Hey all!

I'm going to be starting up a Deathwatch campaign soon, and I wanted to ask veteran GMs something: how feasible is it to convert stats for units from the Warhammer 40K tactical combat game Codex books for use as adversaries in the Deathwatch RPG? Have any of you tried this? If so, how did you do it?

Thank you all!

A quick and messy way of doing it would just be to add a zero on the end of each stat. Its somewhat in line with what they actually are. And just replace initiative with their agility. Wounds you'll have to designate arbitrarily. But that should work in a bind.

Gear you'll also have to convert to RPG form, obviously.

The honest truth, its possible, but its a long hard process. It requires approximately 1 part ingenuity, 1 part experience with both systems and 3 parts tweaking the numbers till it works. The main issue you will run into is sheer level of dumbed downness in tt's statlines. for example everything in tt from guardsmen and grots to chaos space marines has 1 wound, but in deathwatch that same scale fills somewhere between 5 and 30 wounds.

First thing to say is I can't think of many units that don't have rules somewhere, MotX has most of the tyranid army, alot of tau, lots of interesting chaos and some nice orks. there are some good Dark Eldar Houserules floating around on this forum. the easiest way to get stats for this game is to let someone else write them for you.

that being said if you want my a very general formula (don't trust it, it will make mistakes and it will need tweaking)

1. all the stats that have direct analogues aim the tens unit of the deathwatch stat to be the same as the 40k stat. so for example a tt monster with weapon skill 4 wants to have weaponskill 40 something in deathwatch.

2. the number of wounds a monster has tends to go like this (this gives a lot of free reign over how tough you want your monster to be)

tt - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | etc

deathwatch - 1-30 | 31-60 | 61-90 | 91-120 | 121-150 | etc

3. now for the other stats, generally if a monster has high initiative it will probably have high perception or high agility or both (depending on the type of monster. for example a genestealer has a high initiative born of its super natural speed and alien senses, so it's agility and perception are both very high. because deathwatch differentiates between agility and perception but both contribute to how fast a player can react it is important to think a bit about whether the monster you are creating draws its initiative from its speed or its ability to perceive its surroundings. It is important here to take a look at some other monsters that have been created to get an idea of how high agility or perception should be (check out mark of the xenos it is crammed full of tasty baddies)

4. In a similar vein to initiative if a unit has high leadership then it probably has either high fellowship or high willpower or both. again deathwatch differentiates between two types of leadership, the first is willpower, the characters ability to stand firm in the face of death (and the stat which psychic powers are drawn from) and the second is fellowship, the characters ability to convince others to stand firm in the face of death obviously some monsters in tt have high ld because they have high wp and some have high ld because they have high fel. an example again is genestealers who have leadership 10 because their will is essentially unbreakable, however their fellowship is effectively nil. this is something you have to think about when deciding these stats for your monsters.

5. Talents and Traits. This generally just comes down to a firm understanding of the rules and knowledge of the talents and traits that are out there. Think about whether you want this monster to be able to go toe to toe with marines or whether the pc's should be gunning them down by the hundred. generally if the monster is a horde unit just look at the horde traits and leave it at that, other traits are less important. If the enemy is an elite or a master the first thing it will need is a couple of unnatural characteristics or space marines will flatten them, be frugal with traits at first until you get a feeling of what combinations are very powerful. another thing is if you give a monster an unnatural characteristic then any change in its profile is doubled in magnitude. you might want to tone down the characteristic in question slightly so that the unnatural characteristic doesn't send it into unbelievably broken levels. a good example of this is again the genestealer. the purestrain genestealer from MotX is agility 40 and unnatural agility, at first it may seem that agility 40 is laughable, a genestealer who is less agile than the average space marine (average space marine roll is 41). but the characteristic is this low because if it were agility 60+ then it would have an agility bonus of 12+ which is very high indeed. again I will reiterate, balancing this is all about trial and error, practice makes perfect.

6. Finally equipment. personally I cheat here, if I can find a weapon that is similar I steal that profile. an example is when I was creating fusion blaster equipped tau, I just flat out stole the profile of a meltagun, and gave it to a tau. other good ideas are taking a weapon and adding or subtracting a quality to add a bit of character to the weapon. for example a plasma gun with the accurate quality might make a good, if devastatingly powerful. rail rifle.

7. once you have created this monster try it out (preferably out of game) it will almost certainly be either overpowered or underpowered, but it gives you a starting point from which you can attempt to balance. and one last piece of advice, its not unheard of for marine characters to reach WS75 or BS 75 in this game, by my own conversion above this means that in table top you are in fact fighting monsters with ws7 and bs7 some of them even with S7 and T7. When trying to balance encounters with tt monsters it helps therefore to think of your marines not as space marines, but as Special Character HQ choices in their own right, each one would probably be worth 200 or so points in tt, so don't be surprised when they splat your house ruled beasties with little trouble.

This is great information guys, thanks alot for the help! I had looked through some of the Codex books and it looked like I could just multiply the stat numbers by 10 and get a Deathwatch rpg statline, but I wanted to make sure.

Nark: thanks for all the background on unnatural characteristics. I gotta admit, using those makes me nervous as a GM. Finally, I have one other question: I see that Chaos, the Tau, Orks and Tyranids are detailed in Mark of the Xenos, but there isn't much info on the Eldar or Dark Eldar, or Necrons. Are those races detailed in any other books? If not, are you aware if any other "monster" books are coming out for Deathwatch?

Thanks again!

I'd recommend trying the published stats for critters for the first few games, while getting to grips with the system. That way, you're not potentially grappling two problems at once.

Eldar and Dark Eldar do not have much of a presence in the Jerrico Reach, where the game is set. However, if you have a browse of the Forum, there's an off-site link somewhere to some excellent Eldar stats.

Dark Eldar stats have been unofficially extrapolated/used from a Dark Heresy adventure, whose name escapes me.

The Necrons are not officially part of the setting, as the timeline of the game is set prior to the Imerpium's recognition of them as a wide threat. However, there are some statistics for a couple of Necron critters in The Emperor Protects - a published scenario book for DW.

Siranui said:

definitely +1'd

and yeah as siranui says eldar, dark eldar and necrons are not common within the setting, however there are definitely limited rules for them scattered throughout the published material, but more importantly than that there are extrapolated house rules on here, I was looking for the links but my internet is being incredibly dodgy. sorry