hey im pretty new to roleplaying the 40 k universe and right now im GMing a KT of 5+ and most of what im throwing at them theyre shruging off without much trouble. like the other night i had them face down a hive tyrant and two hordes of hormogaunts and termigaunts. our devastator rolled fantastically and in one round killed the hive tyrant by himself... hes rank one. im basically having a scaling issue but im not sure just how big i have to go.

With 5+ players you are going to need to add in a couple of Elite enemies and probably another horde or two. Bring enough fodder to make the Hive Tyrant less of an immediate threat.

Don't have the Boss show up immediately, send a few waves of hordes and an elite or two, then the Boss with more reinforcements.

Have you limited righteous fury to a d10 instead of full damage ?

radrac said:

I'd do a forum search for heavy bolter, overpowered, hive tyrant, horde tactics, or the like. There's a ton of ideas and suggestons out there on how to make elites and masters scarier, and how to make hordes more interesting.

Basically the conclusion of most is that A) the system is very kill or be killed, if that HT get's shots off on your players, you end up burning a fate point, and B) you have to play up the smarts of all the enemies to make them interesting or the devestator and combined might of your players will wipe the floor with your enemies corpses, C) make sure you're using the eratted rules for Rightous Fury.

While I've found I'm not making as complicated of a plot when I do Deathwatch, I'm finding that I'm spending a TON more time developing my combat encounters to keep them fresh and interesting (and a ton more time looking for as many RP opportunities in the carnage as possible).

- Use the Righteous Fury rules from the Errata pdf, available in the support section on this site.

- Nerf all Bolt Weapons by 2 to 4 points, also decrease the Heavy Bolter ROF by 2 to 4 shots.

Game becomes more playable. And dangerous for the players.

Alex

thanks for the help guys, i did read the errata and adjusted the RF accordingly, we just ran the one out of the back of the book to get started, nerfing the bolt weapons sounds like a great idea.

to ituncertain: thanks for the tip, ill try staggering the enimies arrival alittle to give it more of a challenge.

to charmander: ive noticed the difficulty being kinda hit and miss too, whats your thoughts on horde magnitude?

also i should have been more specific, the first run we only had three, i was helping roll six for our session after that.

Btw does anyone have stats for either the devilfish troop carrier or maybe even the broadside teams?

radrac said:

I tend to stick with a magnitude between 20 and 30, particularly when dealing with things like cultists or pdf. The 29 comment from someone (where did it go, maybe a different thread?) is a good one, as it keeps the horde down to two ranged attacks, gives them max damage (+2d10), and gives them extra health. Once you hit mag 30 you've given them an additional ranged attack.

On more specialized enemies that are more powerful than your average PDF, I tend to go with higher magnitude but lower actual number. Like a team of elite Tau will be just 10 guys, but might be mag 30-40. This gives them the attack number, the firepower, and the damage resistance to stand up to the marines for an additional turn or two.

Overall a lot of it I've had to play by ear and adapt to my groups play style. Originally the started out with simple weapons and simple tactics, but they started getting smarter and smarter and reading the descriptions of things like specialty ammo more carefully (and probably have read this forum to figure out how to munchkin it up), and so I've had to increase the smarts of my enemies to keep up.

But as a rule of thumb I stick around 30, deploy a couple of idiot hordes to draw fire, a couple of smarter hordes to perform manuvers, and then one or two hordes or special set pieces (a vehicle, a squad with a vox that's calling down fire, the command squad, etc.). I also (try) to make heavy use of turning points in my battles to break up the combat (like the examples in Final Sanction). I also will often attach an elite or two to the hordes, at least the smart hordes, to throw the players off balance.

But in the end, if I find that they're cutting my hordes up too fast, it's super easy for backup to show up most of the time, and if your marines are behind enemy lines, that backup can come from any direction at any time.

For boss fights, and I've not had a ton of them (harder time getting together post holiday for one reason or another), I tend to deploy 3-4 less than genius hordes to soak fire and distract the KT, then use the master, with his elite pals, to circle in for the kill. Another thing I tried (only once) was to create an encounter environment with limited mobility, only use a handful of elites (CSMs) and one master (modified CSM/Prince Hybrid), and I used the elites to simply take the heavy support weapons out of action (the librarian and devestator, came out of hiding and engaged them in melee), while the master engaged the rest of the party (also in melee). The Elites went down in a couple of turns, but that was two turns the master got to act on people without being shot with a heavy bolter and psychic death rays. I did have to be careful and not play the master too smart, I spread his attacks through the rest of party so that everyone took some hefty damage, but I didn't have the master do the logical/smart thing and concentrate fire on one PC. Two of the 3 that were fighting the guy took critical wounds, but no one died. The lib took no wounds from that fight, and the devestator took about 50% damage. Overall they were scared, but not dead, which is what I wanted.

Also keep in mind I'm a GM that rolls behind a screen, and I've also started keeping track of players health on my own, so I can spread the pain out and make things exciting without having an unfortunate accident.

TL;DR: Recap, I stick with mag 20-30 and use 3-6 hordes on average, targeting the average damage to do 1-2 points per hit on each marine.

cool, thats perfect, i completely misread the rules on hordes and ranged attacks. to simplify ive mostly been using elites to bring the pain. but those suggestions should make my hordes quite a bit nastier thanks.