Hello everyone,

I just picked up the Deathwatch book for my group and have set about making a character so I can take them all through it. I have just reached the page about spending experience and read up on Rank etc. It strikes me there is a bit of a rules flaw here and I was wondering if there had been a clarification from FFG as yet, can't see one in the current errata.

The book states that Rank 1 starts at 13k xp. You start out as having spent 12k and then are given another 1k to spend. At this point in character creation you are told you can take rank 1 Chapter, General and Specialities Advances. All good and well. However, if I spend less than the 1k extra I have been given, then I am technically not Rank 1 after character creation, see the table on p.28. Since rank increases happen after I spend xp the only way for a character to get to rank 1, and thus start having access to all the advancement tables, is to take Characteristic Advances from his Speciality.

So what I am asking is, is this correct or are characters assumed to be rank 1 once they hit 12k not 13k experience.

Cheers in advance for any clarification

Iain

ihmcallister said:

For simplicity, just assume that Rank 1 begins at 12,000 XP.

If you want to make a bit of a change, you could do what I did which is to say that Rank 1 begins at 0 Accumulated XP (who really gives a **** how much you had before the game begins if everyone is solely using Deathwatch rules) and Rank goes up every 5,000 XP. This means that your second and third Rank will actually each have an extra 1,000 XP to spend before advancing up in Rank, but I don't consider that a problem - far better to just have the uniform Rank increase every 5,000 XP.

I believe RAW was trying to make something of a delicate point, but it's not necessary.

Rank 1 begins at 13k, you start with 12k "invested" and then get another 1k to spent. It specifically says you can spend this on Rank 1 Chapter, Specialty, and Space Marine Advances though. Therefore, you can buy Rank 1 Advances even though you aren't Rank 1.

It's only once you've spent that 1k that you become a Deathwatch Marine, Rank 1. The delicate point they're trying to make is that the 1k XP is in fact not any you gained as a DW Marine, you only just became one of those, hence why you can't buy DW Advances.

Basically, RAW works just how your intuition says it would, it's just worded a little silly. It also wasn't really necessary to lift the shelf all the way to 13k, they could have easily said that Rank 1 started at 12k and just specified that you couldn't buy DW advances.

Yeah I'll just be assuming that Rank 1 starts at 12k. However they really, really need to errata this as the rank issue causes problems later on as well. Having read through more of the book now several of the squad and solo abilities last a number of rounds equal to your rank. If you are technically rank 0, then this powers last for 0 rounds. It is obviously a mistake but one that needs to be corrected.

Iain

ihmcallister said:

But starting Marines in the book are all rank 1 by RAW. So where is the issue? If you're a GM and you're running a pre rank 1 game then you're already in houserule territory, and you should simply make the call if you want people to be able to access these powers or not based on your game. Either make rank 0 equal to rank 1 or make the powers unavailable until you reach rank 1.

yeah, basically the issue is that the table 2-2: ranks has not taken into account the fact that not all space marines are deathwatch space marines, and not all space marines will spend their first 1000XP on character creation, might have 100 left over for example. It should say 12000-16999 as the first entry

I find it ironic that a book with a load of table entries that make no sense in the interests of "compatibility of future supplements" made this mistake in its table entry.

But its not that big a deal because as Charmander says it does say specifically starting characters are always rank 1 (page 24, the last line of 'stage 4'

but yeah, if it wasn't for that line by table 2-2 technically your first 1000 XP could only be spent on chapter advances because you lack the XP for rank 1 general, rank 1 deathwatch and rank 1 speciality