MY group was playing a session tonight and our pysker managed to summon a demon prince from the perils of the warp chart. The black templar(rank 2) in our group activated his solo mode ability Righteous Zeal and charged the demon prince. In the next two rounds he managed to deal 95 wounds with a power axe. As a GM i am wondering the balance of the Righteous Zeal ability that lets him deal this kind of damage and easily dispatch something that is supposed to be a potental TPK encounter. What say you all?

I would say that the Black Templar Abilities seem more in line with what a Grey Knight would have. Seems that the BT's are a bit remiss in their purpose if being so BadAxe against Daemons they aren't crusading into the warp until all daemon kind is gone.

BK abilities seem broken to me. IMHO. No I don't have a quick solution, but something inline with historical templars faith propelling them against insurmountable odds seems good. Key word being against. They should have a chance, but there better be a lot of them and some luck(good dice rolls) with them.

Never been a fan of BT's. They took the thunder away from the Crimson Fists.

E

To be honest? The fights against Master enemies are do ore die affairs. Unlike other rpgs it's not a protracted affair where it goes over several wounds until you slay the beast.

In DW it's either you kill it quickly or it kills you.

Here's what to do: next time when a DP appears you take a 10 for initiative via one Fate Point. You make a thunder charge against any marine equipped with obvious close combat weapons (such as a power axe) if you go first. If you don't go first, survive the attacks and then attack those who have charged you which will be the same as above. Make an all-out attack and expend fate points for killing strikes. You're bound to kill one or two of your PCs that way without them having a chance to parry. Not nice, not fair but if you don't act this way the Daemon Prince will not be a challenge.

Alternatively give him in addition one of the Marks of Chaos.

But no matter what you do - look at the damage of the DP or the Hive Tyrant (4 attacks!). It's either do or die, eat or be eaten.

Alex

He must have gotten some mad RF numbers or something because even if he rolled max damage and he had a str of 100 thats only 76 damage assuming he rolled max damage of corse. And did the DP not get a chance to dodge parry ect?

He got a little above his average damage.. his damage being about 24 + 1d10. His first attack did RF but it was for like 3 or something. The reason he was able to deal so much damage is that his Zeal ability make his attacks ignore toughness of the demon so.. the DP only gets his armor against his attacks( Power weapon reduces armor from 12 to 6). The DP wields an unwieldy weapon for one so it can not parry and it does not have the dodge skill either so it did not dodge.

The standard Daemon Prince (described in the core rulebook) have Dodge +10, giving them a 58% chance to dodge with 3 fate points. Using that your player would have had to be quite lucky to hit both rounds.

But I do agree that the amount of wounds you can get with the RF rules as written are bit too high. It's actually even worse with heavy full auto weapons. I'm using the "houserule" that RF does 1d10 extra damage (which is how it works in Dark Heresy), but that the Deathwatch training means that no confirmations rolls are ever needed (regardless of opponent). This decrease the damage range a fair bit and makes for a bit less of mindless rolling at the same time. Using this rule your player would have done 24 less damage per RF rolled.

If you really think the Righteous zeal ability is too much, I guess you could change it to allow the Black Templar to ignore the Daemonic trait (and thus also the Unnatural Toughness trait for the DP), this would allow the prince to still use his normal toughness.

I think there's a bit of confusion in the book on Daemonic and Unnatural toughness, the trait description for Daemonic say that it should have a number representing the toughness multiplier, but this is not the case for the DP, instead it has Unnatural Toughness(2). Not 100% sure how to interpret that (if they stack or not).

UOMkoll said:

He used Righteous Zeal? That means in the round in which he charged he only had one attack, right? While the DP could strike back with multiple attacks?

Alex

ak-73 said:

That should have been the case. The only exception would be having Preternatural Speed , which I do not think any SM can get as low as rank 2.

-=Brother Praetus=-

gruntl said:

The book says Daemonic and Unnatural Toughness stack, but you're spot on about how the Daemonic trait is missing it's parens. I just interpreted it as UT (2) and Daemonic (1) as his toughness bonus is listed in his stat block as 12 with his trait being 45 (4 for toughness, 4 for unnatural, and 4 for daemonic = 12), but I've yet to see anything where Daemonic is listed with a number in parens, which is kind of annoying.

Also, is Zeal considered a Holy attack? The DPs also have "The Stuff of Nightmares" so they're immune to criticals (save for the ones that kill outright), essentially giving them about 6 or so extra wounds. Nevermind it's Dodge +10 that it could've used (also remember dodge is basic, so you can use it untrained at half your attribute), or if it carried something other than a giant two handed sword that was unwieldy (parhaps two swords given his two weapon wielder and amidexterous traits, or bolt pistols given his astartes weapon training), and the ability to spend fate points (thus potentially surviving any killing blow anyhow, or if he's a CSM turned into a prince perhaps using a chaos version of heroic sacrifice).

I was going to stop there, but this doesn't add up and is nagging me more and more. How many attacks did this BT get? Dealing 24+10=34, assuming he rolls 10's with each attack (average out the chance for RF), means each hit is doing 28 damage (34 - 6 from armor, no toughness). That means at least three hits to bring the guy down, if not 4; 28x2 is only 56, leaving the DP with 24 wounds, the next doing another 28 bringing him to -4, which means with stuff of nightmares he woulnd't really be phased that bad, giving him the ability to fight back. Also, where were his regenerating hordes and CSM allies?

But however you slice it I do tend to agree with Alex here, if you don't kill it in 1-2 rounds you'll end up with dead/crippled players or fate points burned- 85% chance to hit, 2d10+25 pen 6 felling (I assume felling 1?) means your marine probably has a soak about 8 (6 if it doesn't hit the body), meaning you have to roll two threes on 2d10 to bring most players to zero (again nevermind that they get RF due to touched by the fates). Roll better and you can kill your marines outright. That's not even counting the fact that he gets multiple attacks (at least 3 of them, even on a charge), has a +2 to damage due to crushing blow and a +4 to your crit damage due to crippling strike.

Charmander said:

As a side note: Crushing Blow should have been factored into the damage already, I think.

Alex

ak-73 said:

Probably, and even if it doesn't the damage is more than enough. Just used to wierd damage blocks like the CSM hand to hand weapons that seem to miss some bonuses

Charmander said:

I think in general all permanent bonuses are worked into the stat lines, iirc.

Anyway, where is the errata?

Alex