just got thru running my first BC game and decided to add a little extra stuff in. this was mostly due to the fact that more than one player had already run thru broken chains and i did not want them to get bored. so as i was looking for ideas i ran across the stats for the space marine movie guys( cant remember names) and thought cool. well turns out that the hammer of macrage might have been a bit much( i was avariging 20+ damage per roll and took out both CSM players in one turn. then the psyker doom bolted him to death, but not before the marine managed to throw the hammer thru the celing of the bridge and exposing it to the warp with only a failing field holding in the air, on top of the inquisiter trying to blow up the ship. the players won( only because i didn't want to kill them all)

anyway as i have very little experiance running these games can anyone tell me what a good equivalant level is for the pregenes, cause we would like to do some more stuff before the book comes out, but i don't want the balance to be so far off again.

No one is entirely sure what level BC is for sure yet, at least no one who doesn't have an NDA. Best guess is these ones seem to be a rank or two into Rogue Trader. But not yet Deathwatch. And remember, Deathwatch Marines are the Elite of the Marines. Which does help. Also, I'm not sure those ones that were posted come off as starting PCs even for deathwatch. Maybe a few ranks into that!

Dulahan said:

Considering they apparently put in Chosen for CSM, which are pretty much CSM vets with centuries of experience....Who is more veteran isnt even really a question.

I dunno really. Alot will depend on game balancing reasons....

I got my late 3rd ed CSM HQ already half-statted out since ive got my hands on a 40k RPG, well see if BC allows me to build that guy/ one thing is sure, he wont be able to be as good as the TT version. Yeah there i said it. TT rules get you a more powerful model than the fluffdriven RPG rules.

not too sound like a total noob or anything but what does TT stand for???

Ahh sry. No its not the Audi.

It simply means tabletop. Which is just the wargame.

Should have simply written 40k......cant edit now anymore..

Voronesh said:

While I can't provide any concrete examples at the moment, I'm pretty certain I could reproduce all the Special Characters from the current Codex: Chaos Space Marines with the Black Crusade rules without much difficulty (Abaddon would be the trickiest to do, IMO), and they'd all be bowel-looseningly terrifying in terms of power. Indeed, once the game is out and I have the final version of the rules in my hands, I may well do exactly that, just to show people what can be done with those rules.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Hrmm as a legal PC? Ill trust you on that.

Basically you have to achieve 4-8 dead Deathwatch Marines within 2 turns. One for shooting and one for melee. Thats a pretty stable result with the TT rules, if you consider this a game turn. (Which is alot more than say 4 DW marines can achieve on a CSM though.........)

But also fun is the Daemon Prince. Including the ignore terminator armour completely daemon weapon (make him monstrous+other gifts). You do have to check the best CSM codex they have ever done though, since the current one was done during the dark time of 4th ed.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Abbadon: I guess the main problem are his weapons and the legality of the Mark of the Chosen.

Ahriman: Easy as pie.

Lucius: You're kidding, right???

Typhus: Nurgle sorcerer with a special weapon you'll probably have to houserule

Fabius Gallus: Should be possible due to the freedom of the Black Crusade system, even though I have no idea how you would treat the modifications he makes on other CSM....

Huron Blackheart: Piiiieeee.

Khârn: Nice.

An RPG turn is short. A TT turn is a deliberately vague unit of time that includes both sides being able to do HTH combat. They aren't even close to equivalent.

As for Abaddon, IIRC he's got the Marks of Chaos from all four of the big gods and there's stats for that in Deathwatch. It's pretty horrific, but he is Abaddon the Despoiler.

As for CSMs, clearly starting players aren't the uber badass veterans of the Heresy who have been fighting the IoM for the last 10,000 years. We've only seen bits and pieces, but no one is arguing that the Chaos Sorcerer starting character represents a veteran of the Thousand Sons. A promising new inductee, or a raw recruit from an earlier era who got lost in the warp, or a junior librarian from a recently fallen Chapter all make sense but not a leader of a Thousand Sons cabal. Ditto for the Chosen and so forth. They're Traitor Marines with blood on their hands and who have attracted divine attention, but they are not the Deathwatch elite of the elite or veterans of the Heresy.

Mjoellnir said:

I didn't say I wouldn't have to houserule a bit for their more unconventional abilities, but some of those benefits can be extrapolated from and inserted into the Gifts and Mutations system, and creating new weapons is really simple.

As for Voronesh's criteria... well, I disagree with that definition for length of turn. A 40kRP turn represents 5 seconds... a turn in the wargame represents an indeterminate amount of time with no sense of scale attributed to its arbitrary measures. Nearest approximation I've ever come to required a lot of extrapolation (a 6-turn game of 40k can be represented in Epic: Armageddon as a single Assault Phase; a turn in Epic: Armageddon represents 15 minutes or so of conflict, and consequently, accounting for time getting into and out of assault, it means the Assault probably represents about 10 minutes. Each full game turn (that is, one turn for each player) in 40k is 1/6th of that, so about 1 minute 40 seconds, which is 20 rounds of combat in 40kRP).

N0-1_H3r3 said:

No problem with the weapons, but making something like Lucius? Sorry, that's immortality AND the ability to kill whoever you want. Regardless if they are stronger than you, you just have to get into melee range and get killed. In the TT this ability is unimportant because it's pure fluff. But in Black Crusade? Okay, I have to admit Lucius fluff is holey like swiss cheese and he probably wouldn't be "eternal" (what would happen if the one who killed him gets exorcised etc.)....

Then there's the possibility of Lucius dying to a Necron...

Lyinar said:

Or a wraithlord. Even though then you maybe could still argue that that has enough of a soul to be mutated into a new body for Lucius somehow.... But a Pariah would be the perfect killer for him. A shame the Imperium trains Culexus only as anti-psyker weapons.

Or Lucius simply dying to an artillery bombardment. His killer simply needs not take pride/pleasure in the kill, and Lucius can find no purchase upon their soul. They might not even be aware of his death.

Cynical Cat said:

The Thousand Son Sorcerer kind of has to to be one of the 10,000 year old veterans. Being a sorcerer of the Thousand Sons means he underwent the Rubric of Ahriman which has only been done once 10,00 years ago. The Thousand Sons do not recruit, their standard marines are souls trapped in power armour that are controlled by the legion's uber Sorceres that carried out the Rubric.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Allow me to be more preicse about it.

It was a rather quick shot at it.

I dont intend that a rank one CSM should be as powerful as a TT HQ. But sometime during his career, this can even be the very end of it. It should simply be possible.

A single CSM HQ can rip a squad of 10 DW marines apart without breaking a sweat. Considering a TT game has 5-7 turns for a platoon level battle. A single melee involving 11 people would be over within a matter of minutes. Most of which would be spent moving towards the target.

So Voronesh the terminatorclad sorcerorlord (cue the laughs ) moves towards the DW squad. Everything they fire pelts off his armour. (T5 and terminator armour tend to do that). At short range a Chaoswind will even the odds marginally. Once in melee the DW need 36 attacks to remove one wound. The Terminator kills 4 DW marines per melee turn, of which there are 2 per turn (one CSM, one DW). If the Chaswind removes 2 DW, the ensuing Melee kills 4. The DW get aroung 8 strikes back. Under the assumption that they do not run, the remainign 4 will get killed off in their own turn. Its the CSM turn again, and he is free to start killing more stuff.

This can be done with Typhon as well. But basically every CSM HQ will kill off 10 R1 DW marines within short order. Without getting alot of wounds at all.

Either R8 (or whatever the maximum XP will be called in BC) attain near invulnerabilty against chainsword toting space marines, or they kill stuff faster than you can blink (which is what the TT does).

A DW bolter does 2d10+5 damage and ignores 5 armour. Due to tearing ill assume itll do 15 on the dice roll (but ill ignore RF) plus 10 for the flat boni. A CSM with max toughness should sit at 12 TB, plus 14 for the terminator armour. Yay it works. So basically you get invulnerability instead of WTF killyness of the TT. Which sadly doesnt help if you didnt level alot of toughness and managed to grab a suit of chaos or terminator armour. But beyond that you are good to go.

Ahh oh well, its still cool to see 4-6 marines drop dead in one go, instead of having to do them piecemeal .

Still, the RPG stuff isnt really more powerful than the TT stuff. Stuff = marines in this case. WAlthough alot of people were toting around on the RT forum that the RPG marines are more powerful.......Once the Bolter issue is fixed, there wont be any contracidctions between TT and RPG left.

Still missing the killyness of the TT HQs, but still awaiting the final release of BC. Now i just need to force some people to play. (In BC you do not recruit, you simply collect players ) Although if you are a Khornate follower be sure to collect the head after doing the game.

Voronesh, aslo take in mind that they changed the damage on Bolt weapons for Deathwatch, and carried it over to Black Crusade, at least from what I can see from the characters.

So a bolter does not do 2d10+5 Tearing, Pen 4, it does 1d10+9 Tearing, Pen 4. So, it will be even "simpler" to survive a hail of bolter shots.

Add in some thoughness mutations and you will laugh at anything less potent then a melta. Good times for all!

Perfect, Invulnerability here i come.

Now if we can find the killyness, the RPG actually manages ot be equal to the TT.

Heck my Terminator HQ already survived an orbital lance strike while meleeing a Seer council.

Step1:

Simply stand 0.1" away from the blast zone.

Step2: Watch the whole Seer council die.

Step3: Laugh maniacally at the hilarity of the situation.

Voronesh said:

But that was my point "killing 8 Space Marines in one turn" in the wargame means something very different in the RPG, because the wargame doesn't distinguish between "dead" and "incapacitated and incapable of fighting" while the RPG does, and the wargame's turn represents an arguably longer period of time than that of the RPG. With the differences accounted for, it means that a fight between two characters in the wargame that lasts a single turn could easily translate to several rounds of combat in 40kRP.

Beyond that, the wargame artificially skews the differences between characters and troops, where the RPG doesn't - compare a Deathwatch Librarian to a Deathwatch Tactical Marine of the same rank, and they'll be roughly equal, while a Librarian in the wargame is twice as hard to kill and more skilled in every way than a Tactical Marine, because the Librarian is a Character and the Tactical Marine isn't.

In short, different games require different expectations, because each game has different assumptions and different abstractions in play.

I know that that was your point. (I might [definitely have] have shot too much from the hip with my decidedly too high target. BUT if 3 marines would be nice enough to line up for a good attack?)

But how many turns can a short and bloody fight between 11 guys be. A very, very one sided fight at that.

While the librarian and the tactical marine might be not that different in the RPG, they certainly are in the TT; mainly because the HQs tend to be independent characters and can be singled out. So in the end a tactical squad sergeant tends to live longer than said librarian. The extra wound he receives because of independent character status cant rectify the fact that many people will concentrate on that one guy.

So yes even if a turn takes alot less time in the RPG, its still not THAT much longer. I know that the TT has no concrete numbers at all, so i am simply basing this off a potential "What if" scenario. Shooting plays no large role in this scenario; mainly because damage id prefer to ignore it. And the CSM HQ carries no mentionable firepower, and we dont want to change the result upside down.

So how long would it take a Chaos Lord / Sorceror Lord to vanquish a sqaud of Deathwatch marines? 1 minute? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? Parrying should be rather unimportant, since power weapons tend to cut through non power weapons (Not given within the rules per se, but decidedly imaginable; plus it ups the killyness of the CSM, which is wanted in this scenario).

5 seconds a turn. Thats not alot. Which in turn gives enough turns to kill something (pun not intended). Only problem is that many of those turns might be spent walking towards the next target. So a good assumption is that every turn spent next to a target should result in a kill (a kill being any target rendered unable to fight like in the TT). So we get 10 turns purely spent killing Space Marines and a few extra turns spent walking [well as much charging as you can do in terminator armour] at targets.

So we easily get something like 1-1,5 minutes for the combat. Close enough, but the "character" in question really needs to hammer home the message .

So after revising my far too short statement about 4-8 kills in a very, very small number of turns. We just need to make sure, that most damage received needs to be smaller than 24 (max TB+chaos armour).

Not quite a 180° turn, but close enough?

In short, different games require different expectations, because each game has different assumptions and different abstractions in play.

Nah i only expect a souped up Chaos monster to be just the same monster, regardless of the ruleset. So i am all good here. I only hope that the armoury and mutations table are sufficiently huge. Daemon weapons and the 3rd ed codex armoury were the best and practically a mini RPG by itself

redhead22 said:

Table Top as in the original Games Workshop Warhammer 40k

I'd love to see stats for the CSM characters. Then I can run a fight between Lucius and Kharn.

Banjulhu said:

That doesn't mean they're 10,000 years old. For the Exalted and his Nightlord warband it's been a hundred years since the Heresy because of warp time dilation. I haven't seen any source that says the Thousands Sons don't recruit. The sorcerers should still have viable progenoid glands and they control vast networks of cults that can supply potential recruits. There's also inducting other Space Marines into their legion. I can certainly see them targeting talented sorcerers from other legions.

Yup, only Rubric Marines are 10 000 years old (plus or minus the warp effects, of course, but it doesn't matter anymore for them ^^), Sorcerers need to control them, I don't see why they would need to date from the Rubric.

Unfortunately they can no longer create new Rubric marines. Though I believe there is an old piece of fluff that suggests the spirits of Rubric marines can be re-bound if their armor is destroyed in battle.