A lot of the entries I've read so far have been as followed:

1. Bolters are Tearing.
2. Unlimited ammo clips for normal ammo.
3. Righteous Fury.
4. Underestimating the players who are playing space marines!

So, major problems so far are that someone fires a heavy bolter, rolling 3d10 for damage dice + more for each degree of success = something is dead. Why? Well, he's discarding the lower of the three die, but the chances are he's going to RF a good percent of the time, and has the potential to chain RF till the target is nothing but a stain for miles around. For some, this isn't a problem, but I have repeditively seen "they killed the Hive Tyrant in one round!." I am starting to see the problem here too. Though, I must ask, why was it a lone Tyrant? When have you ever seen a lone Tyrant kicking it, sipping some tea, alone, in the woods? Dawn of War 2? Yeah... lets not talk about that game.

But, why did the players utterly destroy the Tyrant? Well, did they fight through the horde of lesser beasts, the lictors, the warriors, the guants upon bodies of gaunts? Or did they have unlimited ammo for bolter rounds, never once concerning themselves with the probability of running out, when, they saw the Tyrant looming closer? That in might be the problem, along with the fact the devastator is going to let loose with a torrent of death from his heavy bolter like its going out of style.

Dunno, got me thinking people forget that the players are Space Marines, and start the game with 13k exp. They're not some pack of level 1 dungeon and dragons player characters, they're level 1, half dragon templated players. Sure they're level 1, but they also have gear, abilities and prowess of someone much more experienced. Underestimating their firepower, as well as most players ability to find that one chance to outwit you every few seconds with something COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED, you have dead npcs piled miles high. But, when did the job of the GM/DM mean V.S. the players who are my mortal and spiritual foes? I thought the reason people had a GM/DM in the first place was to TELL THE STORY. Not to TPK the party their every waking moment.

Anyways, house rules to calm the problems many face.

1. Remove tearing from the bolters: except when using specialized ammo, or when using a tallent that might grant it.
2. Going by a post below this one, 8 clips of ammo are all the players realy should have on them, and puts the fear into them as a whole.
3. Against NPCs of the Master and Elite standing, make it so RF can only trigger once. I realize that this changes a lot of the mechanics of the game, but at the same time, it adds just that much more fear factor of these worthy foes.
4. Never underestimate your players, somehow, someway, they will find a way to turn the tide in their favor.
5. Don't play against the players, play with them.

Just my thoughts on this. Sorry for being so preachy!

Luciferiel said:

Well, they were at this hatching chamber in Oblivion's Edge. They start to stir stuff. With great troubles they fend off the enemies and cut their path through the chamber. They are faced with 3 Hormagaunt hordes and a Tyranid Warrior Prime. Even though it's a (huge) chamber I can't let those pop up near them, I must give them a turn firing while they charge or else it will be TPK. So the HB fires at the Prime and - misses. One Lead by Example reroll later the Prime gets struck by 9 bolt rounds instead. It's only limping after that. So the Ultra team leader fires at it with Hellfire rounds and finishes it off. The rest fires at the hormagaunts inflicting some but not enough damage.

Next round, the hormagaunts can charge now. Init rolls for the three hordes: 1, 2, 1.

A bit anti-climatic for the biggest fight on the Hiveship but okay...

tl;dr: even with company the BBEG's are not safe from being one- or two-shotted.

Alex

Wouldn't this be better suited in the house rules sub-forum?

ak-73 said:

Hmm, yeah, I see the problem with bad rolling on the GM's part for initiative is pretty bad, a lot of the time. Though, you wouldn't have to throw the Prime at them immediately. If they have attacked anything else on the hive ship, I would think that the ship itself would start awakening the broods within already. Things like this happened in the "war of the spider queen" adventure for dungeons and dragons. Players attack the tower the end villian is in, wiping out some places piece by piece, but listen checks are made, its hard not to notice fireballs exploding and screems, personaly. So, the tower starts moblizing and moving to different areas.

Least to say, you've already run the adventure, and clued me in on how things were set up. Looks like a fun adventure either way, but depending on group composition things might need some tweeks. Like when the players are nearing the chamber I'd have the pack of termigaunts scuttle out just as they're getting there. While fighting them they can hear the other beasts mobilizing, but its going to be on top of them soon.

Again, my take on it. Heaven knows I'd have run it like normal, and scratch my head as the pc's blow everything up with a big high five at the end.

Luciferiel said:

It's actually the second free demo mission from FFG, Oblivion's Edge. You can find it and Final Sanction in the DW support section here in case you don't know about it yet.

The situation was actually such that it was a hatching chamber (see the pdf) on a giant, really giant Hiveship. One player awakened the whole chamber by firing his HB into the hatching pods. Then they had to cut a path through the chamber and ran across the hordes and hordes of hormagaunts and the Prime. The Prime had to attack as he was guarding the kids. (And with the tyranid hive mind every tyranid nearby new what was going on, of course. No alarm needed to be sounded.)

In all fairness they focussed on the big baddie and if I had rolled well for init (9, 10, 9), they probably had all been dead. 3 hordes with 4d10+3 Pen 5 attacks? Good night. As it went it worked out for them, only the NPC Apothecary Lucian died (no fate points).

Alex

That poor apothecary. XD

Yeah, those hordes looks legit if they're doing 4d10, even after taking into account a space marines soak from armor and toughness that wouldn't be something easy to live through two rounds of, and if you did, probably barely holding on.

Thanks for telling me about the pdfs, I look forward to reading through them as I can.

Though, it seems to me that the designers of the game intend for the players to die here and there.

Luciferiel said:

The worse part about them is that in the following rounds they have 2 attacks, so you need to reduce them below 20 as quickly as possible.

Be forewarned though - depending on your playing style, the free demos may turn out to be too combat-heavy and the horde-fighting can get boring after a while. I found as a GM you have to spice up both those scenarios. With serious role-playing opportunities added in, they are just fine.

Alex

You guy's actually let your players see what you roll!? Personally im a big fan of the GM screen thingy, most of the time im just rolling the dices to make the players comfortable. As i see it, Im a storyteller not a GameMaster! and if mi dice rolls interfere with mi story, the dices goes out the window first! but thats just me, you guys got some fine points right here, thanks

Luciferiel said:

My thoughts:

1. Actually, I wouldn't do this. Instead, I would (and have) reduced the damage of bolt weapons. I am running Bolters as 1d10+9 Pen 4. Heavy Bolter is 1d10+12 Pen 5. This brings the rest of the weapons much more into line with where they should be. By reducing the damage from 2d10 to 1d10 you speed up combat quite a bit, even with tearing. It also helps fix the skew that makes melee do quite a bit less damage than ranged bolter bursts.

2. We use the "enough for the mission". However, I think 8 is actually too much. In Imperial Armour 3 - The Taros Campaign they list the standard equipment of a tac marine:

Taros Invasion Force - Adeptus Astartes Tactical Weapons Load
- Mark 7 Power Armour, settings optimised for desert environments.
- 1x Mark IV "Macragge" pattern Boltgun.
- 4x20 bolt sickle ammunition magazines.
- 1 carbon composite combat knife
- 2 Type 14 general purpose fragmentation hand grenades
- 2 Type 7 anti-tank 'krak' hand grenades
- 1 shaped demolition charge (2 per squad)

The assault marine is the same but with a BP/Chainsword and 4 clips for the BP.

So I would lean towards 4 clips for the bolter. Unless you mean "8 clips" as in 4 for each weapon. If so, then ignore my rambling.

3. You are using the revised RF rules in the Errata right? An extra d10 isn't so bad, and exploding 10, after 10, after 10 is very rare.

4. Of course, that is kind of their job right?

5. The first rule of GM'ing IMHO.

Defiler said:

I always thought that these things that happen according to dice rolling is called story afterwards . And since Deathwatch is a game where players have fate points to withstand the worst I do not see why I should fudge the dice behind my screen. If an attack is deadly, well spend a fate point and be better prepared next time ... that is what you receive XP for. For learning.

Cheers,

TechVoid.