Heya,

Well, the way I see it, there's more to the game than swinging a weapon or shooting stuff. Lots more. I bet that strong Militant has tons to do, and is having so much fun, when he's not just rolling and killing stuff.

Make the campaign more diverse, so that absolutely narrow characters are not as useful/fun, and promote people spanning out their purposes. Do more investigative sessions, less combat sessions sometimes. Change it up.

And when it does come down to combat, see how well the Militant's willpower holds to something that affects or controls things via opposed willpower tests. Let him come up on a powerful psyker, or even an evil Navigator or something. It will get ugly.

Very best,

Arch-Militants are not too strong/OP. In fact, they are pretty much the most "one note" career in the game.

Mine took the Manhunter at rank 1, hails from a frontier world and took xenos hunter as his lure of th void which makes him a but more interesting but yeah it's still a problem. I can't imagine how one note it would be to play the class per Core Rulebook vanilla.

Oh and something has been bugging me, this Arch Militant with the power armor and the duel stormbolters I'm curious how the hell that happened. Personally I don't even think I'd allow it in my game, SPHESS MAHRINES don't even use storm bolters with non-terminator armor unless they're chapter masters or something presumably because they're too hard to manage otherwise.

They're considered BASIC weapons in RT so using one with a single hand would incur a penalty, sure the Astartes do it but only in Terminator Armor which isn't available in the RT armory because even if you somehow got ahold of a set a Deathwatch Kill Team would probably show up at your door and ask you politely to hand it over exactly once before they just took it from you. Those suits are almost totally irreplacable and whether it's ever true or not the Astartes really do believe each one contains a small fragment of the Emperor's own armor.

Who says that because they usually don't means they can't? Welcome to logical fallacy. Going against standard doctrine is something many Rogue Traders are fine with, not so most space marines.

Recoil gauntlets allow you to use basic weapons one handed without penalty and heavy power armor comes with a pair of them automatically. Also the storm bolter PC's use in RT are different than the ones used by Astartes.

To dual wield them without major penalties the AM needs a string of talents, which cost him some of his XP.

PC's are extraordinary individuals even amongst the ranks of swashbuckling space conquistadors and pirate captains and other extraordinary folk. The Arch Militant is the career from among that extraordinary group that is almost entirely focused on killing stuff.

I'd allow it, but probably throw in a -10 recoil penalty, since the Storm Bolter is pushing the upper limits of Basic Weapon, and leave it at that.

No I gotta say no, it's one of those cases where even though it's technically permitted as the rules are written it's totally absurd in terms of the fluff. Per the rules as written a character with a high strength and toughness could always be carrying more than a dozen weapons depending on their individual weight but there's absolutely no **** way I'd allow that either, if he wanted to hire a team of gun caddys that'd be one thing and I'd have him write the name of each weapon on a notecard and sort them under who is holding what at any given moment.

Hell per the rules as written you can duel wield thunder hammers too which is possibly even dumber than duel wielding storm bolters because ignoring the weight it would be so awkward and you'd be so completely in your own way it would be comical. I'm trying to imagine what duel striking with twin thunder hammers would even look like, perhaps some sort of spin attack? I guess my point is that even though thunder hammers are not listed as two handed weapons they should be, and if not I think the idea was you'd be using it with a shield or something. Even a smallish thunder hammer is like six feet long.

Obviously this is not a unique problem to RT, I've heard stories about D&D players duel wielding halberds, long spears or even carrying a ballista around like a crossbow because they somehow found some hole in the rules or two rules that interacted in some unforseen ****** up way. It's the nature of the hobby to some extent and that's why the GM needs to put his foot down in the face of obvious munchkinism and utter nonsense even if it means changing some of the official rules.

Ruling against something based on fluff has nothing to do with opposing munchkinism, however, and will pretty much inevitably lead you into a downward spiral of requests for marginally less powerful weapons until the player finds out which rules you actually intend to follow.

I strongly recommend that if you're opposed to a combination on mechanical grounds, just say so and explain why to the player, so you can come to an understanding about where the line is drawn. You can come up with a justification for anything, based on fluff, so dropping the pretense means not having to deal with protracted arguments.

And just in case you reply with "but everyone should get where I draw the line automatically - agreeing with my opinions is just common sense" (not saying you will, but a few people in any given group of people will inevitably think so), it should be evident by the sheer amount of groups that do in fact allow storm bolters to be dual-wielded, that this is in fact not the case.

duel storm bolters really is not that far into the power spectrum. wait till that guy is rocking twin best quality clovis plasma guns.

duel storm bolters really is not that far into the power spectrum. wait till that guy is rocking twin best quality clovis plasma guns.

That seems funky to me too although honestly not as much, because plasma weapons presumably don't have much or any recoil or at least FAR LESS than a storm bolter. However the problem I see with that is that if you do the math each Clovis weighs about forty five pounds which seems extremely heavy to be holding in one arm even if you're built like Marcus Fenix. Recoil Gloves are called "Recoil Gloves" not "hold weight of two medium sized dogs in your outsretched arms gloves".

If you're wearing power armor sure, but at that point you're wearing and holding three Extremely Rare items so good luck making those aquisition rolls even if you have the minimum nine weeks to shop you'll need for all three at best craftsmanship and why the hell would you not go for best craftsmanship if you were trying to buy your final ultimate gearset?

I don't know what other GMs do but if one of my players buys two rare items or even a single very rare or rarer item I usually cut them off by saying if they make any more aquisitions at that time I'll start rolling on the "you're buying too much ****" table" from Into the Storm ragardless of whether they've even made their rolls.

I don't know what other GMs do but if one of my players buys two rare items or even a single very rare or rarer item I usually cut them off by saying if they make any more aquisitions at that time I'll start rolling on the "you're buying too much ****" table" from Into the Storm ragardless of whether they've even made their rolls.

... while I actively try to encourage my players to buy the most outrageous stuff they can think of. And so far none of them have bothered to go for plasguns.

And the light power armour bought for the arch militant had to be golden, ofcourse.

Wow, Larry. Even I don't cockblock my players *that* much.

A clovis pattern plasma gun weighs 20kg (22kg with a magazine inserted). Only the weediest of gits would be unable to lift 22kg in one hand, and rogue trader characters tend to be far, far stronger than regular people.

Of course, I disagree with your gaming philosophy in general, but if you want verisimilitude, you should at least have some basic idea of how reality actually works before you start complaining.

I bet you have no problems with the existence of chain weapons.

I don't know what other GMs do but if one of my players buys two rare items or even a single very rare or rarer item I usually cut them off by saying if they make any more aquisitions at that time I'll start rolling on the "you're buying too much ****" table" from Into the Storm ragardless of whether they've even made their rolls.

I, for example, don't penalize or threat players for buying 5 krak grenades.

I don't know what other GMs do but if one of my players buys two rare items or even a single very rare or rarer item I usually cut them off by saying if they make any more aquisitions at that time I'll start rolling on the "you're buying too much ****" table" from Into the Storm ragardless of whether they've even made their rolls.

I, for example, don't penalize or threat players for buying 5 krak grenades.

Aren't Grenades treated like Ammunition in Rogue Trader? That is, if you "buy" 5 Krak Grenades, you've actually bought 5 supplies of Krak Grenades.

That's a lot of Krak Grenades.

Oh, come on - just a quick example of 5 rare items. You can have 5 disposable launchers if you want so.

Nevertheless, you shouldn't have more than 5 grenades at any givem moment at the penalty of ItS table roll, imo it's a bit too restrictive.

Scintilla, Inquisition HQ:

- "My Lord, the Whoever Dynasty has obtained steady supply of 5 krak genades!/5 disposable launchers!/2 solo boltguns"

- "Qucik! We must act before it's to late!"

I don't know what other GMs do but if one of my players buys two rare items or even a single very rare or rarer item I usually cut them off by saying if they make any more aquisitions at that time I'll start rolling on the "you're buying too much ****" table" from Into the Storm ragardless of whether they've even made their rolls.

... while actively try to encourage my players to buy the most outrageous stuff they can think of. And so far none of them have bothered to go for plasguns.

And the light power armour bought for the arch militant had to be golden, ofcourse.

Honeslty I have the same problem if anything, I've got two players who basically want to pay the iron price for every **** item they get to the point it becomes rather silly. I don't know in alot of cases if they don't read the books or if they have a super specific vision of their characters that's not coming through to me or what. I'm like "hey buy frag grenades they're stupid easy to get" and they're like "no I want to buy xeno tech" and I'm like "this is an imperial World there aren't any Xenos here so that **** is at a -20 to what it would otherwise be" and they're like "hmmph"

Wow, Larry. Even I don't cockblock my players *that* much.

A clovis pattern plasma gun weighs 20kg (22kg with a magazine inserted). Only the weediest of gits would be unable to lift 22kg in one hand, and rogue trader characters tend to be far, far stronger than regular people.

Of course, I disagree with your gaming philosophy in general, but if you want verisimilitude, you should at least have some basic idea of how reality actually works before you start complaining.

I bet you have no problems with the existence of chain weapons.

I dare you right now to find the nearest assault rifle and to hold it by the business end one arm fully extended and hang it there without any additional support for as long as you can. When I was in Marine boot the DIs would punish us that way and the M16A2 only weighs like seven godamn pounds. It's not a matter of the weight it's a matter of leverage, and a matter of having to maintain the position for any length of time. In alot of cases I imagine you don't have access so just grab something that wieghs about five pounds and do it. Yeah, after about ninety seconds it hurts doesn't it? Funny how the human body has trouble holding awkward poses for long periods of time, muscle memory and wieght training help some .

As for chain weapons nobody has one yet although someone wants one, although since the Tech Priestess now has a Best Craftsmanship combat servitor wtih chain axe and heavy bolter some rinky dink 2d10+St Strixis doohiki doesn't seem that OP to me anymore.

I, for example, don't penalize or threat players for buying 5 krak grenades.

Grenades are grenades, you buy a grenade type you have that grenade type. Although when you buy your fourth grenade type I'm likely to start asking you exactly where you're carrying all your grenades and how many of each. You figure each of them is about as big as an apple and wieghs a kilo and you have to wonder where that **** is being stored at. I figure grenade availability comes down to whether you can find and afford the guy who somehow has a pallet of grenades.

On the other hand dealing with plasma rifles those things are supposed to be stupid rare in the Imperium, I figure with them Extremely Rare means there are only one at a time for sale at Port Wander as various ships pass through having that one. Want more at once? Ok set sail for the planet where they MAKE the damned Clovis Plasma Rifles.

ITS suggests just making each aquisition 10% harder during a single shore leave but I don't want to punish the guy who just wants to buy a grapnel or some photocontacts or whatever. Fine buy all the reasonably common **** you want as long as you make the roll, but grab relics of the dark age of technology and that's where cash flow is going to become an issue.

As for chain weapons nobody has one yet although someone wants one, although since the Tech Priestess now has a Best Craftsmanship combat servitor wtih chain axe and heavy bolter some rinky dink 2d10+St Strixis doohiki doesn't seem that OP to me anymore.

My point is here.

Your head is somewhere on the bottom of the sea.

Aren't Grenades treated like Ammunition in Rogue Trader? That is, if you "buy" 5 Krak Grenades, you've actually bought 5 supplies of Krak Grenades.

That's a lot of Krak Grenades.

EXACTLY and YES .

By allowing a RT player to make an aquisition roll that perpetually grants them three to six krak grenades per drop from some nearly inexaustable stockpile I've already put them ahead of basically every Stormtrooper Squad out there but hey fair enough because a RT character is basically an 80's action hero with the equivilent financial means of a modern billionaire so **** it all's well.

Yet these guys want to act like I'm being a **** for restricting the players from shanigans that should make a DW character blush. Seriously dues if you just want to wear Power Armor and single handedly save the Imperium from a rampaging horde of Carnifaxes and Chaos Lords while smacking beer steins with the Space Wolves play DW.

Her's the way I see it:

Dark Crusade: Call of Cthulu in 40K, player characters are deliberately squishy and expendable.

Rogue Trader. Big 80's action movie, every character is the muscle bound gun toting hero of his own story. Overpaid, over-armed and over-here. Capible of wiping their ass with generic mooks but still in danger of they get cornered by the space monster on it's own ground.

DeathWatch: Absurd god level Dragon Ball Z bull, 50% saving the universe from destruction 50% self congratulation.

Make sense?

By allowing a RT player to make an aquisition roll that perpetually grants them three to six krak grenades per drop from some nearly inexaustable stockpile I've already put them ahead of basically every Stormtrooper Squad out there but hey fair enough because a RT character is basically an 80's action hero with the equivilent financial means of a modern billionaire so **** it all's well.

My RTs do not compete with Stormtroopers, they hire them.

Yet these guys want to act like I'm being a **** for restricting the players from shanigans that should make a DW character blush. Seriously dues if you just want to wear Power Armor and single handedly save the Imperium from a rampaging horde of Carnifaxes and Chaos Lords while smacking beer steins with the Space Wolves play DW.

Her's the way I see it:

Dark Crusade: Call of Cthulu in 40K, player characters are deliberately squishy and expendable.

Rogue Trader. Big 80's action movie, every character is the muscle bound gun toting hero of his own story. Overpaid, over-armed and over-here. Capible of wiping their ass with generic mooks but still in danger of they get cornered by the space monster on it's own ground.

DeathWatch: Absurd god level Dragon Ball Z bull, 50% saving the universe from destruction 50% self congratulation.

I don't see RT as an action game. I find the arch militant not to be over powered as the name of the thread suggests, but to be a sad almost irrelevant third-stringer, until around rank 3 when they get command, and even then they aren't too exciting.

Personally I wanted the arch militant to be able to become a competent general, but I suppose that's contrary to the setting.

As mentioned above, my RTs do not compete with Stormtroopers, they hire them. If you're playing heavy infantry, you're behind the curve, because we hire those by the company to do dirty work for us .

I honestly don't care if my players buy enough krak grenades to swin in, like a militaristic Scrooge McDuck. What would they use them all for? Drop them on a planet? They have macrocannons!

I'm not saying your way of running (or thinking about) RT is wrong, though from what you write I think you might be happier playing OW. It's just that, in RT, there's no reason to insist on playing the grunt. You're playing the guy who's bribing the pres planetary governor to give you the grunts to send to do your dirty work.

The value in the eldar power sword at your hip is less in it's combat stats than in the excited "Oooh" from the governor's daughter when you tell her how you got it, because hopefully her father is clever enough to bribe you to leave before something ... bad happens. Or in how, at your good bye ceremony, you catch him in your web of obligations by presenting him with this artifact and flatter him on camera. You can alway later contact the Ordo Xenos and explain how his eyes glinted with greed with you presented him with this thing, to be locked away in a stasis field. Perhaps he might be worth an investigation?

During a boarding action, it's not the RT's job to personally cut down every pirate scum* on the enemy vessel. His job is to pose heroically and photogenically with one foot on the chest of the defeated captain and declaring "We have the ship gentlemen! Victory is Ours!" to the cheers of those who did the actual work.

To me, the only annoying thing about players buying krak grenades by the bucket load is that I was planning for them to buy the factory.

Does any of that make sense?

* pirate, rival RT, it can be hard to tell the difference, really

You're not the only one here who says "sit on the bridge and order your fifty thousand employees to do everything because you bought the entire world".

However from the rules as presented by the book I get the impression that you're supposed to take a more hands on approach, if not then why is there an entire section on player character combat and a brief one page description of commanding mass battles? Why do the players have fate points if they're not intended to be in harms way? Why do Kirk and Spock beam down to the dangerous planets? Because nobody wants to watch Kirk sit on the bridge for forty minutes listening to radio status updates.

My point is here.

Your head is somewhere on the bottom of the sea.

A sea of beer and sleep deprevation when I wrote the post, when you said chain I thought you were referring to flexable and then went on to talk about a chain weapon. Yeah lots of people in the group own chain weapons but most opt not to use them out of preference for ballsitics or weapons with power fields. What do you think is so OP with chain weapons? They're just melee weapons with the tearing rule.

(...)three to six krak grenades per drop(...)"

According to the rules, one supply of disposable items means the character is assumed to have *3* of that item on him unless he takes a different amount, so five supplies would be 15 krak grenades.

(...)three to six krak grenades per drop(...)"

According to the rules, one supply of disposable items means the character is assumed to have *3* of that item on him unless he takes a different amount, so five supplies would be 15 krak grenades.

However, the purchase of a single "unit" of ammunition or other disposables, like grenades, you have an abstract number of this item, specified to supply the amount you buy for. As long as expenditure is close to normal, and nothing threatens your stash, you are assumed to carry enough to last until the next restock. However, if, for example, two people would start sharing the same stash of bolter ammo originally Aquisitioned for one, you'll quickly find your current supply lines overused and unsatisfactory.

The exception this being extremely unusual items, such as Tau pulse ammo or Elder Deathspinner filament thread, or if concurrent supply lines or stashes are attacked, lost or suffer other misfortunes.

I know. I was trying to stick to short sentences to avoid misunderstandings.

You're not the only one here who says "sit on the bridge and order your fifty thousand employees to do everything because you bought the entire world".

Because that's not at all what I'm saying.

I am saying that you have grunts, and to let minions do the dirty work.

But that doesn't mean to never leave the bridge.

RT is in my view not a game about combat .

It is (as I see it) a social game.

It can be run as an action game, goodness knows one of my RT campaigns currently is pace somewhere between Indiana Jones and Die Hard, but that's not where the strength of it is.

RT works wonders as a social game, where you hope to explore new worlds, full of heathens to convert, or even better empty but habitable planets to colonize.

Where you visit imperial space to jockey for position in the line for an audience with the cardinal, in hopes that he will see fit to instruct his bishops to preach your crusade so that you don't have to bribe every one of them.

Where you find ancient remains of pre-human civilizations, still habouring an ancient evil - and you can't call in the inquisition, because then how would you make money out of selling the stuff?!

My one group spent most of last session deciding how they could aid the troops in the periphery, without getting within 10 light years of the front, so they ended up starting a candy factory specialising in caffinated bon-bons, for those long night watches. And odds are they'll amke money off of it.

More than they would from murdering a regiment of seperatists and looting their guns certainly.

Regarding the OP from last year (haha) you can certainly challenge a melee Arch-Mil by creating situations where he cannot easily close to melee with the foe. Acid blood. Extreme Toughness multipliers. Force field effects. And ranged superiority.

As to the people mentioning storm bolters, I consider the RAW Storm Quality to be one of the most blatantly broken, OP, and just plain stupid instances of game design that FFG has ever written (or chosen not to errata), and have heavily house ruled it just so the storm bolter is not the clear and obvious best possible weapon for every situation in every FFG40k game line.

As to the people mentioning storm bolters, I consider the RAW Storm Quality to be one of the most blatantly broken, OP, and just plain stupid instances of game design that FFG has ever written (or chosen not to errata), and have heavily house ruled it just so the storm bolter is not the clear and obvious best possible weapon for every situation in every FFG40k game line.

My opinion and experience of Storm Bolters has been vastly different. I've always viewed them as a great dabbler weapon (you want decent ranged offense, but you can't/won't commit many character building resources to it), but for the dedicated ranged char there are other, much better options.

The Storm Bolter's main strength is that it can put a great amount of lead in a corpse with a few DoS on your BS roll. It's main weakness is that it puts rougly the same amount of lead even if you get a ton of DoS. And that's exactly what a ranged character will be doing. You an start with about 50 BS, add 20 from advancements, 20 from full auto, 10 from MIU, 10 from Motion Predictor and you have about 110 effective BS before range modifiers.

Now complare a Storm Bolter with a Heavy Bolter. the heavy bolter has: more damage per shot, 33% greater chance of Righteous Fury per Shot, more range, and the ability to full-auto as a half-action with Suspensors (which you can't put on a Basic Weapon) and a dedicated ranged character would have enough BS to deal more damage per round than a Storm Bolter 60-70% of the time.