Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

[gerey]

There isn't even like a "unfortunately, these are biolocked to the previous owner, please enter override code" message it's just "these weapons are the best!"

That's going to be recurring issue with the whole game, I suspect. Rogue Traders are very rich, very powerful and very well-connected.

Many of them own whole fleets and planets. It's very difficult to present that kind of scale and wealth outside the tabletop. How do you balance combat encounters around a PC that can deploy a whole army against an opponent?

They should have adapted Dark Heresy, but not allowed the player to be an inquisitor, but instead let them play as an interrogator.

[rusty_shackleford]

They should have adapted Dark Heresy, but not allowed the player to be an inquisitor, but instead let them play as an interrogator.

It's pretty good, on the slower side of hack'n'slash RPGs which fits me, played through the campaign in about ~50 hours.

[Sweeper]

This is offset by appealing to people who get their jollies by looking at excel spreadsheets.

I mean, you ain't wrong. Your error lies in thinking that RP virginity is somehow superior to build autism chadism.
What's the difficulty like in comparison to KM and WotR? I've seen some of you mofos say it's way easier.

[somerandomdude]

There's an armory full of amazing weaponry you can examine in your bedroom that you have access to at all times but you're not allowed to take them. There isn't even like a "unfortunately, these are biolocked to the previous owner, please enter override code" message it's just "these weapons are the best!"

The Rogue Trader can't even stock a decent supply of medkits and other consumables. The Rogue Trader is Soviet poor when it comes to basics like toilet paper, ironically.

This is only artificial difficulty for those who're unwilling to make necessary party changes to cope with the scarcity of resources.

[Oyster Sauce]

Closed this game earlier and can't think of a reason to launch it again. Maybe some day.

[J1M]

Site is pretty dead. I guess we are all pretending we aren't playing this, lol.

I don't know anything about the combat system but I made a custom character with high intelligence and fellowship. Noble Officer because having a sidekick you empower sounded novel. Looking forward to finding out how much of a mistake it was to make ballistics a dump stat.

Also increased difficulty above the default because it seemed like the type of thing a rogue traitor would do.

[WhiteShark]

Site is pretty dead. I guess we are all pretending we aren't playing this, lol.

At least on IRC it seems like there's an even split between people who started and hated it, and those who intend to play but are waiting for Owlcat to patch their inevitable day 1 buggy mess.

[Lhynn]

Game is fine, a bit on the easier side even on unfair, but the narrative doesnt suck so far.

[WaterMage]

Honestly, the game is good? Yes, but is imo bad in one aspect which is extremely important for me. Psyker sucks.

when someone makes a "psyker fix" mod like NWN2 has I will play it. All psyker power in this game sucks. I wanna to cause massive firestorms reducing enemies to dust, stop bullets Matrix style, summon multiple forcebolts to tear apart enemies, make my enemy blood boil at the same time that I transform their blood into poison and use lifeforce to create massive lightning storms Sith style. All of this is present in TT Dark Heresy. Yet in this game, you can at low level "ignite" a single enemy and dish way less damage than any flame weapon do at the time.

Picking the main disciplines in TT.

• Telekinesis? Non existent. It is great in TT as has force bolt, catch projectiles Neo style, force fields and so on
• Pyro? No incinerate, firebolt(and at high pr you can summon multiple ones), holocaust, no fire wall, nothing interesting, even regular enemies can soak multiple molten beam(no visual effects), Fire storm in TT can turn 50m area into ashes, in game requires a round to cast ignite and a round to spread it, being much less effective than any flamer.
• Telepathy? No domination, arguably the best one, see me not, terrify
• Biomancy? NO blood boil, no bio lightning, not a single offensive power. The ability to regen lost limbs and remove injuries from TT is also not in the game.

Even with PR = 5, my sniper which can attack multiple times per round outdps me and enemies in chapter 4 have everyone hundreds of hit points.

[Nooneatall]

Boring, ugly, depressing game. I hope someday game developers are able to make a game at least as good as final fantasy tactics. I guess I'll just go play 90s and early 00s games that were fun and nice to look at instead.

[WaterMage]

PSyker powers in this game where made by a 4e fan. I"m serious.

[somerandomdude]

The navigator is busted. There's 2 passives that make non-damaging skills do damage, along with just the general navigator tool kit of inflicting mass debuffs to everything. Every single turn, point of curiosity => zone of fear => lidless stare, and they all do damage. Even better, is those effects can pull mobs away from your melee which will allow them to get attacks of opportunity against them. Even bosses appear to fail the willpower checks, so this is not just great against clearing trash, it's really good on bosses too. Once you get tier 2 classes, pick master tactician to boost the damage even more. Level 16 navigator does around 30 damage with point of curiosity with the master tactician buff.

[Acrux]

I'd recommend ATOM RPG & its stand-alone expansion Trudograd.

I've never started Trudograd. Do you recommended importing a character or starting fresh with a new one?

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd recommend ATOM RPG & its stand-alone expansion Trudograd.

I've never started Trudograd. Do you recommended importing a character or starting fresh with a new one?

Either works fine, if you import you'll be stronger tho which is kinda a bad thing because the difficulty is all around lower than the base game, the only negative thing I have to say about it.
But there's also a good deal of references to your character if you import.

[somerandomdude]

In most games, a class like assassin has to be some sort of dex-fag build using 2 lithe weapons.

[Emphyrio]

The game also just suffers from serious dissonance that rapidly adds up if you think about it at all. You're on what is basically one of the largest spess fortresses that exists, one of the most important people in at least your part of the galaxy, and nobody can get you anything better than a crappy pistol?

The tabletop had the opposite problem. You were likely to get the best or almost best weapons you could right in session 1. There were tons of shit weapons you'd never use (because they were ported over from Dark Heresy I guess).

[rusty_shackleford]

The game also just suffers from serious dissonance that rapidly adds up if you think about it at all. You're on what is basically one of the largest spess fortresses that exists, one of the most important people in at least your part of the galaxy, and nobody can get you anything better than a crappy pistol?

The tabletop had the opposite problem. You were likely to get the best or almost best weapons you could right in session 1. There were tons of shit weapons you'd never use (because they were ported over from Dark Heresy I guess).

Honestly, I just think this is a poor setting for an RPG, computer or tabletop. It's one definitely made with wargaming in mind.

[Emphyrio]

The game also just suffers from serious dissonance that rapidly adds up if you think about it at all. You're on what is basically one of the largest spess fortresses that exists, one of the most important people in at least your part of the galaxy, and nobody can get you anything better than a crappy pistol?

The tabletop had the opposite problem. You were likely to get the best or almost best weapons you could right in session 1. There were tons of shit weapons you'd never use (because they were ported over from Dark Heresy I guess).

Honestly, I just think this is a poor setting for an RPG, computer or tabletop. It's one definitely made with wargaming in mind.

It is. Also, the rules were frequently non-functional. Fantasy Flight was a really shit game designer. I recently went back to the rules and tried to figure out the rules to hire 1,000 elite mercenaries and arm them with flak armor and bolt rifles, for example. It took me hours, I had to look through four different supplementary rulebooks, and the rules in those different books contradicted each other. We never had a spaceship fight in my game, but I've heard that those rules don't work either. The only way to play Rogue Trader is to run it as a star trek episode (the captain, XO and ship doctor go down to the planet with 1 security officer while the warship and the rest of the marines stay in orbit).

[Galdred]

The game also just suffers from serious dissonance that rapidly adds up if you think about it at all. You're on what is basically one of the largest spess fortresses that exists, one of the most important people in at least your part of the galaxy, and nobody can get you anything better than a crappy pistol?

The tabletop had the opposite problem. You were likely to get the best or almost best weapons you could right in session 1. There were tons of shit weapons you'd never use (because they were ported over from Dark Heresy I guess).

Honestly, I just think this is a poor setting for an RPG, computer or tabletop. It's one definitely made with wargaming in mind.

Actually, it could have worked just well with a game that would work a bit more like Birthright (or even Kenshi, Mount and Blade), with a heavy focus on mass combat instead of party combat.
Granted, Birthright suffered from being over ambitious, and the party RPG part was by far the weakest of them all.

Anyway, despite all of its flaws, I am having a great time with the game, because it conveys the tone of the setting pretty well, and made me doubt my choices to go "benevolent iconoclast" over oversealous dogmatic.

[GhostCow]

I can't seem to get past character creation in this. No matter how much I read up on the classes and mechanics, it all sounds like boring garbage.

[boot]

Also a major issue kingmaker had: why is someone so important doing such dangerous work? If the PC died, everything would be chaos, there isn't even a heir after you, there's no good reason for the PC to be out there risking his life.

I can't speak for other owlcuck games, but in kingmaker you're just a very capable mercenary who's taken his own lands. Made sense to me player character would continue traveling about solving the kingdom's worst problems. He's a hero king, very cool.

[WhiteShark]

Also a major issue kingmaker had: why is someone so important doing such dangerous work? If the PC died, everything would be chaos, there isn't even a heir after you, there's no good reason for the PC to be out there risking his life.

I can't speak for other owlcuck games, but in kingmaker you're just a very capable mercenary who's taken his own lands. Made sense to me player character would continue traveling about solving the kingdom's worst problems. He's a hero king, very cool.

Kings often fought on the front lines in real life, though at the heads of armies rather than adventuring parties. Warcraft was considered an essential skill and the king's battlefield leadership was important for morale.

[rusty_shackleford]

They inspired their troops, not just because they wanted to go adventuring. It would be putting your entire kingdom at risk for your own personal whims, someone would kill you and put a pretender on the throne.

[WhiteShark]

It's a quirk of d20 systems that the most qualified leader is also the most personally powerful individual, so in such settings populated by high HD monsters, it's not really all that surprising that the king would need to go deal with threats with his gang of high level characters.

[Galdred]

They inspired their troops, not just because they wanted to go adventuring. It would be putting your entire kingdom at risk for your own personal whims, someone would kill you and put a pretender on the throne.

They did actually fight from the front in the middle ages, and it was expected from the king to lead from the front. It was not only for inspiration, but because there was no clear hierarchy between the nobles, and in many cases, only the presence of the king would make them kind of follow orders. Actually, the disaster at Agincourt partly came from the fact that the leading constable didn't have sufficient authority over the barons to delay the battle and choose a better place to fight.
There has been kings killed (Harald against William), or captured(Jean 2 at Poitiers) in battle actually, and many who did risk their lives (King Henry V at Agincourt, Philippe Auguste at Bouvines).

However, the risks were mitigated by several factors:

• The armors offered much more protection than in your typical RPG.

• Kings were almost always mounted, making it easier for them to retreat if things went south.

• Killing prisoners of noble birth was anathema, until the English and Swiss did so on a regular basis in the late middle ages

Another factor, that works well in Kingmaker, was that medieval European armies were comically small (typically less than 10.000 for kingdom defining battles like Hastings or Formigny, and around hundreds most of the time. Some reported battles featured as few as a dozen warriors on each side), so having some of the best equipped warriors not fight, and needing a retinue for protection would have been much more detrimental.
After all, the kings were only the first among the nobles, who were the warrior caste and derived their privileges from that, so they were expected to fight themselves.

But it was far from a medieval only thing. Julius Caesar and all Roman generals were expected to fight (but usually not the Emperors), and Alexander the Great did lead his cavalry.

So given the scale of your "kingdom" in Pathfinder Kingmaker, it is perfectly reasonable for you to take risks. That said, going on risky errands for random NPC might be pushing it a bit too far... My main issue is not the risks taken by the player in all these games, but the low importance of most of the tasks assigned to the player.

In RT, so far, the tasks are usually a bit less mundane than usual.

But the core issue of RT for me is the fact that they ported the filler RTwP combat from previous games to Turn Based. It just doesn't work as well when you cannot just autoattack trash mobs while making more coffee, and it triggers flashbacks of Jeff Vogel encounter design.

But as a 40K fanboy, the game is very compelling nevertheless...

[WhiteShark]

all Roman generals were expected to fight (but usually not the Emperors)

I wonder if this changed back at some point, because when I was reading the biography of Emperor Alexios I (11th century), he definitely did much leading from the front. Maybe it had to do with dynasties getting overthrown by generals with some frequency in that era.

[Wretch]

They inspired their troops, not just because they wanted to go adventuring. It would be putting your entire kingdom at risk for your own personal whims, someone would kill you and put a pretender on the throne.

It was a lot more common to capture nobility rather than kill them. Not only that but the King had special protection that really meant they didn’t have to worry about that stuff. Back in the Feudal ages for Europe there were centuries where far more people died during military service from disease and logistic mismanagement than actual combat. I think movies have really warped people’s perception of these times.

[Ratcatcher]

Kingmaker works simply because it's the frikin' trope from 'The Keep on the Borderlands', guys. I mean, c'mon, auld D&D even had specific level ups when you were supposed to get a fortress of some kind. KM is just a direct evolution of that, and the setup for it isn't even too shabby, since there's the call of the siren shite that should justify your character wanting to see behind the illusion. Wotr is moot, since there you're actually the one invested with mythic power. You can do things no one else can.

I haven't played RT but I feel like the best bet would be to play around the trader itself, ie use it as a powerful NPC directing the group. Doing that you can easily have the group be stranded without resources and forced to make do with what they have and you easily solve the issue of 'wtf is this space massah doing amongst us niggas?' I talk pnp ofc, there's no way to properly set a cRPG with this premise imho. Lol.

[Lhynn]

Best owlcat game, easily.

The setting is a lot more interesting than lolzanygolarion and the arenas are far more interesting, making wombat more enjoyable. Also the encounter design has been stepped up a notch.

[somerandomdude]

Chapter 1 wasn't that good, but after that the game opens up a bit in complexity, and you got a bit more freedom to move around, and builds open up a lot more once you get into the 2nd tier classes.

Full Dogmatic, I chose every "You're a heretic, die" choice consequences be damned.