Greetings, all. I've played around a bit with Dark Heresy, and I'm currently in a Rogue Trader Game. My character is the Arch-Militant of the group, and I've flavored him out to be a Stormtrooper. However, I'm not that thrilled with how he is; a significant amount of Stormtroopery things just aren't available to a Rank 2 Arch-Militant.

So, how does the Stormtrooper in Only War look? In terms of power, how does a Rank 2 Arch-Militant compare to a Rank X Stormtrooper? I recall reading that a rank 5 Dark Heresy character was a Rank 1 Rogue Trader character; is something like that still the case?

Thanks all for the help!

If your GM lets you use point buy instead of rolling stats a starting stormtrooper can be incredibly good. Even if you're rolling for stats the base equipment gives you a big leg up on survivability. After that just start upping your agility, dodge, and toughness. You're already pretty accurate out of the gate when taking aim actions with laser sights, etc.

Personally I enjoy the Stormtrooper Advance in ascension, but for the only war mechanic its pretty tight. Good starting equipment, nice wounds and it unique abilities make it a rather interesting add on for a Rogue Traders Retinue. I would say use the "Storm trooper" Selection but not actually be a storm trooper. Perhaps a mercenary type character or bodyguard getting paid for his services. Alot of GM's get bogged down by the name of the speciality rather what the specialty really is about. If the build fits in your group and your GM allows it, I'd say run with it!

The only real problem here for you is that advancement works differently in each game. The biggest change is going to be character advancement as Only War does not have "career" advance. You'd have to do some work to convert the Only War Stormtrooper to a Rogue Trader character with career advances.

If you didn't you'd have to earn XP on a different scheme, and there would be other problems buying new things from RT since they don't necessarily have a coorelarly in Only War and they won't have aptitudes with them.

So I would suggest using the convertion homebrew rules posted here somewhere and switching everyone over to OW style characters; However, since you don't seem to be the GM, this may be problematic.