So, I am still rather new to Deathwatch, as some of my other posts have hinted. In this system, what is the "average" speed of accumulating Renown? I ask because I look at various things, and want so much to say "hey, for that Chapter, these would seem almost like normal kit", and then I go look at the tables, and they demand Distinguished Renown (not the highest, and one item I liked, a special infernus pistol, I think, was Famed, but still). Now, I assume you start at 0, and the DW doesn't really care how cool you were among your Chapter; that you got selected to even join the Watch is proof of your accomplishments there (and you didn't bring any toys from home with you), so how much stuff, on average, do you need to do to hit 40 Renown, and start getting some of the cooler stuff?

That I have an image of an Imperial Fists Space Marine carrying a Thunder Hammer and a Combat or Storm Shield, and both are well out of his reach for a time, makes me a bit sad, and irritated that so much art uses it, when so few can. The Techmarine has to wait as long to get a signum (if they really are worth it; i think they are, on paper). Of course I'm whining, but I am also curious as to what sort of investment it will take to get there. Servo-harness for said Techmarine is way off, I know (Famed), but I would hope that, with a bit of effort, Respected shouldn't be too hard, and then Distinguished coming in on its heels? The IF TM with Servo-Harness, Thunderhammer (not as fond of the TM Axe), Signum, Infernus Pistol, and such (maybe the shield and art. armor), is a pretty sight to my mind, but one I suspect would be a very late-game build. Thoughts?

As an end-bit, I mostly want the racking up points speed, and then also thoughts. Thanks much.

I think 3 to 6 per mission is common. To solve the problem first reduce Respected requirements to 15 or even 10 if you feel like candyman.
Secondly you can house rule to offer the players one item from one rank over their renown ranking for X renown points. That doesn't shut them totally out from the fancy stuff but gives them something to play with while maintaining incentive to climb in renown ranks.

Expect to see lots of Storm Shields though.

Alex

While maybe some of the bits are far off, I have to point out that the hammer and shield combo is more a particular of Lysander and other FIRST company marines of the Fists. Judging by what little fluff is out there on the topic, most DW secondments are of promising marines, not established veterans. The chapter sends them to DW to get broader experience than they might have otherwise is my look on it. Also, other fluff (e.g Sons of Dorn) states the Imperial Fists have a culture built around swordsmanship.

But yeah, some of the other bits seem a bit high. It's part of the usual "If we don't give them something to obtain through advancement, no one would be happy playing role playing games" mindset. It's also probably there to let the new GM get time to get used to the game before everyone is strutting around in tactical dreadnoughts.

Took my players 3 missions to break 20 Renown, and that was with Oath of Glory on either 2 or all 3 of those missions. One mission was really short (Extraction), the next was pretty long (homebrew Exterminatus of Tantalus from Extraction, lots of objectives) and the third could have been short but we really dragged it out (1st mission from The Emperor Protects).

They're about 200 XP shy of Rank 3 and have like...25 Renown or so. My future GMing strategy is finishing the 2 missions of TEP, interspersed with *checks* 2 missions in Tau space, one of which is related to the overall TEP storyline.

I might've been candyman if I had 3-4 players, but with 6 PCs, I wasn't going to reduce the Renown cost for Respected. I imagine they'll hit Distinguished in late Rank 3/early Rank 4 or thereabouts.

How do you get that much renown?

Our GM usually gives 2 or 3 per mission and long ones might take 2 sessions to complete.

I just dinged rank 3 and I have our team has on average 18 renown.

On related note, how many objectives do you get per mission?

If it is a big one we might get 2 primary, 2 secondary and maybe 1-2 tertiary, but those take 2 sessions to complete anyway. With average of 3 objectives renown comes slow.

You don't get renown per objective. You get one if you succeed all primary objectives and another one for all secondaries.

But TEP and Shadow of Madness tend to be less stingy. Add to that RoB page 201 and you should be getting 3 to 6 most of the time.

Also: Oath of Glory, no helmet, etc.

Alex

RoB 201. Suffering terrible wound to save battlebrother and saving the team while in critical are very situational, the rest dont happen.

Going without helmet is risky, very few do it since it increases the need to burn fate. Which doesnt come back.

Unfortunately we have been taking oaths that would fit roleplayingly (is that a word?), so no oath of glory this far.

Sometimes doing cool stuff nets more, I did get extra renown for takin Warboss, nob + small horde of orks singehandedly. Without taking any wounds no less =)

Sadly Famed or Hero = not available with this GM =(

Even if we had the renown, the low 70-100 requisition doesnt allow us to get it anyway.

Ard3 said:

I'm GMing a game and I'll give you a little insight as to how I do it.

First we play online, so a mission that might take 1-2 sessions at the table will probably take me 4-5 sessions just because online chat is slower, people might get distracted (hence why I imposed a time limit when I call for people to act in combat or whatever). Playing weekly, 1 mission lasts 4-5 weeks on a good run, not compensating for holidays or having to call it due to scheduling conflict or not having a quorum of players.

Second, the one homebrew mission I've done had 2-3 Primary Objectives, maybe 3 Secondary and like 3 Tertiary; they finished all the Primary and Secondary and left a couple Tertiary at the end.

In terms of missions, I started the game with Extraction, did my homebrew mission (Exterminatus-ing the moon from Extraction), then ran the first in Emperor Protects and now am running Shadows of Madness. For the first 3 missions, the players selected Oath of Glory, which gave them nice boosts but they realized how dangerous it can be not having a Defensive Codex Squad Mode option. And in two missions, one player in each went so far above and beyond for his Brothers that he got a bonus point of Renown for his efforts.

Between those Objectives and Oath of Glory I think they got 4-6 from Extraction, like 6-8 from my homebrew, something like 8 from TEP. I don't remember numbers exactly but that sounds right.

That is quite a lot of objectives. In online game pacing is different but how do you generally have time for that many objectives?

Starting chit chat, listening briefing, choosing leader, oath and gear easily takes 30-45 mins, assuming everyones is on time. Traveltime, minor obstacles, deciding tactics etc may take an hour before we even get to first objective.

For example our last mission was to find out why old automatic station no longer sends sensor data. 1st primary. 2 marines were last seen around here, find what happened to them. 1st tertiary. When we get there we find out there are orcs on station and small waagh starting to gather in the planet below.

We clear the station of orks and find out that the station is sending, but more powerful beacon on the planet is drowning the signal it sends. Signal to all orks to gather to waagh. Also after tinkering with orkified equipment we find that the marines are held captive by the warboss. And after scanning that there stompa being built on the planet. 1st primary and tertiary completed.

Now: 2nd primary: stop the waagh. 1st secondary: kill warboss. 2nd secondary: destroy stompa. 2nd tertiary: free marines.

So we land near the beacon, fight our way in and find bunch of ork kommadoes and a wierdboy. The beacon is inside dead volcano. Well we fight the orks, luckily wierdboys first power goes to perils and gets the "cannot use power for few hours" result. Not so luckily that power was to call some sort of asteroid and smash it around and he just lost control. The doors behind us locked after kommandoes attacked.

We manage to all but 1 ork in few rounds as the asteroid arrives. We take cover as good as we can. Asteroid hits, everyone goes to crits except the ork who is totally annihilated. Beacon is thorougly smashed. After we manage to get conscious and out from under all that rubble we manage to open the door and retreat. Everyone knows that we are here so we go to hiding, waiting and healing for few days. 2nd primary completed.

That was 8 hour session, 3 objectives done, 3 to go.

The next one was shorter, but we only managed to kill warboss. With no heavy weapons left, and all but 1 in heavy crits we left. 4 hours to find warboss, device a plan, get into a random encounter, assault the base, find that the plan dont work but kill warboss anyway. With stompa coming and 2 light fightabombas in pursuit we escape.

Stompa still there, so are the marines. Of cource marines were not anywhere near boss so we could save them in time.

Total 2 renown, plus 1 extra for me for soloing the warboss.

There were 3 of us, tactical, assault and librarian. We got 80 requisition for mission.

Well, all my players are also on my skype list and we have a game-chat. We play on MapTools but do a lot of OOC stuff on Skype. So a couple days before game day I usually give them an IC mission briefing on Skype and put up a Mission Info and Requisition document on Google Docs, where they list all the stuff they want to take with Requisition, their team leader, and their Oath. They can't change any of that on game day once we start playing. First session of a new mission starts with them taking the oath and then blasting off.

Re: the homebrew mission it was a lot of Objectives and I was still getting my feet wet with a good amount of stuff per mission. A couple of the Objectives were accomplished 2-at-a-time which made things faster but they were running around in a giant asteroid processing plant that was secretly an Astropathic relay station gathering info on the Tyranid movement in the system, so there was a lot to get done.

Curious - the mission you described, you got 3 Renown and how much XP?

Kshatriya said:

I think it was 1600 total.

By the way, how do you decide how much requisition to give for a mission? And how much on average?

Ard3 said:

1600 XP and 3 Renown seems a little bit skewed in one direction for one mission of two sessions.

I tend to use the charts from the book in determining Requisition. I have 6 players so when a module suggests X amount of Req, I know it's envisioning 3-4 players so I frequently scale it back by 5-10 total. On average it's in the 50s-60s or thereabouts I think. I know the next TEP mission I'm going to run has a suggested Req of like 120...that should be fun.

Ard3 said:

I would say 1 (maybe 2) major, 2-5 secondary/tertiary objectives was the norm for us. Now it was a large group so things were a bit slower, but I think that we did tend to go for longer missions.

Yeah, it is a bit unbalanced rewards. High skills & talents but basic gear.

Wait, you give 50-60 per player? I was talking requisition total, not per member. 100 for 4 players is pretty much the norm in our games. 60-80 if only 3 are present.

By the RAW, the mission's Requisition amount is given to each player, NOT to the KT as a whole to be divided up. And any one player's leftovers (e.g. I spent 10 and I really don't need the rest of this on anything) can be given to a "community Requisition pool" for everyone else to draw from or just flat-out given to another Brother.

Here's the relevant bit from the beginning of the Req Chapter, p.138:

"A Watch Captain, Inquisitor, or similar authority determines the level of resources necessary for a given Mission. This judgement is represented by the Mission’s Requisition rating. Each Battle-Brother on the Mission then has a number of Requisition Points equal to that rating with which to arm himself . . . A Squad may choose to pool their Requisition Points for a communal item or to Requisition a particularly rare item for one member."

I talked with my GM and pointed that. He flat out ignores it and says he just wings the amount everytime. He specifically told me to keep it stingy to keep it epic. I dont understand that, to me it would be more epic to give the possibility to get cool equipment which allows GM to thrown in tougher opposition.

Althought it is kind of epic to go against 4 genestealers and lictor alone(well with 1 firewarrior, but he dropped on first round) and coming on top without a scratch. With standard gear only. But that could have easily killed the character, which would have been totally pointless and not fun.

Forgemaster was forbidden after the one was practically impervious to all damage and much more effective than the other, mainly because of all the standard gear they get. With little requisition no wonder rest were far behind in power.

After GMing 2 campaigns (with one marine ever getting famed) he wants to play too so I have promized to co-GM missions. We alternate with him GMing 2-3 mission small scale events and I taking the big plot. I will take this opportunity to show what he in my opinion does wrong.

[rant]

I will give decent amount of renown and requisition. Standard difficulty will be +10 instead of +0. I will give fate points for epic and character appropriate deeds, more than once a year of real time. And then the fact that penalties tend to be -10 per degree and bonuses +5 per 2 degrees or at least it feels like that.

I want my player to be epic with kewl gear and horrible enemies. I mean we are playing space marines, how more epic can you get?

If regular GM gets upset because I give stuff, too bad. I did warn, several times, that I will play different style that might mess up our current continuum(all of our 40k games are loosely connected). I told that I wanted a fresh start with 0xp characters. He convinced me to co-GM and swap every mission.

If someone is NOT at least distingished by rank 5 something has gone badly wrong. By RAW 1 primary + 2 secondary + oath of glory gives 5 renown, he might disagree but I will run it by the book.

[/rant]

I did run 1 mission already. I wanted to start simple, since that was my first GMing ever. 1 easy primary, 1 easy secondary with 25 requisition per player. 8 hours, 2 renown(no oath of glory), 1000 exp.Sounds reasonable?

If your GM chooses not to run it by the RAW, that's of course his choice and your only real recourse is to try and talk him into changing or find a GM who runs the game in the way you'd like to play it. Sorry that there aren't more options =

I'm sorry to get critical here but going against 4 genestealers and a lictor and coming out without a scratch smacks of fudging rolls for the player or not knowing how to run those enemies and having them act just like dummy hormagaunts would. No offense intended, but that's my impression from the limited info provided. Lictors are glass cannons and aren't dumb enough to charge a line of Space Marines; they'll go for sneak/stealth kills, eat the brains of normal humans to figure out how they act, etc. They're smart enough to play to their strengths: high damage output, high stealth skills, great dodging. Genestealers are somewhat the same. They're more pack hunters, will move to flank from different positions not covered by fire, and once they're in melee they will open even Terminator armor up like a tin can; they'll focus on the team leader or heavy weapons guy to stir up panic and reduce the amount of fire pouring forth from a heavy bolter or whatever.

I had a lictor hunting and sneak-attacking the entire Kill-Team one mission aboard an asteroid base; it dodged most of their attacks when they actually were able to see it (they frequently did not see it watching them) or attacked from positions that made it hard to counter (in the most memorable moment, the KT was driving a magnetic train through the asteroid and the lictor stabbed the Apothecary in the head through the ceiling...boy did they panic when that happened). The Devastator got 6 hits on it with his heavy bolter at one point and then the lictor rolled a 1 to Dodge (they players all saw it and groaned) allowing it to dodge every single hit as it dove into a ventilation duct, it was awesome. Pretty sure it nearly killed about 3 players before the Librarian finally put it down with a Killing Strike with his force weapon at the end of the mission.

I guess my point is that 40k is a lethal system with a setting involving a lot of death, with characters who know they will die in service to the Throne. I think a player could either feel badass about fighting all those things without taking a hit or could feel cheated by the relative ease. Maybe not getting hurt the first time would give them an overinflated sense of combat prowess or blessing from the Emperor, but if that's how it always plays out in such encounters, where's the challenge if there's not really a threat? Just my 2 gelt anyway.

Re: your mission - sounds reasonable, I wouldn't have made Objectives "easy" to accomplish but that's just me. =) I guess you mean you made the Objectives relatively straightforward rather than adding on a bunch, rather than having low difficulty. 8 hours solid playing sounds okay for 1000 XP.

And bonuses/penalties are always +/- 10 per degree, barring certain called-out exceptions like Psychic Powers (penalties usually go 5xPR rather than 10, for balance purposes) and Toxic (Toughness test to resist is -5 for every Wound inflicted, fortunately SMs have Unnatural Toughness, Resistance: Poisons, and the Oolitic Kidney, and there's always spending Fate to remove penalties as well).

I have talked, but it hasnt changed anything. I will GM as I want it, more requisition, renown etc. I will go by RAW. Hopefully he will at least see my point of view. He is a friend and we play in other games too, so I really cannot simple change GMs. Those are rare in this area anyway.

About the mission. Yes, to be more precise it wasnt easy as in low opposition but easy as in straightforward. Simple objectives, simple opposition. Primary was to destroy critical prometheum refinery far behind enemy lines, secondary was to destroy resources and sow confusion as preparation for guard attack. Basically gathering kill markers.

They used smart tactics and managed to surprise opponents on few occasions. Instead of full frontal assault on fortified refinery they searched underground pipeline, waited for midnight and sneaked in through it. I required several search, tech-use, strenght, silent move etc rolls and they made all of them in time. I ruled that most of the opposition I had planned was sleeping and those awake failed all their occasional awareness rolls. Intended to be difficult final encounter with fallen magos and his cadre with servitour hordes turned to silently backstabbing the single awaken tech adept. The rest did wake up when adept was no longer maintaining constantly needed calibration rituals, but had barely time to suit up.

I had given magos and adepts solo pattern accurate bolters and planned them to shoot from behind cover high in the catwalks in refinery while servitour hordes would keep marines busy. Instead marines had time to climb up, and adept failed his relatively easy tech-use roll to gather the servitors. With smartly used Tactical Spacing + cover the solobolters were no real threat. I hit once for full damage dropping brother from full to zero in one hit, but since the they had 4 reactions total with 4 shooters that was pretty much it. In melee the fallen magos 2 handed power axe could have been devastating, but they managed to parry every hit.

After again falling awareness checks nobody outside the actual building noticed anything before explosives went of. As they were sleeping horde took few rounds to get wake up, arm and go against them. With fighting retreat they managed to get out with only few small injuries.

All in all, team used tactics, intelligence and played to their strenght surprisingly well. I want to reward that kind of behaviour so it was much easier than I had planned. If they manage to sneak in in the middle of night, it makes sense for opposition to be unprepared.

About that encounter, character was Iron Hand Librarian. He is tough. We always make all rolls in the open and I did indeed get very lucky.

It went about like this: Me and firewarrior at tunnel intersection few meters apart, roll good awareness checks to see genestealers.

1st round: I roll high init, push Betrayal of Flesh, 1 genestealer down. Firewarrior misses. 3 remaining genestealers run towards us

2nd round: Avenger hits 2 genestealers, they catch fire. One dodges. Firewarrior misses. GM roll awareness for me. 7 degrees, I see lictor. Decent Per, Corvus armor + Exceptional augur array give me unmodified awareness of 90, which is nice. The one nonburning genestealer charges and drops firewarrior. Lictor charges me. Thanks to seeing it beforehand I am not surprised and thanks to Iron Arm I roll 5 degrees and parry everything. We use Black Crusade rules for swift/lightning attack, burst and full auto so 1 well rolled parry can stop lightning attack. The 2 genestealers fail their willpower checks and just run around taking near max fire damage.

3rd round: Pushed point blank Betrayal of Flesh drops lictor. It has radius of 7 meters, so no dodge. Standing genestealer can dodge, since it is few meters away, but fails. I have Flesh is Weak so it doesnt effect me. 2 other genestealer fail their checks again and die to damage.

It was close, if the Lictor had hit me I would probably died. Emperor smiled on me that day.

Same session, different mission. Warboss, nob and horde of about 25 orks charge me. Warboss fails his command roll to boost allies, all miss. Another pushed point blank Betrayal of Flesh, with well above average damage destroys most of horde, one shots nob and takes boss to criticals. But I roll to perils. ****. Roll of 89. Double ****. Then I read the description of perils roll, Reality Quake. Hell yeah. Doesnt do any damage to me, but GM describes that the ground arounf me turns to solid metal, with the dying nob turning to statue. More horde dies.

Warboss hits, Iron arm parries, what is remaining of the horde misses. I sadly miss. Next round warboss hits with 4 attacks, I parry all. Horde misses again. I hit and roll below ten on the opposed willpower test. Warboss turns to burned husk, horde scatters. I take bosses tooth as a trophy.

Betrayal of Flesh is simple amazing power. I took it with my starting exp and never regretted it.

I had crazy rolls for whole session while GM failed most of his rolls. My luck will turn but **** that was awesome.

For bonuses it is the thing that unless explisitly specified by the rules, bonuses are rare and penalties frequent. Penalties are in the -10 to -30 range while bonuses above +10 are rare. And bonuses accrue in steps of +5, while penalties in steps on -10 most of the time.

Heh, the Emperor truly favored you that day.

Your players played smart against those Dark Mechanicus. Good for them!

Yeah, I was a fan of the BC melee rules from the player's side until I realized how much more output a meleeist gets from 3 separate attacks rather than +hits from DoS (and it winnows down enemy Reactions to boot). More and more the BC melee rules really are lacking to me as a GM. Suddenly a genestealer or lictor's 3-4 attacks are a lot less scary so long as you can pump Dodge high and get 1 good roll. Meh.

Good use of tactics on the nids, though stealers and lictors not dodging seems to not happen very much. Your GM must have had a bad dice day. Lord, Betrayal of Flesh was not well-designed. Full 1d10 damage progression AND full PR Pen progression AND Felling AND a ton of extra hits on the vast majority of Hordes in the game? You don't even find Felling on weapons below Distinguished Rank aside from shotgun slugs. Yeesh. Good use of it though, but it's definitely overpowered for the availability (immediate lol) and the cost (500 lol).

How were you using that many powers? Sustained Iron Arm and just Pushing your instants, which would come off at lower PR otherwise? I'm curious.

How didn't you take damage from Reality Quake? It doesn't say the psyker is immune and when the psyker is intended to be immune to a given phenomena, it's explicitly called out in the entry, otherwise you eat it too. Or did you just soak the damage like a boss?

Yeah after reading both instances of full-parrying everything thrown at you I can safely say I won't use the BC rules.

Ard3 said:

Is this a BC thing? Because in the Core, the GM-fiat bonus/penalty steps are at increments of 10. Some wargear does give bonuses in +5 increments (I'm thinking the signum). I'm not sure where you're seeing that bonuses are rare or typically accrue in 5s...can you give me a cite or a quote or something?

I have Psy rating of 4, 7 when pushing. Now that I red those rules again I realized we have been using them wrong. We have played them so that sustaining doesnt effect instant powers, and sustaining reduces effective rating of all powers by 1 if sustaining 2, 2 if sustaining 3 etc. I have no idea where we got that from. But then again I think I am first librarian to ever sustain more than 1 at a time. Or even use instant while sustaining.

Our previous librarian used Force barrier + bolter when ranged, Iron Arm + sword when in melee. Our first one had Might of Heroes but rarely used it, he just pushed Blood Lance on everything. Also Chronological Incontinence became signature move, he had amazing luck to roll that pretty much every time he went to perils. Apart from that on time when he summoned 2 daemon princes in 2 rounds while we were running away from third, who was part of the mission. Cue exterminatus as soon as we got to orbit.

So pushing instants while sustaining would have been PR 5 instead of 7. That would have made big difference.

Yeah, it really is insanely powerful ability. And given that our tacticals prefer ranged, our only assault died(with heroic sacrifice, but still) the only ones that usually end in melee are me and techmarine. So yeah I can blast away with no worries of hitting an ally.

Reality quake is 2d10, I have TB 10 and armour 10 everywhere thanks to flesh is weak 2 + houseruled corvus(AP 8 everywhere otherwise RAW). Unlike many phenomenas and perils, it doesnt say ignore armour and/or toughness.

As for bonuses that is not on the book, it is how the GM runs it.