoppable killing machine with some well polished technical skills and a fair amout of knowledge packed onto his hard drives.... And that is about it. Trust me, that is a big limitation in high level play. Note that the gross-beyond-measure Vindicare utterly lacks for social skills and talents, lacks peer and good rep almost entirely.... So they get to be the most broken bullcrap immaginable in the fight scenes (Vastly better performance than even the TT version of the Vindicare!) but between fights they pretty much sit in the corner like the Inquisitor's pet dog, which they largely ARE!

Ah, was wondering if Machine and normal armour combined... and apparently it does. So that means that the Magos I statted up has a damage reduction of 33 (before Pen obviously).

Ok, it was me just messing about with the Ascension character building to see what results could come out (and so designed mainly to see how stupid a character I could create), and that was after 50,000 xp had been spent, but it is still hideous. And he actually could Dodge (not well for a 50,000 xp character, but dodging on 48 or less for a 250kg Magos seems impressive).

Didn't know **** (he had his staring skills + dodge and then two mastered skill sets) though.

go for assassin -> maltek stalker -> magos and voilá you got your can dodge magos with insane armor and don't forget about the unnatural toughnes*2 with some good toughness values

(ofcourse he is very radical by then and is not in good terms with tech priests.... but well... everything comes for a price)

I would say the character is fine from a "game balance" point of view but might impinge upon group dynamics too much. Your very presence completely prevents any sort of stealth and it also hampers many diplomatic tactics (a la "If you say you're here to talk then why did you bring that tank-priest?") So you kind of, by your very presence, swing everything towards a battle type of mindset. The very fact of how enormous, unnatural, and dangerous you appear combined with your clanking machine parts pushes the game perhaps unduly towards combat... the very type of situation you excel in. Other characters can barely compete (unless they're a Vindicare and can dodge everything forever) because a single hit from the kind of anti-tank weaponry that is used to damage you will obliterate them.

Compare this to said Vindicare, or Crusader, etc. While they certainly can outshine other characters in combat, their very presence doesn't disrupt alternate modes of operation.

Personally I'd just ask other players if they thought your tech-priest was reducing their enjoyment or not. Open discourse solves many problems.

At Last Forgot said:

I wouldn't be so sure of that considering that being heavily modified is normal for people that high up in the ad-mech. Meaning that as long as you can give them a good reason as to why a Magos has decided to visit them himself you should still be able handle diplomacy unless they don't like the Ad-mech.

As long as he leaves the obvious weapons at home (looking at you Omessian Axe), he would just look like an especialy powerful Magos. One of my players has a tech priest character with a lot of modifications, and most of it can fold down and be "concealed" in polite company. Do they know he has somethign under there? Sure, but it would be impolite to ask, and if he;'s not advertiseing, people are good at ignoring it. Besides, its not as if he's going to be leading the negotiations and having a heavy there is a great form of passive intimidation and a sure sign of status