One of my biggest problems with Deathwatch is the overall clunkiness of purchasing Advances - by the time you hit Rank 9 you literally need to be looking at thirty or more tables for character Advances (nine tables under General Space Marine Advances, nine tables under Deathwatch Advances, nine tables under Specialty Advances, plus Chapter Advances, Characteristic Advances, and any Advanced Specialty Advances). You can have the same talent or skill available to you multiple times, at different ranks, and at different costs. To some extent this can be a good thing (if, for example, I wanted Air of Authority, it's a Rank 2 General Advance for 1,000 exp, but for a Tactical Marine it's a Rank 1 Advance for 500 exp) but it can also get ridiculous (a Storm Wardens Assault Marine has Hammer Blow available as a Rank 6 General Advance for 1,000 exp, a Rank 4 Specialty Advance for 800 exp, and a Chapter Advance for 500 exp). I realize that the intent here is probably to make Advances widely available, but....

Then I started looking at how Advances are handled in Black Crusade. For those who aren't familiar with it, all of Black Crusade's Skills and Characteristics are on one table, and Talents are spaced across three. The cost of an Advance is determined by which Chaos God you worship - for example, a devout follower of Slaanesh gets Advances aligned with Slaanesh much cheaper, whereas Khorne and Nurgle Advances are much more expensive. A worshipper of Chaos Undivided buys Advances as if he were allied with all four Chaos Powers - in other words, at the base cost. So I started thinking, how could this system work for Deathwatch?

My thinking runs along these lines - first, don't choose Specialties at character creation. Instead, four of the Specialties run as the equivalent of the Chaos Gods - Assault, Devastator, Librarian, Techmarine, and Tactical becomes the equivalent of worshipping Chaos Undivided. As an example, purchasing Librarian Advances will make those Advances cheaper, but Techmarine and Devastator Advances are now that much more expensive. Buying Devastator Advances makes Librarian and Assault Advances more expensive. Buying Tactical (unaligned) Advances keeps everything at cost.

I realize it's not a perfect idea, and it's got a few holes in it - such as what to do with the Apothecary Specialty, and why a Space Marine can suddenly manifest psychic powers when he starts buying Librarian Advances, but if executed well I think it could really streamline the leveling up process in Deathwatch.

So what are your thoughts on it? Am I onto something? Am I crazier than an Ork pacifist? Am I a secret disciple of the Dark Gods, seeking to undermine your righteous zeal in the name of the Ruinous Powers?

Actually you are not the first doing this =D Personally I've been thinking about how to better handle it and in the end, as silly as it might sound, the best way to play a SM is to use the unaligned cost for all (they are not aligned with chaos after all =D). Astartes do all follow the same training, even if you decided to stick with assault or devastator, you HAD to go through the same training as everyone else. Same goes for librarians, techmarines and so forth.

I was looking at this as well and had arrived at a 4 "archetype" idea

Battle Brother ( ie tac/assault/dev), Apothercary, Librarian, Techmarine

and was thinking of dividing the advances into categories based along the following lines

General - skills most space marines could have, pilot, drive, stealth, athletics, wounds, most stats
Rare - Skills most space marines would lack carouse, inquiry, charm etc
Combat - assault - all melee skills, talents, WS, maybe AGI
Combat - Devastator - All shooting skills/talents, BS, maybe PER
Command - All leadership talents, command/tactics skills
Technical - Tech advances and tech marine implants, relevant lore skills, trades
Librarian - Psy advances, relevant lore skills
Apothecary - medicae advances, relevant lore skills, chymistry

Basically each archetype starts allied with General and both kinds of combat, true to its own speciality (Command for Battle Brother) and opposed to the other specialities and Rare skills.

The aspecting part is primarily for the Combat types with all specialities starting balanced but being able to aspect to Assault or Devestator with the expecting opposition from the other side.

I was thinking that the chapter advance tables would give 1 grade of discount to the listed advances (ie allied becomes true, opposed becomes allied) and so would "specialist ranks" like captain or chaplain etc.

The Battle brother "class" would take a bit of handling with regards to wargear and powers though, for example, choosing at mission brief/oath swearing if being deployed as devestator, tac or assault marine, gaining a power from that class and that class base wargear for the mission. Aspecting would eliminate the opposite choice from the list, so a devestator specialist marine cannot deploy as assault and vice versa but either could still deploy as tactical marines.

It sounds like a bit more work but I like the feel of it and the flexibility for characters allowing CC or shooting for all marines as their player chooses.

All DW needs is a table to correlates skills/talents with when it gets available to whom. That way you can look up at higher ranks whether a particular skill/talent is available to you.

Alex

I think part of the attractiveness of the BC levelling system is it removes the rank restrictions entirely. So there would be no need to wait to reach rank X to buy a skill/talent provided you meet the pre requisites giving more control over your development.

Tech Marines and Librarians would have to be their own path. The training required for those two specialties is extremely unique and time consuming.

Nothing personal, but the idea that anyone would allow people to take psy powers willy-nilly just seems absurd to me. Deathwatch are not Grey Knights.

Apothecaries are also a more unique specialty and should be restricted. Most battle-brothers will not be inclined to the work of the Apothecary.

You will need to define chapter specific restrictions about what skills and talents are not allowed by a particular chapter. I could not imagine some chapters allowing certain things to be known by their battle-brothers.

The idea is neat, but I, personally, think that you will end up with a group of marines who's only difference on paper is what color their shoulder pad is. There will be no true uniqueness to any chapter as everyone will buy all the "good" combat skills first. You will end up with shooty marines and stabby marines and eventually someone might buy a skill.

I'm interested to find out what your results are, good luck.

Tellarond said:

This makes more sense than what I have, at least as far as Apothecaries, Librarians, and Tech-Marines, but seems like it would be a lot of work to implement and balance properly. Also, you're still looking at several different tables for leveling - my goal in this is to streamline the leveling process as much as possible.

Tellarond said:

Yeah, if I implement this new system I was thinking about doing away with Ranks entirely, since they'll effectively serve no purpose other than to tell you when an Advanced Specialty is available to you, and if it becomes a concern you can always check your Rank as normal by looking at the chart.

ItsUncertainWho said:

Apothecaries, Librarians, and Tech-Marines are my biggest concern with this setup. I don't really want to make them completely separate paths, since my goal is to streamline the system, but the only other solution I can think of is to make certain advances restricted to certain Archetypes - for example, only players that have a Psy Rating can purchase psychic powers, and only characters that have Psy Rating at character creation can purchase Psy Rating.

I don't plan on getting rid of Chapter specific restrictions. For example, a Black Templars character can't buy Psy Rating at Character Creation.

ItsUncertainWho said:

My group has this problem ANYWAY - the only skills I see them buying on a regular basis are the skills that help them in combat. Dodge, Parry, Tech-Use (for repairing Overloaded force fields), and Awareness (for spotting enemies). They know that they're going to run into lots of combats, so they buy all the combat advances. They would rather be awesome in combat and have a higher chance of failing in social interactions than be super-social and run the risk of getting holes blown in them - and I can't honestly say that I blame them.

Players will still receive all other bonuses from their Chapters - Solo and Squad Modes, Demeanours, Past Events, and Characteristic Bonuses. A well-played Ultramarine will feel a lot different than a well-played Dark Angel - it's all on your players. Personally I'm not worried about my players neglecting their role-playing duties, just buying the actual role-playing skills.

The way I would handle it, is simply lift the the Rank-restriction but keep everything else, while applying the True, Allied and Opposed alignment.

I would do it thusly:

General Space Marine Advances and General Deathwatch Advances are all "Allied".

Specialty and Chapter Advances are all "True".

All Advances that are neither in General Space Marine, General Deathwatch, your Specialty Advances nor your Chapter Advances are Opposed.

For costs I would probably keep close to the BC costs, but give them a flat cost increase across the board to account for the original DW advances being quite expensive.

I am currently running a DW game where I decided to implement nearly all of rules changes made to the core system for BC. I intend on coming up with a chart similar to the one in BC for loyalist marines. Since I am busy doing other things, in the short run I decided simply to remove level restrictions on advances and for elite advances use the tables in BC for guidance. I allow parry as a skill (which it is in BC) and came up with the cost for each specialty based on their WS advancement (since parry is a skill most related to WS) to determine whether they use the true, unaligned, etc.

There are certainly opportunities for min-maxing with opening things up, but as long as you are not playing to win, and want the characters to have character then it shouldn't be a problem. Since DH I have always felt the advancement charts were too constrictive and left too much out. I've been a firm believer in being liberal with elite advances but that is not as helpful as a streamlined flow chart type system. I might increase pre-requisites on certain skills and talents to discourage min-maxing, but for now to keep it simple I just keep it open. Once I have played a mission or two like this then I'll decide if further tweaks are necessary.