Hi all. We started our Deathwatch campaign on Saturday night. Since all of the players are primarily 40k tabletop gamers and not RPGers, we figured we'd use minis a lot of the time.

I'm having some troubles, though. I have a 6x4 table in my basement we'll be using, but the ranges on bolters and flamers are super huge. We're thinking about halfing the range in meters and counting it as inches. Bolters have a 100 meter range, so make them 50 inches. It makes the flamers a lot easier to play with as a GM.

Any ideas, comments, experience from GMs?

Mostly 1 inch in tabletop game is near 2.5 meter so a weapon with 100m range in RPG will be 40 inches for TT, more or less a yard.

So extreme range would be mostly 4 yard, indeed it's a pretty long shot for TT.

If you really need to play with mini keep the TT range table for player and NPC alike.

I started out using 1" = 1 meter, but that made it too easy for combat to "spill off" the table, so I switched to 1/2" = 1 meter. I like that a lot better. Even so, that makes long-range firefights impractical; in those cases, I would just use graph paper and no minis, with each square counting as 10 meters...

I never really keep it down to having a measuring tape out and seeing how many inches one model is from another; if it looks like a few inches we agree on the table (the group of players and myself) that the mob is a few meters away from the player. It's not 40k it's Deathwatch, we are sharing in an adventure not playing a war game.

I used to use centimetres for Inquisitor when i played it on a 40k TT scale. 1 cm = 1 foot approx in that system. You could use 2cm to a metre if you want to squeeze it into a slight smaller scale. I also find the metrics of working in (ironically) metric much easier.