Our Blood Angel uses his Blood Frenzy chapter ability at every posible opportunity in combat, always joining it with frenzy and battle rage, he also plays his assault marine very closely to blood angels lore, and he do it in perfect role play way.

Our Space Wolf Tactical brother used his Wolf Senses ability once for all gaming sessions till they reached rank 5, (Unnatural perception) after that he is using it in sporadic situations.

My players went with different ideas how to change this situation. There were few nice ones, as to implement sagas from SW codex and such.

But Blood Angels player went with other idea,

- first to change Blood Frenzy rank upgrades (rank 3,5,7 bonuses to chapter abilities) to primarch's curse dependant ones (curse level 1,2,3). To explain, rank doesn't change how Blood Frenzy work, only Black Rage. U earn enough insanity as Blood angel to reach level 2 primarch's curse your Blood Frenzy gets upgraded.

We test it now, It works very well with Blood Angels Blood Frenzy and Black Templars Righteous Zeal, it absolutely don't work with Dark Angels and Ultramarines abilities witch remains rank dependant in our games.

Any thoughts ?

boruta666 said:

I like the houserule idea that you came up with and it seems to work out well with the fluff, however, why does your Space Wolf player only roll his checks every now and then?

The Space Wolf player in my game ALWAYS rolls that **** Awareness check at the first sign of ANY trouble. Especially since he can re-roll the check if he fails.

Really it depends on how your Space Wolf player is playing his character. In my games, the Space Wolf player notices things before even the Techmarine with the Auspex does.

Couse Elric Redclaw (our space wolf tactical) have now 70 Perception, awareness+20, heightened senses +20 and on my GM watch if he would take his helm off for to long it would be like asking for called shot.

boruta666 said:

Then it's his decision to "metagame" to prevent called shots from his GM. Most Space Wolves HATE having their helmets on simply because it handicaps them. If I were said player, I would still play without the helmet on because that's what my character would do, called shots be damned!

Smell danger? It's not incredibly hard to simply put on your helmet at the first sign of combat. have it slung at your belt, or have it mag locked to your armor when you don't wear it?

Tidomann said:

Yeah, Space Wolves can smell all kinds of weird things that you wouldn't think they could... like Chaos. Doesn't matter the source.

Especially if the novels are to be believed, their senses are more reliable than the autosenses provided by the power armors helmet. I think this could have been more accurately portrayed in the rules for them; perhaps granting them the abilities of the power armors helmet even if they aren't wearing it?

The player in my group never puts that helmet on unless he has to (vacuum, etc), so he receives the benefits even in combat. He's even managed to avoid ambush by smelling out the enemy before they opened fire. Pretty handy ability if you ask me.

metagame ? nope, comon sense yeah. He isn't smurf to have plot armour so high than he can survive headshoot.

to have 8AP on head or not to have ? easy answer.

also we think about special modified power armour helmet for Space Wolves, that do not hinder their senses so much.