No, not life span. The average life expectancy of an average Space Marine. Or an average Marien arriving at Rank 1 at Fortress Erioch.

I guess this is form of asking the question: how deadly is your game going to be? Will on average one marine die per mission? Or one marine during the entire campaign at most? Something inbetween?

Alex

Progeniod glands require 5 years and 10 years to mature. So if the average active service is less than 10 years the Chapter is in trouble - depending on the distribution.

In any case I imagine the typical SM serves for decades. The Imperial guard fight wars of attrition. SMs perform surgical strikes. Most of their missions should overwhelm the opposition and be loseless.

Of course missions in a RPG need to keep players interested. Always overwhelming the opposition would get old quick. RPG missions therefore need to be very high risk compared to 'typical' SM missions. The level of this risk is up to the GM to judge.

Imo the impression of risk is the most important thing to maintain. If the players have the impression their characters were at risk and they only just survived - that is my goal. Of course a degree of actual risk aids this greatly.

I'm hoping that Marine death is few and far between.

Thanks to True Grit and Fate Points, I hope that most Marines won't be suffering the worst Critical Damage rolls. Low critical damage rolls can take them out of the fight for a few days, or for the rest of the mission, and I'm hoping that some of them get some bionics from the occasionally deadly encounter. A lot of encounters, I feel, a Marine should survive relatively unscathed (basically, just needing some patching up from the Apothecary with the narthecium), and a lot of big, set-piece encounters, I'm hoping, will be survived with the use of Fate Points (not burning them) and minor Critical Damage (temporary injuries).

If I use something that does enough damage to kill Marines outright (like some major weapons), I'm trying to make it fairly clear (since the Marines are pretty smart and trained at this stuff) that they shouldn't stand around and take that kind of firepower. They should be taking out big threats before they arise (like killing the crew of the Hammerhead, not facing down the guns) or taking cover from this stuff, rather than braving it out in the open.

Too true. Don't want to kill them too quickly. Start them with increasing threats to get the players in the sense that they will need to do more than just hack and slash their way through hordes. Educate them through fire that they need to be smart about this. Remind them that they aren't mindless killing machines and they have a greater purpose than dieing for the emperor. Make the other guys die.

E

And yet I read somewhere that few space marines get to be centuries old but those that do are honoured veterans. With service in the Deathwatch you get to face unusual odds even for a space marine (oblivion's edge?) but otoh you also get access to specialized training and equipment.

Alex

Simple equation for the life expectancy of Space Marine, in a chapter at least, assuming said chapter is pretty much breaking even.

The time it takes for Neophyte to go from a new Neophyte at about the age of 17 to a full battle brother is the time it takes for a tenth of the Chapter to die. I don't see anywhere where it says how old that is though which kind of throws a spanner in the works.

Looking at the cannon in the Codex Spacemarines, a Battle-Brother spends time in Devastator Squads and then Assault Squads before entering a Tactical squad. They will have fought in many campaigns before being picked for Deathwatch. With this in mind they may well be at least half a century old maybe older before finding themselves in the Deathwatch.

I might be wrong, lord knows I have been before......javascript:f_valida_respuesta();

Out of the last 5 sessions of Deathwatch, they party as a whole has been reduced to almost critical wounds.

In my last session, a player needed to burn a fate point when he was targeted by a lascannon from an Obliterator and was out of normal Fate points for the session (was near the end of the session).

So far, not too shabby.

Fresnel said:

This sums up my feelings in a nutshell- do something to make the players feel their characters have the capacity to die- the more horribly the better. This gives them drive to be smart about planning, careful in how they do things, and gives them a greater sense of accomplishment when they're done.

Too much actual death in the party, and people tend to stop caring about their characters and their backgrounds, and just play the stereotype of whatever class they're taking on. Or worse, they start to feel that they're playing against you and start trying to munchkin it up all over the place.

I've got my campaign set up to run for about 25 sessions. My aim is for at least one character to burn his last fate point during the final battle. My ideal campaign ends with everyone playing the same character they started with and everyone on 0HP