Has anyone else had a problem with their Kill Team being hurt too easily?

I ran a three man team (not pregens, with an extra 1000xp) through the opening fight with the rebels in Final Sanction. One member, our Devastator took massive wounds, nearly moving into Critical Wounds. I only placed 3 hordes of the base rebels, the 2 heavy stubber teams in the towers and the rebel leader. Was it that I threw too much at them? Just bad luck on high damage rolls, or have others had this problem too?

To help them recover, I'm considering giving the Autosanguine talent to all Marines for free.

How your players fight is just as important as what they fight, if not more so.

All of the 40K RPG games rely on smart tactics by players to be survivable.

So your assessment is just that they needed to take advantage of cover better?

Marines are pretty tough but the horde rules are unforgiving if they get in a bad spot.

Some tips:

- the horde rules support a blitz attack. if all the kill-team pile on grenades/full-auto onto the same horde you have a much better chance of breaking it by forcing morale tests. This tends not to work with tyrannids.

- cover can seriously augment armour if you get in a slugging match with a ranged horde.

- Apothecaries with a narthecium and the improved medicae ability are awesome. A marine got healed 20 wounds after one vicious engagement in a game I ran (hardy so he was lightly wounded, int bonus of 5 for apothecary plus d5 for his ability, rolled max then doubled for narthecium. If you have no apothecary then one of the kill team may need to pick up some medicae and requisition a narthecium. He will be limited to double is int bonus but that is still pretty good.

- fate points can be spent for d10 wounds apiece and marines start with plenty. Encourage players to use them wisely to prevent permanent burning.

- marines all have true grit and pain suppressors in their armour so even when they start taking crits they don't really care too much unless they die. Plus without horrible crits you won't pick up any gnarly bionics to show off your battle scars.

- there is an ultramarines librarian ability that heals but it is not available straight away.

- hardy and autosanguine are useful talents to speed up healing.

- wounds are pretty expensive but toughness tends to be fairly cheap (middle cost for everyone except techmarine for whom it is cheap). Getting TB to 5(10) early will stop a lot of damage in the long term when you factor in unnatural toughness. A techmarine who makes it a priority could easily get a toghness bonus of 14-16 with a machinator array. Not to be sniffed at.

Cromwell does a pretty good job summing up what the players options are.

Might I ask what the magnitude of these hordes were, and the general tactics (was the dev standing in the open, did they all hit him, etc.)?

If there was cover, what ap did you give it?

Were you accounting for the loyalist PDF in any way, or was it just background?

While I am not sure if Final Sanction says this, in Oblivion's Edge, it states that if you ahve less than 4 players, you should halve the encounter sizes. Perhaps you are running things a bit heavy.

I my opinion, I would say that SM are as survivable as they need to be.

The 3 main Hordes were Magnitude 30, the heavy stubber teams were 15.

There was cover, and the Devastator was behind it, though I gave the heavy stubber teams a clearer line of sight. The AP was 8.

I probably should have thrown less at them, and remembered to have the PDF attack as well.

I'm gonna give it a few more tries and see if it was just a bad day / bad GMing situation.

I would say the clear line of sight to the heavy weapons team is what got him.

Thats a bad idea, those things hurt, especially with the extra d10s from being in hordes.

I would chalk it up to bad decisions and rough rolls for the players than anything.

EDIT: And when I say bad idea, I mean on the players part, he should know better. Unless he was gunning for them, in which case I'm surprised he didn't take em out first. Perhaps mention a well placed krak grenade could take out the heavy weapon teams fortification?

When I ran Final sanction I only had three players and didn't really tone down the enemies much as my players were pretty experienced with the system.

That said they did burn four fate points over the course of the mission.

I think Deathwatch will run better when you do put the players under pressure. They will get to feel like awesome gods of war while being severely beaten up by unnumbered foes. Obviously the trick is to avoid a TPK that ruins a campaign but with fate points this is not too tough.

Another tip is to give players an idea of the magnitude of a horde or at least give them awareness/common lore (war) rolls to estimate. This allows them to get the most effect from their attacks particularly in terms of bringing magnitude down below the tens threshold. Dropping a horde from 21 to 19 magnitude denies them d10 damage and a shooting attack whereas dropping a horde from 36 to 34 has no effect. Marines live for war so it doesn't stretch credulity that the can take in this level of data on the battlefield and turn it to good use.

In my run-through the players rapidly figured out that a frag grenade thrown into a heavy weapons nest would trigger a morale test and this became standard practice in dealing with stubber teams.

BeyondFandom said:

Consider the effects of the True Grit Talent. Marines may be easily hurt (not that easily I think) but difficult to kill. Unless they face Genestealers, that is.

Alex

Cromwell Bootstrap said:

I defininitely found that hordes could really cut a Marine to ribbons given the right situation, and my players started to figure it out, too. We ran Final Sanction as kind of a test of the new rules and abilities and were much better equipped both to play and to GM with our 'real' campaign as a result. It's all situational- at first the Marines felt like they were invulnerable because a) their prior characters were mid level DH guys and they weren't used to über stats and b) the devestator with unrelenting devestation was able to break the first horde they encountered in a single round (7 hits x 2 + explosive 1 for 15 wounds out of 30), and then obliterate the second horde within the next two rounds. But slowly and surely the wounds infliced by the hordes started to mount- 5 here, 3 there, 10 there, even with the apothecary in the team halfway through one of them (the devestator who got caught up in hand to hand) was critically injured.

As the game progressed, it became more natural for the team to really start using tactics, make use of cover and concealment, trying to find flanks or rearguard action where they could engage the hordes, and looking for PDF troops to rally and make use of. They also started coordinating their actions better- the HB nest with a clear line of sight on them- the devestator engages, one tac throws a frag, the other uses supressing fire to make them duck and give them a nice -20 or so bonus to return fire. The assault marine was busy lookng for a path to the nests where he could use tactical advance and then engage via his jump pack. Meanwhile all the marines stick to cover to protect themselves from the rest of the hordes while they take out the key target.

From the GM side, it got easier to make the enemy hordes seem smart and challenging without pouring the fire on the kill team and wiping them out.

I totally agree with Cromwell here- keep the pressure on without the TPK and the players really start to feel that they're powerful- they know they're vulnerable and can explode in a matter of rounds, but to survive such odds can be really rewarding.

Side note: I am not seeing medicae available in the general or deathwatch advances so how would anyone but an apothecary get it since it is an advanced skill

Medicae turns up at rank 8 on general but nowhere else.

Even techmarines don't get it and one would have thought that installing bionics might need a bit of medical knowledge.

I reckon it should be takeable as an elite advance though. Given the small size of a Kill Team there must be a greater level of cross-training in the Deathwatch than elsewhere.

It seems retarded that a rank 1 Tech Priest from Dark Heresy can train medicae but a tech marine with 13,000 xp spent still does not have access to the basics of the skill

I haven't read the adventure (we played through the first fight), but our first encounter was at night. The distance and visibility penalties combined with cover and our own badassness made it very tough for the enemy to hurt us. I did get pounded by the heavy weapon guys after they rolled really well, but that was about it.

Nakir said:

I'm ruling that as soon as the Techmarine takes the Mechadendrite Use and attaches a Medicae Unit to it that he becomes Trained in Medicae.

A Techmarine has no reason to have Medicae, that is the domain of Apothocaries. Techmarines are focused solely on crafting materials of war for their chapter. Tech Priests will have more access and much more inclination to study a broader range of subjects including Medicae than a Techmarine.

Not knowing the exact situation the players were in, it's hard to say what went wrong. I do know that Hordes can deal a lot of damage, as such I would suggest no more than 1 Horde per PC. You had 5 hordes, 2 of which were heavy weapon; most likely just too many Hordes.

Dan.

ItsUncertainWho said:

I concur. Besides I think the Apothecary is not the most appealing specialty as is, which is a shame. Apos are senior, experienced and battle-hardened marines who have a dangerous but important duty at times. I think talents like Wisdom of the Ancients and Duty unto Death would not have been totally off-base.

Alex

CptCaine said:

This is a good point. With so many hordes the chances of hitting regularly are good and with solid magnitudes they can crank out some impressive damage.

Also 2 magnitude 30 hordes can be more dangerous than a magnitude 60 in certain situations. If the Kill Team blitz the magnitude 60 horde with blast weapons and devestators they can break its morale early and take it out of the fight. It's tougher with the 2 30s as they must split fire and risk breaking neither, or focus on one and accept the fact that one horde will be fully strapped on the next round.

One thing my team did was use their auto-senses extensively to scout areas. Although not stealthy by any means taking a few minutes to observe the enemy from a distant position can give you an edge in co-ordinating a vicious assault.

Cromwell Bootstrap said:

And how your players use auto-sense observe?

One thing to add in particular scenario from when i ran it was that were that many hordes but the PC's didn't have to fight them all at once, which is the important thing.

The PDF barackades are 200m across so with a large (larger than I gave it credit for) Cathedral in the centre. So they are unlikely to be able to be attacked by more than two sides at once. Of course that means the PDF are taking the flak on the other sides so you can build up how close the PDF are to breaking when the Marines get round there and give them chances to rally the pdf.

DW Space Marine said:

Auto senses and the ear and eye implants give the marines +20 to most awareness tests. Marines are trained in awareness already so can easily have an effective skill of 60-70 starting off. The Space Wolf is even better.

The rebels had a perception of 30 and were not trained in awareness giving them a skill of 15. Plus there are lots of them.

The marines almost always notice the rebels before the rebels even get a roll. If the marines stay a good distance away then they can observe troop movements and estimate strengths before making a plan and going in.

Cromwell Bootstrap said:

That's how we handled the encounters with 4 separate IG checkpoints. On the first checkpoint we came in from the side after busting through a buildings wall.

Dan.

I just found another huge problem with that first fight. I wasn't giving them the bonus to hit the Horde based on its Magnitude/Size. They probably would have ended the fight a couple rounds quicker with that.

WHOOPS!