How do you use the Tactics and Lore skills in your game? How can you take advantage of Tactics (Assault), for example? What about Common and Forbidden lore? I have found some good uses for the Lore ones but Tactics seems a bit difficult to me. Command has its bonuses in Cohesion, etc, but how else have you seen it used? Thanks!

afterimagedan said:

I haven't got the oppertunity to GM yet but I imagine that Tactics could be used to get a hint about what to do by the GM in a pinch. For instance, or to get some kind of bonus due to the tactical skills employed by the character.

For example, the majority of the skills (pretty much all of them) that can be trained by the Red Scorpions chapter marine are different Tactics skills. I am just hoping to find a reason for that to matter. Good ideas! Any else?

In last mission we had following rolls for the skills:

Kill Team were trying to fight their way through a horde of zombies to deploy a demolition charge. After about 10 rounds of combat I asked them to roll Tactics (Defence). They succeeded so I told them following: "The number of zombies doesn't seem to have lessened and you see fresh reinforcements coming all the time. By now two of your team are wounded and you have not gotten forward at all. You seem to be able to keep your ground in defence by standing your ground and shooting, but you obviously aren't making ahead now." From this description the players took it that they didn't have very good chances of fighting their way straight through the horde (they were correct, there was about six hundred magintudes of hordes left still) and decided to change their plan.

Another time Kill Team were running through a field of corn with tyranid ripper swarms closing in on all sides. I asked them to roll Tactics (Defence). One of them succeeded so I told them the following: "The Tyranids seem to be purposefully want to keep you running. When you are moving they can surround you and attack from all sides and because of the tall corn you won't see them untill they are only a few meters away. If you would stand your ground in one place and open fire your bolter rounds and grenades would probably blast down the corn and you could see the Tyranids dozens or even hundreds of meters away." Based on this the players decided to find a place where the Tyranids could only come at them from one side and make a stand there. They succeeded in killing all three waves of Tyranids.

Kill Team saw several venomthropes closing in on them behind a huge swarm of rippers. I asked them to roll Forbidden Lore (Xenos). They succeeded and I told them following: "Those venomthropes do not look like the normal specimens of that genos. They are built differently and seem to spread some kind of fine dust instead of gaseous poison. You haven't seen anything like that reported before." The players decided that as they could not know what the specific abilities of this new genus of venomthropes were they would snipe them from afar instead of going close. In this case being safe than sorry paid out as this genus would have been more poisonous (-30 to Toughness tests) than normal venomthropes and could have really hurt them in melee.

I hope these examples help?