I've noticed that the chaos marines in Broken Chains have a SB of 10, and a base Strength in the mid 40's. Is this including the bonus strength from power armor? I can't imagine that a marines Strength is 27 without their armor.

Normal Strength - mid 40s

+2SB from the Power Armour

+4SB from Unnatural Strength

So the power armor doesn't actually add +20% to Strength, giving them a Strength in the 60's?

Noisy_Marine said:

It does, it's just not included in the listed strength (though the strength bonus that comes from it is). Don't ask me why, that's just how they were written.

Because they could be used without their Power Armor.

With a Marine, you could have two character sheets: with and without the armor, as it changes a lot of things (Autosenses, +20 Strength, lots of lulzy goodies).

The +2 SB granted by power armour is applied after the multiplier for Unnatural Strength is calculated. An average Marine with S 40 has a SB of(4x2) + 2, which is 10, not 12.

This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Unnatural Strength is a result of the Marine's genetically engineered muscles, and the +20 Strength is from the machinery of the power armour. The two enhancements are unrelated, so there's no way Unnatural Strength could make the armour work better.

Bastard of Melbourne said:

Note that the Unnatural Strength and Unnatural Toughness in Broken Chains both provide a flat bonus to the characteristic bonus, rather than a multiplier - the three Chaos Marines all have +4 Strength Bonus and +4 Toughness Bonus, rather than x2 to each. For these characters, the end result is the same, but the mechanic is different.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I belive, and hope, that this is done just to make it more simple and easy to understand without a long explanation.

Nightsorrow said:

I'm just curious, but... why? Having an addition based trait is a lot easier to use than a multiplier-based system, and means that bonuses don't reach crazy high levels.

The flat increase of 4 sounds great. The multiplier got a little out of control in DH if the base stat is high.

@Nightsorrow

I belive, and hope, that this is done just to make it more simple and easy to understand without a long explanation.

Considering that the two people who just wrote are among the playtesters and designers of the system, I've got a fuzzy feeling that the +4 that N0-1 drew attention to just might be the actual rule.

That said, I'm somewhat undecided about whether it wouldn't be better to just use higher base stats rather than Unnatural attributes. What's the purpose of an Unnatural ability that necessitates deviating from the standard advancement scheme?

Cifer said:

As I understand it - remembering that I didn't design the system, I just work within it (best person to ask, really, would be Owen Barnes, as he's been heavily involved in the development of the 40kRP rules since Dark Heresy) - it's to account for an assortment of scaling issues and sidestep the limitations of a 1-100 scale.

Fundamentally, things like Ork toughness are supposed to sit above the realms of normal human capabilities. That's easy enough in a wargame, where the broad category of "unaugmented human" is covered in its entirety Toughness 3. Not so much in 40kRP, where you need to account for both a variety of starting values, plus values attainable through experience - a Toughness 60 human (Toughness 40, +4 advances) is exceedingly tough, but he's still human, and the range of Ork toughness should be (for the most part) sat on top of that, because Orks are significantly tougher than humans (I've heard comments from 40k designers in years past that the characteristic scale in 40k is not linear, but rather each characteristic level represents twice the capability of the one below it).

That poses a problem... because that puts the range of Ork Toughness from 60-100, assuming similar variation to humans. At that point, there's no room within the scale for anything tougher... and there are a lot of things in 40k that are tougher than Orks. Unnatural Characteristics allow that problem to be sidestepped - an Ork's Toughness Bonus gets to be beyond the reach of unaugmented humans, without making it awkward to model things like Hive Tyrants and Carnifexes.

What about just letting Toughness (or any attribute for that matter) go over 100? I mean, its completely realistic for something tough enough to resist 100% of the time what the average human would resist 30% of the time. There are still penalties for difficult rolls, so success isn't guaranteed even for creatures with an attribute over 100.

Sergeant Brother said:

In which case, at what point do you stop? Working to the basic assumption that each point of a characteristic (WS and BS tend not to be scaled this way, but everything else works on this premise) in the wargame is is 4 points higher than the previous, starting with (approximately) bonuses of 3-5 for 40k's characteristics of 3, you'd need a Strength of at least 270 to model a Carnifex... at which point, there is no surface it cannot climb except by GM fiat, it can leap small buildings with a single bound, it'll win every grapple ever (because even a roll of 100 passes by 17 degrees)...

By keeping characteristics below 100 and using Unnatural Characteristics to cover the differences, the system still allows for uncertainty and a chance of failure without having to introduce colossal modifiers to account for the several hundred point WP score of a Lord of Change, or to actually hit Eldar with a natural Agility in the 80s or 90s and mastery in the Dodge skill.

Mostly, the reason why I want to keep the multiplier for an unnatural characteristic, is to keep a high incentive to increase said characteristic.

Lets take something simple, like thoughness. Sure, higher thoughness means less chance of beings poisoned and whatnot, but in the end, what really sets it apart as a characteristic worth improving, is the bonus that reduces damage. Now I admit it would be cool to have a sickly person with 20-29 in thoughess, getting unnatural characeristic, and ending up with a TB of 6 (2+4), but I prefer it as a multiplier, simply becuse otherwise you remove much of the incentive to increase it. If you have a bonus of 3, and increase in thoughness that gets you to 4 means that you have 33% more damage resistance, not counting armor.

Same thing if you have 3(6) with unnatural, and increase it to 4(8), you get an 33% increase in damage resistance.

However, if unnatural is a flat increase, the increase from 3(7) to 4(8) would not be as significant.

And while I agree, in most games at least, that one should avoid making superpowerd characters, in 40K I kinda like the idea of a nurgle worshipper, with a TB of 6, and unnatural characteristic, having so much damage reduction that its not even funny (for his/her enemies).

In conclusion, I find that a multiplier amplifies an already impressive TB, while a flat increase is a reason not to get a high "natural" TB.

Most characters that get acess to unnatural toughness would eventualy habe 60+ toughness, it's not uncommon at all. It is really easy to end up with a toughness bonus that is out of control with the multiplier.

Catachan said:

Maybe so, doesn't mean I have to like it though. Still, I haven't tried it yet, so I'll hold of on completly judging it out.

@N0-1

The question is, then: Why wouldn't a Carnifex win every grapple? It's not like your average soldier is going to put it into a head-lock...

I understand such high stats make people uncomfortable because the difficulties needed to challenge them are hard to eyeball ("so... flipping over that Leman Russ, is that a test -100 or -150?") and it's easy to arrive at situations where disparate stats end up against each other in situations where one doesn't want them to - the weapon that's supposed to kill a Carnifex used against the normal human being.

However, I don't see what the Unnatural abilities are supposed to accomplish. They enhance the bonus. What's the stat bonus supposed to stand for? How is it possible (ingame) to enhance the bonus while leaving the base ability relatively untouched? Why can a Space Marine for example hurt people and break stuff better than a norm, but not push stuff or accomplish other feats of strength better by an equivalent amount (I know that UAs reduced check difficulties in prior games by 10)?
Unnatural abilities seem more like a band-aid slapped onto a system to patch over the obvious problems (Space Marines hurting people and breaking stuff) than a real solution.

The drawback with going to a flat bonus is that we will very quickly see +12 or higher Unnatural bonuses for big nasties. There is also the possibility that the other aspects of the Unnatural traits may have been dropped. While it looks simpler and will appeal to some people I think the elegance of the multiplier system is lost.

I liked the multiplier since it really put forth the feel that anything that has an unnatural trait is levels of magnitude greater than normal, not just a little better than normal. For me a flat bonus seems too mechanical and less organic, less natural in some way.

Fundamentally, it all comes down to a different of opinion and interpretation. Personally, as a way of resolving the scaling issues that plagued the first two editions of WFRP (where it was entirely possible, due to character advancement vs largely static monster stats based on the wargame's values, for a halfling to be able to physically overpower an Ogre and for a human in the right careers to be able to wrestle a Dragon to the ground), I regard Unnatural Characteristics as a success, but this is also from having seen the problems that 100+ characteristics in a d100 system can cause in Inquisitor (where a Space Marine in his armour was Strength 240).

It may well be a patch (then again, every special rule which makes an exception from the normal rules is a "patch" designed to cover something that the normal rules don't), but it does what it's meant to do - allow depiction of capabilities beyond the normal limits of human ability without getting into the screwy mess that 100+ characteristics become.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I think the bits I've highlighted are the trap that you're falling in to here.

Just because you can get a regular human up to Toughness 60 doesn't mean Ork Toughness needs to start there, Unnatural or not. Most Orks are tougher than most humans, and Toughness 60 is not most humans , is it? I think it'd be an altogether idea to try and eyeball Inquisitor, rather than the TT wargame, but I can see the potential for problems either way.

I don't think every Ork needs to be tougher than absolutely every human.

And as for the Toughness Bonus reaching such levels that Unnatural traits are going to flat +4 modifiers, instead of x2 multipliers... it's always the Munchkins that have to screw things up for the rest of us, isn't it?

Blood Pact said:

I'm fully aware of that. To be fair, 60 isn't actually the absolute upper limit of unaugmented human capability (I picked it as an arbitrarily high-and-difficult-to-reach example of human Toughness), and the lower end of Ork Toughness Bonuses is 6 at the moment anyway (you can roll a starting toughness in the high 30s for an Ork Freebooter in Into the Storm , which equates to TB6). I wasn't covering every eventuality, because I didn't feel I needed to in order to get my point across.

As for eyeballing from Inquisitor - tried. Not as useful as you might think. So few things were ever actually given rules in Inquisitor that it becomes an awkward source to use (I've got plenty of NPC profiles written up for use in Inquisitor games... but as I wrote those myself, it's pointlessly self-serving to benchmark 40kRP stats off of those). Using 40k for comparative purposes (never straight conversion, but comparison certainly) tends to be fairly helpful, if only because of the wealth of representations of different creatures and archetypes and the variations between editions.

Blood Pact said:

It's not purely that. If you look at Hephastius Bore, you'll note that he has Unnatural Toughness +2; one of the advantages of flat bonuses rather than multipliers is the ability to apply smaller bonuses in various situations. Space Marines, as Broken Chains demonstrates, get +4 Strength Bonus and +4 Toughness Bonus, but that's not to say that all Unnatural Characteristics only come in blocks of 4.

Uuuuuurggh, my first time as a GM (and Rp'er for that matter), making the basic mistake of letting players get far, far too strong. I remember the first edition WFRP very well, just as I do those Strength 8 Toughness 9 trollslayers....the moment a surprise warband of Ogres rushes the party and just gets crushed in one turn, you know something is really, really wrong.

Friedrich van Riebeeck, Navigator Primus, Heart of the Void

Personally I like the flat bonuses as they make life easier... Though I am wondering if they are going to make perception and intelligence matter if they get the unnatural boost, or not. Seriously 21 intelligence mod is no better than 7 intelligence mod compared to strength 21 mod and strength 7 mod. Strength wise you get +21 to damage with that x3. What does intelligence get? You can argue the ability to get +3 in contested rolls is good, but strength gets that bonus as well. You can say that reducing -20 penalty instantly is always nice, but strength gets that bonus as well. One stat is getting more than the other.

Strength gets bonus damage and the ability to lift more.

Toughness gets bonus damage reduction and the ability to lift more.

Agility gets more init mod.

Perception gets nothing.

Intelligence gets nothing.

Willpower gets nothing unless your a psyker, or faith user... Then things get broken.

Fellowship allows for more people to control, charm, and out right lie to them.

Intelligence bonus is used in the Medicae skill if I am not misstaken?

So, its only in perception where you do not use the Bonus for the characteristic, making Unnatural Perception a bit weaker then the rest.