I'm new here, just started my account after a year or so of lurking as I'm running a Rogue Trader game. We're in about our 4th session or so and has been pretty fun if a bit slow going due to still learning the rules and the players begin new to 40k.

Being new to the system, one of my main areas of concern has been "what constitues a threat", and it has been a bit tricking in feeling this out. This previous session I tried to do somthing different though:

We had a normal "Navigator screwed up and bumped somthing bad causing a gellar field collapse" thing. My plan is for progressive "waves" of daemon incusions depending on how quick the gellar field gets back up or they return to real space. But I figured, with the PCs doing their normal activies, they are spread across the ship doing their normal stuff, so "phase 1" will be each fighting individually. Now, to keep all the players engaged, and to keep some PCs alive (as some are squishier than others), the other "non-active" players all play 2-3 generic mook armsmen.

This has been a nice way for me to see how lethality changes with different numbers changing (each encounter can be a little different), and lets the players see the difference between themselves and their crew, as well as maybe make them think some more about what kind of gear their crew's armsmen are wearing.

We had to stop about a third of the way through, but seemed to go well so far. Looking forward to how the rest turns out.

I'm not sure how mathematical you are, but "lethality" in RT really depends on how well optimized some (or all) of the PCs are optimized for combat, have the pimped out gear etc.

In general, as a GM, if you have the time, you can try to evaluate what each players probability of hitting an enemy is, given if they dodge or not. Then, given that they hit the enemy, what is the average damage? quick and dirty formula: (average damage)=(d10=5.5 or d5=2.5 + damage bonus - armor) Then do the same for the enemies.

Or you can throw something in and see how they deal with it.

My second planned adventure involved a trip to the "Lost Ship of the Rubycon System" which as all readers of Into the Storm know is filled with Genestealers. I decided to throw in just one to start with, slap the party around a bit and see what they did. We had a not too fighty RT,Two very fighty Missionary, Quite Fighty Techpriest, Ranged fighting Arch Militant and an Astropath.

They one shotted the genestealer with ranged weapons. The following back to the ship chase was quite entertaining as the Genestealer numbers rapidly increased but despite many a wound taken, no one was put down. Given the great statline I had assumed this would be a very difficult encounter but it was simply challenging.

Just make sure you players have options and then be ready when they do something totally unexpected.

Well we concluded our second part of our "First Great Gellar Field Disaster" and I must admit, for something that was a gamble it came out well. I feel I got good feedback on different capabilities of different weapon and stat types and most importantly the players had fun. They really seem to enjoy playing a few armsmen at a time when they weren't the highlighted PC and were open to doing it again, which is nice as it leaves it open to having the PC go and do stuff a bit more naturally without having to worry about constantly staying together to avoid boredom.

You know I sometimes implement that concept too. I even allow PC's to play enemy NPC's if everyone is doing something different. It spices up the monotony. Allowing PC's to play NPC's is a rare concept I implement (like once per 2 gaming sessions), because I really prefer they stick together. But hey, players almost always tend to do stuff that we least expect, which is what makes RPing games fun for me.

Wish your players many fruitful endeavors DevoutBadger.

In my experiance the best fights are the fights that you come out of needing a new pair of underwear and have your heart pumping it was that tense. last session our senichal(not fighty in the least) managed to get in a fight with a unbound demonhost, lucky for him he had a powerstake(does an extra d10 per psy rating) rolled like a god and the demonhost was just coming into reality. a fight that should have taken the whole party(in theory) was over in two rounds. so dont be afraid to throw something big at them, see how they react and if it seems to be a little much, there are always acts of the god-emporer

My big concern coming out of this, and this may be outside the scope of the thread really, but Fear is a real pain in the ass for me as a GM to guage fights. One bad Fear roll by the wrong PC can grossly change the difficulty of the fight.

Howerver, I guess encounters without daemons don't have this problem.

DevoutBadger said:

Hopefully the PC has atleast one Fate Point to reroll that failure. If not, *shrugs* sucks to be the group if he was the tank. Just saying.