Hello, all!

Yet another question. My players have realized that since they have a few thousand troops at their disposal, keeping a good four dozen on them at any time is a good idea. I've had two encounters neutralized by the house guard, which all-in-all is accurate, but a bit anticlimactic. How do you deal with player escorts? Do you have any fair methods of working with them or around them?

My group has about 500 soldiers, but they never take along large groups, I als designed a group of 4 bodyguards, complete npc's with interesting traits.
They are content with only taking along these four so far but I think future instalments will draw away more forces.

* 4 full fledged NPC's are more fun than 4 dozen guards...

A) You can always use Mass Combat rules from RT or Hordes rules from Deathwatch to run large-scale combat fights, especially if you also give the enemy large numbers of troops/Hordes.

B) You can also run it cinematically, have the House Guard do their stuff in the background, briefly describe shots, commands, screams of the wounded in the background.

C) You can also remind the players that Rogue Traders are all about getting their hands dirty and reaping personal glory rather than rely on underlings too much.

D) There are also locations and situations where taking a a few dozen of your troops with you might be inadvisable or impossible. For example if you're in civilized space, or in tight confines of alien tunnels, or even if there's simply no room for that many troops in a shuttle.

E) Finally you can always simply run the henchmen as a series of Command tests to see how effective they are and how much assistance they provide to the PCs.

Razorboy said:

Never thought of option E... Definitely like that.

I use a combination of option A to E but still finds the tendency of bringing dozens of guards cumbersome to handle, espescially since my players really like to roll for each npc individually. In the future I think I will implement some rules that you can't have more underlings doing effectively in combat than your fellowship bonus or more if you have talents like Air of authority, and requiring a successful command check and a half action (or more if the command is really advanced) to utilize. Otherwise the npc's only inflict glancing hits or miss entirely.

One word: fear. Most NPC's, meaning the house guard, don't have terribly high Willpower, and they don't have fate points to spend. So, anything suitably frightful turns them into a gibbering wreck. When my players decided to land on Oblivion, with thirty meltagun armed goons in tow, they discovered that everything there had a fear rating (because, well, it was all daemonic all the time). The PC's ended up doing nearly all the fighting themselves and they had to put down about 2/3 of their guards due to irreparable mental trauma. Hey, it made me happy.

Cheers,

- V.

Mystrunner said:

Personally I try to avoid giving my players followers. It just isn't my style. There have been a number of interesting ideas for how to handle them suggested already in this thread.

Although I don't have a lot of personal experience with allowing my players to have such a large compliment of flunkies, I would say that the first thing to keep in mind is you gave them these troops, so you shouldn't go looking for ways to arbitrarily remove them again. That's just not fair play. The fear thing is a valid strategy (and it sounds like it taught those players a lesson, too) but I wouldn't want to see that happening every time the PCs brought out their goons.

My reaction to this situation would be to ask myself who my villains are and how they would react to such large numbers on the opposition. Perhaps they'll pool their number and attack en masse? Using rules for mass combat will matter. Perhaps they'll use some sort of psychological warfare to break the ranks with morale checks? I said I wouldn't like to use this every time, but it certainly is a good thing for the players to learn and keep in mind. These mooks aren't heroes. They break easy. Maybe the villain will employ a covert operative of some description to try and circumvent the large security force and steal/destroy/assassinate whatever he wants stolen/destroyed/killed. Maybe he'll dig into his own lair, setting traps and chokepoints designed to combat a large force and then lure the party in, counting on them bringing a few dozen lambs to the slaughter.

Basically, I'd role-play the villain's repsonse to such opposition. This would, of course, depend on how much the villain knows about the party. But I wouldn't make it a cakewalk just because he's previously ignorant of their presence. Remember, a villain with some master plan might not take notice of a rag-tag group of heroes landing on his planet and proceeding to muck up his operation. He probably WILL take note if an independent militia of a few thousand troops shows up in orbit. Whether or not he has any evidence that they're there to stop his plan, that's the kind of thing a good villain will keep an eye on.

Agree that the roleplaying response is the best option.

If you are always accompanied by 20-30 troops acting as your bodyguard, what does that mean to the gameworld.

Some ideas:

1) People won't want to talk to you, large numbers of twitchy armed men are not conducive to conversation.

2) People will assume you are somewhat cowardly, too scared to roam without large numbers of goons. This might in turn affect reputation, especially if they do anything to validate this opinion. This is perhaps the most significant. Let them find out about their poor reputation subtly, maybe jst let them over hear a nickname "Sarvus the Wuss" or something like that.

3) Good luck haggling with a merchant, making new contacts, contacting spies, seducing an attractive man/woman when you have a gaggle of guards hanging over your shoulder.

4) What restuarant/bar/speakeasy/gambling den/other is going to want you as a patron if you bring so many bodyguards, it'll put off the other customers and crowd out their joint.

5) people will assume you are there with trouble in mind, same reason your don't wear power armour while shopping.

6) makes it impossible to be sneaky. If the enemy attacks, you won't be escaping in the confusion, you'll be the guy surrounded by bodyguards. Grenade time!

Besides all of this, keep in mind that all of you are playing RT and that the players DO have such resources at hand.

In case of social situations, the options where aleady mentioned.

But if they onto a hostile environment, I think it is only right and prober that they have a score of armsmen with them.

Use mass combat rules and keep in mind that the real opposition must life up to this. A lone xenos predator or small group of thugs is no opponent. If it really comes to battle, it is a battle.

It's probably also worth mentioning that if they DO get into a social situation with their personal guard, other nobles might look down on them depending on how the guard is equipped and presented.

If you think of it from the other point of view I find it helps. If you imagine how the players would react if another group entered the area with those guard. If they take the time (and make the aquisition rolls) to have their fifty best men decked out in best quality carapace armour and armed with best qualisty chainblades and hellpistols, and describe it as looking awesome, then NPCs in a social situation might respond favourable - these are obviously Traders with great personal wealth and taste. Remembering, of course, that taste in OUR universe and taste in the 40k universe are very, very different beasts.

My players recently needed to enter a party where they thought they would get attacked. They bought better weapons and armour for their fifty best men and described them as wearing sculpted golden breastplates and greaves, faces covered with angelic golden masks and gravchutes made in the form of golden wings. Equipped them all with those burning power swords from Into The Storm and brought a host of angels to a party. The NPCs never went nuts due to bodyguards ruining their party, they wanted to know if they could purchase some of these fine, fine individuals.

Of course, that didn't stop the group comin under fire from an assassin soon afterwards who was dressed as a waiter and had manage to poison half the group first, but that's the sort of crap the enemies of PCs do when faced with a host of angel bodyguards

I guess I'm running against the grain of others today, but for me these issues feel like GM issues. You simply presented them with innapropriate encounters. It is like sending some goblins against a level 15 fighter and then asking how to handle his +5 sword. It isn't the swords fault the goblin isn't as much a challenge as it was to the player at level 1.

It feels like you are having a hard time adjusting to the scale of Rogue Trader. This is very common, as most GMs are coming over from games like D&D and Dark Heresy. I would never send, say, 20 armsmen against my players and expect them to bat an eye.

I would expect them to hit them with a lance strike.

You really need to scale things up to absurd levels to run a Rogue Trade campaign. My players have pelted areas with pods, called in lance strikes, strafing runs from gun cutters, and blockaded planets to force a surrender.

Now you can also...hack the game to FORCE it to be more like D&D and DH, as others here have suggested. But I really feel like you are sacrificing a lot of potential if you do so.

Here are some examples of some encounters I considered "worthy" of my rank 4 players:

An Eldar Farseer (as written: psy rating 8, every psyker power in the book, and then a few extra just for fun), 5 Wraithlords, with a new one arriving every 3 rounds (coming up from the sea), and a group of 6 rangers hiding in the brush.

10 orks, with new ones appearing every round.

70 guardsmen entrenched with heavy weapons.

Notice how a lot of those scenarios had troops appearing every few rounds. Why was that? Because their armsmen were busy handling the rest of the army!

I guess it all comes down to style. How you want your game to be.

Would you rather your players crush cities than fight groups of mercenaries? Do you want them to face off against entire WAAGHS! or just ambushes in the jungle? Do you want their enemies to have thousands of troops and fleets at their disposal?

For me the answer to these questions is always "yes, bigger and meaner!" That is why I am running a RT campaign instead of a DH one. Scale!

If my players DON'T need at least 30 armsmen to take down an opponent, I don't feel I have given them enough of a challenge.

riplikash said:

For anything near what you are suggesting they either need obscene luck or a profit factor in the 60's. My first group got unlucky and rolled up a profit factor of 20. They held all the power and respect of minor Ministorum Sect. They decided to go straight for the Lure of the Expanse adventure. At the end of it they had a total PF of 30. After months of hard work they had been upgraded to an Outcast's level of wealth and prestige.

For the majority of the game they couldn't even afford to repair their own ship. Getting an army was out of the question, let alone having enough power to even act as a speedbump to a WAAGH or even bring down one enemy ship with them in a fleet engagement.

While I would love to run such encounters, how can players with low PF's obtain this things without a miracle roll or GM Fiat?

riplikash said:

Beg your pardon, but which of the replies here exactly suggest hacking the game to force it to be more like D&D and DH? I find that all advice given (yes, even my own ) is appropriate to the spirit and scale of Rogue Trader, both the pro-henchmen and the anti-henchmen. You give some good advice as well, but I think you misunderstand the original question. The OP was not questioning the validity of RT's scale and whether it should be more like D&D or DH, he was just asking HOW to handle running a game on such a scale.

Incidentally, the mass combat rules in RT also include "The Simple Method" on page 292 which uses simple rolls (typically Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, or Command skill) to quickly and easily run mass combat - anything from a squad or platoon up to regiment or whatever. It may lack the granularity of some other systems (or even the Hordes rules from Deathwatch), but IMO if players really want a lot of rules for running mass combat they should just play 40k the wargame at this point.

Psyker11 said:

They don't have to use guardsmen, it could be just a bunch of shiphands etc. (i.e. low quality troops). Penal world troops, very low grade clone troops from the Xenos in edge of Abyss, mutants eager to prove them self, etc. But instead of buy this and that, they have to convince or barter for the troops.

Some mercenary aliance realising their need may strike a contract to refill secret outpost at intervals for a few troops and reserved in case of need as long as they feed the secret bases, etc.

Could be pirates instead of merc. Once in a while they also get a few goods to sell back that no questions asked about stamped all over them, etc.

Just don't give them storm troopers right away!

Psyker11 said:

As the previous poster mentioned, there are all kinds of ways to get troops beyond just purchasing guardsmen. My players have only recently broken the PF 40 threshold, but have kept alert for opportunities to grow their military forces. Here are the scenarios my players got their troops from:

• When they replaced all the manual gunnery crews with automated gunnery they were left with a lot of gundeck clansmen who suddenly were complaining, "them robots dun stole our JORBS!!!" (though they said it in a scottish accent. Yes, their gunnery clans were all burly scottsmen) As established bondsmen with hundreds of years of service it would be dishonerable and cruel to just dismiss them, or re-assign them to a less prestigious position on the ship. Then someone realised that years of manually loading shells had resulted in some burly men, who knew how to handle munitions, and were at home in the void! So they renamed them the "honor guard", purchased them some 'fancy uniforms' from "into the storm", some bolters, and the Arch-Militant spent the next 6 months training them into an intimidating marine force.
• When they landed on vaporious they eventually met the human dwellers in the mountain, who set up a very clever trap and were able to immobalize the PCs in a melee ambush. These 'free men' (or perhaps...fremen? ) apparently had honed amazing commando skills over centuries of desert warfare. Rather than starting a fight the captain had an idea. She claimed she was a saint sent by the true God Emperor of mankind to reclaim them from this hellish existence, and proved it with three micacles. She called fire from the heavens to obliterate one of the hated glass cities, she made it rain in the deasert for 3 whole hours (using shuttles), and did some third thing I can't remember. After some impressive fellowship tests the fremen swore fealty to her and assigned a attatchment of deasert commandos to her ship.
• After saving lady Charlabelle on two occasions and forming an alliance they requested that she allow them to recruit some of their Kroot. After some negotiation they aquired 10 Kroot scouts, who have proved invaluable, deadly, and quite amusing.
• Finally they have their make-shift guard regimen. Whenever they find refugees or survivors who have survived against incredable odds, and they are typically added to the guardsman like regimen they are building. The Arch-Militant typically spends most of his free time on the ship training these troops and forming them into a coherent military unit.

So now my players have a sizable military force which includes: marines, commandos, infantry, and scouts. They couldn't have afforded such a force, they just had to earn it by keeping their eyes open, and putting effort into building and training such a force up on their own, rather than "buying" a pretrained force from the guard.

Razorboy said:

I am sorry if you disagree. I just read through the comments again, and I still feel that a large portion of them are focused on ways to either remove henchmen from play, or gimp them to the point of uselessness in an effort to fit the game back into the "party of six vs the world" paradigm that most games use, so that the gm can continue set up encounters in the same way he/she always has. When I say "more like D&D and DH", that is what I mean. encounters scaled to the party level.

And that is still a very valid method of play, and you can have a ton of fun running Rogue Trader this way, but I still feel that if you do so you are missing out on some of the cool experiences RT is specifically designed to facilitate.

Now if a GM concienciously plans his campaign and says "this is the feel I want", I have no problem with that. My concern is that most people with these issues usually aren't making a conciouse decision, they just don't realize that it is possible to play a game at a grander scale (in the descriptive sense, not saying grand as in better).

You don't NEED to gimp henchmen and find excuses to exclude them to maintain a fun game, and if you haven't conciously decided that you want the game to have a small party feel you just need to learn to run things differently than you would for a group focused game.

And that also isn't to say that EVERY encounter needs to be focused on the dynasty, but party level encounters will typically emerge naturally without the GM having to step in to handicap the henchmen.

My PCs have some 16,000 men under arms now. Mostly light infantry with 1000 heavy infantry and a skitarii legion of 5,000 very heavy infantry. They are looking to acquire more but need more ships with barracks first. An armoured regiment of tanks and crew are enroute to them, although they don't have room on their ships to hold them (luckily they can berth them on their space station).

Most of these are flavour use only, by which i mean my PCs can do stuff like capturing a small city by sending groups of troops off to various objectives while they go and do the really fun objectives.

For instance, on vaporius, they had hundreds of troops seize strategic points in the city they decided to invade (gates, road junctions, town squares, etc) while they led a couple of hundred to the palace to take out the priest-king.

On the Dread Pearl they brough hundreds of men plus a few leman russ tanks, good thing too considering the Farseeer, rangers, aspect warriors and wrath guard arrayed against them.

The trick is as Riplikash said (paraphrasing) to make the challenges big enough that while your troops are getting stuck in, your heroes do the important bit. Its not necessary for your PCs to personally kill every enemy soldier on the field, instead they should be storming the command bunker with their elite bodyguard (who will be dying like flies to make the PCs feel the danger) and take out the enemy command group.

Professor_Kylan: Loved the angel guard. might have to steal that for an NPC in my game.

Riplikash: Wish my players would recruit a xenos or two for laughs, but my PCs are pretty puritanical, our seneschal and Arch-militant have an on running feud over the arch-militants use of xenos weaponry, good knows what an actual xenos would do to our seneschal temper but at a guess it wouldn't be pretty.

I agree, very good points, my players almost never have escorts, they only bring out like 10-30 guys and a standard bearer when on official duty, otherwise my players usually have 1-2 npc's with them.

I ran several home brew games before getting into the Lure of the Expanse, that gave the players a chance to get stuff and build up a bit. We played for three months every Wednesday before I even started the official campaign. My characters got a Profit Factor up to 76, spent a ton of it and it dropped down to 46.

Well the recently announced "Battlefleet Koronus" will also feature rules on raising, fielding, and combat-running massive armies, as well as squadron operations. My players are already crapping their pants in anticipation.

Preventing RTs from gaining any troops is just ridiculous. They have ships with THOUSANDS of crew to begin with for heavens sake, not to mention they are usually given a detachment of Imperial troops if needed/wanted.

The easy solution is to use the troops as roleplay/setting/story-telling devices and take away direct control. Bogging down the game so they can roll for EVERY NPC is ridiculous, and they shouldn't be rolling for an NPC EVER.

The GM always makes ALL rolls for NPCS. What rolls *can* the PCs make? They make Command/etc tests to give them orders, but there is no guarantee they will even be followed. Allowing direct control breaks the mechanics of the game. Even the crew of the RTs ship can mutiny...

So in my eyes one logical solution is to, for example make the RT check Command to give orders in battle. Say he orders "assault the trench-line". That would be one of the more difficult tests definitely. So depending on DoS/DoF they will have reactions ranging from:

(Best) Assault the position with a morale bonus

(Pass) Assault the position

(Barely Pass) Most the troops assault position, others refuse

(Fail) All refuse to assault, they hold position

(Worse) Most troops start to assault but break before reaching position and flee

(Worst) Troops flee immediately

Thats off the top of my head, and its tougher being generic like this for sure. Just think about the likely actions of the troops, and base their reaction off of how successful the test is.

--

Alternatively, for those who want to keep rolling and actual gameplay elements of troops out (the best decision, but too late for the original poster apparently), I would say that the way Gribble does it is by far the best. Use the troops for flavor/story and the PCs take care of the "hero work".

Torcano said:

I don't disagree with you that unimportant things don't need to be rolled out, but I often let the players roll for significant NPC actions (including both the actions of named allied NPCs and starship action checks based upon Crew Quality). I don't understand why you'd be so opposed to this.