Can someone explain Kill Markers to me?

By BeyondFandom, in Deathwatch

Posted at

I've been over that section a couple times and there seems to be a block that I'm just not getting it. Help?

Posted at

That link doesn't seem to work for me (although it might be my browser acting up).

My understanding of Kill Markers (I might be totally wrong) is that sometimes instead of a clear, concrete mission objective ("Blow Up the Refinery", "Retrieve the Data Slate") you want to give a more nebulous mission objective ("Disrupt the enemy attacks", "Find out What is Happening").

Kill Markers are basically a shorthand way of tracking player progress on a broadly-defined mission.

For example, you might decide that the ways in which players can "Disrupt Enemy Attacks" include killing any one of several critical leaders, taking out bridges, destroying ammo dumps, or disrupting their communications arrays. You might decide that each leader killed is worth 50KM, each bridge destroyed 25, and the communications array 100 (these numbers come off the top of my head, it assumes that the communications array is big and heavily defended while the bridges are easy to hit). You might then decide that 200 KM worth of activity will count as completing the objective - meaning players could blow up the communications arrays and kill two leaders or kill three leaders and blow up two bridges, or any other combination that added up to 200.

Basically the idea behind Kill Markers seems to be to provide a concrete way to deal with abstract goals or, to put it another way, a way to stop the GM having to make woolly judgement calls about when a particular goal has or has not been achieved. You can avoid them entirely if you (a) always give your players concrete goals or (b) are willing to just handwave things.

Hope that helps.

Posted at

Assign 100 kill markers to an objective and they are nothing else but a fancy term of how many percent of the objective have been completed. Or of the minimum to have the objective count as completed.

Alex