I agree that psykers can be crazy powerful. So much so that they throw the balance of power for their XP level? Maybe, but I think that's a discusion best suited for a more narrowly focused thread...

And can we drop the argument that everyone can recognize an unarmoured CSM? A) 99.99% of Imperial society has never seen an Astartes or CSM before and would have no frame of reference, and B) Take a look at the members of House Goliath in Necromunda for an example of the ethnic diversity produced within the million worlds of the Imperium- they look exactly like unarmoured CSMs! Add to that the genetically-manipulated, surgically-altered bodyguards of the wealthy elite, and it's absurd to think that every hab-prol catching a glimpse of an unarmoured CSM will start yelling for the Inquisition!

On combat: yes, the guys with the heavy weapons will generally target the greatest threat. Usually, that will be the CSM; but what if line-of-sight is blocked, or what if the CSM is engaged in melee with his back to the guy with the krak missles, but the Renegade is clearly targeting him with his plasma gun? Does the game require the heavy hitters to treat the non-CSMs as invisible?

And I just don't buy the argument that intelligent tactics will garantee the survival of Mortal PCs- that assumes that they are never surprised, that enemies never use Blast weapons, that combat never takes place in locations without lots of cover, etc...

But like I said, I could be wrong. I'm still waiting to hear some detailed descriptions of combat from people who have actually played a signifigant number of games.

Zaldrak said:

One of the points of the game is that Humans and CSM each have their own advantages and disadvantages, not "LOL Chaos Space Marines are best at everything."

@Crate

Even if we agree that you can not stealth in power armor (which Im not so sure about since the rules say 0 about it) you dont find the unnatural stats, +5 wounds and +5 to all stats a huge advantage ?

Of course it's an advantage and I'm not sure whether the +5 was actually necessary. That said, I don't think it's an advantage more powerful than the advantages of the other characters.

So if you played a DH campaign, a 7 foot tall feral worlder he would basically not be allowed to do anything social since he is clearly a space marine or mutant (a CSM doesnt even have the crappy FEL stat a feral worlder does so he clearly speaks and acts more normal) ? I dont buy the idea that a disguised CSM (and he can get pretty **** good at it) stands out nearly as much as you imagine.

A character - any character, really - that looks radically different from his surroundings is going to suffer in an environment as xenophobic as the worlds of the Imperium. He may not be instantly accused of being a mutant or a Space Marine, but he will draw attention and "proper folks" may not want to have anything to do with him. And yes, for any player who is mostly interested in social interaction, I would recommend a different character. And by the way: I'd say 7' S40 T35 does look somewhat different from 7' S45*2 T47*2.
As for the heavy robes... combine "abnormally tall" and "has something to hide" and I'm quite sure where my DH players' thoughts would arrive.

Why would a CSM be identified ? unless he proudly displays his old chapter colors then there is no reason to assume he is a CSM even if he gives heretical speeches, he could be disguised or merely be a big man agitating against the imperium. I dont see where this big shining light indicating that he is a CSM comes from.

I'd say as soon as he shoots someone with a bolt pistol, shrugs off bullets and pulls out his chain-axe, people will be able to put 1and 1 together. Unless of course he sheds his entire gear, in which case he loses a lot of his advantages.

@Zaldrak

First, as someone already pointed out, after a while human characters are probably going to draw just as much attention, due to tentacles, flaming skulls, bestial visages and whatnot.

Only if he has either bad luck combined with a tendency for failure or he doesn't care about unobtrusiveness - in which case, chances are those tentacles, flaming skulls and other mutations (of which he gets more than CSMs do) will likely compensate for the Marines' implants. Other mutations are strictly positive without being obvious.

Second, yes, in imperial space, a chaos space marines draws attention. Too bad the default setting of the game isn't Imperial Space. In case you haven't noticed, the default setting is the Screaming Vortex, a place where the Dark Gods reign supreme. In fact, in a place like that, most of the time a Chaos Space Marine is going to get MORE respect and authority than a mere human heretic, (for the fact that he is a friggin' Chaos Space Marine!), thus facilitating social interactions.

Yes, the GM can choose to move the setting to imperial space, and that could present difficulties for the average CSM. If he does that, it's either for a small part of the campaign, or else it isn't a standard Black Crusade Campaign. The same way that a Dark Heresy GM might move the setting to a Feral World inhabited exclusively by barbaric Chaos worshippers: you can bet that tech-priests and ministorum characters will have huge problems interacting socially with the locals of said planet. Yet, no one complains for that fact, because if that happens it's either a brief interlude in a standard Dark Heresy campaign, or it's a very nonstandard campaign for which characters like that were never meant.

I very much disagree. Yes, the Vortex is the setting that was presented in the corebook of Black Crusade. Does that mean it's the "standard" setting? Maybe. Does that mean it's the setting most campaigns played will take place in? I doubt it. The Imperium and its Inquisition is a setting very much focused on the inside - a fortress beset and infiltrated by foes from all sides. Chaos, on the other hand, is a much more active force whose most visible and interesting actions generally happen in Imperial space. The Vortex seems more like a tacked-on bonus because FFG (rightly!) didn't want to publish the Calixis Sector twice.
I don't know about you, but whenever I've read on this forum about stories people want to tell in Black Crusade, they've always begun with "My players will infiltrate the Imperium and..."

Thus... I won't stop it . Thank you.

@Adeptus-B

A) 99.99% of Imperial society has never seen an Astartes or CSM before and would have no frame of reference, and B) Take a look at the members of House Goliath in Necromunda for an example of the ethnic diversity produced within the million worlds of the Imperium- they look exactly like unarmoured CSMs!

A) You don't need a frame of reference to label something as "different from us = wrongbad".
B) Which is why CSMs would have a good chance of posing as members of House Goliath on Necromunda. Not anywhere else that doesn't by chance have a population of CSM-lookalikes.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that scenario, where a bunch of redemptionists run into some undercover astartes and tell them "We don't like your kind her, boays..."

Deinos said:

"We don't take too kindly to your kind around here stranger" A CSM enters Lovecraft country.

Not trying to flame Cifer, but your category of "suspiciously different" is now so broad and apparently so crippling that any off-worlder is instantly identifiable, and marked with suspicion and possibly burning at the stake.

Either the Imperium is more cosmopolitan then you envision, or the average DH GM is ridiculously generous when it comes to combining characters from Feral, Hive, Forge, Shrine, etc worlds in one group. Granted, in a campaign featuring a lot of spy scenarios, a fair amount of skill points should be spent on language skills to mimic local dialects and disguise to cover physical differences, but not having those abilities does not completely cripple the average DH character or shape the campaign. Hell, try to be all sneaky and low profile with a sister of battle in tow...

The point is that campaigns can be whatever GMs envision. And an unarmored marine is no more attention grabbing then the average Heavy, assuming he dresses appropriately and keeps a low profile.

Also, as concerns stealthy marines: The rules in DW and RT states that anything with 7 AP or more inflicts a -30 penalty to any attempts at stealth. For some reason, BC does NOT include this rule although I assume its an oversight. Normally this is written in the beginning of the Armour section where it describes the different values and entries for armor, under the AP section. Assuming this is an oversight and gets errataed, a Marine can still don scout armor which is little more then carapace armor (and thus far more affordable) but which actually grants a +10 bonus to stealth related skills. All of this at the cost of 2 AP. If its not an oversight, then there is nothing stopping a marine from being sneaky even in power armor.

After reading up on the humans and what they start play with, I don't think the gap is as great as I had initially feared. While they don't start at Ascension level, BC humans are very strong in their own right, especially within the fields of expertise that they choose. Even so, the gap created by the unnatural attributes of the CSMs is very difficult to close.

The initial 500 xp bonus and additional skills will also pale over time. And since Corpus Conversion -> Protean Form is so far the only "human restricted" talent that I've noticed, I don't think character advancement offers a lot of options for humans to close the gap that don't also offer the CSM the same option.

In Sons of Fenris there's a Fallen Dark Angel running around pretending to just be a guy and not even the Space Marines seem able to tell the difference.

Cifer said:

I, for one, have no interest at this time in playing Black Crusade in Imperial space. I find the Screaming Vortex (or perhaps the Eye of Terror) to be a new and far more interesting setting. I disagree that that Chaos only has interesting interactions when it's placed in conflict with the Imperium. The Imperium doesn't even have to actively enter into a Black Crusade game for there to be interesting conflicts of Chaos vs. Chaos or Chaos vs Xenos. If anything, I might take Black Crusade into the Koronus Expanse, but that's not exactly Imperial Space - it's more of a neutral zone between the extremes.

Bladehate said:

Don't knock Corpus Conversion + Gift of Tzeentch. It completely, utterly reverses the power gap. CC+GoT means 4-6 extra points of unnatural attributes, while an unbound psyker's buffs give an additional 2. A bound Tzeentchian psyker + an unbound psyker of some flavor, means the total potential of 6-8 more unnatural attribute points in WS, BS, Agi, possibly Per, possibly Tou (for a revolting Nurglite), and 3-4 extra Unnat Str (for a Slaaneshi).

Protean Form is odd, but Unnatural Stamina 30 has its uses, too.

And this is still an option that's only available to Psykers, who really didn't need the help in the first place...

As with all things psychic it does involve a certain amount of risk. Pushing at +5 is risky as an Unbound. It also requires a Psyker to follow Tzeentch...

It also doesn't take into account that Protean Form precludes using any kind of armor, unless your GM takes leave of his senses. In any event a Marine in power armor has a strong defense, and a potent offense and its something he can count on, risk free and constant.

Again, I don't think the combat gap is as great as I had feared. But its still there.

Sacrificial Slaughter says Perils of the Warp can shove it.

Take a look at the illustrations in the Dark Heresy Rulesbook , pages 123, 151, 264, 265, 291, and 345, or in the Rogue Trader Rulebook , pages 36, 107, 175, 307, 336, and 371. The whole point of including pictures of these grotesque weirdos is to drive home the point that what looks "normal" to us here in the real world is absolutely meaningless in the 40Kverse. Even if we assume that from 5.5 to 6.5 feet tall is the Imperial average- absolutely not a given, considering the change in average human height from ancient times to today- I still call b.s. on the argument that being half-a-foot taller than the local average can only mean that you are a CSM! Sure, they may stand out in a crowd, but no more so than a 6'9", 300 pound Somoan shopping in a Midwestern grocery store- no one is going to yell "Monster!" and run for thier life, they will just mumble "Hm, that big guy's not from around here- say, that's a good deal on celery!"...

The larger issue is the claim that a CSM's proportionate lack of social skills balances out a Mortal PC's lack of a 20 point starting damage soak, but I just don't buy that. If an unarmoured CSM, using his +5 starting Int to try to keep a low profile and pass himself off as a common "Heavy", fails a Bluff test, the worst thing that can happen is combat (which favors the CSM, unarmoured or no); but if a Mortal character with a typical starting damage soak of, lets say, 6-8, fails to Dodge a hit from a weapon scaled to be a threat to the party's CSMs, the best case scenario is that he can Burn Infamy to avoid loosing that character. That doesn't feel like balance to me...

On combat: I run a DH campaign, plus occasional stand-along games of Deathwatch , and even in those systems, where starting characters are pretty comparably killable within the party, it can be tricky to scale combat encounters so that they avoid the extremes of being a boring "cakewalk" or a PC "wipe-out". I just can't wrap my brain around creating encounters where half the party has a 20-point damage soak on Day 1, while the other half has less than half that. Seriously, can someone who has signifigant experience with running BC give me a few examples of challenging combat encounters for typical starting mixed CSM/Mortal parties?

Adeptus-B said:

Fine, call BS on that argument. But that isn't, strictly speaking, the argument. Space Marines aren't just big guys. The Horus Heresy novels have made a particular point, over and over, of noting just how inhuman a Space Marine seems, in spite of the common origin. It isn't just height and bulk... it's a combination of heigh, bulk, width, physical proportions and more esoteric things like body language (they're built for war, down to every last fibre of their being... and it shows in the way they carry themselves) and grace of movement (remember, considering that they are bigger and bulkier than a human, they're also quick and agile).

Also remember that all humans are, in the 40k universe, mildly psychic (at least to the degree of having some extremely rudimentary psychic perception - it's the main reason why Nulls, Untouchables and Pariahs are so disliked, because the instinctive psyniscient capabilities common to all humans can't perceive a Null at all, and that's unsettling), and the Astartes are more than the product of science - they're the progeny of the Primarchs, who themselves are the product of a powerful and unrepeatably complex combination of science and sorcery, wrought from the genetics of the only being capable both psychically and intellectually of creating them. Space Marines, by extension, have some innate touch of the warp about them, a nature that gives them remarkable metaphysical durability (it's why all Chaos Marine Sorcerers count as Bound, and why Chaos Marine characters gain Gifts and Mutations more slowly than humans).

All in all, Space Marines are different. Not in any singular way, but in a combination of ways that is uniquely Astartes. Whether or not an individual recognises them for what they are does not necessarily mean that they'll pass unnoticed.

And to put a stop to it from my perspective: Corebook, page 49: "A Chaos Space Marine is generally incapable of blending in with human society. Their enlarged physique and extensive modifications are distinctive amongst virtually every human population."

The best solution to the Humans vs CSM problem?
Give bosses haywire weapons. Turn that Power Armour into Cower Armour.
In one of my games I haywired a space marine, and captured him, and made a Nobleman steal his armour as a Trophy. Now the marine has to run around pretty much naked until he can get it back, as he can't get new armour that fits him.

Cifer said:

First of all I'm asking a question not starting an argument here, ok ?

1) I haven't ever read any of the 40K published books since they are just reaching my country but I remember someone mention before in one of the SW books (one of the Ragnar serie) that at one point they meet Fallen and even the SW aren't sure if he's even a SM at all. Has this notion been retconned over the years or am I missing something ?

2) Does this quote concern CSM or Astartes in general ? I'm trying to understand this from a fluff POW. If illustrations are of any indication, the average heretic and/or chaos worshiper can't possibly pass for human with all the chaos crosses and other amenities tatooed or carved on their bodie.

@Lucius Valerius

1) I haven't ever read any of the 40K published books since they are just reaching my country but I remember someone mention before in one of the SW books (one of the Ragnar serie) that at one point they meet Fallen and even the SW aren't sure if he's even a SM at all. Has this notion been retconned over the years or am I missing something ?

Retcon means Retroactive Continuity. The line of Warhammer 40k may have Retroactive , but it sure as hell doesn't have Continuity except in the broadest sense of the word. Authors contradict each other all the time and the official stance of GW is "everything is canon". Thus, there are both sources where Astartes are bulkier humans as well as those where it's often mentioned that they're definitely and recognizably not. Reading about the implantation process and its results leads me to the second opinion. As was noted (I believe it was either MILLANDSON or N0-1), the proportions, looks and grace of motions of an Astartes are decidedly different from those of normal humans.

2) Does this quote concern CSM or Astartes in general ? I'm trying to understand this from a fluff POW. If illustrations are of any indication, the average heretic and/or chaos worshiper can't possibly pass for human with all the chaos crosses and other amenities tatooed or carved on their bodie.

The quote concerns CSM, as CSMs are the guys you play as. However, as you start with no mutations, I'd assume that it's meant to cover all Astartes.
Also, presumably both CSMs and mortal heretics will go easy on the tattoos and carvings if they ever intend to infiltrate Imperial society.

Cifer said:

After this I was curious about how an astartes would look like outside his armor and made a quick experiment involving photoshop and youtube.

I'm familiar with Philip Sibbering work on the anatomy of the astartes but it has always had something wrong to me about it. So I went on youtube and looked for one of the biggest wrestlers I know of (bar Big Show) and that is Nathan Jones, 7 feet tall for 350 lb. I took a screenshot while he was standing still and layered over a picture of a scout marine (the lack of armor made it easier to evaluate the proportions ) first and then on an fully armored one both from the GW book "How To Paint Space Marines" and shocker he overlay the image quite well.

The scout pic is the top left one at page 40 and the fully armored is still top left at page 41 if you guys want to try yourself.