Hello fellow Battle-Brothers,

since I am using the Game Master's section I have no question about the rule mechanics of fate points.

We have played now a couple of sessions and are quite familiar with the basics of the game. So one thing I want to point out has been an issue again and again in this forum: The challenge of the enemies. Sometimes they are very tough and sometimes just ignorable.

For instance take a magnitude 20 horde with a tearing weapon. Assume 1d10 base damage + 2d10 according to their magnitude and +1d10 because of tearing, although it has to skip the lowest die. So on the average a Space Marine can take a couple of hits before being in danger.

On the other side it can happen hat the enemy rolls a rather high for damage and ... whoops ... a Space Marine would die instantly.

But as a Space Marine you have fate points. We have two house rules. First, you gain instantly 10 wounds and second you can use it any time. Even between rolling damage for several hits. If I get the RAW right, using a Fate Point is a free action which could be only used during your turn.

So what is this? A friend of mine views fate points as bad game design. It is a rather brute game mechanic to treat this 'whoops-effect'. It shall be a sign for a not well balanced mechanic. I confess that this is a hard treatment of this topic but on the other hand I agree when I look back to DnD3.5 or now DnD4. There you had challenge rating and as a player you could be sure that if you GM is using the rules honestly you could have at least a chance to rething your attack and leave the enemy.

But with Deathwatch.

Now are we doing something 'wrong' ? Shall we play more carefully? Even if Space Marines are super soldier they have to 'think', use cover and not just openly confront enemies? Or shall we take this fate points literally as 'faith' in the emperor? I mean I can hardly remember that we used it for other issues than regaining wounds. Maybe sometimes to re-roll a die. Sometimes.

It feels like the Space Marines sometimes need the double or even triple their wounds they have.

Do you have similar gaming experiences or what role play fate points for you?

Cheers,

TechVoid.

It's not bad game design, it's compromise game design, and a very good compromise.

At one end of the scale you have D&D 4th Edition. You only ever encounter monsters that are appropriate for your level, their damage output is nowhere near your maximum hitpoints, you can with absolute confidence attack anything you meet and know that you will almost certainly defeat it, and that if it turns out to be too strong for you, you will have ample time to retreat.

At the other end of the scale you have Call of Cthulhu. Monsters are more powerful than you are, firearms are pretty damned dangerous, and if you do something that might get you killed, you might get killed, it's that simple. The game includes neither an implicit contract, nor an explicit mechanic, which allows you to assume that a PC will be able to survive any given encounter. (Ironically I'd argue that 2nd edition D&D was actually closer to this end of the scale than the other).

Then you have games that come somewhere in the middle, and DeathWatch is a very good example.

The assumption in Death Watch is that missions are a *close call*. The Imperium is fighting every day for its survival, and if you are fighting enemies that do not pose a real risk of killing you, you don't really get a feel for that. Fate Points allow the players and the GM to balance the real risk of death with the inconvenience of having to roll a new character every few sessions. They reinforce the notion that your characters are facing real risks (as opposed to artifically constructed "challenges") while allowing you to perform heroic deeds and stand a good chance of survival.

I've seen RPG-groups who even introduced fate points to other RPG-systems that don't use something like fate points at all, so there are strong supporters for fate points.

As for myself, I consider fate points to be a very good concept as they give your players an amount of control in areas where they usually don't have control at all: They prevent the impression of being delivered to the blind chance of dice. I even allow players to spend fate points for story effects.

However, I think a game master should take care that fate points are a very, very rare resource.

(By the way, I really love how Warhammer Fantasy RPG (3rd edition) handles fate points: Rewarding players/groups by fate points instead of rewarding them by bonus-XP is a great concept: This grants that good roleplay will give them advantages in dice rolls as well – and that's really impelling. Moreover, this prevents the XP-runaway problem in groups with varying degrees of acting.)

Chastity said:

But that is exactly the core of my argumentation:

How can you call deadly encounter a 'real risk' with having in mind that the players have fate points? One of my players even said it once: 'Oh boy, I just have 19 wounds but 5 fate points, that is better!'

It feels strange to talk about heroic deeds if you have such a mighty backup like fate points. 'The tyranid warrior strikes me down but ... whoops I regain some wounds ... then he would strike me down again but whoops I regain again some wounds ... and finally I am able to kill him. Now that was heroic since I opposed him face to face.'

I mean if we now hopefully put in some roleplaying opportunities which would lead to less battle encounters they could use more fate points per battle. And having two or three fate points to spend per battle is a huge improvement.

Oh I just will see to it. Maybe at first I should cancel our house rule to use fate points at any point and just during one's turn.

So asking the players if they are interesting in playing it more serious now, after we played a lot like 'freak-of-the-week' the last seesions.

Cheers,

TechVoid.

I think there are two important things to remember. first of all space marines are super soldiers who can heal wounds extremely quickly. in fact if they weren't PC's I wouldn't be surprised if their stats included regeneration (1). I treat healing by fate points as the body knitting up wounds.

second, and I was actually thinking about this this morning. although a wh40krp with space marines had to be done, because come on... they are space marines. It doesnt have the feel of all the other warhammer rp's. I still have the old 1989 (I think) whfrp where no matter how good you got, you could get stabbed in the eye by a lucky goblin and basically insta-die. fate points are as have been said above a good mitigation against a pathetic unmariney death.

You can call fate points "The protagonist effect"

Imagine that one of your characters is charging a bunker with the rest of his company under heavy fire. Some of them die, of course but:

-In "real" 40k life those who die have a background, strenght and courage almost equal in quality as the character. Your character can even die if the heavy weapon enemy gunner aims at him and shoots, because physic laws stand that if he is hitten strong enough, he will die. What depends on that your character lives? His own ability and luck. But because these parameters are similar to their mates, he has the same posibilities to die as any of them. That's one of the most tragical things of real war.

-In "movie/rpg" 40k Your character is in camera's objective, dodging bullets heroically in slow motion with an awesome music. Those who die are in the background of the scene.What makes your character to live is that he is the protagonist, nothing more. If protagonism wouldn't exist, do you think that most of the heroic scenes of films would be possible? For example, when Leonidas in "300", is wouded with 30 arrows or more, do you think that a normal human, physically speaking, could have stood that ammount of pain and blood loss without falling to ground instantly? No. But, in a film? Of course.

Yes, because of fate points you haven't to do a new character each session. And sometimes you have even to give them some points more to survive. And it helps to balance more your game, as dices are fickle and...well this game is a bit like "whoever shots first, wins"

An advice: tell them that you are going to reroll their fate points and that you are not going to tell them how many they have from now on. Of course, you dont have to really reroll, its only for misleading them. That will make them be more careful about the enemies, because if I know that I have 10 fate points, I will try to kill the Khorne's Great Deamon with my knife, as I'm sure that I won't die.

If they want to use a fate point, make them shout something like "For the Emperor!" or invoke any unnnatural aid on them, adding roleplaying.

Yes,

you have said some wise words.

CruelGM said:

Indeed, these two points are interesting. Especially the first one is nice and the seconds one tends to be a rule of cool.

Best regards,

TechVoid.

TechVoid said:

Umm ... yes, that does seem like a good idea.

Your complaint seems to be that Fate Points take all the drama out of things, because you houseruled them in such a way that they obviously would.

The actual rule for Fate Points is that they can be spent to restore 1D10 Wounds (as well as a variety of other effects) - the RAW is ambiguous about when exactly the can be spent for this purpose but you seem to be reading them as allowing players to instantly spend FP to instantly restore damage (and unless you phrased your OP wrong, to instantly restore the maximum of *ten* damage).

FP are there to stop you getting one-shot, and to allow you to perform a variety of other feats (like activating Solo powers and regenerating Cohesion).

I'm honestly not sure what your criticism of the system is here. You started off by saying that FP were bad game design, because they seemed to be a way to compensate for swingy combat (which they totally are). You now seem to be saying that they're bad game design because they amount to a flat 50-point HP buff (which is inaccurate, but which was what you originally seemed to be complaining that they *weren't*).

Sometimes survival isn't the biggest deal.

Sometimes success is more important to players.

And sometimes they have to choose between where to spend their fate points.

A player doesn't need to feel their character is in imminent threat of death for there to be drama. Trying to save a fragile NPC, trying to beat the clock on a race against time, trying to kill an enemy before they can get away.

I once played in a very tense and dangerous game, but the event i remember best wasn't one of the times my character was a single roll from death it was the extraordinary lengths we went to to try and take down a mercenary in flying powered armour to get from him a cure for an npc who was dying from poison. My paranoid conspiracy theorist drove a van without a driving skill leaning out the window and shooting a pistol without a gun skill and using his non-dominant hand to do so, the chances of crashing were high which could have been fatal but i rolled a string of 03s in a row and critically hit the fiend who fell from the sky and we got the cure. We had a series of games that had built up to that and the so-and-so had got away from the others as he flew off from the rooftop out of their clutches when i tried that foolish and desperate tactic. We were all so very determined not to let him get away again and not to let the NPC die.

So a marine would have had better skills and would have survived a crash, the drama would still be there if taking down the flying eldar corsair was the only thing that could save the inquisitor etc.

I'd completely disagree that fate points are bad game design. I feel them to be the opposite. They allow your player to succeed (or be much more likely to) when you REALLY want to, instead of being at the total mercy of dice. Those 4 hours of planning to infiltrate the bad guy's castle too often are wasted in D&D when someone fluffs the very first dice roll that they're asked to make. That's poor game design to me. Failing one 50-50 dice roll and just dying because of a saving throw? That's poor design. Fate points allow players to make their own luck, to a degree. It's all about the heroic action and pulling it out of the bag when the chips are down.

It's not very fair to say that the Challenge Rating thing was 'good', given how completely out of whack a lot of published monsters were. GMs who blindly accepted the CRs and planned encounters based purely on them had TPKs on their hands with startling regularity, in my experience. And it's already been pointed out the 4e is poorly designed because monsters appear to have been designed with care-bears in mind, and the party are seldom pushed close to the limits if you play by the book. I digress...

Sure: If you have a ton of fate points, you're a lot safer than when you have none, and are more likely to succeed. But that's the same with memorised spells, hit points, potions and other stuff in games. It's a resource. And one that you need to ration carefully. However, if you've house-ruled FP to be worth 10 wounds whenever you want, then expect the players to have an easier time, as that's not how they were intended to work. It seems an overly powerful use of them, and I'd recommend running them more in-line with the rules. Furthermore, it's such a powerful ability that players are going to use it pretty much to the exclusion of other uses. You need to encourage them to spend FP more on dice rolls and achieving great things, instead of simply relegating them to filling the role of 'healing surges'.

If you have a problem with players seemingly having 'too many' FPs per session, you could consider refreshing them every two sessions, or once per mission. It's harsh and makes for a much less heroic game (not only because they are rarer but because players will then only use them to directly save their butts, rather than simply to do cool things, in my experience), but if that's what your players want; give it a go.

Well,

today I continued the discussion with this friend of mine about the fate points.

I think at some point we agreed that it is not merely an issue about fate point or not but somehow more 'fundamental' about playing a space marine.

To start at the beginning I have to say that I like the Warhammer setting, be it fantasy or 40k. Especially the lethal and grim setting. Since I have played DnD a lot, where you started as noobs to become a hero as intended, I like the warhammer fantasy setting where you started as a noob and became a survivor. For me, this has been the flavor of the setting.

Again, the same with Dark Heresy. You play an acolyte and hope to survive somehow while you face sinister heretics, xenos or even daemons.

And again, with this setting and with these deadly rules you have to play Space Marines. And from the table top game and even space hulk we all knew: "A space marine who uses his second clip of ammo has done something wrong."

The galaxy is deadly and even if the space marines are the emperor's finest they always face more deadly foes just to fall on the battlefield and somehow live on if their gene seed is rescued and used again.

But wait. Now you do not play such a trivial space marine. Not one among a hundred in a company just to fall during the enemy's first wave. Now you are a player character!

And what I said since the first days with the preview adventure avaible: The stats of a space marine are not much better than an acolyte intended to fight, .like a well build arbitrator.

So what do we have. A space marine has nearly the same (poor) chance to hit and kill an enemy like acolytes. But that does not feel heroic so they have to invent something new: The horde! You get a huge bonus to hit since you receive a greate size modifier. To tear down the heretics and xenos. To make them die like flies.

But wait. Would it not be the same for acolytes? With such an incredible bonus even these poor guys could hit easily.

And even kill. Within the rulings of a horde, the number of hit points are totally ignored. So it does not make a difference if you use a termagaunts or tyranids warrios. Because, c'mon boys, in both cases the devastator will simply overcome the armour points and toughness bonus.

We discussed it at the example of the horde comparing to single foes. There is such an asymmetry. If you take a single foe, you have problems to hit but the opponent will not do much damage to your marine either. On the other hand if you take a horde, you will hit and kill very easy compared to a single foe. On the other hand the enemy as a horde does an incredible amount of damage.

It feels like: "The enemy is too weak and does 0 damage. But if you encounter them as a horde, a huge mob they will be very dangerous. You see, 0 times something is much damage..."

We just have the impression that there is a huge gap between several opponents and a horde. And using hordes somehow breaks the system and yes - you can only again survive these odds by using fate points!

I once mastered the introduction mission in the back of the core rules and there a space marine faced five little tyranids. Every round I rolled a lot of dice to attack the marine and every round he suffered one or even two damage points because according to statistics any one or two tyranids rolled enough damage (yeah, five is not a big number to talk about statistics). And that is a huge difference if you say: "Well, assuming a magnitude 20 horde and do - woosh - 3d10 + 5 + 1d10 tearing damage...."

So for my part I am very curious about mark of the xenos to see some new rules about hordes. Because on the one hand I like the idea. To make it more easy so simulate a huge number of opponents but as I wrote above, somehow it does not feel 'finished' so far...

Cheers,

TechVoid.

Umm ... again I'm not sure where you're coming from here.

A space marine has a significantly better chance to hit an enemy and, as a result of using better weapons, a better chance to kill an enemy. This is entirely in keeping with canon (heck the usual argument is that Marines are *too good*, not that they're not good enough). I mean do you really want a situation where Space Marines never miss ever? A 50% hit chance is entirely achievable for a starting Marine, and is pretty damned good by 40KRP standards.

I also don't see where Hordes come into it.

I sort of feels like you're complaining for the sake of complaining now, to be honest.

I mean do you really want a situation where Space Marines never miss ever?

That is not a problem. A friend of mine has build up his own system which also uses percentage dice. But his rules say that you hit 'normally' if you roll under your skill value, that you hit 'better' if you roll under half of your skill value and even hit 'significantly' if you roll under one tenth of your skill value.

So a Space Marine in his campaign has a Ballistic Skill ranging from 120 to 170%.

So it is not about if the marine hits, but just how well.

I sort of feels like you're complaining for the sake of complaining now, to be honest.

Well, at some point I must confess that it may sound like that.

So we are just surprised that we both agree on our thoughts about the system and that here there is such huge difference in the point of view. That is strange...

Fair enough, if that's the way you want to play the game, personally I don't think "never misses" is part of what makes a Space Marine. I can see why, if you think that the possibility of Marines missing attacks is a problem, that you consider Hordes to be a bad way to resolve that problem, but that's because they weren't designed to resolve that problem in the first place.

Hordes aren't designed to allow Marines to have a better chance to land shots, they're designed to streamline combats involving large numbers of enemies.

Chastity said:

Well, than it seems that my problem is not about fate points or weak space marines, but about hordes. That there is a huge gap between many individual enemies and playing them as a horde. Like treating them as many needles on the hand and a big canon shot on the other hand.

So I think about using many enemies instead of a horde and try to build up some fast houserules, although it could include a lot of dice.

I will remain silent until Mark of Xenos will be avaible.

Cheers,

TechVoid.

TechVoid said:

I'd say it was more like the difference between one thousand one kilogram masses on one hand, and a one tonne mass on the other.

The inconsistency between Hordes and individuals comes about as a result of a rounding error.

Look at it this way. If you throw a tiny pebble at me, it won't hurt enough for it to be considered real damage in an RPG - in game mechanical terms, a thrown pebble does zero damage to an ordinary human.

If a hundred people throw pebbles at me all at once, I am very likely to be seriously hurt. If an avalanche of a thousand pebbles hits me, I will almost certainly be killed.

In a conventional RPG, the only way to model this *very real* difference is either to have a single pebble do at least one point of damage (meaning a handful of thrown stones will kill the average person), or to accept that the way you model a very large number of weak attacks cannot be the same as the way you model a single strong attack.

I think the Horde rules fairly accurately depict the TT rules. A lone termagaunt isn't going to matter unless it gets really lucky agaisnt a unit of space marines. But a group of thirty of them are going to break down a couple marines just by weight of numbers.

As for fate points, I wouldn't see them as an easy safety strap. Granted, they keep you from dieing, assuming your party as a whole survives. But it's a cascading effect. As you burn fate points to keep yourself alive, you'll begin with less and less points at the start of each mission. That means less healing, less rerolls. Then, before you know it you'll be burning another fate point. Deathwatch is sort of a grind. All the smaller fights should be causing the players to spend fate points until they get to the master enemy at the end. At that point most of the players shouldn't be at 100%. And considering how much damage a hive tyrant, ork warboss, or daemon can do, the marines should be fearing for their lives.

Chastity said:

Plus, hordes represent the 'lucky shot' factor that -without giving them RF- single foes don't get. Five las-shots hitting a space marine does ntohing, but fire enough of them and one of them will hit a weak point eventually.

They're also great for streamlining fights. I love 'em.

Essentially it's a choice: Do you want to tediously play out each hour-long fight against 50 individual guardsmen who all have zero chance of hurting the PCs, while having pretty much no significance to the story and making the players feel like they're rolling around in the mud, or do you want to reduce that fight down to five minutes so saving more time for roleplay and more memorable encounters, make the players feel awesome AND actually pose a threat to them.

I know where my money is. The horde rules aren't perfect, but they save an awful lot of time that would otherwise be spent just rolling dice. And if I wanted just to sit and roll dice, I'd play the TT game.

CruelGM said:

Interesting. How do you keep your players from finding out how many fate points they have during game sessions though? If your healing wounds doesn't work, it means you have run out of fate points, right?

Alex

Siranui said:

Ahhh......thats harsh.

-J

ak-73 said:

Tha's because of my GM'ing style. I'm actually trying (as my houserules are not finished yet) to present my players the most "organic" game they could have. Without rules and parameters: I won't say to them that they have 5 wounds left, I would try to say "You start feeling exhausted, as if the strength was abandoning you" and the players read beteween lines "I'm heavily wounded". Roleplay instead of Rolling

If they say something like: "I try to overcome my wounds" or "Help me, Primarch, in this moment of need" indicating they want "Fate" healing, I will roll a dice behind my screen and then I would say to him/her "You feel a bit better" or "The world starts to darken" or something similar. But that would be a bit abstract to them, which is exactly what I'm trying to transmit. Maybe the "Healing" effect has been efective or maybe not and it's only psychological.

If they run out of Fate points, I won't tell them. I will continue rolling dices, with no healing effect, behind my screen.

And if they are clever enough to use, for example, habilities or talents which need of Fate points, I will say to them something like: "Your blow hits, but don't do damage"

And if all fails, I will reroll fate before each mission

CruelGM said:

Well, I want to steal the idea someone else had and give the crits table to the Apothecary and let him handle everything.

CruelGM said:

That's actually not a bad idea: the players keep a tally of burnt/gained fate instead. Every player rolls in secret their fate points for the mission, previously burnt fate deducts one from the result, gained fate adds +1.

Alex

Maybe I am a lazy GM, but I do not like to keep score of wounds, fate points and such. The players should do that. The fate point system gives you as a GM a reason to be harsh. And when they need to burn fatepoints it should be for a good reason.

I had a player with 5 critical wounds and was facing a deamon prince on his own. He knew that if the Daemon prince hit him he would be dead and needed to burn a fate point, but he kept in it and in the end won when his friends arrived. It was truly heroic and even if he had lost a fate point he would have given it gladly.

Also if your characters have morethan 3 fate points you must try harder to get them loose one or two. Because when they have only 2 fatepoints and 19 wounds the story is a lot different than when they have 5. Fate points should be the rarest commodity in the game and each player should be aware that they are not easily replaced.

About the hordes rule: I like the idea and the fact that even a group of guardsmen with lasguns are able to hurt a marine, while a lonely guardsmen cannot. It is actually one of the biggest drawbacks I have for systems like D&D. A simple ork, even in a horde, is no threat what so ever for a tenth level fighter. If he is even wounded it is just a scratch. the hordes rule makes that horde more dangerous and makes the marines think how to deal with it. they are powerful, but not invincable.