Pariah Marines?

By Nerdynick, in Deathwatch Gamemasters

Posted at

N0-1_H3r3 said:

A Dark Heresy game has its heroes, but they are ordinary men and women made extraordinary by brutal circumstance and grim necessity, to wage a war unseen by the masses, forced to cast aside innocence and blissful ignorance to fight enemies that shouldn't exist and strive towards victories nobody will ever know about.

Basically, it's an infinitely more playable version of CoC.

In CoC you find out about the horrible truth and then when you confront it, it kills you all and you gen up another character.

In DH you find out the horrible truth and then when you confront it, you at least have the illusion of having a fighting chance against it, to the point where it's at least worth picking up the dice and trying. And if the worst comes to the worst you still get to go on a number of adventures equal to your Fate Points before having to gen up a new character!

Posted at

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Siranui said:

DH is the one where you're horribly out-gunned and rubbish at everything, RT is the one where your spaceship is far more important than any one party member, and DW is the one where you save planets. gran_risa.gif

In my experience, all of them involve saving planets (except Black Crusade, which tends to be more about defiling them)... in Dark Heresy, if you succeed, nobody notices. In Rogue Trader, if you succeed, the planet's populace make you their king. In Deathwatch, if you succeed, you get a pat on the back and your choice of what would-be suicide mission you'd like to do next.

Personally, I view the four games thusly:

A Dark Heresy game has its heroes, but they are ordinary men and women made extraordinary by brutal circumstance and grim necessity, to wage a war unseen by the masses, forced to cast aside innocence and blissful ignorance to fight enemies that shouldn't exist and strive towards victories nobody will ever know about.

A Rogue Trader game is where heroes aspire to be legends, where danger is merely a signpost pointing you towards opportunity, and where the section on the map saying "Here Be Monsters" is a challenge, not a warning.

A Deathwatch game is blood and fire and noise and death, it is to be a god of war in a universe that loves nothing more to see gods bleed and die, and it is to be faced with a war where victory means nothing more than postponing extinction for another day.

2 Awesome posts!

I'll just add that in the WH40K universe noone gains anything, you usually trade it for something else of higher value. Be it morals, health or body parts.

Isidro