So, first there's the mandatory "hello all i'm new here.." etc. But to cut to the chase I'm here to ask for some advice on running Rogue Trader games. I've run other RPG's before such as D&D, Call of C'Thulu and Paranoia but RT turned out to be a bit more daunting than I expected. I somewhat got forced into running the games since I'm the only one who knows anything about warhammer 40k lore in the first place, but I'm finding it hard to keep track of everything in this game (especially space battles) Now i've run a few adventures already but I'm well aware they were all-in-all failures even if my players don't. At this point my campaigns story is getting ready to really take off, involving a prophecy and some other things, and I really want to start doing it right. So I'll take tips on anything from basic statistic tracking to how adventures should be run over all. Like I said I have experience in other games just wanting to know and Rogue Trader specific tips and tricks you guys have picked up.

Also, my players keep getting into arguments about how one dies in Rogue Trader. If anyone can explain this better than the book please do, I'm tired of ending arguments with "I'm the GM so just shut it and get on with the game."

Death for players is taking sufficient Critical Damage to suffer a death result and not being able to burn a Fate Point to survive. Death for NPCs is largely what you choose; I tend to just have them die at 0.

General advice on running RT scenarios:

Try to think "sandbox style" . Do not try to figure out what the likely cause of action of your pc is. Simply, decided what kind of group might be encountered, what these groups want, what they might be going to do to further there aims and what their resources (men, weapons, money, influence, equipment, access to oil, water and power) are.
Do not get me wrong here, it is good to prepare some scenes/encounters, but do not expect the pc to follow a certain line. And always be open to your pc doing something completely different. They have LOTS of options since their resources encompass a ship with some thousand crewmen and coffers and storage bays to match.

Do not think combat, unless you think it big or personal : really, any kind of combat encounter is likely to be either a duel (affair of honour or anything similiar) or a battle between two groups. One of them being your playerscharacters and the away-team they brought with them. So do not even try to ambush them with bengal-tiger similiar xenos creatures on the surface of a planet. Unless, you are fine with the fact that this encounter will only last one or two rounds of combat.

Be prepared for the away team! Where your pc will go, they might be accompanied by a few good men and will ask you what kind of needful things are onboard. So, either prepare and hand them a list of times for ever strange planet they might be landing. Sparse you a lot of "ehm... errm..."

Enter the social arena . The RT is a person of politics. Prepare some lines of conversation and negotiation. And think about social situations to be solved like combat ... this means, with not just ONE die role but perhaps three or more checks. To keep things interesting. If you and your group like things like this.

Prepare yourself for boarding! The pc WILL try to board a ship and take it home. They will always try to tow a hulk to bring it back instead of salvaging it.
My personal approach: there is now way of towing a ship through the warp. You either tow it "real time" or you repair to the point where it is void-fairing again or you salvage it for valualbe parts. Boarding is fine, so. Better prepare a little adventure where the pc start with a borded ship and try to sell it.

Thanks to both of these. That sandbox thing will come in handy since my other experiences have been in games where its pretty linear in adventure structure.

And maybe they'll listen to the health thing since thats what ive been saying the entire time.

Plan encounters and scenarios, not adventures: Your players are too powerful and have too many resources for you to be able to sufficiently plan EVERYTHING. You just never know when you are going to solve a big session you have planned with a lance strike or 100 troops. Conversly, often they will decide something you considered minor requires lots of personal attention. Between their ships, guncutters, crew, political connections, and massively powerful weaponry, planning out a traditional module becomes a daunting problem.

Instead just plan out encounters and let them figure out how to overcome them. Never plan out solutions

Make combat cinematic, not crunchy: again, too much to track, as you have noticed. You can treat most troops and groups as 'blobs', or even just enviromental effects. For really big battles you can just have your players roll a few command tests and have that determine what the battlefield "feels" like. Troops can also have a 'story level' effect, capturing things 'off-screen', bringing down shields or defenses, etc.

Embrace the scale: understand that RT takes place at a much grander scale than anything else you have run, and adjust to it. Opponents aren't bandits, but planetary empires. Battles take place not at the unit level, but the company or army level. Items are no longer a significant motivator, power is. Players are no longer snubbed or praised by barkeeps and peasents, but by planetary governors, and even they rightly fear and respect the players.

I am also new to the Rogue Trader game. I haven't started a campaign yet but I hope to sometime next year (we have multiple DMs). I have been doing alot of reading, from novels (Eisenhorn), to this website, and some fan websites. There is a pretty good campaign log posted by MARVIN THE ARVIN if I remember the name right. It is written from one of the PCs view and its pretty good.

Another helpful log written from a GM view is the Warrant of Trade. He addresses the scope of the game in the post below-

http://warrantoftrade.blogspot.com/2010/03/micro-macro-divide.html

There are alot of other posts that will be helpful but the above was one of my favorites.

The news and supplement pages for Rogue Trader on this website are pretty good too!

And don't be afraid to destroy their 'ride'. Before my gaming group broke up earlier this year we got into a titanic battle with an ork host and their space hulk. We lost. It was the best thing ever. When our RT Captain realized we were fubar'd he rammed his vessel into the hulk as we teleported away to a stricken transport nearby. Other than blasting a smoking hole into the hulk we didn't do much but restarting on a new ship was a good feeling afterwards. If they can adapt well losing big can be fun.

Gregorius21778 said:

Actually, you can tow a ship through the warp according to Battlefleet Gothic. The really big star forts? They have active gellar fields and warp drives which allow them to translate to the warp, but they have no propulsion to do so. They rely on battleships and cruisers to tow them. So it is possible to tow a ship through the warp, but that ship has to have its own gellar field and warp drives.

A lot depends on your players. My group has some players who like one thing, and some another.

Some of mine want to take part in gritty personal combat even though they are very powerful officers. So I ambush them and send assassins after them when they are doing things that need doing. I use the mook rules from Disciples of the Dark Gods when I want mass quantities of mayhem without the bookkeeping.

Which is another point: If you want something done right, do it yourself. If my players send in minions, they can expect a fair outcome at best. Equipment, clues, personnel will get lost or broken. If they put themselves at risk, they may see greater rewards. (Or another review of Fate Points and death.)

Another thing to figure out is how much of a sandbox do your players want? Some of mine look to me to provide an overall story arc, so I use "Ship in arrears" as a way to get a powerful patron to send clues and create a framework. Other players have definite (if crazy) ideas on what they want to accomplish. So far I haven't noticed a strong desire to "fly to that star and see what's there," but you might have players like that.

As Gregorious said, think big. Look at large organizations as rivals or threats. Edge of the Abyss and Disciples of the Dark Gods have many cool organizations. Other Rogue Traders are great rivals.

There's quite a few ways of running & playing RT,

If you've got experienced PC's and as an experienced GM you can wing-everything they come across in that part of the galaxy they're using as a sandbox with a PC as the RT giving it direction. Don't forget that as a GM and arbitrator of their actions the linear and secular plots can be in the form of complications to their ambitions, because nothing is ever simple! Plus- there is nothing to stop you from creating a macro-plot of events which will culminate in some kind of conclusive event that PC's will be a part of to some greater or lesser extent.

Second choice for new PC's and a GM is simply to have the GM playing the RT and the PC's playing the role of supplemental characters and careers, maybe one of them is still a Rogue Trader career, but he/she's heir to the throne when their parent or relative passes away, retires or they manage to kill them (assassination in 40k is a legitimate way of increasing social standing!). Up until that point they'll be given missions and donkey work which are fairly linear, the boss wants you to get this bit done, so they go off and do it.

Once they and the GM find their feet with the rules, gear, ships and culture of 40k then by all means have them in the hot seat making the hard decisions that they are 100% accountable for. That is part of the fun of RT and why its my favourite game to play that you're a larger than life, absolute meglomaniac and tyrant much the same as any number of leaders of men we've seen in history, for better or worse. Dark Heresy is still my favourite game as a GM to run as I can run it much the same way as RT when acolytes are of sufficient level and responsibility, its also been enjoyable watching them come up from nothing as menial little proles to powers that have the ability to destroy worlds, so there is a great sense of achievement from both a GM and PC in that game that they've dragged themselves up by the bootstraps to actually being a someone. DH also has a massive wealth of material for it as a GM which you can use in RT. As a game RT is the poor, broke-arse cousin to both DH and Deathwatch in terms of material, basically we've had jack sh*t for a really long time and its still missing a tonne of things to round it out and whats been given so far hasn't come close to filling the big hole.

I don't get a sense of achievement in DW, its all turned up to 11 from day-one and is ridiculously f**king stupid to try and challenge PC's on an even level with encounters... because they kill everything, all the time with ridiculous firepower and constantly run the risk of a TPK doing the same to them, just to crack their armour. Also the scope of their activities and skillsets is pretty much limited, however it serves a place where if you wanted NPC's or even a secondary set of PC's assigned to a particually rich RT that deal with dirty xenos, its there for what it is.

Gregorius21778 said:

I like this, but the Stryxis ship concept mentioned in Edge of the Abyss (basically one ship with drive components towing a train of derelicts) kind of wrecks this rule.

Thank you for the advice, though.