Space Marines are tough, and they only get tougher. Rites of battle are basically to Deathwatch what Ascension was to Dark Heresy. No longer playing level 1 tactical marines, now characters can become dreadnaughts as well as Marine Captains. When the game begins, Marines are tough, but must still be careful because some enemies can still throw great firepower at them. However, as they grow and get stronger, and get more equipment and bonuses, at what point do they become a whirling malestrom of destruction that no Xenos horde can overcome? Similar to Dawn of War (especially Retribution), where you start off weak, but eventually become so powerful that you can just walk around the map and destroy anything that gets in your way.

I imagine the following would make a Marine group almost unstoppable

Raising toughness bonus to 10 ( or even 12 if they take all toughness upgrades)

Getting upgraded armour, such as artificier or Terminator armour

One of the characters being a dreadnaught

Having support, such as a landraider or a lance strike

Master Crafted weapons

Bonuses to combat such as Bolter Drill

An Apothecary capable of instantly healing any wounded characters

A librarian able to errect a protective bubble around the party

Chapter upgrades in defence such as the Dark Angels ability

Squad tactics which increase the survivability of the group (go to ground, soak fire)

All of these are multipliers which, put together, can probably create a party which is truly epic. There must be a point at which the GM cannot challenge the party without resorting to unbelieveable measures (such as when the party can demolish the hive tyrant without breaking a sweat). What are some experiences with Deathwatch characters becoming extremely powerful?

There will always be an enemy who is more powerful than your troop. Keep in mind that Warhammer 40k offers the possibility of battles against entire starship-fleets or against legions of Xenos. And there are still Chaos Space Marines who can be antagonists of equal power...

However, I agree that simply increasing the enemies' power level from mission to mission is a bad idea for roleplaying. Better solutions will be missions that don't depend on the personal firepower of your marines.

And even if you want to play those epic firepower-missions: Don't forget that time can be an efficient limiting factor. It doesn't matter if your Space Marines can blow away every hive tyrant if they have to accomplish that in a hard time limit.

Our group's tech marine/forge master has armour 16 all around and 15 toughness, most thing cant hurt him. Things like genestealers are still very dangerous, we can kill them very fast but if they get some attacks off they can still kill us.

Our gm makes us fight alot of elites now, which imo 7 glass cannon elites are harder then master levels.

I am thinking also in terms of mathematics. At which point do bonuses and mechanics make the Marine team almost impossible to defeat. Yes, I am aware that some enemies are going to be more powerful, but I am thinking in terms of troops, elites, and some Masters (typical enemy forces without having an entire army coming after the characters). There must be a point where the probability of harming a marine becomes very low, and the chances of the marine not getting proper medical help in time becomes low in the event that an enemy attack crosses the threshold for damage. In addition, There must be clever uses of squad tactics which make the marines greater than the sum of their parts, as well as combinations of classes which are most efficient. I guess my question is, what is a combination of classes, bonuses, traits, and equipment (within reason) can stand up to even the most dangerous enemies in the core book. I have seen many threads that, effectively used, even a new team of marines can defeat an enemy boss in a surprisingly short amount of time.

It is indeed, IMHO, a problem. The issue is that Space Marine PCs must has as many, or more, advance options as were present to lower level counterparts in Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. In reality, if the games followed a ADVANCEMENT PATH through each other, the Space Marine PCs would have already have purchased half the max advances available (ie, they already have increased all stats by +10 and would only have +10 more to purchase, while Rogue Trader characters already have +5 with +15 more to go). And if you want to bring up the Arguments that they are DEATH WATCH so they are Veterans, then fine, put htem in the +15 already purchased, +5 to go category.

There is no reason why space marines can have strengths and toughnesses up to the 70+ category when Unnatural Characteristics already give them an amazing edge.

The other issue is that FFG keeps on publishing new bonuses for these Space Marines. Squad, Solo, Chapter, Career, Distinctions and so forth each start to add up.

Spae Marines of such a high level of power are not boring, nor are they unchallnegable, but they sure are annoying. I hate having to look through pages of pages of character sheet to figure out what I can do and what modifiers apply during any given situation.

I think this is one of those things that relies as much on the group playing the game, as much as it does the system. Some folks like having epic bad asses who are near invulnerable and wade through the masses like a kiddy pool ( White Wolf's exalted is about on par with death watch in this case). They'll naturally gravitate towards abilities that make them 'stronger' and thus produce the invulnerable supermen.

Thing is, if that's how that group plays, it's not a big deal. If it's how someone in your group is skewing things, then throw some non combat opportunities at them or remind them it's not all about having your power level over 9,000.

Failing that, bring in a greater daemon of Khorne with anti psyker abilities and a massive soul destroying axe. Or, a necron lord with some weird arcane weapon that does fun stuff to people.

Not to be snarky but the answer to the topic is: As soon as the GM stops trying and players stop playing an RPG and start trying to "Win".

Both of these can happen before the game even starts. If all you care about is number crunching how much damage you can output vs absorb then you have lost focus of the fact you are playing a RPG and not a war game.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Actually if I compare a rank 1 Marine and rank 1 Acolyte, I find the difference noticeable but manageable. You need to have some missions under your belt and be totally familiar with the basic skills and talents of Space marines, including their organs. And you need to be familiar with the workings of squad mode abilities. But that is easy because you should know your chapter abilites and you memorize the effect of codex ability at the start of the mission.

Long story short, you just need to be practiced at it. As one would expect from having to play an epic-level elite warrior. In fact it can be part of the fun to scour over your list of abilities to try to squeeze the maximum out of your character in combat (I play a young master tactician right now so that comes natural to the PC).

Alex

At what point do Space Marines become unstoppable?

never.

If DW command notice how godlike certain KT of Space Marines become, their missions become godlike hard then.

Also known as the Ciaphas Cain effect.

Surely the weaponary in deathwatch is powerful enough to threatern even the most heavily armoured marines. A multimelta to the face is always going to hurt and I'm sure than some of the xenos scum heretical equipment is pretty nasty too. I haven't yet played at the higher levels of deathwatch so maybe my point isn't vaild (force fileds look quite good). I supose my points is as long as there is so jepardy for the players then they will have to use tactics, abilites and risk to `win.' If this makes them unstoppable I suposes thats okay. They are the Emperors avenging angles afterall!

You can dodge a multi-melta to the face, though...

2 dodges for a character with sidestep, each at perhaps 80-90% chance. Then a 50% chance of anything hitting the iron halo. -6TB, artificer armour, adamantine mantle...

You need to shoot a character like that about three times in a single combat round before you're likely to even hit them.

But, as you say: Given the right GM, things can still threaten even the toughest of PCs.

The challge is to the GM, No matter how tough your players become. You should always find a way to give them something to think about, Necrons's Gauss Flayer will give them a run more the money.

Siranui said:

Can't dodge the same attack twice with sidestep.

Alex

ak-73 said:

Step Aside, of course.

Alex

Hence the three times. 0.1(x0.5)+0.1(x0.5)+0.5 = 0.6. Hence you need to shoot them about 3 times to have a decent chance of getting a hit. First 2 to soak those 2 dodges.

In reply to the OP. I have played with a team of rank three SM's and frankly we were so good that it just hurt. To hit 100%+, Parrying and or dodging was automatically by the more melee oriented characters. The librarian can blow up everything he wants. The devestator only has to wonder how often he hits and the assault marine was unbeatable in melee. The Apothecer could heal easily all wounds done to us in a single round. Unless we were faced with with multiple nasty hordes or single opponents with multiple attacks we made mincemeat of everything the GM threw at us.

I say that at level 3 one can say that SM's have appoached near unstoppability. Having awesome gear helps a lot as well.

Still not even a SM can survive a direct Lance hit (unless he burns a FP of course)

Sister Callidia said:

Was it that you were truly unstoppable at that point (sans lance hits, orbital bombardments, titan's feet, etc.) or was it that your GM wasn't challenging you and your abilities?

It seems to me that there are plenty of adversaries in the book(s) that could be used to create a combat based challenge for PCs of that power level. If you're being challenged by nasty hordes or enemies with multiple attacks, perhaps the GM needs to start using a few more of those. And there is always the non-combat additions to adventures/missions that can provide a challenge for even the strongest PCs. But if your GM is going for a theme of unstoppability then no big deal.

I tend to run things in my games as boruta describes: "If DW command notice how godlike certain KT of Space Marines become, their missions become godlike hard then." And TBH, I give his PoV a lot of credit given how vocal he's been about the abilities of high rank BA Assault Marines- if he can still find ways to challenge his players with the abilities he's described then I've got little to worry about with my group. Though I have to say it would be an interesting campaign to play it as unstoppable warriors for the first few ranks to let the PCs and Characters get over confident in their abilities, then drop them in the fire to see how they react.

Sister Callidia said:

I believe 91-00 is still a failure, isn't it?

Personally, I dread to think what would be needed to take down the following:

Deathwatch Captain (Iron halo and artificer armour) Ultramarine Tactical Marine Career.

Deathwatch Chaplain (Rosarius and artificer armour) Blood Angel Assault Marine

Librarian in artificer armour (mostly using probability shield and one offensive power a turn) Imperial Fist - nasty potential for stacking fear in conjunction with the Chaplain's Icon of Duty talent.

Techmarine in Terminator Armour - servoharness allows more flexible weapon loadouts.

Devastator in Terminator Armour - Dark Angel for temporary wounds.

Storm Warden Deathwatch Champion...

However, the system does allow for things like hordes of Tyranid Warriors, Genestealers, Chaos Space Marines and so on....

Erm: How would you fit a techmarine with associated servo arms and pointy bits in Terminator armour?

Given how deadly genestealers are, three in melee combat with even the toughest of assault marines is - I think - still going to be a threat. Assuming that you have to announce a parry attempt prior to rolling for 'invulnerable saves' due to iron halo et al, they're going to run out of parries very quickly when faced with about five successful attacks with the razor sharp quality.

I suspect that the answer is Attack first.

Spending a fate point or using a demeanor to count the roll on the initiative die as 10, combined with 60+ agility and lightning reflexes, should do the trick. I realise that the genestealer also has lightning reflexes and an effective AB of around 14, but it's still good odds, particularly if the marine's armour is Mk6 or has similar bonuses from its armour histories. If the genestealers aren't already in combat, using Killing Blow would pretty much auto-gib at least one of them. This isn't necessary if the assault marine has prenatural speed of course, in which case he could quite happily killl two of them.

"There is always a bigger fish."

Its up to the GM to find it and unleash it on the kill-team.

I would be rather frightened of any engagement where Tau have open field advantage with marker lights, railguns, etc. Hordes of genestealers.

Like it was mentioned earlier once your players try to win rather than play, the game loses its luster.

Lucifer216 said:

Again though, if your marines are regularly splattering his enemies the GM needs to up the ante. In the case above you could do this by simply tossing in more stealers, by give them even nastier traits, give them more creative traits that aren't straight combat, or make combat a stepping stone to something else so that the splattering of enemies is a speed bump on the way to a non-combat scenario (much like hordes do for the higher level encounters). As a GM, as has been said by others, you should be coming up with NPCs that suit the needs, style, and power level of your player characters.

Again, the more powerful you become the more difficult the missions can get- that watch captain isn't likely to let his best men sit idle or take on the missions new recruits can tackle.

I don't deny that as a GM it's more difficult to create compelling missions (I'd say encounter but don't want to be misconstrued) that don't feel forced than say in DH, but that's the price of an 'epic level 'game.

@Siranui: I don't know that it calls out that a 91+ roll is a failure for anything outside of autofire. I could be mistaken. My group does however play where we apply the jam rule across all rolls, giving the character a constant, if low, chance of failing any and all rolls. 100% chance of success is for narrative elements, not for situations that call for a skill/ability check if you ask me.

if u play RAW+errata+RoB and use RAW only enemies its around level 6 with players who know system. At rank 7 when artificer armours will come to play game becomes harder (for my GM perspective) at level 8 its simply absurd. if u use RAW rules for BA librarians and assault, as GM u are f****, totally, sadly rest of team will follow with hurt feeling and start to feel as "lesser" sidekicks. Im able to play very often with my team (due to our work time and responsibilities) so leveling was quite fast in our case, DW is best played at level 3-5 u start to feel what being space marine means but u still know that some horrors in the galaxy are much above u, after that mechanic bugs start to shine so much it will hurt your eyes and brain, RoB additional rules just make things worse.

But answering to thread topic/question, if u play RAW with no house rules at all, its level 6 with for players who played RPG where combat was important part of system (DW for example).