I've been playing in a friend's black crusade game for the last few weeks and something thats been hitting my party hard are the encounters he puts us in. Its very common to have foes with 30+ wounds, additional reactions, and multiple high pen attacks and while I like to have a challenge now and then it's becoming difficult to get anything done.

My party is currently composed of a mercenary band composed of Black Crusade Heretics (a couple chaos marines, a couple humans) and a couple Rogue Trader Orks (a freeboota and a weirdboy). We've ran fetch quest jobs for chaos benifactors twice so far and both times it's been nearly impossible to succeed without outside help. I feel like we have decent gear, stats and talents and all but it doesn't seem to be making much difference. We've already had a few players reroll new characters since the first game was run and one of the longest lived characters is down to 2 infamy points.

How could we build or group with more suvivability against mid-Deathwatch level encounters? The GM is allowing the RT orks to take black crusade talents so long as it doesnt allow them to take things earlier than they normally would have. We could also use some advice from players and GMs alike on how to make our band of mercenaries a success.

Thanks in advance!

Well, ask your GM not to use highly difficult encounters, for one thing.

Mid-level Deathwatch is high-level Black Crusade, to put it mildly. Deathwatch is a game for all space marine groups of significantly higher power than their BC equivalents.

And capping the Orks to RT style progression is not only undermining one of the biggest strengths BC characters have, but also holding them back to the RT levels of power, which is behind even BC by a small margin. I mean, how does he define "earlier than the would have"?

To me, it seems he's using excessively difficult challenges comboed with a somewhat overly harsh restriction on the Orcs in your group.

So just talk to him. Tell him you feel the game is excessively difficult and ask him to scale it down. You're all adults, so just discuss your problems.

But if for some reason everyone want to try and play it like it's about winning, here's a mean old trick for a psyker or sorcerer to pull. And I do mean mean. This is full on rules lawyering dirty, while inarguably utterly legal.

Combo Abhorrent ward and Host of Fiends. An xp investment of 500, so rather affordable.

Push both and put them up. If possible, find any way to get fear ratings in play, for both you and your allies. Have the Orc's go commando, use infamy to get a mutation, use a psychic power. Whatever.

Now, any time someone fails a willpower save within 20 or so meters of your psyker, they get 1d5 points of Corruption PER DEGREE OF FAILURE. They also get 2x the psy rating of Host of Fiends as a penalty to all their willpower tests.

Any time they try and shoot your psyker, they must suceed at a willpower test at -5x the psy rating of Abhorrent Ward. Which, obviously, gets the Host of Fiends penalty as well.

Fear tests are also willpower based.

now note, as soon as any minor NPC (debatory term, but anyone without a name is a good baseline, so most enemies you face) gets 10, they are instantly killed, automatically, and turned into a harmless chaos spawn. PG 289. This is not listed as an optional rule.

Obviously, at psy rating 4 this is good. Pushed to 7, which is easily done, that's 6 each. That's a penalty of -42 on the abhorrent ward test.

Add in anything and everything that provokes a willpower test, preferably with a penalty. Use Force weapons, hallucinogen grenades, anything you can get. With that, even npc's that get to go to a 100 can be brought down pretty quick. Not to mention that having violent mutations happen to you is bound to be problematic, unless he rules that it happens instantly without pain and that they instantly adapt, but that's a bit of a stretch for the logic.

Another thing you could do is to avoid direct conflict. Use stealth extensively. Stealth in, retrieve objective, stealth your way out. Get gear that can hack into vox channels and use mimic to give false orders to move gaurds, who are on your objectve, out of the way. The idea is if they can't find you, they can't fight you, and then thier uberness is irrelevant. Hopefully none of you are dedicated to khorne though.

Reverend mort said:

I… love… this idea >.>

If you go Psyker, use sacrifices. You can push powers freely without risk of perils (regardless how small it is). Get force weapon, use precision telekinesis on it, and then blade of balefull might. With those powers pushed, you can get 40 dmg per hit with warp quality. If this is a daemonic weapon with Mindeater atribute that hits into intelligence and perception, you can kill bloodthirster in two hits If you are tzeentchian sorcerrer then get boon of tzeentch and flicker - the ultimate GM annoying power.

Others - get True Grit, Reaper Autocannon or Noise Marine Blastmaster, and force fields. And max out dodge. Get machine trait, armour monger, ablative armour upgrade. If you use stuff from RT, get flip belts.

May I ask that what you opponents are?

Oh and usually, when your GM puts OP enemies in front of you, then it is a sign that he wants to see a sneaky/crafty solution instead of the good old "gun and run" .

AtoMaki said:

Some GMs are also just dicks.

IMO, the main course of action should be to talk with your GM. Ask him about his thoughts behind his choice of adventures. Ask him what you might have done better during the previous games. Tell him that the current style of play is not to your liking, if that's the case.

Black Crusade, like any other RPG, is not a game where clever play can change anything if the GM doesn't want it to. If you manage to overcome a hive tyrant, nothing prohibits the GM from siccing a second one on you right then and there. Thus, your first agenda should be to determine why the GM does what he does. Does he want to provide you with a challenge that can be solved by clever character building and tactics? Does he want you to think outside the box, circumventing encounters you can't win? Does he just want to create a "realistic" and gritty world where character death in the course of a story is quite normal and to be expected?
Without the answers to these questions, chances are you won't accomplish all that much.

Pack more firepower thats mu solution to any problem. My Reaper Autocannon (Scor Toung) and I have felled allot of foes the past 100 years (6months), but ok my Termy armor aint working that great atm so from time to time I get my ass handed to me but then its a good ieader to remember that running away is no shame… specialy if you come back with bigger gunz