going to play in a Deathwatch game...

[Bearpunch]

and our party is (or might be, nothings final): two assault amrines, librarian, devstator, maybe a tactical, and maybe a tech marine. I have no experience in this game, and the most I know about the 40k universe is what is containted in Space Marine. My question is, given the party comp, what class path should I play?

Also, does the chapter choice have any effect on gameplay?

[The Glyphstone]

A 7-man squad? Be prepared for massive carnage.

Chapter choice does have an effect - it changes what attack and defense patterns you have access to, what paths you can follow, and your starting stats.

[Bearpunch]

A 7-man squad? Be prepared for massive carnage.


I am perfectly okay with this.

So an apothecary, maybe? They just sound really boring. (granted, all I have to go on is the wikipedia description of the class)

[Lostintransit]

Deathwatch is awesome! :smallamused:

Having both run the game and currently playing, I would say that you should pick the speciality that most appeals to you! As a space marine you have lethal amounts of deadly weapons, both ranged and melee, so general carnage and destruction will be common. The specialities really help define your characters favoured style of slaughter, so if you like getting into dirty brawls play an assault marine, if you prefer spray and pray play a devastator with a heavy bolter!

The main thing with deathwatch is to remember that you are a space marine, a living embodiment of martial prowess. None of the specialities are 'boring' they just magnify certain aspects of a marine’s natural outlook. So again I would say choose the one that suits you own playstyle. For example if you prefer a damage dealer in D&D then a devastator is going to be a good choice, if you like wizards, then a librarian is a good start (although psykers are a little more dangerous to the players!).

As for the chapter, this is more important than your speciality! The chapter is the force that made your character into a space marine! They have instilled in him all their doctrine, tactics and skills. Each chapter has its own rites, customs and outlook, meaning a Ultramarine plays very, very, very differently from a Space Wolf or Iron Hand! Rules wise this is reflected in the various chapter specific abilities, trappings, relics and demeanours. All these things are important to the role-playing experience of the 40K universe.

As for group size, 7 marines is a huge group, so you will routinely defeat foes with little trouble (baring bad luck). This means you are likely to face multiple master level foes or even buffed versions, so teamwork will be crucial to survive these epic encounters. All in all have fun playing a gene enhanced super soldier! FOR THE EMPEROR!

Regards

[Fatebreaker]

Apothecary? Boring? Nonsense!

You are the future of your Chapter; by extension, you are the future of Humanity.

If your brothers falter in battle, you are their salvation.

If your battle-brothers should perish, you will recover their gene-seed for the next generation of heroes.

If anyone pisses you off, you have a gauntlet made of chainsaws, needles, spikes, and drills.

Apothecaries are awesome.

[Bearpunch]

Deathwatch is awesome! :smallamused:

*snip*

Thanks for the advice, man. This game sounds really cool, as the 40k-verse has always at least midly interested me, and I love life-or-death
battles.


If anyone pisses you off, you have a gauntlet made of chainsaws, needles, spikes, and drills.


... wat. Sold.

[The Glyphstone]

Thanks for the advice, man. This game sounds really cool, as the 40k-verse has always at least midly interested me, and I love life-or-death
battles.



... wat. Sold.

More like death-or-more-death, but that just makes an Apothecary even more necessary. With the opponents necessary to challenge a group of 7 marines, you'll be the difference between someone in your party needing to roll up a new character every fight changing from 'guaranteed' to 'extremely likely'.

[Bearpunch]

Is character creation fast? Because most of the group are roleplaying noobs, and will probably get themselves killed. Only 3 of the guys (including me) have more than a session of gaming experience.

IF combat is so lethal, is it not very combat-focused? Because I imagine an rpg about 40k would be a symphony of flying limbs.

[Lostintransit]

Thanks for the advice, man. This game sounds really cool, as the 40k-verse has always at least midly interested me, and I love life-or-death
battles.

Well I'm glad I could help. Alot of people tend to approach marines as boring 2dimensional characters that just scream and attack people. wWhile they are excellent death dealers they are also noble warrior monks with a rich and interesting heritige, unique outlook and attitude!

Think along the lines of ancient stories regarding heroes, they weren't just full of combat and war, the really interesting bits were the encounters inbetween!

Regards

[Lostintransit]

Thanks for the advice, man. This game sounds really cool, as the 40k-verse has always at least midly interested me, and I love life-or-death
battles.

Well I'm glad I could help. Alot of people tend to approach marines as boring 2dimensional characters that just scream and attack people. wWhile they are excellent death dealers they are also noble warrior monks with a rich and interesting heritige, unique outlook and attitude!

Think along the lines of ancient stories regarding heroes, they weren't just full of combat and war, the really interesting bits were the encounters inbetween!

Regards

[The Glyphstone]

It is an extremely lethal game, and very high in combat - mainly because you're Space Marines, and can solve pretty much any problem with sufficient violence.

The problem is that unless you use the optional rules in...Mark of the Xenos, maybe?...damage scales far faster and higher than health and armor. A SM against his opposite number will kill or be killed in one or two exchanges of full-auto fire.

[Fatebreaker]

... wat. Sold.

Yeah, dude, it's called a narthecium. There's a picture of it on the apothecary page of the Deathwatch book. You'll know it when you see it. It's designed to punch through Space Marine power armor and safely extract their gene-seed glands -- power and finesse!

It mostly has beneficial abilities, according to the rules. However, if you ever get ahold of a power fist see if you can talk your GM into letting it be a "relic narthecium" which functions as both. There's no real game benefit to this, since you can have both a power fist and a narthecium anyhow, but now it's just that much cooler. There's a pretty awesome story in Dark Imperium ("Apothecary's Honor," by Simon Jowett) where an Apothecary has a power-narthecium, and it's kinda the best thing ever.

If you've ever played Mass Effect 2, you meet a doctor who advocates killing some gang members. The doctor's assistant gets upset, saying that doctors are supposed to help people. The doc goes, "Many ways to help people. Sometimes heal sick. Sometimes kill badguys." Apothecary's subscribe to this particular definition of "helping people."

You also get to have all sorts of neat lines about death.

"No man died in vain who died in service to the Emperor."

[Bearpunch]

Well I'm glad I could help. Alot of people tend to approach marines as boring 2dimensional characters that just scream and attack people. wWhile they are excellent death dealers they are also noble warrior monks with a rich and interesting heritige, unique outlook and attitude!

Think along the lines of ancient stories regarding heroes, they weren't just full of combat and war, the really interesting bits were the encounters inbetween!

Regards

I'll keep that in mind.


It is an extremely lethal game, and very high in combat - mainly because you're Space Marines, and can solve pretty much any problem with sufficient violence.

The problem is that unless you use the optional rules in...Mark of the Xenos, maybe?...damage scales far faster and higher than health and armor. A SM against his opposite number will kill or be killed in one or two exchanges of full-auto fire.


Unfortunately, I believe the DM only owns the core book for now. I'll remember to warn the players about the lethality.

Good think it is everyones (even the DMs) first session, because if we had an experienced DM I have a feeling we would all be dead in seconds.


Yeah, dude, it's called a narthecium. There's a picture of it on the apothecary page of the Deathwatch book. You'll know it when you see it. It's designed to punch through Space Marine power armor and safely extract their gene-seed glands -- power and finesse!

It mostly has beneficial abilities, according to the rules. However, if you ever get ahold of a power fist see if you can talk your GM into letting it be a "relic narthecium" which functions as both. There's no real game benefit to this, since you can have both a power fist and a narthecium anyhow, but now it's just that much cooler. There's a pretty awesome story in Dark Imperium ("Apothecary's Honor," by Simon Jowett) where an Apothecary has a power-narthecium, and it's kinda the best thing ever.

If you've ever played Mass Effect 2, you meet a doctor who advocates killing some gang members. The doctor's assistant gets upset, saying that doctors are supposed to help people. The doc goes, "Many ways to help people. Sometimes heal sick. Sometimes kill badguys." Apothecary's subscribe to this particular definition of "helping people."

You also get to have all sorts of neat lines about death.

"No man died in vain who died in service to the Emperor."

Dude, I don't care if it would be completely useless, the principal of the matter is totally worth it.

Yeah, I've played ME2, Mordin Solus was one of my favorite characters. My Space Marine will totally be Mordin Solus in power armor.

[Lostintransit]

I'll keep that in mind.

Unfortunately, I believe the DM only owns the core book for now. I'll remember to warn the players about the lethality.

Good think it is everyones (even the DMs) first session, because if we had an experienced DM I have a feeling we would all be dead in seconds.

Well speaking from experience the first few ranks can be downright deadly if the group doesn't work effectively together, but an important thing to remember is that only players (and NPC who have touched by the fates) can righteous fury on an attack. This is quite important as it means hordes of foes take off a few wounds per hit instead of instant dead players!

For example in a game I played in sunday, the kill team of 3 vs 4 chaos marines was quite scary as 1 of our team dropped to 0 wounds and another lost around 16 or so to fully auto bolter fire (we were ambushed) before the return fire cut them down like the heretics they were! and we are all rank 3 marines, so quite skilled!

As for Marine on Marine (or equal opponent) the players should learn to not stand blindly in the open vs fully automatic weapons! :smallbiggrin: Joking aside, sensible use of the run action coupled with cover should see the players survive those early encounters (unless you have an assault marine who wants to go toe to toe with 5 tyranid warriors in melee at rank 1! long story...)


Dude, I don't care if it would be completely useless, the principal of the matter is totally worth it.

Yeah, I've played ME2, Mordin Solus was one of my favorite characters. My Space Marine will totally be Mordin Solus in power armor.

This basically sums up a Deathwatch apothecary, find a Xenos, study it then kill it! Now you've got me thinking about what chapter Mordins attitude would be from... :smallsmile:

Regards

[The Glyphstone]

This basically sums up a Deathwatch apothecary, find a Xenos, study it then kill it!
Regards

I think you got those in reverse order...

[king.com]

I would make a recommendation to as the GM to take a look at the Errata for Deathwatch, fixes a lot of problems. Also, from my own experience (though admittedly the least game time of the 40K rpgs) the Devestator was overwhelmingly the best class atleast at the Rank 1-3 range (not played enough beyond to see how it evens out) and with access to different ammunition types lets you keep the Heavy bolter as one of the best weapons in the game. So many dice....so many righteous fury's....

[The Glyphstone]

I would make a recommendation to as the GM to take a look at the Errata for Deathwatch, fixes a lot of problems. Also, from my own experience (though admittedly the least game time of the 40K rpgs) the Devestator was overwhelmingly the best class atleast at the Rank 1-3 range (not played enough beyond to see how it evens out) and with access to different ammunition types lets you keep the Heavy bolter as one of the best weapons in the game. So many dice....so many righteous fury's....

The Heavy Bolter remained the best weapon ever up until at least rank 5, when we stopped playing.

[Lostintransit]

The Heavy Bolter remained the best weapon ever up until at least rank 5, when we stopped playing.

Well the Errata to the weapons was mostly to fix the issues with righteous fury, but they fixed that anyway! It was supposed to be roll +1d10 for every 10 you roll on the first attack, not re-roll the whole attack! this does make quite a huge difference!

Regards

[The Glyphstone]

Well the Errata to the weapons was mostly to fix the issues with righteous fury, but they fixed that anyway! It was supposed to be roll +1d10 for every 10 you roll on the first attack, not re-roll the whole attack! this does make quite a huge difference!

Regards

Tell me about it. The first game my group played had the unerrataed rules - I ended up shoving a melta bomb down the throat of a Tyranid Warrior that was about to eat me, and did something like 300 damage after the dice finished rolling. We houseruled it on the spot, and only later found out that the official rules had been modified to match our houserule.

[king.com]

Well the Errata to the weapons was mostly to fix the issues with righteous fury, but they fixed that anyway! It was supposed to be roll +1d10 for every 10 you roll on the first attack, not re-roll the whole attack! this does make quite a huge difference!

Regards

To be honest though, I still found the Heavy Bolter the best weapon even without that rule. Simply because of raw number of dice you end up throwing and the pure damage you can put out compared to everyone in the party (even better if they let the devestator take custom ammo every mission).

[Fatebreaker]

To be honest though, I still found the Heavy Bolter the best weapon even without that rule. Simply because of raw number of dice you end up throwing and the pure damage you can put out compared to everyone in the party (even better if they let the devestator take custom ammo every mission).

This is a .75-caliber diamantine-tipped depleted deuterium core armor-piercing mass-reactive high-explosive bolt round. It is the standard ammunition for the Astartes Mk IVa Heavy Bolter. Upon firing the round will activate a primary propellent charge; upon striking its target, the round will penetrate the exterior surfaces and explode within. This process creates a very distinctive sound. The Mk IVa can and will unleash up to six hundred such rounds per minute. There is no finer chorus in the Emperor's domain than six hundred voices raised in glorifying His Name. Go forth and sing the song of the Emperor!