A player in my group recently lost his character well into the campaign and wanted to make an assault marine from Deathwatch. What has been everyone's experience with astartes being introduced into human parties of the same experience level? I know that the new character would excel in combat and suck with plenty of other skill tests but can they fit in well with a Rogue Trader's general group of random misfits?

I do have a stealthy melee themed human character in the group that I thought might feel outclassed next to the newcomer, but I was hoping to eventually solve that problem by letting him spend experience on a custom melee talent I'd design. I was thinking about "saving" degrees of success on WS and dodge rolls to add bonuses on damage and pen.

I'd be more worried about the Astartes guy feeling outclassed. Space Marines don't really have a lot going for them that couldn't be replicated or plain outmatched with the kind of gear RT characters can easily access.

This can end up one of the two ways: either the Astartes fellow uses all the tricks in the book to be the complete combat monster and break your game in half in the process, or he'll try to make himself into a more rounded-out character and end up a decent combatant but little else. If he's a right kind of a player, he might even enjoy it.

The Marine should be able to fit in, but DW and RT use different xp scaling, so you may want to award the marine different amount of xp than you award the RT players. If you look at the suggested XP reward for a session as stated in rogue trader and in death watch, you should be able to come up with a good idea on how to handle it. Without being able to check it right now, I think it somewhere in the region of letting the marine get double as much xp per session.

Also, strongly reccommend he take the "Kill-Marine" template.He gets access to limited squad mode, so noneof his cool abilities that he "pays" xp for are wasted, and "Web of Peers is n awesome talent to go along with a RT.

Go with the Black Crusade ruleset if you want a fair balance between Space Marines and common humans as player characters. Deathwatch does not play well with the other games.