Hi,

As a DM of a rogue trader group which is mostly rank 5 or 6, I am starting to run into a particular problem during personal combat (and, to a lesser degree, vehicle combat), that is the stacking of near-unreducable defensive abilities.

What I am talking about is Dodge 90 (Agility 45 during creation, 3 increases, Dodge + 20 and talented:dodge) plus a conversion field (and it could still get worse ....) with 2 or even 3 reactions (though just 2 of them may be dodges).

Now, the problem is not that I cannot hurt the players, since you can solve most of that by just throwing multiple opponents at them, or hosing them down with heavy bolters and such, but...... the combat has now turned into a Save-vs.-Death Roll business. Basically, the chance of a single hit to get through these layers of defensive rolls (and re-rolls with fate pts) is below 3%. However, in the case of those 3%, the character still has armor 5-6, TB 5, which requires me to give the NPCs pretty solid weapons, otherwise they just wont ever do anything to that character.

Which then leads to the big issue: 97% of the time, nothing happens at all. 3% of the time, the character is possibly killed outright or at the very least in the high critical ranges. If I pack smaller weapons, the player doesnt care at all (lasguns, autoguns, even with proper ammo, just dont scratch them), and if I pack the big ones, I run into the problem of a) looking a bit weird with random grunts packing meltas and b) one-shotting players just on a matter of pure chance.

IMO, power fields are not done very well in the system (too much copying of the tabletop idea with the saving rolls), and attackers dont have enough ways to circumvent Dodge, or at least make the check harder, outside of full-auto.

Maybe I am missing something, but it really has turned combat into a "hope he doesnt get lucky" situation, where most of the time nothing happens at all, and sometimes someone just falls over.

Hmm...

First of all, I'm not sure at all where you got <3% from, that makes me wonder if you might possibly be doing the rules wrong somewhere, or you just made a math error. That aside, I don't think that the problem you have here is quite as insurmountable as you think.

In terms of dealing with their reactions, you already mentioned multiple attackers and auto-fire as ways to get past reactions. To that, I would also add:

-Weapons with the scatter quality, which can gain extra hits at point blank.

-Melee fighters with high WS can feint to prevent the player from dodging or parrying, often overlooked.

-If you're not feeling particularly nice, use assassin-style enemies that hide and strike from concealment. Attacks they are unaware of cannot be dodged.

In terms of damage reduction, I'm not sure why you're resorting to melta weapons for AP 6 TB 5. You should bolters or SP heavy weapons for dealing with that level of defenses. A heavy stubber with manstoppers will damage such a character 60% of the time. A bolter, if memory serves, should do so at 80%. There's a huge range of weapons available, try to find ones with a damage "base" (AP plus whatever is automatically added to the roll) of slightly below to even with their damage reduction.

After that, if you're still not feeling like combat is exciting enough, make sure the enemies are using good tactics, such as cover, suppressive fire, grenades, flanking, and so on. Additionally, add factors to combat that make the enemy only one of the things the PC's have to worry about. Add catwalks, dangerous weather conditions, poor visibility, civilians in the way, avalanches, rockslides, or falling buildings, or mission-related complications. Perhaps the PC's have to protect a whiny bureaucrat who may not be as good at dodging as the PC's.

And last, but not least, just be grateful you don't have to deal with an Eversor PC.

Look through the combat circumstances (pog 246) and gravity effect rules (pg 269). Those can cause up to a -30 to all dodge tests. Or create your own terrain rules.

Bolters are going to get through that armour and TB. With pen 4, that leaves at most 2 points of AP. So 7 soak remaining, against a weapon with 1d10+5 tearing. They will take damage on anything except a 1 or 2 and, since these are tearing weapons, that's only a 3% chance per hit.

Plasma weapons fired on regular mode will always hurt someone with AP 6, TB 5, if they hit. Then you have maximal mode.

Chain weapons on mooks isn't going to be too bad. Give a decent strength rating (4-5 SB) and that should hurt regularly.

Having all the mooks the players face (remember, most of the rabble will be dealing with the players army) with Might Shot (+2 damage to all ranged weapons) and/or crushing blow (+2 to all melee damage) won't be too hard to explain.

Grapple them. While their armour will prevent damage, it won't prevent fatigue.

Hordes from Deathwatch will hurt if you implement them.

I suggest giving everyone Righteous Fury, even though the RAW says it's only for PCs and those with touched by the fates. Except hordes, they probably have that included with their bonus damage.

For elite enemies, give them similar defences to the players. See how your players get past them and copy it for later enemies.

How are they getting three dodges? You get one extra dodge with Step Aside, and only seneschals get that at rank 6.

As others have pointed out there are simple ways to challenge the PCs without breaking out the meltaguns. More importantly, is it really necessary to include all these battles with unimportant goons? Or, if you feel it is, do you really need to play out the fight?

Barack Obama doesn't get into shootouts with taliban terrorists. The CEO of Coca-Cola doesn't prowl dark alleys looking for bad guys to fight*. Rogue traders and their advisers are important people, especially at this level, and shouldn't be scrapping with nobodys. They don't need to go out and kill orks for the xp.

*As far as I know.

Iku Rex said:

A lot of people use DH rules without regard for how game-breaking they are.

Fortinbras said:

So how does someone using DH rules get the third dodge ?

If I understand correctly, the OP said three reactions, two dodges, meaning wall of steel and step aside, and Fortinbras was referring to using DH careers in a RT game.

A third reaction, not a dodge. You get 2 dodges and 1 parry with Step Aside, Wall of Steel, and your standard. And you can add another one with defensive stance, though that means you wont attack.

Technically, you can avoid up to 4 hits in melee, and 3 hits from range.

The 3% chance is calculated as follows: I assume the attack hits, lets say its a chainsword or single shot gun as most guns are, esp. when the enemy has normal BS scores and doesnt have like 5 degrees of success on a full auto regularly.

90% chance for a dodge means 10% chance of a hit. Lets assume he does not spend a fate point on the failed dodge (otherwise, we d be dealing with a less than 1% chance in the end), so the Conversion field kicks in. 50% chance to negate the hit, leaving you with 5% overall chance to actually CONNECT with the attack that you already hit with. Then, we have armor and TB, lets say at 5/5 (not unreasonable at all), so most weapons will not do a single point of damage when rolling low (say, 1-4). Thats a 40% chance of not doing damage... of a 5% chance to actually connect with the hit.

That comes out at a 3% chance, from the moment I make my BS/WS roll, to doing one or more pts of damage.

And, if you figure in fate points, even a LASCANNON only has a 0.5% chance to hurt (and, admittedly,, kill) a character it shoots at with the above mentioned stats and equipment, which are not hard to get for almost all classes. (90% dodge with reroll, plus conversion field= 90% + 9% (reroll) +0,5% (conversion field) = 99,5% chance to negate the hit somewhere along the way.

The way we play Rogue Trader is more akin to a bigger version of "Firefly" or "What if Han Solo hat a Cruiser" than the full-scale, army/fleet action-driven militaristic playstyle as suggested in Frozen Reaches. As comparison, most rogue traders in Lure of the Expanse are on even footing, or slightly less powerful, than my players, and they mostly have 1 or 2 ships, and few if any military might outside a retinue or personal houseguard.

I think the problem both here and in Dark heresy lies in the linear scaling of skills and abilities, which makes them exponentially more powerful at higher numbers. For example, adding +20 Dodge to a character with 20 agility means he now dodges 1/4 of all attacks that would have hit him before. Adding just +10 Dodge to a character with already 80 Agility+Skill+talented means he now dodges 1/2 of all attacks that would have hit so far, essentially DOUBLING his survivability.

Force Fields really exacerbate this effect because they are just a flat-out unchangable chance to negate anything. I am toying with the idea of having AP have an effect on them, or perhaps have them degrade if absorbing lots of damage in a linear, non-randomly generated way (yes, we had a case where it did burn out on the first lasgun that hit... but we also had one where the PC scored 6 hits out of a shuriken catapult on my assassin, and I made EVERY roll for the field except one).

First, make your enemies smarter.

Haywire Grenades are a once in a while option to bypass fields, and shut down their energy weapons.

Gas and Flame weapons are also wonderful ways to bypass fields and dodges.

Use suppressive fire against your players, then have the other enemies open up with grenades, flamers, and guns.

Khaunshar said:

Use the IH rules instead? Force Fields reduce damage taken by Xd10 (X being Rating divided by 10, say), attacks bypass the shield on double 1s and overload the shield completely for 1d10 rounds on double 10s. Aside from that, make them declare their Reactions before the shield takes effect. Don't allow your players to Fate Point Field tests since they aren't properly defined as Tests, only rolling a d100.

My players have been laying on the defenses thick as well - most players have Power Armour and some sort of energy field. Throwing more mooks works to an extent, but even then only dings and scratches gets through occasionally. The way they've been taking down baddies fast has been high Pen weapons - power fists, thunder hammers, hellguns etc.

The way I've been leveling the playing field is giving the baddies (not the nameless mooks) high penetration weapons - Ork power klaws, snazzguns, etc. If they're using energy fields, either disable them through special effects or hose them down with lots of automatic fire. Even if the rounds do no damage, eventually the field will be overloaded from soaking so many rounds. I've also houseruled that fields can only soak so much damage from explosive rounds, so this makes them overload faster as well.

One other idea I've been toying with is houseruling a field overload system in which high energy attacks - such as plasma weapons or high damage las rounds automatically overload the field

Hmm. Roll Damage, shield automatically overloads if it absorbs more than its Rating, minus the Quality Overload chance?

Thats not bad, except that for a common quality conversion field, that'd be 40 damage. And thats alot of damage.

Reduce by pen as well, maybe?

I am (and will) use these to chalenge my group:

1. Fear (hopefully not all of them are fearless)

2. Gas/Toxin Grenades and the like, even stinkbombs; ignoring fields, dodges, even armours

3. Psychic powers

4. hails of Heavy Stubbers

5. Gravity gun (well, just to hinder them, while the villain do whateever he needs to be done)

6. Moral dilemma (well, "you can choose to fight them, but those three other groups needs help soon, and the enemies are ignoring you~" type of encounters)

Since in my group there are salvation rings, best fields, dodges, and power armours as well.

hey waidaminute, some of these have been suggested by itisuncertainwho.. my bad

If they're great in combat, there may be other areas where they are lacking. Fantastic dodge ratings and power armor and toughness out the wazoo won't help on the dance floor, or impressing a reluctant planetary governor, or convincing that ecclesiarch to bless your voyage. Perhaps it's time for challenges for the players outside of combat. An adminstratum adept's pen can be more damaging than a plasma bolt. Put them in social situations. Give them more cerebral challenges instead of combat challenges. Give them a rep as down and dirty brawlers, not the sort to be associated with polite society.

As for dealing with their high scores, a lot of suggestions have already been offered. You can have their reputations as the Emperor's own fury on the battlefield precede them, with enemies either running away or setting up spectacularly deadly ambushes. An artillery barrage, for example. Or a fight in exceptionally cramped space where they get to learn first hand the old maxim, "Friendly Fire Isn't." I am particularly fond of the earlier suggestion of including enemy NPCs with similar abilities, but then sometimes it's hard to resist a little payback.

Good luck!

Lots of good suggestions upthread but I found them to be band-aids on a chainsword wound as I ran a campaign up to 45000 XP. It was fun at lower ranks but swiftly got to the 'Fate Point or No Effect' stage in fights.

I switched the campaign to Mongoose Runequest 2 to get back the exciting and dangerous combat. One session in and had fun so far (void master got impaled by an ork choppa and missionary was almost decapitated by a deffgun). The PCs said it felt more dangerous with opposed resolution in dodges - essentially you need to roll a better dodge than your opponent for all attacks (not just semi/full auto) rather than just get under the 90%.

the DH system doesn't scale very well IMO. Deathwatch is a prime example of this but high rank RT characters can be worse in some areas. I would like to see a book of optional system rules to patch this as far as possible.

Still great books for the background and art.

There is a great difference in my players between their ability to dodge. The only cure I have found is to increase the number of attacks, and make sure that a single attack is not that deadly, this means my bosses rarely have a big bad ass attack, but instead numerous strong attacks.