Hello All

So recently my group has been searching around for a game to run. I've been wanting to do smething WH40k but after literally years of running Shadowrun, Mage, and other intrigue games I wanted to get down to some straightforward military games. I ran the Extraction scenario for most of the gorup and they were hooked.

The only snag is one or two of my female gamers really doesn't want to play marines. I'm looking at varying ways to handle this the most obvious being to let them play soemthing from Rogue Trader or Dark Heresy since I have most of the books or can get them through drivethru. My fiance in particular is interested in trying a sister of battle, she'd originally been going for tactical marine but didn't feel she had the out of character presence or patience to lead. Does anyone have any advice on this, any pitfalls I should watch out for or work to avoid? Any tweaks I should put it. I looked over the basic conversion ruloes and they see relatively straightforward if they bring in a sorita I just have them spend 13000 more on advances and goodies. Also looking at the Sorita's starting kit I'm going to have to give them some regular or best quality power armor out of Rogue Trader, any other thoughts?

Thanks in advance, oh one stupid newbie question, how much ammo do space marines actually carry on miissions standard? Are they all assumed to have on of the ammo backpacks unless there's a logistic reason why they wouldn't?

SoB Ascended to Palatine or Crusader should do alright along side space marines. You might need to give them a few unique pieces of gear though. Primaris Psykers are also fairly combat worthy. But in general DH characters will be better at interaction and SMs will be better at combat.

If it were my game i would limit to DH and DW, since RT is built on a different ranking system that scales differently than the other two. Basically, a R9 DH character is the equivalent of a R1 SM.

Any DH character at ascension level (actually some will have them before rank 6) will have four plus attacks a round where most rank 1 SM will have ONE. A SoB Palatine will out class every marine in the game. No worries there but do what you can to tone down the number of attacks they get a round, maybe allowing swift attack but not lightning. From there its just power armor and kit. SoB will work well, and if you let them have faith powers watch out.

Give a SoB ascension level a Heavy Bolter and its clobberin time, Unrelenting Devestation or not.

And ammo is the rule of three if you don't institute any limit worth keeping track of.

And don't let them play assassins for god emperors sake unless you want them to dodge/react/parry equal to their AG bonus.

Hmmm, so i don't have Ascension, should I be getting it and having the player use that to build her character? I guess I don't understand I thought thematic differences nonwithstanding all the game systems were sequentially more powerfull. Is there a downside to having say for instance a Astropath Transcendant in a Deathwatch game? I appreciate the help, this is my first outing witht he system though i've compulsively bought a bunch of the books (at least in PDF) in an ticipation of this day.

Non DW chars also pay a lot less xp for their advances, so even if they aren't stronger than a Marine at the beginning, they can expect to be so soon.

Theoretically, squad mode abilities might be a balancing factor in this, giving DW Marines an edge noone else has. So best not to give anyone else access to them.

That seems strange but yes I think I see what your talking about now, I guess I won't worry overly much about balancing weapons or gear with the deathwatch stuff as it seems like deatchwatch gear should naturally be better.

In my opinion, for equipment wise, I would try to point you in the direction of Black Crusade. Seems like all the weapons there have been better streamlined and thought of. I felt that after they introduced RoB, they had to streamline the weapons etc. So Black Crusade would be a suggested read. There is a section towards the end also for converting BC to RT/DW/DH.

Hmmm thanks, i might do that, although setting wise Chaos does nothing for me so i'm hesitant to throw the money down for that book. Plus it seems like in a lot of cases the Astartes gear should be superior.

Things to look out for:

Dark Heresy

• Psyker abilities/powers need to be modified to match DW psyker abilities so you don't end up with two systems.
• Number of attacks a round can be high past Rank 5 depending on the Career.

Rogue Trader

• At 13,000xp not much difference in abilities, the Astropaths abilities at least use a similar system.
• Attacks per round are similar, not more than one or two if they have Two Weapon Wielder.

Add power armor to any of them and it at least means they can keep up with the SM.

Any of these characters can have strength in excess of fifty if built that way but its harder for DH and DW characters to get Unnatural Str and Toughness - usually requires mutations which would put them at odds with most SM Chapters.

Armor and Weapons aren't necessarily better for DW characters unless you use the non-errata statlines. Rogue Traders can get access to some truly turn-you-whie-scary stuff.

lurkeroutthere said:

Combat is pretty similar except for righteous fury. Gear wise I think BC uses more balanced rules. There are Necrons and Dark Eldar in there, +/- Harlequin/ Storm Seers. Although there are specific rules to corruption etc, infamy I think its quite balanced as compared to DW. I think its pretty solid

Ok so after a few sessions one of my female players has just opted to play a female marine, I'm going to come up with some fluff for a space marine chapter and call it a done deal. The other still wants to play a sister of battle so that's what we're going with. I'll give her the faith powers as kind of her nitch and had her take signature wargear to get her some mid quality power armor and so far so good.

If the only thing holding your fiance back from playing a Tac Marine is fear of being thrust in a leadership role, then I'd try to reassure her not to worry about that too much. Tac Marines make good leaders, but they don't have to fill that role. Their talents also make for a real good rifleman/grunt as well. Not all Tac Marines need to have good Fellowship and social skills, some of them can just be good all-around warriors.

There's nothing wrong with playing a Sister of Battle from DH either, of course. It can be difficult playing a character that is of the opposite sex than the player. Ignoring some of the fluff and creating an all-female Space Marine chapter is a pretty solid solution I think. You can use the Chapter creation rules in Rites of Battle to create an all-new female Space Marine chapter. Alternately, if you don't want to mix up the DH and DW rules, you can simply use the Chapter creation rules in RoB to re-skin the Sisters of Battle as a Space Marine chapter and ignore the rules in DH.

lurkeroutthere said:

I think you can get by without even that. Apart from writing an F behind Gender on the charsheet, there isn't really anything that changes by including female marines. If she is okay with it you could even say that in the case of Space Marines "brotherhood" and "brother" have lost their gender specific meaning when used by SM for SM.

For now we're just patterning them off the ultramarines until i can spend some quality time with the chapter creation rules. As to my fiance she just really wants to play a sister of battle now that she knows the option is on the table.

As to the fluff for a female space marine chapter I want there to be some of it as otherwise does the game world a little bit of a disservice. I've talked to the player and basically explained to her that while the other astartes arn't dismisive of females there is a lot of suspicion over the long term viability of the process. The imperium is a stodgy and hidebound institution after all. So there's a bit of an all eyes on her and her chapter situation. It will also give me a chance to feature her chapter a little closer into what's going on in the Jerico reach.