Hey guys,

I'm new to Rogue Trader, and I'm super excited to get GMing my own game—I used to play WH40k and I LOVE the setting.

The other night my buddies and I were doing a practice space battle to try and test out the mechanics, but we ran into two things that we couldn't figure out after reading the starship chapter. I did quite a bit of searching on the forums but I couldn't find anything.

1) How do you know what to roll when you score a critical hit? The table goes from something like 1-12 but the example box has them rolling a D5 with the lance critical.

2) Where do I find the consequences for having certain components disabled? Specifically, if the plasma drives are disabled, can the starship fly? And are all the other components disabled due to lack of power?

We're probably just super blind. Thanks in advance!

Hi,

Welcome to the world of rogue trader. I have to say there are a lot of gaps in the rules and in most cases you as gm just have to house rule it as you encounter it.

In this particular case though: there are 2 types of crit hits, lucky hit, which is the one you describe and a 1d5 on the crit table and a hull breach, which is when the hull integrity drops to 0 (just like wounds). After that every hit that surpasses armour is a critical hit

e.g. armour 10, hit 18 --> crit = 8 on the ship. Note that the hull integrity remains 0 and not like with wounds is cumulative. The consequences for disabled components are usually described in the books, that is 'damaged' and beyond: it won't work, 'depressurized': it will still work BUT void suites needed, penalties etc.

Beyond that… its up to the gm. DO note that some components CANNOT be picked by the attacker for critical damage, plasma drive being one of them. A 'disabled' plasma drive during an attack usually results in 'BOOOM' no more ship. Should it miraculously just be disables due to e.g. sabotage, then indeed: no more power, unless there is some backup. (these components exist). Most essential components are self explanatory what would happen should they fail.

Perfect. Thanks so much.

Yeah there do seem to be a few gaps—which is understandable, given the depth of the universe and the complexity of physics, etc. I guess it's a good thing there's a strong community going on here