My friends and I are looking forward to our first Deathwatch session soon, and I have a very important question:

Are Apothecaries essential?

In many RPGs, having a healer is paramount or your party will meet a swift end. Either that you slog through a dungeon one or two rooms at a time before retreating to make camp.

In your experiences, is the Apothecary essential to the success of the kill team? If it helps, we are going to have a 4-man Kill-team: a Wolf-Priest, a Raven Guard AM, an Ultra TacMarine, and me (either a DA Tac or DA Apoth).

Secondary question: I'm pretty much sold on DA (they are my favorite chapter and I am a fanboy), but is there one chapter that is the "best" Apothecary?

Apothecaries are as essential as the GM makes them. Without them you will find the party will save up fate points for healing much more, however again that's based on how the GM runs the adventures.

The "best" Apothecary depends on what you're trying to do. Blood Angels make good Apothecaries due to the fact that BAs get some pretty tight close combat abilities. DAs could have some great flavor due to the lores and the like. If you want to be the uber healer, go for a Chapter with an Intel bonus and dump XP into intel to get that up as quick as you can so you're healing 14 instead of 8 with each heal check.

There are several threads on ideas to make Apothecaries more than the 'resident healer' you may want to check out, but not sure of how your group views their advancement tree. As they are, many of us feel they're only excellent as healing and at RP opportunities, and only okay at contributing to killing xenos.

In every RPG healers are enablers for reckless behaviour on behalf of the players.

Having no healer means you simply have to play more defensively and act more cautiously and thoughtfully. For you as a GM it also means that you have to be careful to not overtax the PCs and to play it a bit conservatively especially at the beginning of the mission.

Otherwise it can be done, it just makes everyone feel a bit more uneasy.

Alex

Thank you. I had noticed their Advancements were severely lacking in the offense department. I may be able to get enough offense from going Ravenwing/Deathwing/Chaplain, though. Unless you can only take one Advanced Specialty, but I did not see a rule for that.

Also a Watch Captain can assign a servitor or servitor skull with medicae skill to the kill-team (assigning beyond normal req rules). Just don't get it destroyed though.

Alex

Apoths are not necessary but without one you won't really be able to have as massive or epic of battles typically, since Fate healing is not reliable.

Note however that it's Medicae that is super important for healing, not necessarily the Apoth specialty itself. Anyone can theoretically take it as an elite advance, Wolf Priests and Tyrannic War Veterans have it on their tables, and there's a Deed that gives it too. One of those plus spending req on a Narthecium for its heal-boosting and you're good to go.

I don't know, my group has gone Apothecary-less for some time now and they have some pretty epic fights against some pretty massive bad guys.

Not sure about others, but my players are either rarely in a position to take a full turn off to heal in combat, or they're reluctant to give up that round of killing to heal anyhow. Having an apothecary in my group would only truly be helpful in post-encounter healing. With only a couple of combat encounters a night, the team tends to go into each one with full or close to full wounds anyhow. Between fate and tactics, they do alright.

It *IS* more work on my part to account for the lack of Fate predictability, but I still say it's not a deal breaker.

As a side topic, would a Narthecium be issued to non-Apothecaries? Do Wolf Priests even use Nartheciums?

Wolf priests do not but the Narthecium is not tagged as Apothecary-only either. So barring fiat, anyone with enough req can take it. Sorta makes sense, even if you don't have an Apoth you'll want to be able to easily recover geneseed.

My players do the same; healing for after combat unless they really need to Fate it. But admitted they are not the best at defensive tactics.

Thanks, all. I think I will stick with my TacMarine then. If he dies, then I can roll up an Apothecary.

Kshatriya said:

Well they are Space Marines, after all . Maybe it's because you have an apothecary? I'm not trying to be facetious, as AK mentions above, healers can often be the enablers of reckless behavior. If they get their butts kicked enough because they don't have the ability to heal, they may start approaching combat more conservatively (that's really what happened in my group, enough razor sharp claws and semi-auto from pulse rifles got them to think about things like suppressing fire and cover, but it took a number of critical wounds to get there)

So how does the game change with an Apo? You can afford to dish out small wounds on the PCs. If a player loses 14 wounds in a fight, chances are he might be back to near normal after combat. With high Int, narthecium and fate points, there is only a slight risk it won't work.

Without Apo it's more interesting. But both set-ups pose challenges for the GM to properly callibrated combats. The goal is usually to attrite the player's a bit for boss fight all-the-while carrying a slight risk of killing or disabling them in a non-boss fight.

Anyway without Apo, saving fate points to restore wounds at the end of session is a must. And works rather well.

Alex

The plus side to an Apoth is the players can play more fast and loose with their Fate rather than hoarding it to heal.

Charmander said:

Only a couple of combat encounters a night? I'd be very interested to hear how you make DW a less-combat-ey and hopefully more RP-ey game experience. I can't, however, seem to find a Private Message function anywhere.

igotsmeakabob!! said:

Deviating from the discussion on apo medicae/healing prowess and alternatives, apos also preserve the geneseed material for future space marines, extracting the geneseed from brothers unable to battle and returns.

I think an Apo can generate many RP hooks like capturing a Xenos sample for the DW to study, a campaign to recover geneseed material of a squad of marines within his expertise.

They may seem less combatey than the other characters but it doesn't mean the class is lacklustre if other characters are able to take medicae as elite advance.

igotsmeakabob!! said:

It's somwehre buried outside of the forum itself in the member profile section I think. But I'm a sucker for derailment anyhow

To be fair my group and I only play for about 5 hours at a time. Combat tends to take a significant amount of time (like an hour per fight) for us. When the group is being expecially cautious, and asking lots of specifics about terrain, enemy positions, etc., it can take longer as they look for tactical ways to end the fight with less rounds fired and fewer wounds taken. So half the night is already burned in those two combat encounters.

In the interim there are people to talk to, cogitators to hack into, puzzles to solve, visions to interpret, negotiations to be had. It's a little bit harder for players to grasp, as there aren't a ton of examples of how SM's would go about that type of stuff, so we wing most of it but it seems to be working. But these are 'peers' of Inquisitors, and I give my players the chance to deal with the Guard generals in the field, the planetary governors, ranking nobility. These are the types of people that most other games the players never meet, or if they do it's to be bossed around by them.

This thread by AK-73 might also provide some inspiration: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=179&efcid=3&efidt=413048&efpag=0 Some of those are 'just' adventure ideas, but if you have creative players a lot of the things in there could create quite a response out of some characters.

I won't lie though, it's almost impossible to do without your players buying into it- if all your characters are the stereotype alone, even when you do put opportunities into the game they won't take the bait. If you give them a stubborn governor and they shoot him for not listening to them, they've just turned an RP encounter into a combat one, and you can't always stop that. You can take all the RP potential right out of TEP if you have a group that shoots first and asks questions later.

Every party would want one, but if no-one wants to play one, they'll have to make do without one...

Or if the GM feels for it, maybe see if they can "bribe" one to join them on a mission by mission basis...

Maybe the way to "bribe" the apothecary, would owe him favors... which could lead the squad to go a mission to... perhaps gather geneseeds or pick up a dangerous tyranid for him to study...