Hiyas!

S-l-o-w & dumb me, can't seem to understand:

What exactly are Kill Markers?

Thanks

L

kill markers are from my point of view a bad idea, in fact more an unnecessity... but I've got 20+ years of game mastering....

Sorry...

They are here to help a GM to quantified the success of a kill team for objectives resolution.

When playing some parts of a scenario, players have to gain a number of markers to complete the job. Some ennemy and sub plots are going to give them a certain amount of markers, when the players reach the target number the objectives is fullfield.

It is a way to judge the players actions and how far they are to complete objectives.

Basically Kill-markers are used for tracking the completion of non point objectives. If the kill team is trying to break an army's cohesion and morale, kill markers can be assigned to killing commanders, setting up jamming stations, destroying supply depots, and generally scaring troops. That's my view anyway.

It's putting an objective value (killing X genestealers gives Y markers towards the Objective of Eliminating All genestealers; securing M IG bunkers gives N markers towards the Objective of Save the Imperial Guard Battalion from the Ork Horde, etc) on what is typically for GMs a subjective appraisal (when an encounter ends or when a particular goal is achieved).

I used them for the mission on Aurum in TEP. One more thing for me to keep track of. = Was not a big fan.

Everyone else has basically got it - its a means of tracking the ongoing success of certain objectives which might not (by themselves) be easily quantifiable. Whether or not they're useful is a matter of both taste and context.

In my experience, they're best used on objectives where the task is somewhat vague or variable in nature. If your objective is "Kill X number of Y type of enemy", you don't need to use Kill Markers, because you already have an obvious means of quantifying success. However, if your objective is to "Cripple enemy operations within the region", then quantifying success is less clear - in that situation, the GM can assign a required number of Kill Markers, and then assign particular values to different targets (facilities, enemies, materiel, etc - the more valuable/crucial the target, the more Kill Markers it's worth), so that the specific details of what the group destroys don't matter so long as they destroy enough of the targets overall to hit the target number.

In essence, it's a tool to make things clearer to track in particular situations. Whether or not it's well-suited to a situation depends more on mission design and type of objectives than anything else.