Xyklos said:

I have to admit, I do not understand this attitude at all. It is incomprehesible to me. I have no idea what kind of games you play that make you thing characters don't progress if they start out as pathetic losers and need two months of realtime play before they are even equal to the generic mooks on the line with them, much less anyone worthy of note.

Honestly, the only kind of adventures I see for pathetic losers are "Go clean the latrines, you worthless conscript." Yay, fun game.

I had the same problem with Dark Heresy.

LuciusT said:

Wow, aren't you a negative nelly?

If a starting party can't beat an equal-number group of NPC guardsmen in combat, they suck. The reason NPCs have a higher XP total is that they are supposed to represent the archtypical Imperial Guardsman. You know what basic NPC guardsmen don't have? Meltaguns, Hotshot Lasguns, Heavy Bolters, Hellhounds, Comrades, and Fate Points, to name a few. Player characters can, and usually do, have most of those things spread throughout the party.

You can't just look at a stat-block and declare that a random NPC is better than a PC, because PCs have tons of built-in tools that make them naturally better than non-PCs, regardless of their net XP total.

Xyklos said:

Yes, I am.

Yes, PCs have all of that but they don't have the skills and talents for an average Guardsman. That's what doesn't make sense to me. To my mind, PCs should have everything the generic NPC guardman trooper has and more. That makes them PCs. So either the generic NPC template has too much or the PC has too little.

I've always viewed fresh PCs as being slightly sub par (compared to the average) skill/talent wise, but superior in that they have fate points and party telepathy.

I say party telepathy, because in all seriousness, players never seem to properly "unhear" ideas that are proposed at the table, and are able to function quite well as a team.

Also, PCs gain XP per session and can spend it as they want. NPCs do not have that luxury.

So yes, fresh out of the box, "average ability" NPCs >(in straight stats) to PCs. And I'm fine with that.

Slightly sub par, maybe… though it isn't my peference. However, 2800 experience points worth of advances does not equal slightly in my book.

Honestly, however, I hate the whole "the PCs start are schmucks and get better" model. I generally don't play those kind of rpgs. I haven't played D&D since the early '90s and for good reason. I prefer games where my players make the character they want to play, not the character who - after 2 - 6 months of real time play could become the character they want to play. Frankly, I'm a professional working adult who games with other professional working adults and I don't have the kind of time to commit to a game to make that work. We play twice a month if we're lucky enough to get our schedules worked out. I don't like wasting the little time we do have playing mooks.

Yes, but as you point out, 800 of that is on Nerves of Steel.

Which, while useful, sure, is hardly the most efficient use of that XP. A commissar could get Swift Attack -> Lightning attack and still have some left over (obviously, this is guardsmen vs. guardsmen, but the intent is give players 800 XP and they can buy something quite more useful than what the NPC guardsmen spent XP on).

LuciusT said:

LuciusT said:

In your case then, you'll just need to fiddle with things. The vast majority of players play the game the other way, starting out weak and getting stronger. If you want to play a more high power game from the start, then all you need to do is give the players some extra starting xp. The sytem is not tailored to your group specificly, it need to fit a large aduence and their different play styles. It's easier to scale the game up, all you need to do is give people more xp to start with, than it is to scale the game back, so the system is made the way it is.

Varn said:

I know. I even agree. I'm just taking advantage of the whole Beta test phase to give voice to my play style. I think it has as much right to heard as others.

From everything I keep hearing, it really sounds like Black Crusade is a closer fit to our play style… though I'm not entirely sanguine about the whole "playing Chaos" aspect of it.

@Lucius

Black Crusade does nothing except up the starting XP by a couple thousand and fit that into packages. You can do that yourself to OW with no problems.

From everything I keep hearing, it really sounds like Black Crusade is a closer fit to our play style… though I'm not entirely sanguine about the whole "playing Chaos" aspect of it.

Don't worry - sanguine is what Khorne is all about.

I am mostly fine with the advancement costs, as OW campaigns can easily be longer than BC ones, however, the medium price Characteristic advances seem signifcantly overpriced. The jump from 100xp to 500xp seems like way too much, especially if you consider zero Aptitudes is "only" 750xp in comparison. Because of this, raising a two Aptitudes Characteristic the third time costs as much as raising a one Aptitude one a single time. For me, 350xp or 400xp seems like a much better starting point (and then scaling accordingly), especially in relation to the 750xp for zero Aptitudes.