Ogryn - What they are vs what they should be…

By H.B.M.C., in Game Mechanics

MILLANDSON said:

What about all Intelligence-based skills other than Common Lore (War) and (Imperial Guard) then? And the BONE implant removes it for some other skills? Survival is a Perception-based skill, so that wouldn't be affected by the -20 modifier.

The more I'm going over it, the more I think this and -5/-10 Int would work better than the flat -15 Int modifier.

I guess that would work. Not so sure about the exact values though since those can be tricky.
It would be favourable if we could avoid having the Ogryn have low intelligence value (since we want to avoid the whole getting knocked out by an unlucky RF crit due to intelligence drain) while still having Ogryns be bad at intelligence based tasks.

I like that idea better too. As really, if you want to make Ogryn -right- AND make them playable characters, you are going to need to get rather creative about it.

great idea. that would give them some kind of instinctual intelligence.

I just wrote up an Ogryn, for the fun of it and because a young kid who comes to our gaming group sometimes with his parents would would get a kick out of playing one.

I won't comment on are Ogryn "what they should be" because I'm really not sure there's a good answer for that. I will say that I find it hilarious that my Imperial World Ogryn speaks High Gothic.

The character itself went together very well. Ogryn are a very specific archetype, and they don't need a lot of flexibility at character creation. Still, I think they have enough flexibility within their archetype to be interesting and that every Ogryn need not be identical. In that regard, I think the Orgyn specialty is pretty solid. He's a big, dumb thug… in my case, a big dumb thug with Survival and Athletics who is part of a scout unit and can probably help out his buddies very well. I like that he has also Common Lore (Imperial Creed) and can speak High Gothic, albeit with an Intelligence 10… he's not going to be succeeding a lot of rolls with those (but at a +30 for an easy test, he stands a chance), but they give him an interesting flavor… a pious Ogryn.

I found another bug with the ogryn…

so you have 30 wounds. and 6 TB…

that means from 0 to 18 wounds you are heavy wounded. and only from 19 to 30 you are lightly wounded. means once you are at let's say 10 wounds you are pretty much game over, you will never recover those wounds. Unless you have the Hardy Talent.

characters with a lower wound score are much faster out of the Heavy Wound Zone.

vogue69 said:

I found another bug with the ogryn…

so you have 30 wounds. and 6 TB…

that means from 0 to 18 wounds you are heavy wounded. and only from 19 to 30 you are lightly wounded. means once you are at let's say 10 wounds you are pretty much game over, you will never recover those wounds. Unless you have the Hardy Talent.

characters with a lower wound score are much faster out of the Heavy Wound Zone.

That seems like a fair trade-off. The moment the Ogryn gets into heavily wounded, most other characters are into crits already.

If that's such a deal-breaker, Hardy costs you only 300 exp, you can buy it right off the bat if you have T40 (which is an average score for an Ogryn).

it seems strange that the big ogryn has as many "light" wounds as a heavy gunner, and more "heavy" wounds.

hardy seems mandatory if you want to play more then one fight.

characters with a lower wound score are much faster out of the Heavy Wound Zone.

They're also much faster dead . I can understand that an Ogryn who can still pull his weight with gaping wounds torn into his flesh and bones broken (at which point a common human would just go and greet the Emperor) will need a little more time healing those wounds.

That being said, it still doesn't take too long to heal as a succesful medicae check and a week of bed rest will regenerate 12 wounds + 1 per DoS.

i think since DH I have never played an adventure where we could afford a week of bedrest.

and I said this before somewhere, when you are an ogryn, everyone will attack you. and they will hit you and do damage. so the ogryn needs to be a damage spongue, unless you have great armor my bet is you will die faster then the average heavy gunner who will occasionally be shot at.

Maybe that's a style of GMing, but with my human crew the enemy will usually not focus down each PC one by one. Once a foaming Ogryn is charging all bets are off.

And why should a tougher robust ogryn need longer to regenerate his wounds then say a frail weak ratling?

As I already said: The ogryn doesn't take longer - mainly because the ratling won't regenerate, but slowly decompose in whatever makeshift grave his remains were buried.

And regarding the week-long downtime, chances are you'll have to pull through many adventures with no healing at all, which again means the Ogryn will still fare best.

I agree with Cifer.

It's a really simple comparison: A starting Ogryn who receives 20 points of damage total after all reductions is heavily wounded. Any other starting character who takes 20 points of damage total after all reductions is best case critically wounded, worst case dead.

You can function normally while suffering heavy wounds. You are in serious trouble if you suffer critical wounds. If you're dead, you're dead, game over. Thus, the Ogryn is a clear winner here.

Also, note that since the average Ogryn has +3 TB more than the average non-Ogryn, he:

1. Needs to take more wounds before he gets from lightly to heavily wounded.

2. Accumulates damage more slowly than others by virtue of better reduction from his TB (on top of the same kind of armor the rest of the squad gets).

3. Actually heals that damage a bit quicker.

You're really grasping at straws here, man.

vogue69 said:

i think since DH I have never played an adventure where we could afford a week of bedrest.

and I said this before somewhere, when you are an ogryn, everyone will attack you. and they will hit you and do damage. so the ogryn needs to be a damage spongue, unless you have great armor my bet is you will die faster then the average heavy gunner who will occasionally be shot at.

Maybe that's a style of GMing, but with my human crew the enemy will usually not focus down each PC one by one. Once a foaming Ogryn is charging all bets are off.

And why should a tougher robust ogryn need longer to regenerate his wounds then say a frail weak ratling?

I think this is more a problem with your GM then a problem with the game mechanics… at least not a problem with Ogryn. Broadly, I think it exposes a flaw in the way 40K roleplay handles Heavy Wounds… but basically your GM needs to give your characters time to rest.

I think it's a flaw in the system. it really shows when you start buying sound constitution. with max SC an ogryn could have 42 wounds. and only 12 of them are lightly after that he is heavily wounded from 30 all the way down to 0. before he bought SC he was at max 30 and heavy wounded with 18 wounds left.

so basically he just bought himself heavy wounds. the flaw is, that the rule operates with set parameters instead of a percentage (for example after losing 80% of your wounds you become heavily wounded).

but anyway for 300 exp you buy hardy after session 1, the whole thing becomes mute.

vogue69 said:

I think it's a flaw in the system. it really shows when you start buying sound constitution. with max SC an ogryn could have 42 wounds. and only 12 of them are lightly after that he is heavily wounded from 30 all the way down to 0. before he bought SC he was at max 30 and heavy wounded with 18 wounds left.

Only if you've bought no additional Toughness during that time.

vogue69 said:

so basically he just bought himself heavy wounds

True, but he's also still standing after suffering damage that would have killed any two other members of the squad. That, in and of itself, still counts for something.

Time to heal is as much a matter of GMing style as anything else - if the GM doesn't provide any downtime between missions, heavily injured characters (whatever their number of wounds) won't have the opportunity to recuperate, just as armoured units won't have time to effect repairs of their vehicles. Rotating a heavily-injured unit off the front lines for a few weeks seems like an easy thing to do, as well as giving the GM the opportunity to say "six weeks later" and shift the state of the war effort significantly (which provides new possibilities for missions).

Only if you've bought no additional Toughness during that time.

Or just bought Hardy which is available to Ogryns for a paltry 300 XP…

N0-1_H3r3 said:

vogue69 said:

I think it's a flaw in the system. it really shows when you start buying sound constitution. with max SC an ogryn could have 42 wounds. and only 12 of them are lightly after that he is heavily wounded from 30 all the way down to 0. before he bought SC he was at max 30 and heavy wounded with 18 wounds left.

Only if you've bought no additional Toughness during that time.

vogue69 said:

so basically he just bought himself heavy wounds

True, but he's also still standing after suffering damage that would have killed any two other members of the squad. That, in and of itself, still counts for something.

Time to heal is as much a matter of GMing style as anything else - if the GM doesn't provide any downtime between missions, heavily injured characters (whatever their number of wounds) won't have the opportunity to recuperate, just as armoured units won't have time to effect repairs of their vehicles. Rotating a heavily-injured unit off the front lines for a few weeks seems like an easy thing to do, as well as giving the GM the opportunity to say "six weeks later" and shift the state of the war effort significantly (which provides new possibilities for missions).

I am no talking about in between missions. I am talking about missions itself. For example the adventure in the book.

As a human you can go into behind cover etc. as an ogryn your strength lies in melee, basicaly you are a big ork. And what is great cover for humans most isn't any cover at all for ogryns. so to wound a human the shots need to be called (they miss 100%) or lucky enough to hit the head or arms.

so yes you have more toughess then a heavy gunner (3 points) but you are much easier to hit. heavy weapons units will focus their fire on you.

so maybe the maxed heavy gunner (TB4)gets wounded and suffers 8 wounds (55% damage for the sake of it) the maxed ogryn (TB7) might suffer 15 wounds (also 50%). After the fight the pimped out Medic (max int, good cerebral cyberware (IB7)) uses first aid, the heavy gunner heals 7, the ogryn heals 1. so now gunner is at 14 wounds, the ogryn is at 16.

Heavy wounds can't be first aided so over the medium to long haul, the ogryn weighs the group down.

unless he buys hardy, which he will. Hardy is the remedy to the broken system.

I think I'll stop arguing now. Yes, under sufficiently abitrarily designed goalposts, it's a drawback for the Ogryn that he can still fight on while everyone else is already dead. The system that allows him to do that is crap. You win.

Man, if you assume that everyone will do nothing else than fire upon the Ogryn until he's dead, you're right, the Ogryn will eventually die.

But that's not really helpful, because again, given the same treatment, anyone else will die much faster.

You really seem hell-bent on disliking the Ogryn, don't you?

EDIT: Also, complaining that the Ogryn needs to spend experience to take full advantage of the stuff he gets for free is about as meaningful as complaining that the Commissar needs to spend exp to become a fully proficient sword-and-pistol fighter.

no i really like ogryns I just don't like the way FFG handles them.

as for the fokusfire: of course every enemy will fire at the charging ogryn, why wouldn't they? if you have a 3 guardsmen behind cover firing at your cover and a 3 meter tall hulking brute charging your way, what would you do?

vogue69 said:

no i really like ogryns I just don't like the way FFG handles them.

as for the fokusfire: of course every enemy will fire at the charging ogryn, why wouldn't they? if you have a 3 guardsmen behind cover firing at your cover and a 3 meter tall hulking brute charging your way, what would you do?

Well, that's your problem. You have an image in your head of what you want Ogryn to be and you won't be happy until they fit that image… which they probably never will if only because the image in other people's heads is different.

As for who to shot first… the psyker. Always, the psyker. But seriously, a smart enemy will lay down suppressing fire and then take shots at whichever targets of opportunity present themselves. If the ogryn rushes forward into oncoming fire, yeah, he's going to get shot… but even Orgyn need to make Willpower tests to avoid Pinning.

well the biggest and easiest to hit target of opportunity will be the ogryn. allways. cover will be too small, everyone gets +10 to hit, sneaking is almost impossible, his range weapon is diminished after 40m range (double armor points), his melee skills are way higher then ranged and he is too stupid to pass any tactics test.

Last week we started playing the adventure in the book. if there would have been an ogryn present, he would've probably not survived that initial fight. that's all I am saying.

vogue69 said:

well the biggest and easiest to hit target of opportunity will be the ogryn. allways. cover will be too small, everyone gets +10 to hit, sneaking is almost impossible, his range weapon is diminished after 40m range (double armor points), his melee skills are way higher then ranged and he is too stupid to pass any tactics test.

Last week we started playing the adventure in the book. if there would have been an ogryn present, he would've probably not survived that initial fight. that's all I am saying.

… and I'm saying that's as much or more to do with your style of play as anything with the rules. Cover is only too small because the GM doesn't provide sufficently large cover for the ogryn. That's a choice. For most rpg combats I've seen, 40m is pretty far. Again a choice by the GM. The ogryn's melee skills are higher because that's how he was built, again a choice. He may be to stupid to think of his own tactics, but he can follow orders. Again, a choice. These problems stem from a style of play and a way of thinking, not a mechanical issue with the game.

Now, I agree with you initial point, that the way Heavy Wounds are handled in 40k rpg isn't sensible. It never has been. The Hardy talent is such a mechanical no-brainer for ogryn that it should be included in their free Starting Talents.

LuciusT said:

The Hardy talent is such a mechanical no-brainer for ogryn that it should be included in their free Starting Talents.

Another proof that Ogryn speciality was poorly executed from the start but it is the point of beta to find weak points and correct them. Till now at least wounds were corrected which give little hope that at the end of beta we will have Ogryn that is both playable and not complete fluff ****.

There's a few things that need to be considered, most notably this:

Ogryn: S 5, T 5, W 3

SM: S 4, T 4, W 1

Orkboy: S 3, T 4, W 1

Guard: S 3 T 3, W 1

Those are the tabletop stats for an Ogryn and a Space Marine as well as an Ork and a normal Imperial Soldier for reference. What this (roughly) means is that an Ogryn is much tougher / more durable than a space marine. I.e. a space marine has 1 hitpoint and an Ogryn has 3.

If you're using this as the basis for the Ogryn in OW that game will be extremely broken. (also spotlight balancing which isn't good especially with extremes like the Ogryn)

DW Marines start at 12k EXP.

Non-DW Marines are probably lower but still in the 10k ish area I guess.

OW Characters start at 300-600EXP

What I'm trying to say is that it's okay for the Ogryn to start out weak than S5, T5, W3 (OW equivalent).

To achieve something that still is somewhat close to Fluff the Ogryn should have the potential to soak up damage like crazy. This is partially what I feel lacking with the current Ogryn. Buying the Hardy Trait is a good way of getting the Ogryn where he should be but giving it to him straight away would make them far to powerfull early on not only unbalancing the game, taking fun away from it by stealing the spotlight but also leaving him little room to grow into.

So what I want all of you to consider is this:

How strong should an Ogryn be at no experience spent (or maybe 300).

How strong should he be after 2k, 4k, 6k, 10k EXP?

Edit:

Personally I feel like the way the Ogryn is right now is a good starting point for a low level Ogryn but I haven't dropped the mathhammer on him yet nor on what he'll look like with a lot of exp to spend.

Musclewizard said:

There's a few things that need to be considered, most notably this:

Ogryn: S 5, T 5, W 3

SM: S 4, T 4, W 1

Orkboy: S 3, T 4, W 1

Guard: S 3 T 3, W 1

Those are the tabletop stats for an Ogryn and a Space Marine as well as an Ork and a normal Imperial Soldier for reference. What this (roughly) means is that an Ogryn is much tougher / more durable than a space marine. I.e. a space marine has 1 hitpoint and an Ogryn has 3.

If you're using this as the basis for the Ogryn in OW that game will be extremely broken. (also spotlight balancing which isn't good especially with extremes like the Ogryn)

DW Marines start at 12k EXP.

Non-DW Marines are probably lower but still in the 10k ish area I guess.

OW Characters start at 300-600EXP

What I'm trying to say is that it's okay for the Ogryn to start out weak than S5, T5, W3 (OW equivalent).

To achieve something that still is somewhat close to Fluff the Ogryn should have the potential to soak up damage like crazy. This is partially what I feel lacking with the current Ogryn. Buying the Hardy Trait is a good way of getting the Ogryn where he should be but giving it to him straight away would make them far to powerfull early on not only unbalancing the game, taking fun away from it by stealing the spotlight but also leaving him little room to grow into.

So what I want all of you to consider is this:

How strong should an Ogryn be at no experience spent (or maybe 300).

How strong should he be after 2k, 4k, 6k, 10k EXP?

Edit:

Personally I feel like the way the Ogryn is right now is a good starting point for a low level Ogryn but I haven't dropped the mathhammer on him yet nor on what he'll look like with a lot of exp to spend.

1.TT stats are made to balance game and that is why SM are much weaker in TT than they are portrayed in fluff. Of course it does not change that in fluff SM will still be weaker and less tougher than an Ogryn.

2. As I said before I am fine with starting wounds of 25+1d5 but S/T unnaturals should be 4 at least to make any sense at all [how can Ork Stormboy be tougher? By the way who decided that Stormboyz should be tougher than other Boyz? Its complete nonsense.] Scrap comrades and Ballistic Skill Aptitude completly and add Hardy and Hammer Blow.