Hey all, I'm looking for some advice for our Only War campaign. We have 3 players and a GM who is often… notorious for overkill. He wants to run the adventure in the back of the book and then Final Testament. I guess in some ways I'm looking to break the system to provide us with an edge.

We're going to be creating our own custom regiment, and I was looking for some advice on helping us survive or squeezing out the maximum bonuses. Any advice on what some feel the optimum three man party is would also be most welcome. Especially when the GM loves to throw crazy challenges beyond mortal ken at you.

3 stormtroopers - best starting gear and defenses with versatile skill options depending on build

Regiment options:
Homeworld: Penitent - Take orthoproxy or unschakeable faith, you'll pick up nerves of steel from training doctrines. It also gives you 2 bonus starting wounds and a toughness increase.

Commanding Officer: Choleric - rapid reaction is the best option here.

Training Doctrines: Seige Infantry - Nerves of steel is a fearless pre-req, the toughness bonus combined with the bonuses from homeworld and stormtrooper put your starting toughness at 51 before experience. Which means you soak 11 before pen because of carapace armor.

Sharpshooters - Deadeye shot is great because it reduces called shot penalties but more importantly because it gives you ballistic skill and you already have it from stromtrooper you can pick a characteristic aptitude of your choice. I recommend the 3 of you pick different ones that correspond to skills you would like to get later. Example: someone gets intelligence for cheaper medicae/tech advances or social for cheaper talking skills.

Stats before bonuses: BS 40 Toughness 40 Agility 40, that leaves 40 points to spend on whatever you want. I recommend 20 in whatever stat corresponds to your chosen skill role, int for medics/techs, fellowship for social, strength for intimidate, etc. The remaining 20 use to get strength up to increase carrying capacity and physical skill checks. You don't ever need weaponskill becuase you can use pistols in melee without penalty and dodge is better than parry in all cases. Willpower is also not needed because you'll be buying fearless right away.

Additional Standard Kit Items: Spend 10 to upgrade your armor to best quality giving you a soak of 12, 8 on a photo-visor so you can fight in the dark with no penalties, 10 on a targeter to reduce all BS penalties by -10. The targeter works on all things including called shots, smoke, darkness, range, shooting into melee, full-auto, etc. Combined with the talent you got for your sharpshooter doctrine called shots now have 0 penalties. That gives you 4 left over to spend on whatever you want.

Starting Experience: Buy fearless as soon as possible then max out agility and dodge to avoid damage, agility also helps core skills like stealth and increases your inititative helping you to go first in most fights. After your dodge chance is 80% or better you can buy ballistic skill increases or toughness or other skills at your discretion. You will think that ballistic skill should be increased first but it's not neccasary. Aim+Single shot+short range(which almost all fights occur at) gives you +30 on your shot giving you a 70% chance to hit, which is a good chance in any system so wait on the BS advances until you increase your defenses.

That is the general guide for breaking the system. Other options include weapon specialists with bolt guns and carapace armor, heavy gunners with autocannons and carapace, psykers lighting everything on fire, and a few others. Mechanically I think the stormtrooper option is the best and also makes sense from a fluff perspective where as the others don't.



Edit: No matter what build you decide on a high dodge % is your best chance to keep a character alive. You can dodge just about anything except a few psychic powers but with high powered guns you can only soak up so much damage.

No one should ever allow point buy for stats. It makes cheesing the system so easy…

borithan said:

Droma said:

Actually, OW is really much easier to cheese. Fellowship is now really a dump characteristic (you needed Fel even in DW, but in OW, you can leave it at 25), Int is also 'meh' (needed only if you want Medicae and/or Tech-Use, so Medics and Operators will take it and nobody else) and the Aptitude system is somewhat clumsy (no way to acquire Secondary Aptitudes).

Over here, we roll 2D10 ten times, discard the lowest score, repeat it thrice, choose one batch of rolls and distribute the scores from that given batch. less cheesy than the point-distribution, less random than the original, and the chance that your character will turn out as you want characteristics wise is pretty high.

borithan said:

I have made the opposite experience. I used roll-up stats in the beginning, with DH, RT and DW, but switched to point buy for OW.

I really disliked how unpredictable rolling up stats made PC capabilities, how it leads weird competence spreads in the group, and so on. Point buy allows me to have a much better idea what each PC will be good at. I know my players and am comfortable with the small degree of min-maxing they bring to the game.

My major issue with points is that you will never EVER go for uneven ratings in score except with starting modifiers (ie why everh ave 29 strength when 30 gives you a whole extra point of strength bonus)

Points buy has always been a munchkins dream in games for me (since early D&D where you get a bonus from every other increase in an attribute, so they are always increased by 2 each time). and it leads to games where each character is the absolute pinacle of what they can do, and nobody is any good at the one thing the group overlooked during character creation.

I wouldn't mind a half-and half between the two systems - maybe you roll have a base stat, then roll 1d10 per stat, then at the end you have maybe 50 points left to spend. It would mean the end of "dump stats" and idiot savants, childlike ubermensch etc but would still allow some degree of customisation for those who cannot abide by true random rolls.

I mean ultimately its down to any group to decide how they want to play, but ive never had an issue with rolling all my attributes in sequence then re-rolling one of my choosing (oh no i'm a sergeant with rubbish WS! for example)

AtoMaki said:

If you think social or int is a dump stat you're playing with a bad GM.

Edit: I'm also wondering when this became about point buy vs rolled stats. The thread asked for a way to cheese the system not whether or not s/he should.

Droma said:

In DH, DW and especially in RT, they aren't. In OW, there are classes (Medic,Oeprator, Tech-Priest and maybe ST) for Int and nobody else should take it because everything will be stupidly expensive. And for Fellowship… If you are just a honest Huardsman, then you will never roll to Charm/Deceive, Command is slightly useless, and the important stuff (Scrutiny) is Per based. So yeah, in OW, Int and Fel are tetriary cahracteristics (BS, T, Ag and Per are primary and WS, S, WP are secondary), so you can't go wrong with leaving them at 21-25.

Cleaning up the point-buy/rolled-stats is important because while it has cheese, it also kills the characters. And the OP asked for tips on survival while I guess he and his group want to actually - y'know - roleplay their characters and not just pass (or fail) tests for their min/maxed drones.

AtoMaki said:

Nothing against your style of play, it is after all fun for you.

But for me, if I am not playing the game where the PCs are part of a larger, quite direct structure of support; a structure based partially on tradition and laws, but mostly on informal friendships and respect. If it's not a game where the manner in which they tread the people they are in a regiment with, fight next to, call for help to, spend their free time with, trade their goods with, drink their Amasec with and lie in next to in the dirt, doesn't directly influence their ability to survive the next encounter with crazy things from outer space. If the game isn't one where the cameraderie, the bonds they form in blood and fire with people far beyond just the other PCs, isn't the most important thing that keeps them going and gives their life a meaning.

Then, for me, it's not Only War.

Dark Heresy doesn't have that, Rogue Trader doesn't have that, DW or BC don't have that. Only OW has that focus, that close look at the bonds that form in war.

I have Deathwatch for when I want to play combat focused ubermenschen. It's a lot of fun, I wouldn't want to be without it. But for me it's not Only War.

All you have described about your OW group shows them as a group of lone supersoldiers that value their independence and ability to solve problems as a small team above all. Seriously, your groups seems capable of surviving a trip to a planet that's basically completely in the hands of chaos and suffused with warp energy. That's not remotely within the ability of even the best guardsman that isn't written by Dan Abnett. It is great for you, I honestly don't want to implicate that there is anything inherently wrong there. But please don't take that as a lesson that just because it's the truth for the subjective experience of your group, "an honest guardsman will never roll Charm/Deceive" is even remotely true for any other OW group in the whole wide world.

(I am also very drunk, so please don't take this post too seriously)

Gokerz said:

Okay, I can get behind this, but in an average bonding with your comrades, where you are just talking about stuff, joking, bonding and generally, just doing what normal people do without any intent to backstabbing/double-talking/hyperboling/whatever, then you won't roll Deceive or Charm ever. Because why the hell would you?

AtoMaki said:

Because why should social interactions be automatic when combat or opposed interactions are not? Just because you're enjoying a bottle of Amasec with trooper Watkins over in 3rd platoon doesn't mean he is immediately going to tell you what he knows about why his lieutenant went crazy and shot 3 of his troopers. The sharing of the bottle and the roleplaying is what will give you situational modifiers to a skill roll. That's how roleplaying works and to handwaive an entire segment of the game because of your "why the hell would you?" attitude is sheer insanity.

Kasatka said:

Because social interactions are the best way to roleplay your character? Like, roleplaying a gunshot or a wrestling is kinda' hard ifyouknowwhatImean . Sitting down next to the comrade and rolling a bunch of D100 isn't really that interesting, even though it gets the job done nicely. Now, roleplaying your character and actually making the interaction work between him and the NPC (or another PC) is the way to go in our group. If this doesn't work, then the player can reach for Deceive/Charm, but since the Imperial Guard isn't an army of double-talkers (like, as it was mentioned above, you are supposed to be cool with your fellow guardsmen and not f*cking them up with lies and deception) you can't really rely on this (unless you want trouble), so it just makes social Skills surplus.

At least in the other games, the social interactions are variable. You will meet with like, a bazillion kind of people, and you are usually encouraged to be dishonest with them (especially in BC, where I would say Deceive is one of the most important Skills). In OW, honesty is the best way to go - so Deceive/Charm are unimportant and thus Fellowship is blank (as it has little effect in any other cases).

Deceive and charm are considered amongst the most important skills by the players in my campaign. One of the first things they witnessed in game was the execution by firing squad of an officer who had been too liberal with the truth to his men. From that point on they decided they weren't going to make the same kind of mistakes. Fel based skills became a priority (as did Int, for working out what was going on behind the scenes).

Later in the campaign, the sergeant failed an important deceive roll to the company commissar. Consequently, he was flogged in front of the company and immediately demoted to private. Socially based rolls have been a huge element in the game. I always encourage players to think and act interactions out - and my players do - and these provide situational bonuses as the case may be. For minor things I simply react as if an NPC was a real person and use my best judgement without any roll. For more important situations, I provide bonuses or negatives based on what a player does or says to an NPC. For example, the party wanted to befriend the battallion's professional malingerer and black marketeer, Private Caid. They had to win his trust first by getting on his good side, then by doing him a 'small' favour. Charm figured into this in a big way, but the roll was given a modifier based on how the players actually acted the situation out.

I don't agree that 'everyone is in it together' in the regiment. Like any organisation, a military regiment is full of opportunists, the self-interested, the greedy, and the plain mean spirited (as well as all those who are none of these things). These people will not simply bend over backwards for the player characters, and this fact has led to some very enjoyable campaigns. I love running free-form campaigns that take surprising turns, and rolls based on the important social interactions have helped that to happen in a believable fashion.

Besides which, in about seven to ten adventures (I've lost count off the top of my head) since Beta began, I have run at least three in which there was no combat whatsoever . These have been some of the best loved and most tense adventures in the campaign. Rolls based off Fel and Int have featured heavily in these, memorably in one set entirely in the Brig. In some other adventures there have been combat situations which were resolved in a few rounds or less, and that's it.

I don't play with people who are interested in min/maxxing their stats. In my experience, those kinds of characters are horribly ill-equipped for a varied and balanced adventure (at least of the kind that I prefer to run). There are also many players who don't care that their Aptitudes aren't geared in a certain way, for character reasons , they choose to buff stats they in reality rarely use.

For the record, I let my players use the points system. I advise them what they shouldn't do but I prefer to give my players maximum freedom. In Rogue Trader there were some players who basically pumped everything in the stats they felt were most important to them, and ignored the others. They soon learn't that this was a disastrous gameplay decision and never did such a thing again.

AtoMaki said:

Fine, but can you acknowledge that is how YOU play the game, not how the game is universally played? Because you seem to be blindly stating that an entire section of the game that others enjoy is entirely pointless and should be ignored.

The way you are running social encounters is fine - some other RP systems operate that way, but as OW has specific mechanics for social interactions you cannot say that people are playing the game wrong by utilising them.

srMontresor said:

And that is the really important thing. The regiment is not there for the players' convenience . It can be a tremendous resource and help, but they will have to earn that. No regiment begins as a group of friends that trusts each other.

Kasatka said:

*taptap* Are we still in this topic? The OP asked how to make characters who can survive tough encounters. After some discussion, I said that Int and Fel are tetriary characteristics as Int has special classes for it and a character can solve Fel based stuff without rolling anything and playing the game smart (like not jumping into all sorts of messed-up shenanigans). Not to mention that Fellowship and Social are relatively rare Aptitudes, so your social advancements will be expensive too. Especially in this case, when everyone advices STs (who have neither).

And boy, what about respecting each other's opinion ? I know, it isn't fun, it can't generate flame wars and endless rants, but hey at least we can keep the topic clean and on the rail!

AtoMaki said:

I think I'd actually agree with you here, if we were talking about DH or BC. In those games PCs will normaly be by themselves in combat situations, so while Charm/Deceive is probably more important outside combat situations than in OW, it doesn't help within actual combat encounters.

In OW on the other hand, your Regiment and your relationship with it will directly and seriously influence nearly every single combat encounter. In a normal OW where you aren't playing some kind of elite squad of Transhuman fighting machines, most fighting will be happening as part of larger operation while working together with multiple other, mutally supporting forces. In OW, unlike the other games, your ability to be on friendly terms with your supporting squads, the Medics healing you between combat, the Mechanicus priests keeping your gear in order, or the mortar squads giving fire support, will directly, noticeably, and lastingly, influence a PC's ability to survive a tough combat encounter.

AtoMaki, you have to realize just how untypical things like playing High Threat Tactical Assault Teams or resolving "Fel based stuff without rolling" is for most OW groups.

I actually have to admit that I don't think I have ever played a game before OW where charm/deceive type skill actually affected your ability to survive a tough combat encounter, so it's not something most people will think of when they start playing OW for the first time. Doesn't mean that it isn't true in the specific, and maybe even unique, case of Only War. (I agree on Int though)

tl;dr: we are still on topic

Gokerz said:

Yes. And this is why you don't want to roll Deceive/Charm… Because when you do, then you are screwing someone up. And that's not friendly. Not at all. Generally, as I see it, you build your positive relationships with being The Nice Guy. And not rolling Charm every time you think you can.

Except of course if you want to build some sort of "star of the regiment" character. Then you will need Fellowship and social skills. But I think this case is out of the OP's interest .

And hey, nobody is a superhuman around here! Every character in our current OW Squad is a bog-standard guy with 2500 starting xp and that's all. Believe me, this High Threat Tactical Assault Squad is much more punishing (especially to my Medic) than you would think .

AtoMaki said:

I think we have different interpretations of what using charm or deceive means from an IC perspective.

For me, Charm isn't some form of mind control or hostile social attack. Using Charm is being the nice guy. In my opinion, If you try to be the nice guy without actually having the charm skill, you will not be seen as the friendly guy trying handing out amasec from the goodness of his heart. You'll be seen as the creepy weirdo that thinks he can 'buy' everyone's good will by handing out stuff.

Deceive is more of an edge case, but functioning as part of the regiment will sooner or later require you to work together and depend on people you find personally revolting. Killing them or avoiding them is not really an option, so being able to play nice and hide your true opinion of them will be important to fit in. To pull this back to the skills specific applications to survive tough combat encounters, Deceive will often be the skill that decides if you can make your squads situation sound dire enough over the vox that reinforcements comes now , not in an hour (and later help you make everyone belief that this was the right call).

^I dunno, but if it is really the case, then the whole Imperial Guard is a massive organization of creepy weirdos, because Guardsmen lack the Charm and Deceive Skills… And personally, I don't think that it is the case. I mean, the NPCs are not static props waiting for the interactions of the PCs… Nothing stops NPC Joe to try to befriend NPC Jimmy with his astonishing Fellowship score of 25.

And if Charm/Deceive is a "PCs only" thing then wouldn't you essentially force the players to use them? Like: "Either you have Charm/Deceive and good Fellowship or you are a social monstrosity and nobody loves you!". That sounds rather… unfair IMHO.

AtoMaki said:

I think for OW, as is the case for every rpg I have ever played, the rules are not the setting. They are meant to facilitate interesting play, not allow realistic simulation of everything that happens within the setting.

In the case of the 40k rpg, this is explicidly the case. A few years ago I sent a question to FFG about Goliath ships in Rogue Trader and why their main objective of harvesting plasma was so hard that by the rules an average Goliath would be destroyed every third time it harvested plasma. I got the following answer from Sam Stewart:

"[…]In other words, the rules provided here are for vessels crewed by player characters, in order to make the experience challenging and not without risk.[…]"

A game system that is able to plausibly simulate everything that happens within the setting would be extremely awesome, but though many have tried, no game has ever succeeded. Some tried really hard.

tl;dr: Assumably, NSCs don't roll charm/deceive against each other. Same as the NSC crew of a Goliath normally doesn't have to test if it gets destroyed when harvesting plasma. Same as NSC Navigators don't use the rules for warp travel provided in RT unless going up against a PC ship (just imagine if they did. The Imperium would be functionally impossible, so high would the rate of destroyed or lost ships be).

(Edit: Note that at least in my games, rolls on charm to foster good relationships between members of the same regiment would get pretty big boni, especially if backed up with a bottle of Amasec. Enough that even Fellowship 25 guardsmen would have a fair chance at succeeding, as going through hell together means a lot and creates an enormous amount of trust and goodwill. Giving a good description of what is being done and said by the player would increase this even further.)

Gokerz said:

Pretty much this is what we do too, but without forcing Charm in. It would be like 200xp "well spent" to unlock the "socially eligible" PC condition and never-ever come back again (what is pretty much my original point).

I think that in the end of the day it's all down to the players and what kind of game you are playing. If you are having a straight up gun riot then Fellowship and Int becomes a dump for most players. If you are focusing more on interaction with the company then suddenly they become more important. It depends what the OP thinks the GM is going to do. If you boost for mad combat (penitent storm troopers?) then will he mess you up with some social challenges? If possible 2 combat tanks and then 1 medic/communicator should mean you can hit any reasonable challenge and have at least one person savvy enough to deal with the other aspects. Although if the GM is that detirmened to mess you up then you are in trouble anyways.

With regards to the other discussion occuring. I prefer to run with a mixed group. My players are an interesting mix, 2 prefer heavy fighting, 1 is a bit of a mix and the last is happiest when doing the actual role play. So the 2 fighters will dump everything in the combat stats and skills and will come alive during the heavy combat. The mix is leaning towards medic / tech and I will be sure to throw in some tech based stuff for him to do. Finally the role player is looking at a sergeant role. So he will get several encounters with commanders, logistics, other units, locals and so forth.

Personally I think it's better to have some good conflict within the Guard armies as well. Perhaps it's a frosty relationship with another unit from another regiment for some reason. Then you have to work together to take on the xenos with a strained relationship. The twitchy commisar, the jealous squad, the suspicious locals all of these are great encounters that help flesh out the Guard and the characters beyond just being Guardsman No3.