tl;dr: Good metaplot is good, bad metaplot is bad.

We can all cite examples of both. A good author should read and respect the background, and -if their 'brilliant ideas' clash horribly, they should throw them away and write something else, because one ego is less important than an entire setting. Many great plots and settings have fallen foul of discontinuity or a clear clash of opinions between authors (ie the whole 'Clan X is uber this week, because they're my favourites' thing in WoD).

The thing is.... we can always choose to ignore bad metaplot, and carry on playing our OWoD game, pretend Kerinsky was just a merc from the periphery, or whatever. Whereas good metaplot is genuinely staggering and a great asset to the game.

Too much of a reveal to early about plotlines can really spoil things and hamper creativity, and too vague a hint can be useless to a GM. "Well gee; there are ghosts in that place. Thanks. I could never thought of that. Maybe some clues about WHY or the history would be nice, too?"

I don't want 'GM material' that is just paragraph after paragraph of isolated mysteries. I'd like to see things that are fully fleshed out. Maybe the answers aren't all there, or maybe there's a 'choice' of three ideas behind each mystery (as per newer WoD material), but I don't want something that's too Twin Peaks: All questions and no goddam closure.

When the newer WFRP and 40kRPG stuff started to trickle out, my reaction to published plot and scenarios was immediately 'I hope it's as good as the original WFRP stuff'. You remember those adventures? They were some of the finest plots ever written. If FFG can come out with material like that: Great. If they try and it fails... I won't use it. Simples!! I think it's worth the risk of them trying. We might get junk, or we might get another 'Masks of Neothotep/The Enemy Within'.

Oh yeah: Another problem with metaplot is that sometimes it moves too fast. L5R for example is based on a card game, and the metaplot used to tie in to major tournaments. And they always had world-shattering themes. So the RPG was dragged along, and every 3 years there was a massive conflict which killed 80% of samurai and nearly ended the Empire. It wasn't great.

Kain McDogal said:

I think your opinion on the speed that books go from the writing stage to coming out in print is rather optimistic. Occam's razor would point to coincidence.

Siranui said:

Frankly I don't know what you mean. Of course it takes some time from the writing stage to coming out in print, we can assume the writing on MotX was already finished long before RoB came out, which shows us that at least some of the new weapon stats were available at this time so there must be a reason why they weren't used for MotX. Call me the 'Holmes of the week' but this is the proof that the optional stats are only OPTIONAL (this must be the reason they are called by this title) and as long as there will be future supplements for DW everyone who decides to use them has to convert a lot of stats for each upcoming book as these are based on the old stats.

I ask myself if it wouldn't be much easier to use only the OFFICIAL post errata Unrelenting Devastation rules, more and stronger adversaries (now we have enough) and (hold your breath) upping the SB Req!

I think that you're being far too keen with your 'must haves' and 'proofs' there. If the new stats were available for RoB, then why were the upgraded melta and plasma weapons included, which were clearly there as a 'fix' for the original ones?

Siranui said:

I wrote that the writing on MotX was probably finished long before RoB came out, not that the optional rules existed at the time of the writing of RoB. As you said there is a long period between writing and printing, so why should the official post errata melta- and plasma rules be in RoB, which was written shortly after the rulebook was published?

Be that as it may the future will tell if the optional rules will appear in any DW supplements until then we should treat them as optional so they should have the same significance as House Rules and are not the cure-all for every difficulties which might arise during play with the official rules.

Well, except that they kinda are...

The new rules have made battle more difficult and more strategic and thus more fun and have replaced the need for all those half-cooked house rules we used to get the same result - from my experience anyway. That doesn't change the fact that they are optional of course.

Also, if anything, the fact that many weapon in MotX follow the new template for weapons (especially the new Chaos Marine weapons - they pretty much all do) is much more indicative that FFG is moving toward this rather than way from it... if they were moving away from it, it simply wouldn't be in it at all.

There's also the very distinct possibility that this isn't a call for or against the optional rules and that the different chapter (or even entires per say) were written by different people and the disparity wasn't picked up during the proof read (A proof read error in an FFG project? Shocking!).

All in all, we can talk about this all day long really, which goes to show your claim of 'only possible answer' are pretty far off the mark.

Tarkand said:

Are they?

I wish your group much fun with the Dagon Overlord, 3 Tyrant Guards and the nerfed Bolters. If they aren't Termies with Assault Cannons or coincidentally have a Land Raider they will need a lot of Strategy to overcome this foe. Of course this is the real Endboss (the Hive Tyrant is only a general) and it should take something more than a Tac's Bolter to put him and his guards down but with the optional rules the only 'option' is to run.

So basically, Bolter are about as ineffective against a Hive Tyrant and a Hive Guard as they are in the tabletop game, and you need heavy weapons, specialised melee weapon and vehicule to take them down... just like in the TT. To think the game forces you to use heavy weapon to destroy 'heavy' target, what has the world come to!

Funny thing is that even non-optional rule normal bolters cannot possibly hurt a Dagon Overlord without Righteous Fury (23 dmg, pen 4 doesn't do anything to TB 18, Armor 10). You need several talent and special ammo to have a decent chance to do anything and ultimately you're still praying for Righteous Fury to actually do more than tickle him - meaning Bolters were a bad choice in the description you gave anyway, so I'm not quite sure how the optional rule makes this anymore dangerous for my players.

As you said yourself, what you just described is an end-game type of battle, where the characters will most likely be Rank 6 or above (Making them the TT equivalent of Captains and other HQ)... **** right I hope they won't be using Bolters anymore by that point (Because the TT equivalent certainly don't!)! In fact at that point, you'd expect them to be in Terminator armor with Assault Cannon, Storm Shield, Power Great Axe, Chainfist... the whole deal.... as a matter of course. This is like complaining that your starting short sword isn't effective against a Great Wyrm Red Dragon

Sadly when i send my KT vs bug lord and dozens of bug guard, few bugfexes, some bug warriors and unlimited number of bugmeatshield im sending epic squad of 6 elite adeptus astartes chosen to serve in DW, NOT 2k points space marine army with tanks, honour guard, cans and other fancy stuff...

Six vs uncountable hordes.

Also if u move to close to TT with DW one of players may ask u funny question: why imperium bother with marines? One of my players who was having contact with wh40k only through computer games asked me such question after play. (as one skirmish with stupid orks usually ends with half company dead and 50 years waiting till u can beat ork force twice your company size...)

boruta666 said:

What's your point exactly?

Weither you use Pre-Optional Rule or Post Optional rules, your Marines will die against this regardless if all they are using are boltgun and stormbolters

Also, the idea of sending only 6 guys against the an army worth of Tyrannid (or anything else) isn't really in keeping with what Kill Team do. They go in, execute an objective, and come out. They don't land on a planet and start walking in a straight line, killing everything in their way, until they went around the planet. In short, if your Kill-Team is ever in a situation where they have to fight '2k worth of Tyranids' at the same time - something went terribly, terribly wrong.

boruta666 said:

Just compare how unbelievably powerful a deathwatch character is versus a guardsman. Anything with less than a total of 16 damage+penetration can't damage him... period... ever. Compare how unbelievably powerful a land raider is versus anything else... a heavy venom cannon only has a SLIGHT chance of SCRATCHING one, for instance.

They can handle themselves excellently in close combat, and can switch around with any weapon as the situation warrants.

Space marines are, in my opinion, a lot more efficient than imperial guard... power armor and bolters are more expensive than armor and lasguns. For an example, it cost 28,000 thrones to outfit someone with a godwyn storm bolter & sister power armor. We don't know how much the geneseed culturing and implantation costs, or how much more expensive astartes armor is than sister power armor; but we do know it can't be that much, or else the cost of a storm bolter would be an irrelevant pittance and that they'd give regular astartes something better. (For instance, if it costs 50,000 to implant the geneseed and 50,000 for the astartes power armor, it doesn't make any sense that they'd furnish them with something so much crappier than a 8,000 throne storm bolter... you'd want to at least give each spess mehrene a storm bolter & lascannon at that price).

But anyway, to compare the aforementioned stormbolter & power armor type vs the usual flak jacket and lasgun type. Yes, you can equip 75 troops with the latter for every one of the former, so at first glance it seems "more efficient" to go for quantity over quality. Yet those 75 troops will also consume 75 times as much food and drink, expel 75 times as much air, and in general, the cannon fodder loadout type will waste space on a troop transport or starship 75 times as quickly.

I realize that all leaders of the Imperium are Renegade Shepard and don't care about sacrificing human life. Well good for them. That means that if an alien invasion happens, you might as well arm as many people as possible to repel them. But when you want troops going around the stars? You really do want to minimize the size of your supply train, and to minimize the amount of starships you need to tie up transporting these guys everywhere.

The real situation where you'd want the masses of troops isn't in fighting things like tyranids and orks in open battle, but where you want to conduct utterly massive search and occupation type operations... attempting to root out every last ripper swarm on a world that's been attacked by tyranids, trying to find every last Alpha Legionnare left on a planet, etcetera. Of course, that also leaves you more open to infiltration, requires you to examine even more people for mutation & infection.

And in Dawn of War, well, I'd always have ridiculous mounds of space marine corpses everywhere, to the point where after like two missions, the entire Blood Ravens chapter would be dead. It makes little sense to me.

^ i know how mecha works in both DW and DH (and TT too) no need to explain it to me. My point is that if u move with DW RPG to close to Wh40k TT u may discovery how broken everything is, and that marines arent epic but just good. (or if u will try to fing any reason in wh40k)

PS: what or who is renegade shepard ?
PS2: i dont play computer games, between wife, rising two daughters, work and hobby like rpg i dont have time for such waste.