While I like the whole hordes thing as it makes large fights manageable I got a few issues with it.

The rules say that you can't dodge or parry a melee attack from a horde. Rendering talents like Dodge and such useless. Of course picturing a giant walking through a crowd of peasants flailing at him futily with their puny fists is a nice thing. But so is the nimble opponent capable of dodging and weaving through loads of bad guys, parrying multiple attacks while he does so (Yes, I love the Jackie Chan movies, can you tell . The fact is that when you can't dodge or parry, no Space Marine will survive entering melee for long. Making assault based Marines a tad less fun to play. We made a house rule that you CAN parry and dodge. it made my life as Apothecarcy a bit easier (though I kept failing those healing rolls) and our jump marine a bit less squishy.

What do you think about the you can't dodge/parry rule?

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Sister Callidia said:

Personally, I think an appropriate alternate approach might be allowing such defensive options, but with a penalty - a penalty equal to the magnitude of the horde being fought (rounded down to a multiple of 10 for ease of calculation if necessary), so standing in the midst of a Magnitude 20 horde imposes a -20 penalty on Dodge and Parry tests, because there are so many attacks. It would allow extremely skilled and well-equipped characters to weather even large hordes through their abilities rather than just toughness and armour (a Black Templar Assault Marine with the maximum possible WS of 75 and a Storm Shield against a Magnitude 50 horde would still successfully parry 45% of the time).

Considering that with hordes, it's usually only through the volume of attacks that damage occurs, I don't think one dodge per round would cut it.

An Assault Marine's tactic should thus be getting in, inflicting enough damage to force a break test within one or two rounds and getting out again.

Cifer said:

And given that Assault Marines can have a starting talent that allows, on a successful attack on a Charge action against a Horde, an extra 1d10 magnitude damage... yea, they can do that pretty easily (if you decide to go for being good against Hordes rather than individual foes).

Sister Callidia said:

I think the whole point of Horde rules is when you want to minimize a large scale "flavour" combat and keep the game from bogging down. If there are a lot of bad guys (dozens? Hundreds?) You have no where to dodge to. If you want to maintain all the minutia of combat simply don't use Hordes, roll up a hundred little NPC's or give them all the same stats (even easier).

Remember the Horde's magnitude is representational of the number of opponents, not the number. So a Magnitude 30 Horde of spastic cultists might represent 100+ cultists, but realistically 90% are going to miss an Astartes. These rules represent you wading into the cultists and slaying them left and right - mowing them down, without making you take 100 rounds of dice rolling to do it. Even if you were to kill 10 every round, 10 rounds is a lot of dice rolling.

Thanks for the answers but I am not done yet

I assume that plenty of you had the opportunity to play/test the free introduction adventure. I am curious how your assault marines compared to the equation against the hordes. I know that I was rather busy fixing everybody up all the time and that was WITH allowing to dodge/parry. I wonder how popular assault marines will prove to be.

On the reasons why this house rule makes sense to us at least. When you fight a large number of opponents it is hard for them to fight you effective. I believe it is an optimum of 4 people as more people will just get in each others way. So your Space Marine will have to effectively fight 4 people at the same time. If Jackie Chan can do it, so can a Space Marine being the epithome of combat prowess. The rules stand as they are with the only exception being the ability to parry/dodge. Perhaps we can include the size of the horde. Every margin of succes dodging reducing the effective size of the horde.

So if the Space Marine has two margins of succes against a size 50 horde, the damage he sustains is as if he was hit by a size 30 horde. Which still could hurt a lot but not the big autschie of a size 50 horde.

Alternately the horde still manages to strike the Marine, but the damage it causes is reduced by an amount equal to how well the character dodges. Thus if the Marine successfully makes a dodge check at -50, he suffers 50% less damage than he would have otherwise. This would certainly maintain the flavor of "having nowhere to dodge" while granting the Marine some benefit of having a high skill.

Sister Callidia said:

Completed Final Sanction today. The main problem wasn't in fighting the hordes. These pose no real threats to the Space Marines anyway but only exist to soften them up. The real problem was the Genestealers. One of my players had a modified Marine, a Space Wolf Blood Claw. He charged a GS and got pwned. Eight Genestealers in Thorsholt Manor was far too deadly.

For the hordes, he did inflict much less damage than the Devastator Marine but I think it's in general more satisfying for the player if he knows his PC cuts his path through the enemy lines rather than mowing them down from afar, so it's all good.

Alex

ak-73 said:

Really? My group cleaned up with only a few injuries. They concentrated on one or two genestealers at a time, one marine forcing it to use its reaction, with another following up to wound/kill it.

I would suggest having 2-3 of the genestealers get distracted smashing their way through the paniced nobles for a round or two, because 8 at once is a bit much, still Genestealers go down fast when you're using teamwork to take them out.

GalagaGalaxian said:

and boltguns. lots of boltguns.

GalagaGalaxian said:

My players have some long-standing familiarity with the world of 40K but no detail knowledge. That led the Blood Claw Marine (I allowed for self-made simplified chars based on the pregen's level of abilities) to charge a Genestealer; which nearly cost his life. The Long Fang Marine made a very bad roll with the Bolter and racked up killing dozens of nobles and then got charged by another Genestealer. Another Genestealer managed to between the marines because noone was covering the rafters in the Gov's mansion.

Yep, they didn't act particularly smart but I was lenient since it was just a demo play.

Anyway as soon as a GS makes it into close combat, a single marine is on the losing end. And they can charge long distance and have very high dodge and WS values.

For players who are not 100% familiar with the setting and assume a standard encounter, this was totally lethal. If I hadn't been lenient, it would have been total team wipeout.

I don't recommend such lethal NPCs in introductory scenarios. Anyway, those players won't underestimate Genestealer anymore.

Alex

I ran Final Sanction a few weeks ago. Fighting Hordes was no problem at all. Actually over the whole mission only one (!) horde ever even managed to hurt a marine. Most of them were shot down in short order by combined bolter and heavy bolter fire. Although I have to say none of my players were stupid or reckless enough to wade into a middle of dozens of armed foes just like that. Instead they fought like real warriors should, using ample cover, outflanking and ambushing enemies and so on.

The genestealers were harsh, but they are supposed to be able to rip Termies to bits so they are supposed to be harsh. All my players knew this and thus gave them wide berth... They still got hurt, of course, but most of the time the fight went like this:

"You spot a genestealer charging at you a few dozen meters away"

"Okay, I'll fire full auto... (rolls dice with +40 BS) Two levels of success."

"Roll 2d10+7, tearing three times. I'll check the hit locations."

"Right, its 18, 20 and 22."

"Okay, your burst rips through the genestealers armored carapace, the bolts exploding inside and sending the blood and pieces of carapace flying. The mauled form of the stealer collapses in heap, twicthes for a moment but doesn't seem to be getting up..."

Polaria said:

The problem is that I have been roling the dodges mostly in the twenties.

What did your fight against the Broodlord go? I only presented a watered-down version due to players being severely bruised already and being under time constraints. It was just a demo after all.

Alex

ak-73 said:

Broodlord turned out to be pretty epic. I had 6 marines who decided to enter the factory in three pairs, each pair covering each other. Instead of trying to depict a labyrinthine maze of pipes and machinery with map I went freeform with no maps or models and had the players roll Intelligence and Perception checks to navigate the factory so that they kept covering each other. Unsurprisingly some of them missed the checks and got lost at which point the stealers and the Broodlord attacked. The others then had to continue checking Int and Per each round to find the lost pair and get a line of sight to enemies.

The players made a choice of pretty much ignoring the stealers and all trying to get Broodlord first... Which turned out to be the right solution. Finally the turning point was when the heavy bolter finally got LOS to Broodlord and slaughtered it in two rounds of intensive autofire. None of the marines died but all except for one tactical were badly hurt and they ended up spending at least half a dozen fatepoints (some of them burned permanently). Once the Broodlord went down they called a manticora strike into the factory and legged it... The logic was that they were too battered to fight the remainding stealers so they called the heavy artillery to kill the stealers by levelling the whole factory compound and trusted being able to run out before the first missile hit. A few fatepoints had to be used to make it, but it made for spectacular ending.

Sister Callidia said:

Yes and no. Assault marines can't break hordes by themselves as quickly as Tacticals and, especially, Devastators. However, my players found use for them in dealing with weakened hordes. A typical rebel horde in Final Sanction has a magnitude of 30. Wading into that risks getting hit for 3d10+3 damage with no dodge available. Even with soak of 16 this might hurt although its worth bearing in mind that the horde will still have only one attack against each combatant and thus might very well miss. However, when the Tacticals and the Devastators have shot the horde down to maginute of 14 or less there is still a good chance that the horde isn't broken. At that point the Assault marine would wade in, freeing the Tacticals and Devastators to shoot down other hordes. Against a magnitude 14 or less horde Assault marine risks only taking 2d10+3 damage which, considering power armor and unnatural toughness, is likely to be exactly nothing. What is more important is that Assault marine now only needs to do 2 or 3 maginitude points of damage to force a will check at -10 and the horde will autobreak after 7 magnitude points in any case. When I ran the Final Sanction the Kill-Team fighting was a team effort.

That could work, of course we tried to finish of multiple hordes at the same time. Considering the fact that most often we were faced with having to fight several at once.

It made for some heroic fighting that way though. Rather cinematic as the Assault marine charged with blazing jets a horde that was hacking PDF apart. Followed by the Apothecarian and his noisy chainsword. It allowed for some interesting maneuvering around which made the game more 'fun' to us.

ak-73 said:

You must be much luckyer with your genestealers than mine, in RT i had a whole cave full of genestealers and at no point during the game was i able to roll under a 75 to hit for anything. i was certain i was going to force someone to burn a fate point to survive, but the explorers walked in, slaughtered genestealers and left. (now when i phased in some necron warriors, that was a completely different matter)

Fizzywig said:

Lol, the bad luck streak was all on my Space Wolf player's side. Rolled badly and even when he did hit, I managed to always dodge easily. And I had given his PC Swift Strike. Plus Lordshelm Genestealers did 2d10+12, Pen 5, Rending Claws. Ouch. Major Ouch.

Alex