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  1. - Top - End - #61
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    RangerGuy

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    I never really understood the how and why of the Sword Schools (and/or Gun Katas) before. I had all the information, but in the several read throughs, it just never clicked. These are straight up out of a anime martial arts. I knew they were based on the Book of Weabo Fighting Magic, but it never clicked. For some reason I was trying to slot them into video game combo attacks, instead of anime shouted named attacks. Ah, the holes we can have in our understanding.
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    Warforged Upgrades
    Blade Lord Vestige
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    Transformers RPG Now Updated as PDFs on Google Drive.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    The Shadow Sun delayed attack actually makes me think of Fist of The North Star - I think that's the one. Delay your massively damaging hit long enough to tell the enemy that they're already dead.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Shadowrun had a couple of Physical Adept powers that let you to achieve this as well. Delay Damage did what it says on the tin, for up to 24 hours after your attack. If you paid for the higher-level of this ability, your attack wouldn't even look like an attack. Distance Strike let you inflict damage from a distance. Combine the two for a deadly attack on someone who wouldn't even know you'd attacked them until they suddenly dropped dead some time later.
    Last edited by Lord Torath; 2020-06-26 at 11:32 AM.
    Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
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  4. - Top - End - #64
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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    As I recall AD&D monks had the whole quivering palm thing too.

    Generally it's a framework for building your own special moves. I never had an issue understanding it, but I also have a job turning arcane and convoluted rule sets into rational computer instructions and readable database entries. I generally find that worked examples help the most, ones with explanations of each decision as you go step by step through it.

    Backgrounds

    Spoiler the rehash of the stuff I wrote back in character creation.
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    Step Five: Backgrounds. Start with stuff, status, allies, etc. You get 7 points and can't go above three in any one background during this step. These are actually important because they have real effects outside of combat (sometimes in combat too). Most people will be tempted to go with artifacts (magic items), wealth($$$), inheritance(extra stuff). But we've been learning that beyond putting a couple points in wealth the other stuff, allies, contacts, backing, status, followers, etc., is actually very relevant outside of combat. My players are sort of flailing around for how to do stuff because they are essentially rich, social pariah, mercenaries. It turns out that if you pretty much go with the default setting that there are social networks and knowing a guy who knows a guy is really quite useful. That said, holdings can get you a major spaceship or super-tank.

    It's also important to note that the players need to actually READ the backgrounds and think about them. One of my players just wrote down "Contacts:1". It came up every so often and I'd ask "Who is your contact?". I finally decided, based on some of the other backgrounds, that there's a sort of 3d graph of these things with the axis being availability, power, and response on a five point scale. Total the axis to rating*5, nothing can be less than 1. So his generic "contact" is availability 3 (widespread but not ubiquitous) + power 1 (general info, no specifics) + response 1 (you can look things up and maybe ask questions that might be answered sometime this year). Which works out to something like a subscription to an exclusive news/encyclopedia organization or a secret Wikipedia for particular kinds of information. He has access in any civilized place with a public or semi-public computerized information network, but it provides information about people, events, and stuff, there's no asking a specific question and getting a reliable answer any time soon. This is a framework that I wouldn't use if he'd written anything down, it pretty much amounts to roll 1d10 once in a while and if it's 5+ you get a little bonus info bit. Essentially, if the player picks something like allies or backing, they need to actually say something about them or the DM just makes them up as it suits them. Which could turn out to be near useless for the character if circumstances change.

    Intro paragraphs say that the backgrounds tie a character to the world, represent social networks, and at least some thought ought be given to what your background represent. Also, while you can only buy backgrounds during character generation you can get them during the game. Either by making it a point to do stuff to earn the backgrounds or book 2 has a class path where the class completion bonus is another point in one of certain backgrounds. This will generally apply more to stuff like allies and fame than artifacts and inheritance. Those are (usually) just loot.

    Allies: close friends, trusted companions, usually exalted, could be a daemon that owes you a debit, intelligent animals, rogue AIs, etc. Never a nameless, faceless mook type NPC. They're people with their own lives. They'll help, but not usually risk their lives, and often want something in return. Really needy/greedy characters can lose allies. Each dot generally represents an ally roughly equal to a starting level exalted character, or you can get a stronger ally for more dots. If someone wants to take a dot or two in this for a couple exalt friends who mostly stay aboard your spelljammer and have high arcana skills, maybe some healing spells, and mostly they just play navigator and doctor with only rare appearances for fights... Sure. Maybe a semi-psycho who is willing to occasionally provide technical and fire support when boarding enemy ships. I'm cool with that. But you get them convicted of piracy from your botched attempt and dragged along to Carceri with you where they nearly die a couple times? They'll say that you owe them. I'd also be cool with taking one of the monsters/opponents from the bestiary chapter at, probably, ally rating equal to their level for the actually dangerous ones. Probably one less for the no-so-tough NPCs. So... ally 5 for a young dragon, 4 for an aboleth, 3 for an arch-heretic (approximately a L2 or L3 chosen no-class), but only 2 for a mind flayer (L3 monster but not actually real tough or amazing on it's own), or even ally 1 for a lesser incarnate daemon if you've got a good reason (L2 monster but surprisingly not that nasty).

    Artifacts: Magic items. There's a whole chapter on them that starts with some discussion about how you may or may not want to deal with them in your game. Generally they have a certain level of plot immunity, like character defining stuff that you buy with points in supers games. If you're just rich and buy cars, planes, and boats the DM is free, encouraged even, to blow them up with reckless abandon. You buy the Batmobile with character points and the DM doesn't get to just 'nope' 20% of your character abilities forever. Any how, this background can be purchased multiple times, once per artifact, but only to a total of five points (it makes a difference because in character generation you can only get up to three points in a background without spending xp at 100xp per point). Essentially one point will get you an artifact knife, fire starter, or tracking dart. Five points gets you an artifact man portable laz cannon or power armor.

    Backing: You're a high muckety-muck in some organization. Military, religious, governmental, mafia, an organization. Comes with duties and/or responsibilities, but also support in a variety of ways. Backing 1 is a minor functionary or officer of some sort. Backing 5 is one of the leaders, a general or admiral, a Sigil faction Factol, a major sector governor for an empire (or heir to the throne I guess?). You need to talk with the player/DM about this, some things don't mesh well with random murder-hobo play styles.

    Contacts: Similar to allies but they absolutely won't put their lives on the line and they won't do anything for free. Each dot is a major contact that you know personally, high ranking military officers, influential faction members, rock stars. Those dots also represent a sort of overall "know someone who knows someone" type of things, you can roll contacts + charisma or fellowship or whatever is relevant for information and minor help.

    Fame: What it says on the tin. One dot is a select subculture (bagpipe polka death metal! or perhaps that's too select), five is fame that reaches across multiple crystal spheres. You should probably decide just what you're famous for, lest you risk being famous for being famous and having a number of rude jokes made about you.

    Followers: Your loyal minions. Ok, loyal as long as they're reasonably well paid and housed. A good dental plan helps too. They're mere mortals who need backing, wealth, or holdings (or a combination of) equal to the number of dots in followers. One dot is about 5 people, your little entourage. Five is an army 10,000 strong.

    Holdings: Real property or a spelljammer. Home sweet home. Requires upkeep so you need followers, backing, or wealth equal to it in order to keep your holding in good working order. One dot is the smallest of spelljammers, a modest home, or a local business. Five is a kilometer+ long battleship, an enormous palace, or a multi-world megacorp.

    Inheritance: Your loot. This is just starting with a thing or things. They're regular things that the DM can explode and not feel bad about. Each dot is one item of a particular rarity, or two of the next lower rarity. One dot is one uncommon item, two common items, or four ubiquitous items. Five is any non-artifact, two mythic rare items, four very rare items, one mythic and two very rare, etc., etc. Nice DMs will offer or allow a replacement item(s) if they intentionally explode, melt, disintegrate, or otherwise nuke your really nice bling into oblivion. Pro tip: Cyberwear & bionic implants are hard to lose.

    Mentor: Patron, teacher, defender, friend. Expects some level of obedience but is generally stronger than you are. One dot is someone just a bit more advanced than you are, a sort of big brother/big sister sort of thing. Five dots and you're Merlin's apprentice, or perhaps Palpatine's apprentice.

    Status: A slightly odd one perhaps. This is having a reputation among exalts. It's specific to exalts and doesn't include much of anything beyond name recognition and respect. Although respect is a nice thing to have. One dot and exalts you haven't personally met may (or may not) have heard something about you. Five dots makes you a widely respected luminary. Whatever that means. Maybe it's like being Mr. Feynman at a physics convention.

    Wealth: Continuing income actually, or perhaps you just always happen to have some cash in your pocket and a credit card with no limit. You should detail it or the DM might decide what it is and you could accidentally blow up that factory you're a part owner of. One dot is 'middle class', so buy a new car every ten years or so? Can always pay for plumbing repairs? Five dots is... a lot. Four and you're a merchant prince, bandit king, or media mogul type character. Basically you use this stat to buy stuff with. Stuff has a rarity (common = 5, very rare = 25) and you roll against that. If the DC is more than five times your wealth you can drain your wealth. Then you roll 1d10 + (1 per 5 over your wealth x5 limit) - (1 per every 5 you beat the DC by) and check a chart. Most of the time your next check is just at a lower wealth rating, so go buy something cheap (but to too cheap or the DM may get annoyed, play the game don't game the play). On a 10 you permanently lose a wealth, on 11+ you lose two.

    And that's backgrounds.

  5. - Top - End - #65
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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    So looking back on backgrounds I see some things. There are, to me, two axis. Solid <-> squishy, takes work <-> effortless. The solid/squishy axis is about how immediate, obvious, and quantifiable something is for the player.

    From most solid to most squishy: 1) artifacts, 2) [inheritance, holdings], 3) [wealth, backing, followers], 4) [allies, contacts, mentor], 5) fame, 6) status. 1 & 2 are (in game) physical objects/things that are a major enough part of a character to have at least some level plot immunity and attach directly to rules that the players often use. You know what your artifact sword does, what your inherited best quality power armor does, what capabilities your spelljammer has. 3 & 4 are less defined, #3 has rules and #4 may all have an npc character sheets but the DM is ultimately running a bunch of npcs that aren't under the players' control. 5 & 6 are social effects with no direct rules interactions plus you should remind the DM occasionally as they'll likely forget after that five session dungeon crawl that ended in an exterminatus on the colony sending the distress call.

    From the effortless to taking work: 1) artifacts, 2) [inheritance, wealth]. 3) [holdings, followers], 4) [allies, contacts], 5) [backing, mentor], <undefined>) [fame, status]. 1 to 3 is just pick one and you have it, 2 & 3 requiring just not making decisions that obviously risk losing them. 4 & 5 require interacting with DM run npcs and getting them to do what you want. #5 adds in the fact that you're expected to do things for the organization/person every so (possibly very) often. Fame and status are, of course not only DM dependent but also dependent on you as a player. Their nature, and thus the effort required to use or upkeep them, depends on what you decided when you took them. If you took status 4 and said that it's because you throw lots of amazing exalt-only parties on special neutral territory places, you may (DM depending of course) need to keep throwing those parties in order to keep the status and (DM depending again) your status might not extend much beyond staging and keeping the peace at said parties. That would make using that status 4 rather difficult and uncommon.

    So if you're DMing and you haven't successfully hammered into the players at sessions -2, -1, 0, and +1, that you're trying to be fair, reasonable, and player empowering... Then you're going to see lots of stuff at 1 & 2 on those axis, with a smattering of 3s. And it'll be worse if the players don't read or think about the backgrounds that they choose. Of course as a player I've gotten the other end of the stick too, DMs who ignore, deny, forget, or flat out violate both backstory and mechanical background rules on your characters. I get why, as a player, it feels like such a risk to take anything but artifact, inheritance, and wealth on a character. It's just that when you tell the players that you're trying to make fame 4 or mentor 5 just as useful and strong as a darksteel bionic heart or a rod of lordly might, you'd like to see something more than everyone just dumping all their backgrounds in to wealth and magic weapons.

    Ah well. Rant over. Let's do alignment. Interestingly this is one place where the second book not only goes into more detail but is a distinct improvement over the first book.

    So alignment was basically pick a god to align yourself with. The last three pages of this chapter is just short descriptions of those alignments. Book 2 expands this into a full page per god, including a list of things that call for alignment checks and two major groups/churches/cults for each one, in addition to adding options for being unaligned, aligning with an entire pantheon, and adding three more minor deities. If you're going to really use alignment or play a chosen exalt they you want to use the book 2 stuff.

    Before that though we start with a suggestion to check with the other players to avoid total alignment incompatibility in the group. Remember, this is a game where you can be an "fairness, honor, & glory in fighting" worshipper of Khorne and Cuthbert has a literal organized lynching cult. Five PCs who all worship Malal could be hilarious.

    Talk about your devotion score, starts at 6, buy it up with xp. If you go against your alignment roll a d10, if you meet or exceed your devotion nothing happens. Roll under devotion and you lose a point (unpleasant as they run 50xp times your current number to get a new one, half that if you have the feat from the second level of the cleric class track). If you lose a point of devotion and your new devotion score is 6 or less roll the d10 again against the new score. Again, if you roll equal or higher to the score nothing else happens. Roll under and you get a degeneration.

    The degeneration is linked to the point/level of devotion that you gained it at. So when you lose your 5th point of devotion and go down to 4, if you pick up a degeneration it's on the 4th dot of your devotion. That degeneration will go away if you raise your devotion back up to 5. You can't double up on degenerations, you reroll untill you get a new one. If you get one of the degenerations that reduces an attribute by a point it has the additional effect of preventing you from raising that attribute untill you clear out the degeneration.

    Hitting devotion zero is like hitting insanity 100, the character becomes an insane psycho NPC. Or dead, or mutated into something horrid and people eating. Ok, so there are exalts that are psycho, dead, and mutated horrible people eaters. This is supposed to be, somehow, you know... worse. Apparently you can only gain one point of devotion at a time. No mention of when that time is or how often it comes around. It's also nice to attach some roleplay to raising your devotion, like an atonement ceremony or something, but it's not absolutely required.

    Changing alignment is simple, although wreathed in fluff and roleplay talk, but you can only do it once. To be sure, I'm not annoyed or anything by the roleplay and fluff since that's mostly what alignment really is. I'm just not going out of my way to type up lots of words about it. So, if you swap gods from within the same pantheon (ruinous powers, blessed pantheon, gray council) you just lose two points of devotion, to a minimum of one. That's it. Apparently the old god has bigger things to worry about and the new one doesn't think you're really trustworthy yet. Switching pantheons is a bit different, but not much. You devotion resets to 4, no questions asked, as the new god is happy to have poached a player from another team. Buy you get tagged with a curse on the way out, you get a roll on the degeneration chart at the 7th devotion point. Which means that you'll have to raise your devotion to 8 (or get an atonement spell) to get rid of it. No mention of what happens if you were at say, devotion 2 with three degenerations before switching. I suppose that since your devotion sort of went up it erases the degenerations at 2 & 3, letting you fix the others by raising devotion as normal.

    Hey-o, the horrible mutation & degeneration chart! 16 different afflictions. Attribute reductions account for 9 of them, one per attribute. Remaining are, DM makes you reroll a success to see if it turns into a failure, skin disease for -2k0 on social rolls, an easily concealed minor deformity or mutation (no effect unless revealed?), pick up the Night Terrors hindrance (no free xp, reroll if you already have it), become anorexic and take -2k0 (double penalty) for having fatigue, DM imposed blackouts that turn you into an NPC for the time (no guidance, see classic werewolf/possession movies for inspiration I guess?), and gain a minor derangement from the insanity chapter.

    Well the blackouts are probably the worst and/or most risky. As a DM you'll need to be careful with them to not overly screw the PC. The stats have essentially equal chances to screw you or be a minor nuisance, depending on your character and where they land. The others are anywhere from annoying to almost completely inconsequential.

    This book has 4 pages of deity write-ups. Nice simple ones, a paragraph on the pantheon, a paragraph on each god, and three bullet pointed things the god likes or dislikes.
    Chaos, ok "Ruinous Powers": they don't get along.
    Khorne: battle & fighting. 1) blood & violence, 2) no magic, 3) honorable combat - not slaughtering the weak or helpless.
    Slaanesh: sex, drugs, rock and roll. 1) new experiences are good, 2) don't blend in - be unique, 3) tempt others to hedonism.
    Tzeentch: change, hope, plot, and plan. 1) be willing to change the plan, 2) all the sorcery, 3) follow your own goals.
    Nurgle: despair, caring, disease. 1) don't seek help, 2) escape suffering through faith, 3) be nice to the dying.
    Malal: blow it all up. 1) hate is strength, 2) the fate of everything is to be destroyed, 3) betrayal works.
    Blessed Pantheon: law & order.
    Sigmar: civilization & growth. 1) work with others, 2) tame wilderness, 3) seek & build new stuff.
    Bahamut: power & rulership. 1) honor & justice, 2) oppose evil, 3) protect the weak & defend order.
    Pelor: niceness. 1) alleviate suffering, 2) light into dark places, 3) oppose evil.
    Moradin: loyalty & building. 1) be stoic and tenacious, 2) be loyal, 3) make something that lasts.
    Cuthbert: trust & promises. 1) never break your word, 2) no fear for you & make enemies fear you, 3) murderize traitors.
    Gray Council: generally non-confrontational.
    Acererak: magic & secrets. 1) seek perfection, 2) gain, save, & hide knowledge, 3) don't tell all.
    Raven Queen: stuff dies. 1) no pity for suffering & dying, 2) punish hubris (no avoiding death), 3) stay neutral.
    Luna: change & nature. 1) change for the better, 2) fight for liberty, 3) like nature.
    Corellon: excellence. 1) cultivate beauty, 2) seek lost magic items, 3) neither pity nor mercy as you climb to power.
    Vectron: whatever. 1) Vectron is best, 2) praising Vecton lets you succeed, 3) convert others to Vectron.

    Book 2, as I said, goes more in depth with examples of cults and what causes alignment rolls at leach level of devotion.

    We leave off with an interlude piece that shows the benefits of proper planning. Well, ok, more the frustration of planners when you have an impulsive nut bar in the group.

  6. - Top - End - #66
    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Did you flip devotion rolls upside down? As you wrote it, it starts at 6 and costs XP to buy up, but the higher you get it the easier it is to fail a check so there is no incentive to ever buy more unless it's to cancel losses.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Did you flip devotion rolls upside down? As you wrote it, it starts at 6 and costs XP to buy up, but the higher you get it the easier it is to fail a check so there is no incentive to ever buy more unless it's to cancel losses.
    I think this is supposed to be like the White Wolf 'Humanity'/other Morality stats - the higher your score is, the higher the standard you are supposed to uphold, and the easier it is to fail that standard. From what I've gathered so far the majority of characters do indeed just not care about this stat, and unless they get given a particularly bad degeneracy they're not likely to bother buying it back up should it happen to slip down a couple notches, at which point they probably aren't going to fall much more anyway? (Again, going off the old White Wolf style for this, once you've lost a couple of points of Devotion/Humanity/Moralityscore, you're kind of hardened and inured to Bad Stuff already, and it should take increasingly extreme events to make you test against losing more.. which you're not super likely to run into if you're playing a standard adventure game and not buying all the way into White Wolf's "You get to explore just what it means to be a depraved murderous literal parasite on humankind!" 'artistic' roleplaying thing.)

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    No that's right.

    It's a weak spot, or maybe not. Most characters can just sit on that starting 6 devotion and not care as long as they don't blatantly violate their alignment.

    The ones that care are the chosen exalts whose effective power stat is capped at half (round up) devotion. They get some bonuses, and they'll probably take cleric cass level 2 for the half cost devotion buying feat, but they're the ones who care about having it higher than 7. Most other characters will only really care if a degeneration hits ones of the stats they want to raise or they get the blackout one.

    Going from 5 to 6 devotion is 250 xp, a chunk but not horrid on it's own unless you're going to risk alignment rolls regularly. And not only is it harder to fall the further down you go, but it gets cheaper to fix. Still, it is rough on chosen exalts to get up and stay at 9. It's 1050xp to go from 6 to 9 devotion, half if you went for the cleric classes, and another 400xp every time you want to go from 8 to 9 again.

    I'm not sure quite what to do about it. I think there is a potential issue, mainly related to the chosen and the extra xp they need to up devotion in order to access their higher power stat abilities. Maybe just making it a flat 100xp per devotion? Or halve the cost from 50x current to 25x current (although that puts virgils guidance costs at 12.5x current, really low and odd numbers). I don't feel that the actual mechanic is too ugly, mostly because the alignments are sufficently loose (my opinion of course) that the rolls don't come up often if you're half decent at choosing your alignment (and aren't on the high end of course).

    Hm. A chosen with the mentor 5 background has an argument for literally getting semi-regular divine intervention & interference.

    Edit: also the healing 3 spell atonement. Not generally a pc spell but not impossible to find a caster for. Alleviates your highest degeneration.
    Last edited by Telok; 2020-06-29 at 11:40 AM.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    I think this is supposed to be like the White Wolf 'Humanity'/other Morality stats - the higher your score is, the higher the standard you are supposed to uphold, and the easier it is to fail that standard. From what I've gathered so far the majority of characters do indeed just not care about this stat, and unless they get given a particularly bad degeneracy they're not likely to bother buying it back up should it happen to slip down a couple notches, at which point they probably aren't going to fall much more anyway? (Again, going off the old White Wolf style for this, once you've lost a couple of points of Devotion/Humanity/Moralityscore, you're kind of hardened and inured to Bad Stuff already, and it should take increasingly extreme events to make you test against losing more.. which you're not super likely to run into if you're playing a standard adventure game and not buying all the way into White Wolf's "You get to explore just what it means to be a depraved murderous literal parasite on humankind!" 'artistic' roleplaying thing.)
    That was actually what I thought it was riffing on, but the whole WW morality-message grindstone seemed completely out of place with the rest of Acid Trip RPG World, so I wondered if it had gotten backwards.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    That was actually what I thought it was riffing on, but the whole WW morality-message grindstone seemed completely out of place with the rest of Acid Trip RPG World, so I wondered if it had gotten backwards.
    the one time I played this game, the morality message thing wasn't brought up once by anyone aside from maybe me and no one seemed to care. If there would ever be a second edition of this game (as if, the very idea is a joke) one should probably get rid of it. so yeah, it seemed mostly put in there to continue riffing on white Wolf's nonsense rather than anything serious.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    I'm thinking that 4 pcs all chosen of malal wearing heavy armor and chucking explosives at each other would work, alugnment wise I mean. Play them as happy go lucky clowns that solve all their problems by running up to enemies and playing hot potato with grenades.

    You're all teamkilling ftards so throwing explosives at one another is just good clean fun.

    Really tzeench, cuthbert, raven queen, and vectron are all easy enough for your traditional murder-hobo type adventurer to run with no real dangers of alignment checks. For the real easy street pick vectron and put on a looped recording of ten/fifteen minutes of silence followed by you saying 'praise vectron!'. That should cover 99% of any alignment issues.

    In a year of playing I think I called for 2 alugnment checks, and one may have been for an npc ally.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Money, gun, and lawyers. AKA phat lewt. AKA your stuff.

    Welcom to the equipment section, a brief look at stuff and the not-murder-hobo method of acquiring it. For starters better armed and equipped parties thed to survive more. Ya think? Mr. obvious states the obvious much here? I guess if this is your first RPG (including CRPGs) you might, maybe, not have already known or figured that out on your own.

    Availability. Everything gets an availability rating. DM modifies by whim and/or logic. Medieval mud holes don't normally have machine guns, shops on backwater planets with 1940's era tech don't normally stock power armor. To get stuff you make a wealth test against the availability. Just at straight wealth vs. DC here, and it notes that yes, wealth zero means you can barely scrounge up enough money for low end food. DCs are tagged under a rarity rating that ranges from ubiquitous (2) and very common (5), to mythic rare (30). If you fail you can always try again but the DC goes up by +5 because you're either going to have to offer more money, buy/snag a family heirloom, or pay someone to steal it from a museum or somewhere. Finding the sales takes time and there's usually more (and better) stuff in bigger cities. We get a chart that has everything from village (<1000 pop. and DC 5 max) to metropolis (>10 million pop. and DC 30) to give us the normal size/DC and it includes a time frame to get stuff from an hour for the DC 5 very commons to 1d10 weeks for the mythic rares. Although if you have your minions fetch it (or hire someone to do the fetching for you) then it takes the next time factor up, with mythic rare cranking up to 1d10 months. At least that's what I think it's saying, we don't get any examples to help in this chapter. It also tells us, again a bit of interpretation, that this is for off-the-shelf stuff. Because it mentions buying a startship and having to wait for it to be built. So I'd say that we're looking at whatever the DM feels is right for custom jobs and bespoke stuff. After all, you spent a d10 hours finding a high quality flashlight, you don't need to wait a week for delivery unless you're doing something weird like mail-ordering from another planet.

    You have a soft limit on your buying power of DC = wealth x5. If you buy something more than that (and only if you succeed) you roll a 1d10, add +1 per every 5 above your soft cap and -1 for every 5 you beat the DC by. There's a little chart of the hit that your wealth takes, 1-9 is just you roll one or two fewer dice on your next wealth test, 10 & 11 are permanent losses of 1 or 2 wealth. Anyways not even a wealth 5 person can just fork over money for a mythic rare item without fear of consequences. Just go kill the current owner and take it yourself, that's probably faster and cheaper anyways.

    I will note here that I was nice to my players (all low/no wealth characters at the start) and made up my own house rules for resale and "looting" (actually it first came up in a gladiatorial fight prize money sort of event). First I designated loot bundles, essentially each was a free raise (+5) on a wealth roll, but you used it up even on failed rolls or rolls where you went massively over. I did end up needing to limit it to 4 or 5 loot bundles spent on a single roll though, I don't recall off the top of my head which. And it still triggered the wealth limit stuff unless you used enough loot to totally pay for the thing.

    For resale I let them have a little bundle per 5 of (item rarity DC - 15) So rare stuff would get you a single loot bundle if you were selling one item. If you had more I went with tripling per +5, so it takes 3 rares to get two loot bundles. I did this with the explicit caveat and consent of the players that if they tried to abuse this it would stop working. I'm considering changing it to rarity DC -10 and moving to an order of magnitude per extra raise (rare = 1 loot, 10 rares or 1 very rare = 2 loot, etc.), but I'm not sure yet. Mostly this is to satisfy their ingrained over D&D/ShadowRun loot&sell habits.

    Craftmanship. You can buy stuff that's one rarity cheaper or two rarity levels above the base price. Poor, good, and best quality. This has no defined mechanical impact for anything beyond armor and weapons, but it notes that a 'torch' is commonly a flashlight, a poor quality torch may literally be an oil soaked rag on a stick & set on fire. I presume that a best quality torch could be some sort of voice controlled tachno-magic light ball that floats near you on anti-grav, magic levitation, or some such. Since the result of quality in most things in left to the DM it's in theory possible to just buy all poor quality stuff and get away with it if the DM doesn't care. The book however does note that the DM can invoke poor item quality breakage or failure and/or adjust task DCs because of your gear quality.

    Resupply. Reloads, replacements, and repairs are assumed to all be covered under the initial wealth test. You don't have to keep going out and checking if you can buy bolter ammo every week. If you're at a DM approved 'base of operations' (and/or you're slinking around somewhere with enough markets) you get ammo reloads in about a day, special ammo reloads in a week, and broken or lost gear can be replaced in a month. But if you dropped your flashlight when the shadow tentacle monster went all hentai on you just go buy a new one, it's almost certainly faster and easier than fighting with customer service over the terms of the lifetime warranty (even if you will win in the end).

    Weapons. Guns! Ammo! Stabination & murderization! It's time for the hurty bits.
    First, everything comes with a holster, sheath, sling, carrying case, cleaning kit, etc., unless you bought a poor quality one. Then you have to deal with everyone else teasing you about having to carry everything in your hands and the DM asking what you want to drop in order to catch yourself before you fall off the balcony.

    We get the inevitable 'how to read the entries' thing. It has some hidden-ish rules in it. Only melee weapons and pistols can be used in close (melee, natch) combat, and the pistols don't get any range or targeting bonuses in melee. Thrown weapons are as melee weapons for damage, add your strength to the rolled dice except obviously grenades and such explosivs. Actually that may not be obvious, Pazio's StarFinder has a issue where your dexterity determines the save DC of your explosives no matter what you do with them (this includes stuffing live grenades down peoples' pants and making bomb collars for prisoners), but I consider that a comedy game like Paranoia. Basic two handed weapons can be used one handed at -2k0 attack. Heavy weapons always take two hands and have to be braced (half action) before use or you take a -3k1 attack penalty and can't use them on full auto. Range is the default no-penalty range of the weapon, half that is short at +1k0 attack, up to double is long at -5 attack (not dice just a flat penalty), double long range (listed range x4) is the max and you're at -15 attack. Point blank range is within 2m but not in melee and gives +2k1 to hit instead of the short range modifier.

    Guns jam. It's further along in the rules but it comes up here in a few places. If you're proficient and you roll more 1s on the attack than your level the gun jams and you have to clear & reload it. Yes you lose the loaded ammo, maybe a nice DM will let you pick up rounds off the ground. Obviously rerolling 1s is a good thing here, but frankly by 3rd level you almost never see jams anyways. If you aren't proficient then rolling any 1s on the attack causes a jam.

    Quality Weapons. Poor quality guns get 'unreliable' which halves your level for purposes of counting 1s for jamming. If the gun is normally 'reliable' (jams turn into ordinary misses) then it loses the reliable tag instead. Poor melee weapons have -1k0 to hit. Good quality guns get the reliable tag, no bonus for stacking it so don't buy good quality revolvers. Good melee weapons get +1k0 to hit. Weapons or ammo have to be at least good quality to be made of silver. Best quality guns never jam or overheat. They just flat out don't. If that result manages to come up they just miss instead. Best melee weapons have that +1k0 to attack and do +2 damage.

    You can buy ammo at one less rarity then the gun it's for. A common gun has ubiquitous ammo. Since Good quality kicks it up by 5 you can buy silver ammo at the same rarity as the gun. Melta guns don't have silver bullets they blow holes in tanks, quit whining.

    Then there's about two pages of the weapon specials. Accurate, flaming, unweildy, tearing. Muh. That's enough for now. I'll think about if I want to list them all or just comment on a few.

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    Ok, I'm not bothering to detail all the weapon special abilities. Most are either self explanatory or I'll mention them elsewhere. Let's just hit a few highlights.

    Accurate: +1k0 to hit when aiming & +1k1 damage per +10 past the targets static defense when aiming. Sniper stuff.
    Flame: A 30 degree cone of fire. Don't roll to hit, everyone in it rolls a dexterity save to dodge. DC user dexterity x5 +/-5 for good/poor quality. Targets hit have to make a DC 15 dexterity save to not catch on fire.
    Overheats: roll any 9s on damage and choose to drop the weapn or take a hit to the arm holding it (randomly choose one for two handers). You still hit or miss based on the attack roll.
    Power field: When parrying or parried by a non-power weapon, non-artifact, non-natural attack, weapon foll a d10. On 4+ the non-power weapon breaks.
    Scatter: At range < 2m every +10 over static defense is +1k0 damage. Long & extreme range double armor points on the target.
    Shocking: On wounding make s constitution save DC 15 or stunned for a round.
    Snare: On hit deterity save vs the to-hit roll or be immobilized and take no other action but escaping. Strength or dexterity, DC 10, 15, 20 based on quality, as a half action and lose your other half action if you fail.
    Tearing: Minimum one wound if it gets through armor.

    Guns! (proficency in parenthesis)

    Ordinary (basic & ranged 1) -> Slug throwers. Ranging from revolvers to SAWs, single shot to full auto only, 30m to 150m ranges. They all do 2k2 or 3k2 damage, hand cannonr and SAW are the only ones with armor penetrtion (3 & 5). Common to rare availability. The hunting rifle is accurate, shotguns scatter. The hand cannon is a big revolver that takes a -1k0 attack penalty when used one handed.

    Las (basic & ranged 2) -> Lasers. From las pistol to MP (man portable) lascannon. 2k2 or 3k3 damage except the cannon at 5k5. Pulse rifle has penetration 2, cannon 10 (very good, ignores most armor). Pulse rilfe can do 4 round auto fire, the las rifle can do 3 rounds, cannon has recharge so it's every other round single shots. Ranges from 30m to 300m. All are reliable except the lascannon, the long las is accurate. Hidden in the descriptions is that the pulse rifle is light enough to be used at only a -1k0 penalty single handed instead of the usual -2k0 penalty. The lascannon also has a separate power pack and is "usually crewed by two people", so your probably lugging that around like a backpack.

    Plasma & Melta (ranged 2) -> Both come in pistol & basic varieties. Plasema damage is 3k3 & penetration 8, melta damage is 4k3 & penetration 12. Plasmas both have recharge and overheat, although the plasma gun (basic rifle) can do a 'full auto' of 2 shots. Meltas don't have any special notes. Ranges are 10m & 20m for meltas, 30m & 90m for plasma. Everything is very rare except the meltagun (basic). Yes best quality plasma guns are wealth 35, beyond mythic rare. And 2 of them lets you burst fire every round at anything within 360m.

    Bolters (ranged 1) -> The iconic space marine gun in pistol, basic, and heavy versions. All 4k2 explodey damage, penetration 6 except the heavy that has 8. ROF from single to S/3 to full auto only 10. Ranges 30m to 120m. The pistol is rare, the others very rare. All have the tearing property. You're pretty much always going to deal at lest one wound but the heavy bolter suprisingly isn't too much more dangerous that the SAW.

    Syrneth (ranged 2) -> Ancient weirdo guns looted out of dusty tombs and wrecks that just happen to work perfectly. We have the heavy Null Ray and the basic Lightning Gun. Nuller is a glossy black rifle that shoots crackling purple beams at 6k3, pen freaking "you have no armor" 20, single shot, 10m range, 4 ammo, and has to recharge. Meltagun, meet super-melta. The lightning gun is a tame 4k2, pen 4, ROF S/2, 30m range, 6 ammo, with scatter and shocking. Interestingly hidden down in the description is that null rays can't be duplicated by current magi-tech. Each one is looted from an ancient ruin or something.

    Exotic (ranged 1) -> Neelders and webbers, because non-lethal is exotic for PCs. Each comes in pistol and basic versions. Neelders do 2k2 rending damage, single shots out to 30m and 180m, 6 ammo, very rare, with both accurate and toxic properties. I let players swap out the toxic for any drug you can buy in liquid form. The webbers do no damage, range at 30m & 50m, are rare, and only have one round clips. They both snare but the 'heavy' webber (the name is heavy, the gun is basic) also has blast 5 to cover a 10m diameter area. Down in the descriptions it says that needlers make virtually no sound and hace no muzzle flash, supposedly they accelerate needles coated in viral toxins on low powered laser beams. Also neelders are noted as being next to useless against armored targets. Webber stick-um breaks down on it's own in 1d10 rounds for the pistols, and 1d5 hours for the rifles.

    Flamers (ranged 2) -> Are not exotic probably purely because they use a different proficency than the exotics. You got your pistol and basic versions, both doing 3k2 damage, 4 & 6 penetration, single shots, 10m & 20m, 3 ammo each, pistol is very rare while the basic flamer is just rare. Both, obviously, are flame weapons.

    Primitive (basic & ranged 1) -> Bows, crossbows, hand crossbows, muskets, slings, and bolas. You're look at bottom of the barrel stuff here, almost. The crossbow and musket throw 3k2, slings 1k1, bows 2k2. Nobody has any penetration and they're all single shots. 15m to 30m base ranges. Bows are reliable and a free action to reload, slings just get the free reload so apparently they jam. Muskets are unreliable and inaccurate, plus 5 full rounds to reload, ouch. Bolas are thrown, inaccurate, snares that do no damage. No, nobody is really expecting you to use these except in extremis. Slings can be used to up-range grenades.

    Launchers (ranged 1) -> Come in basic grenade or heavy missile, ammo sold separately. The GL has a 60m range, single shot, 6 ammo, and can be fired indirectly although there aren't any actual rules on that. Missile launchers are one shot, one ammo, out to 200m base range. So they max out at 800m. The only thing that exceeds them is the MP lascannon with it's 300m base range.

    Grenades & Missiles (thrown, apparently that includes the missiles too, just in case) -> Everyone here is single shots with a range of 3x strength (ok, the missiles technically have no range at all). Oh, oh, wait. There was a footnote, the throwing only applies to grenades, you need the launchers for the missiles. Kind of a shame, it could have been fun throwing the missiles. Sure, I'll let it happen, 0.5x strength meters of base range. Chuck away. Frag missiles are 4k2, pen 5, blast 6, flak armor has no difference between a direct hit and a near miss with these. Krak missiles are 5k4, pen 12, blast 1, very rare and used for anti-armor. Grenades are all types, smoke, frag, krak, stun, flash, plasma, and grav. Krak and plasma have no blast radius but 10 penetration. Flash, stun, and grav do no damage. Smoke is smoke, 3d10 meters and a couple minutes. Ok, photon flash has no actual rules but does blinding people or overloading visual systems. Annoying. Stuns are DC 15 constitution saves (10 with eye & ear protection) or be stunned for 1d5 rounds, also one measly meter of radius. Grav is a DC 15 dexterity save or fall to the center of the 5m blast & take falling damage (I think, 2 wounds? by the RAW rules, with acrobatics options to reduce it).

    And that's all of our "reach out and (bad) touch someone" options from this book. Basic weapon proficency gets you ordinary & las weapons which should cover 95% of everyone's needs. Ranged 2 proficency is anti-armor and flamers. Do flamers count as anti-armor? I'm pretty sure setting a tank on fire is fairly 'anti'. Fine, ranged 2 is anti-armor plus !!FUN!!. Ranged 1 is sort of everything else. It has a nice spread of different options though and includes the only non-lethal options.

    The photon flash grenade being zero blast and no rules annoys be a bit though.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    And now, introducing, the one, the only, Stabby McStabinator!

    Yup. Time for the melee weapons. Fewer in number but more diverse than the guns. Like last time I'll note the weapon proficency in parentheses. Did I mention ammo last time? You get generally speaking 2 clips with most weapons on purchase, 4 clips for pistols. Ammo rarity DC is -5 from the weapon rarity, you can buy your special ammo separate but the bonuses for good/best ammo don't stack with the bonuses for good/best weapons. Of course looted weapons don't come with an ammo suppply.

    Ordinary (basic & melee 1) -> generic hand weapons at 3k2. Clubs are a measly 1k2 but they're also unbquitous so you can get that nice best quality silver baseball bat for a reasonable DC 10 wealth test. Daiklaives run 4k2 & 4 penetration being noted that they're magically enhanced and unbalanced for 'mortals'. The power sword is the daiklaive stats but with a power field, also more expensive.

    Parrying (melee 2) -> Knife is knife, 1k2, very common, throwable with a base range of 5m. Katar is 0k2 penetration 3 at commmon rarity. Main Gauche is knife + 1k0 to parry at uncommon rarity. Basic utility weapons. Notable is that one point of the artifact background can get you an artifact knife, a minimal investment for a basic plot-immunity protected magic weapon (with the artifact bonuses, next chapter I think).

    Cavalry & Flail (melee 1) -> All 2k2, 2k3, or 3k2, with ratities from uncommon to very rare. The lance itself does +0k1 damage when 'used on horseback', let's just call that when appropriately mounted and moving, penetration 4, -1k0 to parry, and reach. Spears can be thrown (10m base range), have penetration 3, lack the parry penalty and the mounted bonus. Short spears are one-handed unthrowable non-reach spears. Flails all get the flexible property that makes them impossible to parry, a nice thing in a world of power weapons. That's it for the base flail. The dire flail is just a really big & heavy flail, not the D&D abomination but more like the WH spinny gobbo abomination (gotta pick your abominations carefully), it gets penetration 3, takes 2 hands, and can't be used to parry at all. The electro flail is the base flail trading -1k0 of damage for adding the shocking property, good for riot police.

    Fencing (melee 2) -> These are all one handed awords that get +1k0 to parry. Fencing sword & officers cutlass are 2k2 common & rare, that cost upgrade jsut gets you the shocking property. The phase sword does 3k2, penetration 7, and has the power field. Hidden in the descriptions is that it's definitely at least partially magical and doesn't damage armor as it cuts up the people inside. Whether that last bit is fluff or mechanics is up to you.

    Two handers & syrneth (melee 3) -> Great weapons are your generic upgrade to generic hand weapons, 3k3 penetration 4, -1k0 to parry. The grand dailkaive is explicitly magical in construction, a good 30+ cm wide, and can't be used to parry. For that you get a 4k3 penetration 2 weapon that cost more than a great weapon. The goremaul is a hammer version of the grand daiklaive, it does impact damage instead of rending damage. The syreth scythe and grimscythe are sickle shaped weapons that use a thin forcefield from the tip to the handle as the cutting edge. The physical 'blade' is just a support structure. Both are power weapons, 4k2 & 6k2, both penetration 8, with the grimscythe being a mythic rare 2-hander at -1k0 to parry. the gyrespike is another abomination weapon that uses magic to function at all, you can look at the picture to see what I mean. 5k1, penetration 6, understandable very rare & counts as a flexible weapon.

    Chain weapons (melee 3) -> Our weaponized chainsaws from WH40K. Sword and axe are the same penetration 4, rare, tearing weapons. Sword is 3k2 to the axe 2k3. Hidden in the descriptions is that there are double bitted axes with independent heads. Breaking one chain on those doesn't stop the other head, but there aren't actual rules for that so YMMV. Axe rules either way, that extra kept damage die is better than the extra rolled die, swords have style though.

    Shield (melee 1) -> Only one entry here, callled 'Shield' of course. 0k1 common 'weapon'. Armored & defensive though, so +2 armor to that arm and +2k0 to parrying but -1k0 to attack. Non-proficent gives you the -1k0 to all your attacks.

    Unarmed (basic & melee 2) -> These specifically add to your unarmed damage. So brass knuckles add +0k1 (bst quality can be disguised as gloves though), cestus adds +1k1 & penetration 2, while the power fist adds +2k2 penetration 4 and of course the power field.

    Armor. We went all in on the hurty stuff, so now we get the anti-hurt.

    We get the expected 'how to read the table' bit. Anything that protects your 'body' hit location includes your 'gizzards'. Maximum dexterity is the cap on your effective dexterity for dodging, speed calculations, and anything involving quick movement as adjucated by the DM. When mixing armor on the same location you just use the better AP (armor points) value and the worse max dex value. So, not much point in it. Modern primitive armor is magiced up enough to deflect bullets and resist stuff, so we don't have to care that 'leather armor' should be basically transparent to a shotgun at point blank range, we added magic just o you can count that measly -2 damage off your "where did my ribs go?".

    Light armor goes from leather at AP 2 to everything but the head, to full peices of advanced tech mesh for 4 AP all over if you get the full suit.

    Medium armor is chain mail or flak. All AP 5 except the chain hood at AP 4. Helmets don't have a max dex, but everything else is at max dex 5, almost. You have a choice of the flak vest with max dex 5 that covers the body (there's a flak gauntlets too for the arms) or the flak jacket that covers everything but the legs and has max dex 4. Effectively flak has a choice of pieces for max dex 5 but not the legs, or the jacket and helmet for all over protection and max dex 4. Flank also doubles it's AP versus blast wepons unless they score a direct hit on the wearer. Flak is popular.

    Heavy armor is banded or carapace. Banded is a suit with AP 6, carapace is pieces for AP 7. Both have max dex 3. Also from the armor proficency feat (and not mentioned in this section at all) is htat heavy and heavier armors take half their AP as a penalty to static defense. This really really really should have been part of the table. Your heavy armor static defense penalty is -3.

    Extreme armor is a suit of plate or a siut of storm carapace. Both are AP 8, static defense penalty -4. Plate has a max dex of 2 and you have to buy the helmet separately. Storm carapace has a max dex of 3 and functions as a void suit. Splurge on the slightly more expensive storm carapace.

    Power armor. Finally the really good stuff. Light and regular versions. Light has AP 10, max dex 3. Regular has AP 12, max dex 2. Both give a bonus of +1 strength, +1 resilience, and an additional penalty of -2 static defense. your defense penalties are therefore -7 and -9. It does not say that power armor counts as a void suit, so, a possible down side.

    Armor quality has the same -5, +5, +10 buying DC modifiers. Poor adds -1 max dex. Good gets... Seriously? +1 AP against the first attack in a round. Too bloody fiddly and annoying. +1 AP, flat, all attacks, done. Sheesh. Best quality is +1 AP on all attacks and +1 max dex.

    Right. Next time I'll finish off the equipment section with misc. stuff and bionics. Then it's on to the artifacts.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Ow. I'm copying these posts back into my main text file and the spell checker just starts griping at me. I'd say it serves me right for turning off the spellchecker on my phone but that thing just offends me on some fundamental level.

    So, gear.


    Spoiler: Also, logic.
    Show
    Note there is no listing for ammunition, basic food and water, and so forth. The characters are assumed to be able to take care of such things for themselves. The purchase of a gun is assumed to be accompanied by the purchase of a reliable source of ammunition.A character can take as much ammo as they want with them (within reason - a person can only carry so much!), replenishing it whenever they get back to their base of operations. If they don't have a base of operations, well, then they just get it during any significant downtime. Let's be honest - the necessities are only removed when it's important for the plot ANYWAY, so it's one less thing to be kept track of.


    You have you auspex/tri-corder (uncommon) for tech-use detection stuff. Charms (common), which are assorted keepsakes, relics, luck tokens, etc., that have as much effect as your lucky rabbit foot* so my players ignore them unless they came with their starting gear. Combi-tool (uncommon) for tech-use doing stuff. Data=slate that we frankly just run a tablets/cellphones. Magical implements (uncommon) for style points and there's a feat that uses them. Med-kits (uncommon) for that +5 on medic checks. Micro-beads (common) for that 1km walkie-talkie effect, but smaller and easier to lose. Multi-key (rare) for when you're crap at tech-use or don;t have a multi-tool and don't want to use a meltagun on the door. Void suit (uncommon) for your space walks. And in a perfect display of schizophrenic setting tech level the common writing kit with paper, ink wells, and quills**.

    I skipped stuff, but not much. It's a reasonable sample of general stuff that people buy and use. Clothing & flashlights are very common, cell phones are common, laptops are uncommon, illegal automatic lockpicks are rare. There, you can decide how much things cost now.

    Services get short shrift. There are two paragraphs that cover not sweating the petty stuff because it's all covered under wealth, backing, etc., and it ends with "However, finding transport, getting long-term medical care, and so forth can take some time." and no indication of anything else. Since it's likely that at some point someone will want a limb regenerated or an atonement spell cast I would have been pleased to know what spellcasting NPCs charge. Also hiring mercenaries for the short term or how much having someone assassinated costs. Although since we're talking about PCs here I suppose it would be better to ask about finding and buying the services of a spy.

    Then we end off the chapter with the very important cybernetics section. Because there are crit results that melt faces and blow off limbs.

    We get arms, legs, hearts (not available for promethians), lungs (available but useless to promethians & vampires), senses, and the mind impulse unit (data-jack, direct neural interface, pick a name for the people-machine connection from your favorite fiction). Your bionics are assumed to use the same strength & dexterity scores as you do, generally. They add +2 armor to the hit location (not lungs though) and note that limbs that get inappropriate results like bleeding are rendered useless untill repaired instead. Any actual bonuses or penalties for having a limb only apply to that limb and the don't stack, you just get the bonus using either cyber-limb. Poor and good quality have noted modifiers, best quality has no additional effect except to add bling or look almost perfectly natural.

    Attachment requires a reasonable medical facility in a reasonably technologically advanced place. The procedure will run 2d10 days minus 1 per dot of constitution, minimum of 1 day. License is given to the DM to screw with things if the PCs go in for a back alley chop shop run by a failed medical student. The cost of the service is factored into the cost of the limb. Given that a poor quality cyber-arm is only common rarity (wealth DC 10) that's practically low end out-patient surgery.

    Shape-shifting magic is specifically called out in it's own section. The cybernetics shift with the user and retain full functionality. Do not screw with the stray cyber-dog, it could be a cyber-werewolf with a sick sense of humor and/or a bad hangover.

    Bionic Arm. Arm is arm, replaces normal one with no functional change but the +2 armor and lack of bleeding to death. Poor quality can halve your dexterity for that arm and apply a -2k0 to weaponry and ballistics rolls. Apparently brawling is exempt from that. Good quality is +1k0 to fine manipulation and straight-up strength checks.

    Bionic heart. No mention of quality changes on this one but from the text maybe there were supposed to be. You get your +2 armor and may or may not need to have a good quality one for the fleet of foot feat. Yes, you can buy a movement booster feat (not a bad one either) for a DC 20 wealth test.

    Bionic leg. As arms, leg is leg. Poor quality gets you 1/2 speed movement and a dexterity DC 10 check in order to not fall down when you (actually at the end of) run. Good quality gets you +2k0 to jumping and fleet of foot again.

    Bionic lungs. No armor boost here, just +2k0 against airborne toxins and gas weapons. Poor quality are loud (-2k0 stealth) and strenuous physical activity (vague) requires another raise to succeed (effect: +5 DC). Good quality are a "full life support system" and may be completely unnoticeable. I guess that lets you hold your breath forever? I don't know, needs more editing &or proofreading.

    Cyber-senses. No armor boost here either, just functional replacements. Poor quality gives -2k0 to perception using that sense. Good quality gives you the heightened senses feat and +2k0 to resist attacks on the sense (so that's a +2k0 to resist flash-bangs for sight & hearing). In addition you can include "telescopic sighs" (editor!), see-in-the-dark, cameras, an internal micro-bead, etc., each one bought as a separate wealth test DC 20 "sense".

    Mind impulse units. No, no armor for this either. Apparently the basic unit is a USB port in your wrist or spine. Normal effect is a +1k0 to tech-use, pilot, and drive, with any linkage capable machines or vehicles. Poor quality needs at DC 15 intelligence check to work on jacking in. Good quality adds logic, inquiry, and wireless capability. Since "logic" and "inquiry" are lumped in with the other skills I think there was a time in development when the skill list was bigger. I think that wireless capability is probably just fine as a bennie.

    There's an intermission fluff piece involving a bad joke and randomly murdering a bartender. Then we'll be on to the artifacts.

    *
    Spoiler
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    Charms have no tangible benefits. However, when the unfolding plot calls for something bad to happen to a random character, at the SM's discretion a character with a charm will be exempt. If all the characters carry charms (as most wise adventurers do) then it is up to the SM to choose which charms are the most potent.

    **
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    Buy a !@#$ pencil!

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Artifacts.
    Magic gear, bought with backgrounds or looted from enemies. In theory I suppose that you could craft it yourself, but that’s a bother and then you probably wouldn’t be out having adventures, would you?

    It goes on about how there are different ways to handle artifacts in the game. A gear, where your magic sword is just a better sword. As ‘legacies’, where the artifacts are important to the characters on a more emotional level and don’t just get waved around like normal equipment. As objectives or MacGuffins, “find five plot coupons to redeem for one world savingâ€. It also mentions not overusing that one too much, it can get old when it’s on repeat. As “companionsâ€, which is apparently like the ‘legacies’ one but different? Apparently they’re supposed to affect how the character acts in some way? Supposedly most games do a bit of mix and match, and you should supposedly think about it.

    Script immunity. Someone noticed that players get upset when they lose their stuff. Kill their family, assassinate their allies, blow up the house, sink the barge, everything is OK until you steal that freaking +1 dagger, +3 vs. toe fungus. So A) don’t immediately swipe their magic stuff right off the bat at the beginning of the game, and B) make it reversable. Repairable, recoverable, revenge-able, whatever. Work an undo button into the story/game/quest. You should probably make it pretty quick and immediate too, don’t make them wait around for it.

    Game impact. You can screw how useful an artifact is. Don’t. Player/DM communication is important. Players tell DMs what your character has and what you want to be doing. DMs warn the player if your entire game is set on a space station with no animals and they’re talking about a magic stone that repels animals. Also a possibility is that the player could be knowingly taking an artifact that they won’t use. If it’s part of the character or a story hook for some reason. Treasure these players and reward them by making the artifact important even if it’s never used. If an artifact is too useful then either the artifact is too powerful (probably not actually the problem, the ones in the book are almost all pretty narrow in utility), or the character isn’t facing a variety of challenges. Quote “A soul-eating sword can’t make a space pirate princess fall in love with you or repair a hull breach before the air runs out.â€

    Common traits of artifacts. They’re magical (duh?), don’t wear our or break on accident, are generally hard to break, and shouldn’t be easy to buy or sell. Even the low end artifacts should only be able to be bought or sold by wealth 4 & 5 characters and then with much difficulty. Given that 4k4 & 5k5 run at almost 50% success on DCs 25 & 30 that means that artifact 1 (very common) should probably be DC 35s, which is… one step past mythic rare, if I recall correctly.

    We have the rating able. For a background of artifact 1 you can have a very common artifact or the artifact version of a very common weapon or armor. Artifact 5 gets you a very rare. Armor & weapons are made out of one of 5 magic metals, ammo for weapons that use solid ammo (no, no artifact flamer or lascannon ammo, ask your DM about artifact webber ammo) is at one rarity less than the weapon itself (minimum artifact 1 of course) and you get 1 clip, 2 clips for pistols. The ammo follows our usual rule for ammo, you have a supply and/or source, but the clip limit is what you’re talking on a mission. All artifact weapons and armor (and ammo) are considered best quality but don’t get the quality bonuses, they get the artifact bonuses instead. Artifact bionics are made out of the magic metals too. Like armor and weapons you get the base thing, the +2 (or not) armor for the limb/gizzards, and the artifact qualities overwrite the ‘best’ quality. In addition the death/dismemberment/limb explodes into gore type criticals just sever the artifact instead of blowing it up. Then you have to go through the whole reattachment process again (regeneration doesn’t help). There aren’t any rules for artifact bionics beyond the arm, leg, and heart replacements.

    Magic metals.
    Oricalcmcmcucmcucum: Gold colored. Shiny. Melee, +1k0 attack & parry, +3 damage, 1/scene reroll attack. Ranged, 1/scene reroll attack. Ammo, +1k0 attack, +10m range, never jams or overheats. Armor, +2 AP. Arm, as best quality but you get +1k1 instead of +1k0. Leg, +2m speed, +2k1 athletics. Heart, +2 armor & +2 hp. Sort of all around bonuses to stuff.

    Mithril: Silver colored. Shiny. Melee, +2 static defense, +2 damage. Ranged, no penalties for using heavy weapons without bracing, no penalties for using basic weapons in one hand, no bonuses for pistols. Ammo, double range. Armor, +2 max dex. Arm, +1k1 to general dexterity checks and parrying with that arm, also make one ready action as a free action each round (not quite sure how that works out). Legs, +2m speed, +1k0 athletics checks, +2k0 acrobatics checks. Heart, +1 armor (additional to the base +2 or instead of the usual +2?), immune to toxic weapons, get the Fleet of Foot feat. More sort of general boosts, more dexterity/movement oriented. Some questions about how things ought to work. That arm could be really strong. The heart could be kind of naff.

    Darksteel: Black to dark gray. Glowing orangey magic motes orbiting it. Completely and totally indestructible. Melee & ammo, +4 penetration. Ranged, does double damage to cover. Armor, halve the penetration of weapons hitting you (nice). Arm, +2k0 strength checks with the arm and ignore all criticals unless they would kill the user or destroy the arm, those just sever the arm (apparently without killing the owner?). Legs, +2k0 to checks to say on your feet and the same critical ignoring as the arms. Heart, +3 armor (again, instead of or in addition to the usual?) and ignore all gizzard criticals. Weapons try to ignore armor, armor tries to ignore weapons, ranged weapons trash the scenery, bionics are hard to hurt. There are reasons that promethians can’t get bionic hearts, this is one of them. Absolute immunity to 1/10 of all crits for… artifact 4 I believe.

    Wraithbone: Solid, crystalized, magic from the warp. Ceramic/porcelain. Repairs itself and lots of curves instead of angles. Melee, deliver melee range spells with the weapon, if it has a casting time of a ½ action or more you can… I interpret it as adding the spell as a rider onto the regular weapon attack. Plus, I don’t think there are any free action or reaction melee attack spells. Well, you can always home-brew. Ranged, 1/day generate a clip of ammo (or 3 shots for stuff with 1 shot). Weak-sauce. Ammo, counts as a magical attack, bypasses armor, damage is reduced by Aura instead. Armor, +4 aura. Arm, may parry touch and ranged touch spells. They’re just absorbed into the arm with no effect. Legs, 1/scene walk on air for a round at full speed in any/all directions. Heart, when rolling for warp crap you roll twice and choose. Combo with the Atlantean exalt for making spellcasting much, much, safer.

    Necrodermis: Dull gray. Cold. Living metal. In my game, harvested from modrons and extensively purified to prevent “I’ll be backâ€. Melee & ranged weapons, -2k0 to dodge & parry, +1k0 damage. Ammo, toxic (weak). Armor, opponents -2k0 to hit. Arm, +1k0 to strength checks with the arm and heals all critical damage at the start of the round. Legs, stands you up from prone as a free action without opportunity attacks, plus the critical damage regeneration thing. Heart, if you would burn a hero point to survive something rill a d10, on a 1-5 lose a point of wisdom instead as the heart revives you. The heart should probably also heal gizzard criticals like the arms and legs do.

    Looking through all this I’m becoming torn as to how to handle cyber-legs. Arms definitely come as singles, but that doesn’t make as much sense for legs. It’s like one good quality leg would be just as good as two, and maybe the artifact legs plus a good quality leg could stack bonuses. You can’t actually get two artifact limbs through the backgrounds. Although I suppose that it could be done in play. Actually in my game it was done in play, once on purpose and once they let a loot opportunity slide. Weirdly those were both necrodermis legs. And one wasn’t properly purified (the PC checked out and became an NPC before it became an issue, although now that he’s been in a vampire no-blood coma there’s nothing stopping it from absorbing other stuff and turning that into necrodermis, and eventually into a modron). Neh, I guess it doesn’t matter too much. I’d let a player run it either way, two legs at once or two different legs. You just couldn’t swap back and forth.

    So that’s arms (all), armor, and body bits. Oh, I missed something. All of these except ammo comes with a “hearthstone slotâ€. The hearthstones are little add-on artifacts that you stick onto other stuff. Ok, some aren’t so little but they’re normally less impressive than other stuff. Next time we’ll cover the miscellaneous artifact type stuff.

    Note to self: take microsoft products out behind the barn and put them out of their misery.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    What the heck happened to your punctuation formatting? I starting reading everything in my brain's deranged version of a Scottich accent after the first few paragraphs.
    Last edited by The Glyphstone; 2020-07-06 at 05:28 PM.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    What the heck happened to your punctuation formatting? I starting reading everything in my brain's deranged version of a Scottich accent after the first few paragraphs.
    It turns out that some microsoft applications cannot correctly convert/save quotation marks into plain text.

    I used to be able to do a passable brogue, but it's been many a year.

    And now I can't unsee/unhear it. I've had an old b&w BBC series of shakespear's history & kings plays on recently, with an astonishingly young pre-fame sean connery. And I can't unhear it.

    Weel at least it has decent voice acting now.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Wonderous artifact diddly-boppers.
    I'm just not going through all of them. I mean, it's shorter than going through say, D&D magic item lists. But it would still be pretty long and, I think, dull to slog through all of them. I'll try doing a sample of some sort of grouping. Edit: Ok, it's fewer than I remembered, I'll do them all. Keep in mind that they're explicitly a sampling of stuff and not an exclusive or exhaustive list.

    Situational near trash artifact 1s: We got the detect magic spyglass, a magic ultrasonic animal repeller, indestructible box only the owner can open, a "no dirt on me" thing, a trash amulet that does nothing but hold a hearthstone, a slightly better butane lighter, and a tracking dart (1 to 2 km range if they didn't notice that you stuck a 3cm nail with feathers into them).

    Actually useful artifact 2s: bracers that hold 2 hearthstones and add +2 to all your armor locations, a +2m speed & 20kph always dry and comfortable boots, the classic bag of holding that does 2 cubic meters of anything at zero weight, an infinite battery life 'all the tools from the equipment table' (combi-tool, data slate, multikey, etc., etc., plus extras), the +5 hat of disguise (doesn't do clothing), near perfect psychic paper, and a near useless +1k0 perception, +3k0 to detect magic tiara.

    Others: The rod of might is a 2 to 4 artifact with that many functions, left to the player and DM to work out. Apparently bunches of variants exist, including functioning as different types of best quality weapons. The jump pack is a 1/scene, as a half action, take the run action (x6 speed plus any feat benefits you have) and perfect flight while you're doing that. I'd be happy to allow a 3/scene and 5/scene as artifact 4s and 5s.

    Seriously, I'm kind of pissed at the artifact 1s. You could drop a couple of artifact 2s down to 1 as well. We're talking about a necrodermis autopistol (artifact 2) and 2 clips of wraithbone ammo (artifact 1) that gives us a total of -2k0 to dodge, +1k0 damage, and bypasses armor (resisted by much lower and rarer aura) as 3 points of artifact background. You expect me to believe that's the same value as a fancy lighter, a sonic animal repellant, and a 'no dirt on me' charm? In a game with this much violence? The bag of holding, the 'all tools' and psychic paper are OK. I'll even accept the +2 bracers, boots, rod, and jump pack. The rest feels terribly overpriced.

    Hearthstones, generally the size of a chicken egg, they need to be stuck onto a magic item in order to work. Be prepared for the PCs to walk past them because they'll forget about detecting magic (when it's an easy skill check) and it might not be absolutely, blatantly, screamingly, strobe-light & sound track obvious that they're a magic item. I may be biased. My players passed by the solution to a major problem, directly killed off an entire planet (ok, Athas wasn't that nice but it's still an entire planet), and indirectly killed several more planets due to this. Plus they gave the illithids a D&D 3e style shadow-pocalypse weapon. All because they never thought to check a corpse's pockets or detect magic. I'll grant that DtD40k7e de-emphasizes looting with the wealth mechanic, but you still want to check once in a while. Especially when enemies show up with weird, new weapons and could possibly have the keys to the locked doors on them.

    1s: Get the common sense feat, +2k0 medicine rolls, a one language perfect translator (but not syrenth), and an unerring 'retrace your footsteps' thing.
    2s: A pair of infinite range unjammable perfectly secure walkie talkies, +5 athletics and acrobatics checks (primarialy balancing & climbing, no mention of dodging), resist fire (-5 damage & comfortable with heat), 20m range perception check DC 10 for emotion & exaltation detection.
    3s: May stunt parry (remember, stunts require description but add bonus dice) ranged attacks instead of dodging, D&D freedom of movement (also includes an editing mistake from an earlier draft), unlimited water breathing & water environment immunity (depth pressure, the bends, water temperature, etc.), and one that grants near-perfect outdoor survival skills.
    4s: Daylight at any level & radius up to desert at midday & 1km radius in an instant, nightly dream augury on a DC 15 scrutiny check with no wrong information clause, aging immortality (you're still stabbing mortal), and reduce hp damage by 1 (possibly to 0) but gain a fatigue level every time it works.

    That's rather more like it. Although exalts are all functionally immortal anyways so the immortality stone is just a plot MacGuffin. The 1s are essentially feats, in one case literally, while the 3s are similar to mid-high D&D spells or class features. Promethians may find the Gem of Adamant Skin particularly useful since they're immune to fatigue.

    That's the end of the artifact section. Rather a mixed bag of useless to really useful. It caps off with another inter-chapter fluff piece that goes over the DtD40k7e version of the opening Ghostbusters encounter. Unfortunately I think those poor normies are in for a nasty time.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Playing the game: How I learned to shut up and roll the dice.
    Checks, tests, rolls, etc. You roll X dice and keep Y dice. They explode (reroll and add) on 10s. If you're rolling more than 10 dice, for every 2 past 10 you keep another. If you're keeping more than 10 dice every extra die is a +5. Thus 11k5 -> 10k5, 12k5 -> 10k6, 11k11 -> 10k10+10.

    Skillz: Git good noob.
    Roll skill + attribute, keep attribute. If you have no skill then you can't even try advanced skills, for basic skills you default to a straight attribute roll with a -1k0 penalty.

    Characteristics: Rolls you don't add skills/levels to. If you're reduced to rolling zero dice you get to still roll 1d10, but the 10 counts as zero and can't explode.

    Opposed rolls: Opposed is opposed. On a tie highest attribute wins. I guess if its still tied then highest skill wins. If its still tied just flip a coin or something. If both succeed then the highest number wins. If both fail then its a stalemate and/or roll again.

    Target numbers/DCs: 5 -> 40 and 15 is average. It's the same as the D&D 5e DC chart except this time you aren't a chump to a d20. I've seen 50s to 80s several times, two 100+ rolls, and a single 200+ roll over the course of a year. Guesstimate about 40 sessions averaging 5-ish hours per session. Mind, the 200+ was a cyber-monk paragon stunt jumping at something like 10k8r1x9 (roll 10, keep 8, reroll 1s, explodes on 9 & 10) out of maybe 10 or so of those rolls during a fight. Still running around 1/100,000 odds or something for that result, still less than four 20s in a row on d20s.

    Stunting: How not to be full of suck and fail. Exposition, explanation, and excuses aside... Talk up what you're doing and get bonus dice to roll. Get +1k0 for a good description, running across the heads of a crowd or barehanded parrying a daiklave. Get +2k0 for including the scenery and you're allowed some minor editorial power. You can add stuff like a banner on a wall to grab & swing on, pull a reasonably basic and small hidden weapon, or declare that a mook dropped his fully loaded weapon somewhere convenient for you to grab and use. Get +3k0 for trying to be truly audacious and awesome. You get the same editorial grant as a 2 die stunt. You need to do more than stick some adjectives and adverbs into your monotone "I hit him again. <roll>". Risk is to be rewarded.

    Hero points: They refresh at the start of each game session. Yes, very meta. Use them to reroll a failed check (once), reduce a DC by 5 (before rolling, may use multiples), add +5 to a successful check (after rolling, may use multiples), roll a 10 on your initiative (declare instead of rolling), or instantly recover from being stunned (at ANY time). You can permanently burn (lose) a hero point, even one that's already been spent, to do any of the above (you won't) or to survive a fatality (depends on your risk taking and bad decision making). The player can mostly dictate the survival although they're still out of the fight. Mild dismemberment and horrible scarring are encouraged. You gain them at the DMs discretion. Usually major plot milestones and amazing deeds.

    Combat: Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
    The galaxy is a dangerous place and you're supposed to be heroic (or villainous), not a complete coward. This is the fighty bits rules.

    Narrative time versus structured time: TLDR -> combat is structured time. Rounds are about 5 seconds long, although I run them as a vague 5 to 10 seconds and two of my players are absolutely convinced they are 6 seconds. Hmm... Mr. Bolt did 100m in a hair under 10 seconds. 50 per 5 -> 50/6 = 8.3 -> 4 strength & 4 dexterity gives a speed of 8 which gives us a run distance of 48m per round. Fleet of Foot lets you double that for a round without penalty (fatigue doesn't prevent running so he can keep it up for his constitution + 2 in rounds before passing out) to 96m per round. Either a good cyber-leg makes you (ok, someone in really great physical condition) nearly twice as fast as our current world record sprinter or I like 10 second rounds better.

    Base combat rules: 1) Everyone goes once per round. 2) You get 1 reaction, as many free actions as the DM & other players allow, 1 full action OR 2 half actions. 3) Important: You can't take the same half action twice in a round. 4) Not mentioned here is that you get one free opportunity attack each round and exalts can spend resource points to get additional reactions during the round up to their power stat. I also let people spend a reaction to take an additional opportunity attack, but now I'm not sure if that's right or a house rule. We'll see.

    Combat overview: Surprise, initiative, take turns, round ends, rinse and repeat until it's all over. Then a half page on adjudicating surprise, which pretty much comes down to DM decides with maybe some perception/scrutiny checks. Surprised folks don't get to act in the first round and give combat advantage (+5 to hit them). Paragon exalts cannot be surprised and there's nothing abut that in this section. Actually there isn't anything addressing it in the book at all. I just have them automatically delay in initiative until there's something for them to act on/react to. That prevents stupid stuff like "Oh, we went into combat time. Well I'll fireball that clump of trees and throw a grenade behind that car because those are the only places for an ambush to hide around here."

    Actions: We get a full page list of actions with short descriptions. Print off a couple copies and annotate them to suit your needs. There's no key for the "type" column but it's pretty simple, 'Fr' = free, 'H' = half, 'F' = full, 'H/F' means there are options for both, 'V' = variable. Talks about types and subtypes of actions (for example: immobilized prevents movement subtyped actions). All your actions generally resolve on your turn during the round, exceptions being reaction, opportunity attacks, and extended actions that take multiple rounds to finish.

    Spiffy or unusual actions, not all of them:
    * Aid another - maximum of 2 assists, must be adjacent, have to have the skill involved in order to assist. May not be used with supernatural abilities, free actions, spells, or spell casting. Decent guidance there.
    * Bull rush - straight up opposed strength checks to move the target 2m + 2m per raise. Nice and simple.
    * Charge - minimum 4m distance, straight line. No movement type restrictions, no vision requirements, and no penalties. You can totally charge the invisible wizard through tall grass without a -2 AC or a -4 attack penalty.
    * Delay - Needs an example. Can you do a half action and delay to get your other half action later in the round or are you spending a half action to delay taking your other half action? I've gone with the latter interpretation.
    * Fight defensively - Needs errata. The table says its a full action, text should trump table but the text says its a half action. That would let you take a standard attack, then a defensive attack at -1k0 to hit, and gain +1k0 to dodge and parry until your next turn in addition to bypassing the multiattack action restrictions and the swift attack & double tap feats.
    * Full auto burst - I've been doing the interaction with two weapon fighting wrong. You'll suck down penalties but you can make two full auto attacks while walking with two autopistols.
    * Full defense - Actually quite useful, especially with the parry-riposte feat. The +10 static defense and an extra reaction to parry/dodge means it actually works as a defense.
    * Grappling - Everyone's favorite terrible combat subsystem to bash. Pretty simple here. Initially 1) take a half action to land a brawling attack. 2) win an opposed strength test. 3) take one of the listed sub-actions as another half action. When continuing a grapple or being grappled 1a) a full round action to win an opposed strength test, OR 1b) a half action to try strength or dexterity to escape. Either way if you lose it ends your turn 2) if you won you 're a) in control of the grapple and take one of the grapple sub-actions, or b) you're free and can do whatever you want with your remaining half action. It's all on one page in a nice clear font. Print out a copy for reference, mostly for the list of sub-actions (stand one or both of you, prone one or both of you, bull rush them, attack for normal unarmed damage or 1-handed weapon damage (no reactions allowed by the victim), ready equipment of yours or grab equipment of theirs, use readied equipment equipment).
    * Healing surge - Spend resource points up to your level (bypassing the per round power stat limit?) and heal that many hit points. Also +5 static defense.
    * Multi-attack - You need to be doing two weapon fighting or have one of the feats (swift attack, lightning attack, doublt tap, etc.) to do this. You need to spend a resource point for each attack roll after the first.
    * Opportunity attack - I was doing it wrong. One free standard attack per turn, not per round. Anyone's turn. So when 20 kobolds try to conga line past the lady with the chain sword that's 20 opportunity attacks and probably a nice little corpse pile. Like.
    * Overwatch - Designate a kill zone and ready to full auto burst a bunch of ammo into it. Define your own trigger for the readying.
    * Shift - As per the table this doesn't provoke opportunity attacks. Actually that's handled by the subtype keywords, it lacks the provoking keyword, but I think it's probably worth mentioning in the text.
    * Suppressing fire - Spray a kill zone with full auto burst. Anyone in the zone has to make a pinning test (pretty much a modified fear test, covered under the conditions which are next) and random people in the zone, up to your ammo expenditure, get hit by a single shot (maximum one per person). DC 20 to pull off and every raise is another random hit, you explicitly cannot choose to fail the test. This does bypass dodging and static defense. Do not give in to the players whining the first time the PCs get sprayed. They'll appreciate it when you pull out the 40 static defense super 10k6r1 dodge monkey with triple attack and a syrneth scythe. They'll also learn to appreciate cover.
    * Tactical advance - A full round double move from cover to cover. You don't provoke opportunity attacks and always count as being behind your initial cover until you're behind your final cover.
    * Other - Other is other. Just in case you need it. DM tries to figure something out.

    Next up, conditions. Like being on fire. I like setting PCs on fire.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Attacking: Telling someone in DtD40k7e how you feel about them in five easy steps.
    It's a page and a half of stepping you through how to hurt someone. With some examples and exposition. I approve of the examples, I just wish that some players would read them once in a while.
    1. Tally up your modifiers and figure out what you'll be rolling.
    2. Roll your attack. Base: level (if proficient) + skill rolled and skill kept.
    2a. Victim may be able to stempt to dodge, parry, or take some other defensive reaction.
    3. Hit location. 1 & 2 are legs, 3 - 6 is the body, 7 gizzards, 8 & 9 are arms, 10 head. I occasionally modify by critter body plan, once it was: 1 - 6 big long tentacles, 7 - 9 body, 10 plasma beam eyeball.
    4. Roll damage. Remember any modifiers, and melee attacks add strength as rolled dice to the base weapon damage.
    5. Apply damage to the victim. Armor on the hit body part, less the penetration of the attack, is subtracted from the damage. Then divide damage by resilience and drop fractions. That's you hit point loss/wounds taken. If you run out of hit points you go to the critical tables at a 1:1 ratio of wounds to critical level.

    We had a guy who, for months apparently, without telling anyone was ADDING the penetration vlaue to the damage and then subtracting armor. Which would work as long as the penetration of the attack is less than your armor.

    Any how, the biggest bugaboo of the system is resilience. The calculation to determine it and the damage divided by resilience. The outcomes are good, bigger things are easier to hit and harder to damage, but the math adds a good one or two seconds even once you're used to it. Sure (30 - (12 - 8))/7 & drop fractions is something 10 year olds do. But 8 PM Saturday night after a glass of wine and two slices of bad pizza, and you've been at this since 3 PM... Well, sometimes it does stuff to the mathamatic capabilities of even the best of us.

    Of course just scribbling down a chart on the character sheet next to your hit point box solves 95% of the issues in play. Barring that occasional "count as a size smaller" stuff that pops up here and there. I'm honestly thinking that you could just run all those as "-1 resilience for this attack" or "+10% damage" and it would be about the same most of the time. One other thing I've considered is to make hit points the result of the current hit point calculation times the resilence calculation. You would have to figure out a new way to determine the critical hit effects and large creatures/objects would effectively take a hit because you aren't dropping fractions any more. I'd want to spreadsheet a comparison of the results to see what it looked like. The critical damage is still kind of an issue.

    Next section - combat situations. Mostly just various conditions and modifiers. It would be nice if these and some others were stuck on one big list like the actions were. I have something like that in my personal reference sheets but I've been thinking it needs to be updated now that I've run the game and have a better idea what gets loooked for often.

    General to-hit modifiers
    Combat advantage: +5 to get hit. Difficut terrain: melee attacks and dodging are at -1k0, or -2k0 for waist deep stuff and slick ice. In melee: shooting at them takes a -10. Extreme range: -15 to hit. Long range: -5 to hit. Point blank range but not in melee: +2k1 to hit. Short range: +1k0 to hit. Melee from higher ground: +1k0 to hit. Ganging up in melee: +1k0 to hit, +2k0 if your side outnumber the other side by 3:1.

    * Cover: Acts as a layer of armor that has to be penetrated before damage can get to you. So it covers some of your hit locations instead of giving any defense bonuses. There is alittle chart from pipes and armor-glass at AP 4, through computer banks and static pods at AP 12, to plasteel walls and spaceship bulkheads at AP 32. By the rule anything penetrating the cover or barrier reduces it's AP by 1. Once the AP reaches zero the cover is destroyed. In my games I've done 'makes a very small hole' (it went though after all) and reduced the AP by it's multiple of penetrating damage. Ok, example: Someone wearing mesh (ap4) is standing off to one side in a submarine hatch (ap16, head, right arm and leg, and body #6 are exposed), with a static defense of 20. Three people shoot bolter rounds at him, rolls 15, 25, and 35. 15 is close enough to hit the hatch even if it wouldn't hit him (flip a coin, roll a scatter die, it's explosive bullets in a submarine, it goes somewhere). The 15 shot: AP 16 - penetration 6 = AP 10, damage rolls 7, 7 is less than 10 and it does nothing. The 25 shot: target dodges & gets 14, adds 7 to static defense and reaches 27, the round misses but check for a hit location anyways, if it was an exposed bit the round goes flying past, hit location left leg tags the hatch again, same math as last time but this damage roll is 18, 18 is more than 10 so 18 - 10 = 8 damage went through but still missed the target. Hatch AP is now 15 because something penetrated it. The 35 shot: no dodge so roll hit location 7 = gizzards, AP 15 - penetration 6 = AP 9, damage roll explodes all over the place and gets to 42, 42 - 9 = 33 damage gets through, target's armor takes off 4 because even though the bolt round's penetration is 6 it got applied to the cover, target gets a 29 damage hit to the gizzards, 33/15 = 2.whatever so the hatch loses 2 more AP bringing it to AP 13. I generally apply breaches to about a square meter for small arms, 4 square meters for nasty stuff like lascannons, and whatever the blast radius is for explsions.
    Concealment: For when you can't see the target very well. Usually a +5 to static defense but the DM can rule it to be more.
    * Falling: 1 wound per 2 meters. Acrobatics + dexterity DC 15 to reduce by 1 wound and reduce by another wound per raise. Dropping or jumping down gets 2m per dot of acrobatics that doesn't count as falling.
    * Two weapon fighting: Works about like you'd expect, you can get an additional attack with the second weapon when using the multiattack action. Both attacks at a -3k0 penalty, reduced by 1 die for having ambidexterity, reduced by 2 dice for having the TWF feat. Because it's a multiattack you have to spend that extra reaction to get the extra attack. You can stack TWF with the other multiattack feats.
    Weapon jams: Takes a full action to clear the jam, dumps the ammo so you have to reload, tech use + intelligence or level + ballistics vs DC 15.

    Ya know, next up is injury, healing, and critical hits. I'll skip that for a but and cover the conditions. That's just my personal organization style.

    Conditions, again just interesting stuff because things like blindness are pretty obvious:
    * Amputated limbs: Starting with a good one. The crit tables include limb removal. This is a game where "It's just a flesh wound." is a thing. Hand: -2k1 for two handed stuff. No holding. Potential -2k0 for the primary that you can buy off for 200xp if you can't snag the ambidexterity asset. Strapping a shield to the lower arm is OK. If you lose both hands: "she should either secure a replacement or get someone to sharpen her teeth." Arm: Same as hand but no shield strapping spot. Apparently losting both makes it difficult to reach hard to clean places. Eye: -2k1 sight bases stuff and half range for ranged weapons (since that modifies accuracy). Foot: Half speed and -2k0 for movement actions & checks. Losing both: "Perhaps the ship's Engineer has some spare wheels laying around..." Leg: As foot but no dodging, a 'half the person he was' joke.
    * Blood loss: This is more than just a bleeding finger or something, it's a full spurting artery type thing. Each round roll 1d10, on a 1 you die. Medic DC 20 to fix, DC 30 if you're running, fighting, doing heavy lifting, etc.
    * Dazzled: -1k0 to everything except sight tests, those are -2k0.
    * Diseased: DM discretion.
    * On Fire: At the start of the next and subsequent rounds while exposed to !!FIRE!! (or on a flamer hit) dexterity save vs. 15 or catch on fire. You can take a full round action to put yourself out, same save. DM modifies the save by situation (I give +10 for spraying yourself with a fire extinguisher). Being on fire gives you a wound and a level of fatigue each round, it doesn't say when so I'd put it at the start of the character's turn because I'm nice. If it matters this is usually run as an energy thye hit to the body unless a specific body part is on fire or something.
    * Fatigue: You can deal with fatigue level up to your constitution. Over that and you're knocked out. If you have any fatigue you're at -1k0 to rolls. Fatigue heals at one level per hour of rest or relaxation. If it knocked you out you wake up in 10-constitution hours with fatigue equal to your constitution.
    * Helpless: Autohit plus roll damage twice and add.
    * Pinned: Willpower save DC 20, or DC 10 if you're no longer being shot at, roll again each round at the end of your turn. People in melee are automatically freed from pinning (too busy to care about getting shot at I suppose). If pinned: 1) Only take half actions, no full actions. 2) Must stay in cover or move towards cover. 3) May retreat away from the source of pinning fire if there is cover available there or if there is no cover anywhere at all.
    * Restrained: +1k0 to attack rolls and may be immpbilized if the legs are affected.
    * Stunned: Grants combat advantage and take no actions. Still aware and not helpless though.
    * Suffocation: Hold your breath, if you even need to breathe, for constitution minutes or 2x constitution rounds if engaging in strenuous activity. Also make a constitution save DC 10 or take a level of fatigue every minute/round. At the end of your time you go unconsious if you still can't breathe. If you're unconsious and can't breathe lose a hit point every round and die at zero hit points.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    No spell checking! Live the danger!

    Injury, critical hits, and healing.

    "pilots can discover exciting new ways to land that don't involve leaving their craft in one piece"

    Hit points: Characters have hit points. Minor editing issue, it says HP = constitution + willpower + misc. class bits & feats. In character creation it's (constitiution + willpower) x2, plus the other bits. I think a couple other places referenced the x2 thing as well, and I'm pretty sure it's on the provided character sheets. The x2 version is what I used anyways.

    Damage: Charactes take damage. The resilience vs. damage calculation raises it's ugly head again, but there's an example provided that should help with the basics. The difference between aura and armor is explained.

    Damage types: Pretty self explanatory, mostly relevant for critical effects. Energy, explosive, impact and rending.

    Healing: You're lightly wounded if you've lost HP equal to or less than your willpower. You will heal 1 HP per day or constitution in HP each day if you're getting bed rest. Heavily wounded is if you've lost more HP than your willpower. You'll heal 1 HP per week, or constitution HP per week of bed rest. You'll want to keep track of when you transition to back to being lightly wounded. Critically wounded is when you're out of HP and have critical damage. You will require medical attention to heal one point of critical damage each week until you have no critical damage and go back to being heavily wounded. There's no, ah, other rules or medic check DCs for any of this. Good luck.

    Critical damage: Crits happen when you're out of hit points and still taking wounds. It's a 1-to-1 HP to critical ratio (unless you have the True Grit feat) that cares about the damage type and hit location. Crit damage is "cumulative", blah, blah, blah.

    So here's an interesting thing. The crit charts have 5 crits each for each hit location. Crit 5 is always death. There ends up being two ways to do this, and my group has done both. First: Additive crit levels. Five crit 1s = crit 5 and kills something. This makes tearing weapons pretty darned nasty once the target is into crits. Especially since crit 4 is death on head & gizzards, crit 3 for explosive head shots. It also has the effect of giving you very few crit 1 effects, since they can only happen on a 1 HP hit on a hit location with no crits. Second: Individual crits. In this one crits stack, but they don't add. This makes pretty much everything harder to kill if you're tracking crits on it (important NPCs, I normally have mooks just go down when they drop past 0 HP). But you'll see more of the low end crit effects, more blooding out, and more knockouts (lots of crits do fatigue damage).

    How you interpret "Critical damage is cumulative" makes a difference. A size 12, resilience 10, Athasan, psychic, teleporting, fireballing, murder-elephant can easily go down with three bolt pistol shots to the head under the additive method even if they can't get more than 5 points of damage past the beast's armor. Under the second method you just blinded, deafened, and annoyed it for three rounds. No a bad job, just not blowing the head off with a gun that can barely get past the armor to make a bad bruise.

    The charts are by damage type. Print off copies and hand them around. Well, at least one copy for the DM if you're being stingey.

    Arms: Crit 1s get you to drop whatever was in that hand. Crit 5s sever/vaporize the arm and kill you. Crit 3s result in 1 to 5 level of fatigue, sever fingers, may need medical attention to recover use of the hand, or may just have you roll a constitution sace vs. DC 20 or lose the hand entirely.

    Legs: Crit 1s half speed for a round, get knocked down, get pushed back a meter, maybe a level of fatigue. Crit 5s, like the arms, severed/vaporized and kills you. Crit 3s constitution save or lose the foot, half speed until medical attention, 1 to 5 levels a fatigue.

    Body: Crit 1s include only being able to take a single half action next turn, knocked back 1d5 meters and prone with a level of fatigue per meter, and a level of fatigue of not wearing armor. Crit 3s consist combinations of of 1d5/1d10 levels of fatigue, stunned for one or two rounds, blood loss, and being knocked prone. Crit 5s are death. You get eyes popping like microwaved (chicken) eggs, spraying everything within 1d10 meters with bloody giblets, and being bisected.

    Gizzards: Crit 1s are reduce armor AP by 1, take a level of fatigue, blown back 1d10 meters and take that much fatigue, and stunned for a round. Crit3s include stunned for 1 to 2d10 rounds, knocked prone and/or flying back, 1d5/1d10 levels of fatigue, blood loss, and optionally using an arm to hold your guts in or take double blood loss. Crit5s are the gorey, messy deaths that players enjoy inflicting on NPCs and the DM likes inflicting on PCs. Sliced to bits and creates slippery terrain, strawberry jam, steam explosions, ammo cooking off, fun stuff.

    Head: Crit 1s feature dazzled, blinded, deafened, a level of fatigue, and possibly having a helmet negate one. Brain buckets are a good thing. Crit 3s include fun things like 1d5 rounds stunned, 2 to 1d5 levels of fatigue, losing your helmet, having your head explode, and melting your face which results in blindness for 1d10 hours plus a permanent loss of a point of fellowship. Crit 5s get you death with various special effects tacked on. Flaming chunks of skull meat, a 2m radius fear 1 check, the overripe fruit splat, and decapitation with a 2d10 meter range plus a blood spray.

    Let's be honest here. This is part of why you're playing this game. If you wanted boring old "Zero HP, the goblin falls down. Next.", you'd be playing some flavor of D&D, ShadowRun, Pathfinder, StarWars, or something else sanitized and clean. No, you burned a bunch of XP on a gun kata and went questing for an artifact missile launcher because you like getting that gizzard crit 5 that cooks off ammo and spreads the carnage all over the landscape. And if you have hero points left your character can survive that. It might involve a mysterious stranger, a Syrenth cloning vat, or showing up with a chip on your shoulder about being left for dead and all your bits replaced by cyberwear... But you can keep playing that character.

    Moving on to movement.

    Narrative movement. Generalizations, difficult terrain is difficult, doubple speed invoked constitution checks or take fatigue every hour, DCs go up each time. Yawn, boring. Vast over-generalizations are 20x speed per minute (using the default 5 second rounds), kph = speed per hour, 10x speed in kilometers per day. Honestly, you'll probably just buy a car, or a horse, or a hover tank, or your ship will have a teleportarium. And most DMs will be running at narrative speed anyways and you'll show up right on time for whatever the railroading script wants. Frankly once you know you're on a speed-of-plot railroad go ahead and take your time. Take the 15 minutes ot put on your armor, gather up & repack the backpacks, but more healing potions from the vendor. The castle gate won't be busted open until you get there anyways so it's no use in hurrying and missing the loot from the side fights. Yes, I'm bitter. I didn't take Vow of Poverty, and I didn't have a move speed twice that of the rest of the party, just so we could all show up as a group at the last moment when it was too late to do anything.

    Climbing. If you have any athletics, both hands free, and nobody is shooting at you then don't bother rolling. Otherwise it's generally Athletics (normally + strength or dexterity) DC 15+ to go half speed plus an additional meter per raise. It is literally possible to climb faster than you can walk. You're allowed to be that awesome. you can also fall. Deal with it.

    Jumping. Get a 4m head start to count it as a running jump, it's a difference of DC 10 vs. DC 15 if you care. Acrobatics + strength and you ger strength in meters plus another meter per raise. Fail and it's a distance of half your strength, rounded up. Height is half the long distance, rounded down. If you're trying just for height then just ignore the horizontal distance. You now know how to make your character an super-Olympic class long jumper.

    Swimming. Only check if you're racing, fighting, have your hands tied, or are doing things like trying not to go over a waterfall. Athletics + strength, normally vs. DC 10 to move half speed. Failure is just not moving. Medium and heavier armor is DC 20. People may want to hold their breath underwater. Look, buy a void suit and wear it under your armor, get a submarine or an anti-grav tank that mounts a railgun/missiles, and just tell the normal sharks to push off. Make one of your Follower-3 background interns do the underwater stuff. I put a first level party up against an 80m long daemonhost fish monster. They were fine.

    Next time: Social combat. Talk your problems out. Really. Try it sometime. Like when the courtroom has 10 ceiling mounted, computer controlled, las cannons and you don't want to pay your parking ticket.

  23. - Top - End - #83
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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    You know you're here for thosr crits. Admit it. The silence only confirms your guilty pleasures.

    "Of course heroes don't always need to solve problems by punching each other in the face, launching bolts of plasma, and accidentally opening a gate to the Warp because someone rolled *really* badly on a Perils of the Warp check. There is also the option to simply talk things over."

    Social combat works pretty much like regular combat. Similar to how you usually wouldn't run a full combat encounter for a minor bar brawl with normal peons, you wouldn't run a full social combat for chatting up someone at a bus stop. You use it for stuff like courtroom drama and negotiating a peace deal between ork paladins and assimar pirates. Rounds, surprise, initiative, actions. Overall it's pretty similar. Although the rounds are more fungible in the amount of time that they take. You have to allow for five minute monologues.

    Possible editing error, it says that initiative is modified by fellowship and composure instead of dexterity and composure like violent combat is. Elsewhere in the book regular combat initiative is stated to be 1d10 + composure. You'll have to choose. Dexterity + composure is reasonable if you want to add it to regular combat initiative, or you can cut out one of the stats for social combat. Personally I'm pretty happy with 1d10 + composure being the overall initiative check and not having to deal with a difference.

    Resolve is social/mental hit points, willpower + composure. Regaining it is a composure roll DC 10 every morning/day/when you wake up for a decent nights sleep. Get 1 resolve + 1 more resolve per raise. Or the DM can give you a resolve for doing a stunt that "furthers your alignment". Mental defense is your social equivalent of static defense, 5 + 5x composure. Composure may be starting to sound like a social god stat but it's completely passive and defensive.

    As with violent combat we get a list of actions to take, but it's much shorter and lacks stabbing options. You're doing opposed checks or attacks versus the target's mental defense.
    Move: Free action because unless you're sprinting to the other side of the building or running away we don't really care.
    Monologue/Study: Half or full action, duplicates aiming. Get +1k0/+2k0 on the attack that has to be your next action. Lose the bonus if you take a reaction between this and that.
    Poker face: Full defense action. No attacks and your get +10 mental defense and an extra reaction.
    Refute: Your social parry/dodge. Defaults to wisdom + scrutiny or intelligence + lore if you can figure out a way to apply a lore skill to the argument. Intelligence + lore gets a free +5 for being a snotty know-it-all. Optional stunting for convincing the DM to swap out the attributes or skills.
    Social Attack: Half action basic attack. Charisma (persuasion) or fellowship (lies & seduction)... I'm wondering if those parenthesis bits are swapped... then the appropriate skill of charm, command, deceive, intimidate, perform, or persuasion, dependent on what/how you're trying to do this.
    Speak Carefully: Attack defensively. Full action to get an attack at -1k0 but you get +1k0 to all your refute actions until the start of your next turn.
    Support: Aid another. Half action, up to two people aiding, the aided person gets +1k0 per aid. DM discretion (randomly shouting “Your mom!†doesn't count unless they really just need a distraction).
    Wordplay: Feint. Half action to use deceive + fellowship vs. the target's scrutiny + wisdom. On a success the target can’t refute you.

    Effects. Hopefully you decided what you wanted before committing to an attack. The general options are +/- disposition, compel, and break alignment. If the attack succeeds the target can spend a resolve to not go along with it or they can go along with it. After spending two resolve in one scene they're jaded and suspicious, they won't go along with anything and become immune to further attacks unless you stunt to change tactics. Of course you could always go to lunch and come back later to try again, apparently that works too.
    Disposition is "I like Ike", it's specific to Ike. OK, specific to a particular person, place, thing, or action. There's a small 7 level chart of dispositions from fanatic love to ˜kissmesissitude™ (apparently that's more hostile than hostile), with adjustments of +5/+10 to the mental defense of the target at each end of the chart. A successful social attack that the target doesn't spend resolve against can temporarily shift a disposition by one step. You're going to have to repeat this a number of times equal to their willpower in order to make a single step of shift permanent. D&D 3.5 diplomacy this ain't. You'll be coming back to this person again and again just to permanently change their mind on one point.
    Compel can make someone do something for a scene, as long as they don't spend resolve and it doesn't violate their alignment or too massively violate their normal behavior. This is your immediate intimidate, quick talk, sales pitch effect.
    Break alignment is short to long term brain washing. Get someone to zero resolve and keep them from regaining their entire resolve for a number of days equal to their devotion score. As long as you can keep them from regaining their full resolve back you can compel them to break alignment and do those seriously abnormal behaviors. It comes with a note to be careful about using this on PCs.

    There, social combat. I don't use it for lying to bar bums, bribing mook guards, or intimidating random street gangers. I use it for getting crud past customs officials. Well, I did until they got the teleportarium on their ship and stopped trying to convince people of stuff or get people to like them.

    We end the chapter with fear and insanity. It's all of one page shorter than social combat.

    Fear is an immediate reaction to stuff going on. It's run in ˜levels™ fear 1 = DC 15, fear 2 = DC 20, etc., etc., that sets the DC for the willpower save. Pass and you don't (maybe) care. In combat failure rolls a 1d10 + 1 per check (failed by 5 points), consults the shock table, and applies the effects immediately. Out of combat you just take a -1k0 to anything requiring concentration (not D&D concentration, that's an ongoing effort to sustain spells, this is doing stuff that you don't want to be distracted at, stunt driving, needle point, computer programming, etc.) while it fear source is nearby and if you failed by 10 or more you gain 1d5 insanity points.

    In combat you can snap out of shock by making another willpower save at the beginning of your turn. I suppose you could just roll on the person's first turn while being exposed to the fear source. Otherwise you risk people wanting to roll against fear on exposure (normally on another character's turn) and then roll to shake it off before they begin their first turn, effectively trying to have two saves before being affected. My players have, thankfully, been pretty good about this. It helps that most of the fear caster critters are reasonably nasty and worthy of respect. Interesting to note that there's no mention of automatically or getting a bonus to snap out of shock if the fear source goes away. Up to you how you want to run that. I'm good with having the guy manning the machine gun continuing to scream and spray everything with bullets even after the greater daemon is dead.

    Shock table:
    1 & 2) Only take a half action on your next turn.
    3 & 4) Dazzled until you snap out of it.
    5 &6) Gain 1 insanity and may not approach the source of fear in any way.
    7 & 8) Stunned until they snap out of it, then -1k0 to all checks. Also gain 1d5 insanity.
    9) Gain 1d5 insanity and flee at top speed. If that's impossible take only half actions and -2k0 to all checks. May not check to snap out of it until the source of fear is removed or escaped.
    10) Gain 1d5 insanity and faint. Unconscious for 1d5 rounds, then -1k0 to all checks until the end of the encounter.
    11) 1d5 insanity plus panicked screaming and vomiting. Helpless but conscious for 1d5 rounds (but still conscious so potentially still capable of failing more fear checks), afterwards they can only take a single half action on their turn until they get a chance to rest and recover.
    12) 1d10 insanity, fall down weeping & wailing. No actions or reactions, but not helpless, for 1d10 rounds and at -2k0 for the rest of the encounter after that.
    13+) 1d10 insanity plus completely catatonic for 1d10 hours. Try not to fail your fear checks this badly.

    Actually I'm rather disappointed that there's no option really allowing for panicked full-auto spray & pray.

    Insanity is divided into short term trauma and long term disorders. Every time you "gain 10 insanity points" you roll willpower vs. DC 10 +1/5 current insanity points. Failure gets you a roll on the trauma table at +1 for every 5 you failed by. The "gain 10 insanity points" isn't clarified as to if it means 10 at once or every 10 points. 10 at once is basically never going to happen, every 10 could be really nasty once someone gets up around 50+ insanity. I've gone with a middle road of 10 insanity per scene, rare but not once-a-year-of-gaming rare. The trauma table is another 1 to 14+ type table with effects from 3d10 hours of -1 charisma to seriously unresponsive for 1d10 days, with compulsive behavior, screaming nightmares, and hair trigger violence among the other effects. I suppose that the 3 to 9 results on the table could encompass panicked shooting or explosives use, butthet would be the player's choice on how the PC reacted to the short term disorder.

    That's short term. Long term insanity is a disorder gained at 40, 60, or 80 insanity points, with increasing severity. At 100 insanity the character goes bat-**** insane and becomes an NPC. Say "Hello" mechanics of Call of Cthulhu. There's n table for these, just a sentence of "maybe like this or that" followed by "DM decides" stuff. Apparently there is a roll of some undefined type against DCs 10, 15, and 20 to resist the effect of your long term disorders.

    The long term insanity stuff is obviously an unfinished section. I'd go look at one of the CoC editions (I have 3rd & 5th, 3rd has better atmosphere but 5th has better layout & some improved rules) to work up more rules for it. I'm also not a big fan of how willpower is a sort of anti-fear god stat. Composure is fitting for some of this, and you could work out a quick and dirty recovery mechanic involving fellowship + academic lore or persuasion for psychoanalysis one a timetable of months to years involving wisdom and intelligence somehow.

    Hmm... a downtime activity taking months (say 3d10 - wisdom and willpower? minimum 3?) where one person uses intelligence + academic lore (vs. half of the victim's the insanity score?), then fellowship + persuasion (maybe opposed by insanity/10 rolled and kept) in weekly sessions (but just one roll) to give the insane a wisdom + intelligence - forbidden lore (sum of the dice for rolling and keeping, because CoC would totally include forbidden lore as a penalty) save versus a DC of their current insanity level to remove 1d5 + one per raise insanity points. As insanity falls below the 40, 60, 80, thresholds make a second check (after more counseling) to remove the long term disorders. Probably put in something about not being exposed to a similar source of fear, or at least not gaining any more insanity points from it during that time, or else you have to start over. For short term stuff just load your needle pistol up with tranquilizers and pop them a couple of times.

    Or, for an easier method, after a month of weekly counseling from someone get an intelligence + academic lore OR fellowship + persuasion roll opposed by the target's willpower + forbidden lore in order to get a wisdom save versus the insanity DC. Get a +1k0 per raise that the councilor got on the opposed roll. Beat the insanity DC and lose 1d5 insanity. Must not have gained any insanity on that month and must not have had to roll on the shock table when exposed to a similar source of fear.

    Ok, house rule: On the shock table, the 7 & 8 result becomes 7 -> as written, and 8 -> replace "frozen by terror" with full-auto or multiattack shooting (virtually gain the double tap and quick draw feats for this), all out attacks, or just standing there and screaming.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    You know you're here for thosr crits. Admit it. The silence only confirms your guilty pleasures.
    Actually I'm here for bits like this:
    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Swimming. […] I put a first level party up against an 80m long daemonhost fish monster. They were fine.
    I'm not sure why I found it so funny but I did.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    Actually I'm here for bits like this:
    I'm not sure why I found it so funny but I did.
    Big stuff like that, you just make sure it has enough resource points an a mid-high level/power stat, maybe one or two hero points to un-stun with. Works fine.

    The boat had towers at the corners with 20m long grabber arms and machine guns. There was a mobile tower with the fishing pole and more machine guns. Someone had a 15m tall mecha with a light anti-space craft gun. One guy got out and ran over to swing a chain axe at it. It was not a given that they would win.

    I tell you though, it really helps to have die roller, statistic generator, or even just a good probability chart for estimating outcomes. I worked backward from at least one tower wrecked, the mecha damaged, and someone in medium-bad hurts to stat the monster. I was careful for the first couple fights.

    Now of course I just throw stuff at them and see what hits. A hundred+ assorted modrons and a monolith with shields, quad machine guns, and a mega particle projector cannon? Sounds about right. I didn't even get to blow up the hover-bike.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    We have another intermission bit that does the opening of Fist Full of Dollars, or Yojimbo if you like the original version better. But you an tell it was written off the western movie.

    Then we're on to the setting chapter. Pages 247 to 326. I'm going to skip it for now. Itâ's long, it isn't rules stuff, and I'm not in the mood. We'll come back to it after the DM's section and the monsters/NPCs.

    Another intermission between the setting and the DM section, something about a promethian exalt fighting a robot tank. Maybe taken from a Ghost in the Shell episode? I haven't seen all of those but it looks like the closest match I think.

    Right, the DMing section. The opening paragraph advertises practical advice, simplifying bookkeeping, character advancement, and other tips. Also take what you want and ignore the rest.

    Beginning. Start by figuring out some parameters for the game, players figure out some parameters for their characters, decide on a style, then work with the players about the characters and the campaign fitting together. Initial question checklist, pretty decent. It starts with what bits of the game or setting you don't want and if you need to change any rules for it. Check starting antagonists and allies available, how far you want the game to travel through the setting. Some character considerations, where they're from, how they know each other, do they need to have or not have certain character hooks for this to work, do you need a balanced part and a spread of skills or is massive overlap OK. Face it, you're likely to get several massively overspecialized combat monkeys from players who mostly play D&D/ThingFinder and other combat central games.

    Changing the rules. You can change them but things interact. Try to understand what and why before changing stuff. Players who find out that their stuff doesn't work because you changed a rule may be cranky, especially if it only comes up after the game starts. Try to be flexible and consistent. I think it's nice that this gets it's own heading and section. Just a paragraph, but it at least mentions that rules interact with each other and that the players will default to assuming that you're playing by the book.

    A paragraph on character uniqueness. Try not to have characters that are too similar and try not to have characters that overshadow each other without having another niche.

    Themes. The game tries to use or present some themes for you to use. These are talked about with a little bit about how it can be used in your game. Ancient and forgotten stuff. Exploration of the unknown. Civilization is scattered (even if it's a huge empire) and there's dangerous stuff between outposts. Everything is somehow on the brink of disaster and survival is not guaranteed.

    Game styles. There is no one true way. Certain default assumptions are built in (not really in my experience). Then we got some different types with particular character building focus recommendations.

    "Vanilla": Return to a world. Crush your enemies. Conquer. No 'focus'.

    "Voltron": Powerful individuals, high powered weapons, melodrama, conspiracy, plotting.... orbital strikes in fits of pique... accidental world destruction... a behemoth slowly eating crystal spheres... long lost dead ships... I think this is where my game went. It wasn't the original goal but it sort of ended up there. Focus on artifact backgrounds... Yup. That's us.

    "Outlander": Exploration focused. Go to foreign places, meet foreign people, kill them and take their stuff. Focus on lore skills, supposedly.

    "Clans": Team party. Everyone in the party is working for the same people, has the same exaltation, is the same race, something like that. May run like Mission: Impossible type TV shows. Focus on backgrounds and differing skill sets.

    "Misc.": Assorted other suggestions that apparently didn't warrant a longer write-up. "Bolter and chainsword with daiklaive", apparently the teenaged high-school lol-drama sit-com version of the game. "Invasionâ", stop the invasion with anything from allies to DIY armies to long lost superweapons. "The hero who came in from the cold", intrigue and spy stuff. "Sorcery & sorcery", for the all spellcaster parties. "Walk the earth", randomly wander around fighting random stuff that happens to randomly be nearby.

    How to form a party. Common ways to get this particular batch of psycho murder-hobos to "team up", or at least to mostly be in the same place at the same time shooting in the same direction.

    "The enemy of my enemy": Threaten them all with a big bad and hope that they'll work together and then stick together. Actually tends to work better than it has any right to because the players are usually willing to play along.

    "The gods will it": Authority says 'Do!'. Focuses on mystic/prophetic stuff but any sufficiently authoritative entity/group will do.

    "Beyond the cal to action": The PCs knew each other previously and are now all in a clump. Potentially they could have known each other before becoming exalts.

    Playing the game. Players control the direction of the game. You'll be improvising a response to their actions as often as they'll be reacting to the situations you throw at the. I find this to be true, although it's probably partially my style. I have a tendency to set up situations, people/places, and time lines, then react to what the players do. Sometimes I can guess what they'll do, but I like to think that my NPC's reactions seem more genuine because I'm as clueless about the PCs intentions and golds as the NPCs are. THere's talk of a prelude session wiht mostly roleplaying and little dice rolling. Good luck on that, my players were perfectly happy to get rolling in the first session without bothering to do any character building.

    First session, it suggests starting with a bang. Ditch the whole 'meet in a bar' stuff and start off in na action scene like some of the old James Bond movies. I didn't actually do that, they had a week and a shopping opportunity on board a 3km long luxury starliner before anything started. If this is a first time for the DM or players doing DtD40k7e try testing the limits of the system and being extra lenient with sunting. My players bribed a customs official, went on a drinking binge, bought a baby t-rex, took a krak missile to the face, and decapitated the gang leader after slaughtering 30 gangers (minion rules). Ah, killing characters in teh first session is noted as being discouraging. But it's ok to knock them out with a bunch of crits if they're being timid, just don't make them burn a hero point right off the bat. Consider allowing players to rework unsatisifying characters after the first session. Take an active role in it though, and don't let them totally ditch non-combat skills if the first session was mostly action. Point them at non-combat skills that you know will come up. After that it talks about a shared experience, not an unchangable narrative. It doesn't say 'railroad' but that's what it means. Talk to players and get feedback.

    Well that was a bunch of not-terrible advice.

    Xp. It talks about banked and total xp, not surprising since you spend xp to buy up skills, attributes, and stuff. Two general ways to award xp, bastract and detailed. The abstract method... 500 xp per session. Well... That'll skyrocket the PCs to godhood pretty fast. 200xp to learn a magic school, 100xp for the second rank, 200xp for the third rank => "I learned blink, summon monster, and portal this week!". So we're talking something like a class or two every three sessions, assuming that you're buying more than just the feats and skills required to get to the next class. Sheesh. I usually throw 300xp - 500xp every decent bit of downtime (about 3 sessions) if they've accomplished stuff and been in a few fights. I may be a bit on the slow side (I also tend to forget unless they remind me) but that 500xp a session is faster than even D&D 5e level 1 to 5 blast. Oof. The detailed method screws around with assigning a difficulty to each 'encounter', task, or scene. There's a little chart, easy at 50xp to very hard at 250xp, in assorted 30/40/50 point increments. Plus a note that you should keep an eye out for a tendency to just kill stuff for xp, and not award xp for just random slaughtering. Frankly I tried this method at the beginning and got bored with it. It works, I just got bored with guessing how 'challenging' any particular event was. No, there aren't really any guidelines beyond a set of adjectives from 'easy' to 'very hard'.

    Spending xp. You spend current rank time X amount of xp to buy something up. Remenbering that magic schools, sowrd schools, and power stat are capped by your highest level class. There's an example. There's the xp cost chart, all 9 lines of it. The only thing missing is buying an attribute up from zero. See, there's this crit that can melt off your face for a permanent loss of a point of fellowship... I just pegged it as 200xp like magic and sword schools since raising attributes costs the same as those.

    Non-xp rewards. Well there's always loot. But seriously it talks about gaining backgrounds or assets through play. It's just two paragraphs but at least it gets mentioned.

    The chapter ends without an interlude and goes right into the victims chapter. Ok, it says 'Antagonists' but really, they're mostly just things for the PCs to kill. Right up to the point where they meet a aboleth that slaps four or five dice of Unluck on one of them, dominates another, turns invisible, and then makes a 20m+ jump into melee.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Antagonists. Your baddies to thump.

    Traits: Critters get traits, essentially the same sorts of things that as PC racial or exalt abilities, stuff that isn't a skill or a feat.

    * Amphibious - swim speed of 2x land speed and doesn't normally need to make swimming checks. I'll note that there isn't an 'aquatic' trait, so this will be doing double duty if you want sharks or murder-fish. If I'd paid $50+ for the game I'd be annoyed, as it is I don't really care because basic logic can fill in minor oversights in a free game.
    * Amorphous - x2 HP and it only has a "body" hit location. Used for giant amoebas.
    * Armor plating - natural armor rating, covers the entire critter and represents bone plates, hard scales, shells, exoskeletons, etc.
    * Aura - aura is aura, magic armor.
    * Auto-stabilized - doesn't need to brace heavy weapons and can use the full-auto burst action as a half action.
    * Caster - casts spells, it will list the schools and levels. This says that all critters are treated as having the tested feat (it uses the sanctioned verbiage). Which is odd as the lich entry specifically calls out that they have the tested feat. So I think this is for 'natural' casters, stuff that has innate spell casting abilities. So PC type species I consider tested/untested, innate casting ability I assume is just tested.
    * Crawler - half speed but ignores terrain penalties. If it makes sense I also consider this to be spider like wall walking ability.
    * Daemonic - extra HP and armor equal to constitution. Add this and a little extra description to any normal critter to up the threat level just a hair. Oh, and the armor explicitly stacks with everything.
    * Dark sight - ignores lighting conditions and/or sees in all darkness. This can also be used as a stand in for echolocation, natural radar, whatever extraordinary sense you want that doesn't use light. Personally in that case I'll just write whatever sense it is in my notes.
    * Fear - if it has a fear rating then everyone has to check when meeting it, and possibly when it does certain actions too. Um, I also ignore fear from the same sort of critter. If the PCs meet 3 lesser daemons I only call for one check, and the daemons don't need to check for other daemons. It doesn't say to do this, but 'rules as written and only as written' isn't a concept that works for this game. We knew it was a hideous Frankenstein monster of a system when we started.
    * Flier - it flies, method dependent on the critter. There's either a given speed or you just double the land speed.
    * Machine - artificial constructs, generally immune to the normal stuff that you'd assume, sleep, eating, breathing, vacuum, psychic stuff. They also gain an unspecified amount of armor to all hit locations. This is really for actual robots, golems, that sort of thing. If for some reason you bring up a coal fired robot using pickled mouse brains as a control circuit then that's on you to figure out how it ought to work.
    * Mindless - missing (has a zero for) several social and mental abilities. It is immune to social combat, immune to mind control, and automatically fails any associated skill checks using those attributes. This is a critter with even less happening above the neck that an adventurer who managed to get themselves a zero intelligence or something. I, being a programmer, tend to work out a simplified and general decision tree for these types of critters. Something that fits on two lines like "if senses creatures then challenge, if success then await orders else attack. if attacked seek & destroy for 30 minutes else patrol until battery low then recharge & resume patrol."
    * Phasing - becomes insubstantial and can go through solid objects. Takes a half action to change phases, gets +10 stealth for hiding in objects, is still affected by power weapons and magic/spells. Everything else about phasing is left up to the DM. Again, the game is free.
    * Quadruped - 4 or more legs & not a crawler. x2 land speed.
    * Regeneration - heals the listed amount of HP at the start f it's turn.
    * Resource stat - it has resource points just like a PC, they even specify an exalt type. I actually treat these as full exalts with a power score equal to their level, its just easier that way and solves all the questions about how many points they can spend each turn, how they regain them, etc. Frankly the incarnate daemons and dark mechanus are kind of weak otherwise.
    * Stuff of nightmares - immune to lots of stuff in a similar manner to machines or undead, most importantly bleeding, stunning, and most crits. Specifically they are immune to any critical result other than outright destruction unless it was caused be a spell, power weapon, or other similarly unusual source. This calls back to how you count crits, additive or individual. If you do additive then this isn't a real nasty trait, just sort of annoying that they don't get the midway debuffs at crits 1 to 3 or 4. The monsters won't actually last any longer. If you go with individual crits then this gets ugly, you have to land something like a resilience*3 head shot or a body/limb hit of resilience*5. Those things can just keep coming even though they're on fire and wading through acid.
    * Undead - zombies and skeletons, not vampires. Immune to the normal eat, breathe, sleep, also blood loss and stunning. It doesn't say poison/disease but really, does it need to? Interestingly if you look back at the machine trait it doesn't say they're immune to stunning or bleeding. Again, the game is free, you didn't pay $50+ for professional editing and play-testing.
    * Unnatural toughness - double hit points, including stuff like the sound constitution feat.

    For your "what does it take to splatter a bystander" needs we start off with the general non-combatant. 2s in all attributes, common lore 1, perception 1, craft 1. Speed 4, size/resilience 4/4, static defense 12, HP 4. Unarmed. The system doesn't count anything as 'level 0' so they get to be level 1 on a technicality.

    Green troops/common outlaws are also level 1. They get strength and constitution 3, drop craft for acrobatics 1 (dodge=3k2), intimidate 2, scrutiny 1, weaponry 1, ballistics 1. This gives them an extra meter of speed and another HP. A couple weapons proficiencies, leather armor for the arms, legs, and bodies. a knife, an autopistol, and 2 clips of ammo. The stat blocks helpfully give the entire autopistol stat line and the knife has the strength factored into the damage code. Since the level 1 + skill 1 only gives them 2k1 (8 avg.) attack rolls they need something to make them actually a threat to anyone more skilled than themselves. Spraying 6 rounds from the autopistol at 15m does however get them to 5k2 (~17 avg.) attack and 2k2+(1k0/raise) damage. Half a dozen might inconvenience a starting PC who isn't combat focused. The armor rules of penalizing static defense for non-proficiency were either missed of they're supposed to be proficient with light armor. The agony of lacking professional editors and proofreaders, +2 static defense. [sarcasm]How will we ever manage?[/sarcasm]

    Regular troops/rebels manage to quality for level 2. Add a point of dexterity, and bring weaponry & ballistics both to 2. Speed is now 6, static defense is 13, 7 HP (sound constitution feat twice). They add the jaded feat, las & armor proficiencies. Flak vest & gauntlets for the body & arms, a light helmet or a lousy flak helm (AP 4 instead of 5, your choice if it is flak or not I guess), makes them more survivable. A knife, lasgun, 2 energy packs, a micro-bead, and a torch means that they have at least basic equipment for not being total pushovers. You wouldn't believe how many PCs still forget to bring flashlights until it bites them at least once. Their base attack is now a respectable 4k2 (~16 avg.), or 7k3 (~26 avg.) for a 3-round laser burst at 30m which puts them in range of actually threatening starter PCs.

    Elite soldiers and raiders, level 3. Raise strength to 4 and composure to 3, increase perception to 2 and ballistics to 3. Speed is 7, resilience is now 5 from the level boost, and they have 8 HP... without having anything to earn that extra HP. Maybe their willpower should be 3 as well? They add heavy armor proficiency and get carapace armor to boot, giving them 7 AP in all hit locations. Again either the armor penalties to static defense were overlooked or... something. If you want to be a stickler take 3 off their static defense, reducing it to 10. In addition to the armor they add a rebreather and 2 frag grenades to their equipment. Their shooting is now base 6k3 (25 avg.) or 9k4 (36 avg.) for the 3-round laser burst at 30m. This puts them in range of getting a maximum damage output of 5k2 (17 avg.) on a 21 static defense target.

    That's our sort of basic NPC warrior types running around to get killed. We'll get to some actually interesting threats next time. Not that a squad of chaps with automatic laser rifles, basic tactics, and a good kill zone can't be interesting.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Days, days I tell you, between even getting to tun on my computer at home. Well I've got three pieces of appear here. Let's see what's on them.
    Ah, how to be a 30+ static defense, 20+ hit point, starting character and get to evocation 5 at 3000xp. An attempt at mapping the class path crossovers from book 2 by hand. Finally, more enemies to shoot at.

    Mortal hero level 2: Take an elite soldier, crank up some stats, give them better equipment, and they're pretty much the apex of military forces and generic wandering heroes (non-exalt). Let's see, +1 acrobatics and weaponry, +2 HP, +7 static defense, replace carapace armor with light power armor, swap the knife for a chainsword, drop the lasgun for a pulse rifle. Feat improvements are true grit (1/2 crit damage), luck, and blind fighting.

    A couple errors. Under attacks it says 'lasgun' but it has the correct stats for the pulse rifle listing on the equipment. The chainsword isn't listed in the equipment, but it does have an attack line (plus there's a picture). Apparently the armor vs. static defense penalty error is normal, the static defense is listed as 20 which is correct for the attributes, but the power armor should add either a -2 or a -7 penalty.

    Sabbat thug, level 2: Our first exalt type npc going around doing his vampy thug life thing. Or is that "vampy thug un-life thing"? Eh, they're a level 2 threat and that's probably about right. Equal numbers of these guys against the regular soldiers would be worth betting on. Physical attributes at 3s, intelligence and wisdom at 1 (apparently you have to be a bit dim to sign up as a sabbat), other attributes at 2s. Mostly what you'd assume a thuggy set of skills would look like, mostly 1s with brawling, weaponry, and perception at 2. That means they clock in at 3k1 shooting, 4k2 melee, 4k3 dodge, 3k1 perception. When I do my game notes those common rolls and any casting rolls or special skills the npc uses are all written down already. Saves lots of thinking during the session. If you really wanted to improve this section beyond just cleaning up typos and errors those would be a great starting point. For feats they have their weapon proficiency and sound constitution once.

    Speed 6, resilience 4, static defense 17, 6 HP, no armor. They're armed with their bite, brass knuckles, and a hand cannon. That's the pistol that you have to brace before firing, and considering their ballistics skill they'd better aim too. What makes them not total pushovers is the vampire powers. They get undead resilience, sunlight weakness, blood dependency, 5 resource points of vitae, and dark sight. Effectively a power stat 1 vamp exalt.

    Don't get me wrong, they're still a bit of a pushover, just not total pushovers.

    Sabbat prince, level 3: A better dressed sabbat thug. Good attributes, including strength and constitution at 5s, +1 or +2 to the skills and add politics at 3. Except drive, his driving is just as bad as the thug's. Honestly a good deal more people should probably have drive, unless you consider it more as as combat/stunt driving skill, which is completely possible. Really though, to live up to his hype (I'm absolutely skipping the descriptions unless its something special) he should have more social skills. But since most PCs don't seem to bother with those much any ways (taking or using the skills) this guy is probably a decent threat socially to a PC just on the 4 charisma alone. This guy gets real feats too, quick draw, fearless, swift attack, and wall of steel. This one doesn't wear armor either.

    Speed 9, resilience 5, static defense 22, 12 HP. Attacks are: bite 7k4 for 6k2 rending, brass knuckles at 7k4 for 5k3 impact, and that hand cannon at 5k2 to 35m for 3k2 impact penetration 3. They have the vampy powers, 15 resource points, darksight and fear 1. A reasonable approximation of a power stat 2 vampire exalt. Except that the power 2 vamp would only have 10 resource points.

    Frankly I just have a cheat sheet of the various exalt powers and write "(vamp 3 : resource 15)" in my notes. I generally default them to having a power stat equal to their level in my game. It really only gives them a small boost and a number of the npcs/monsters need it.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Playing around with some ideas. Normal people have something like 3k2 perception, in general. Combined with a bit of googling I've come up with a rough guideline for perception-vision rules. Discerning person scale details, things like a missing eye, a sports team logo on a baseball cap, whether the skirt is leopard print or just polkadots, is DC = distance in meters +/- 5 per halving/doubling from size 4. This is assuming normal daytime, normal vision, etc. Examples: At 20m telling the team of a halfling's hat with an ork baby-punting team logo is dc 25 (hey, ork sports is orky), noticing the scar on a human face is 20, and telling that a size 8 small car has a tail light out is a 15. For gross details, like people wearing helmets, wearing backpacks, car windows being busted out, halve the DC. In high visibility situations (bright blue helmets, hikers in silhouetted on a ridge, white car with tinted windows) either halve the DC again or give people a +1k1 bonus.

    Just spotting stuff goes at DC = 1/100m of distance - size. Again we assume fairly normal and open situations as the base line. Spotting a halfling out on the tundra at 1000m is dc 8, a human standing beside the open road at 3000m is dc 26, the size 16 boat (about 17m long) out at 2000m is dc 4. This is stuff not hiding and without visual obstructions. Our justification here is based on football pitches and the Grand Canyon in Colarado, USA. Unless someone is really trying to hide you will see them if you are looking for them at the other end of a football field, even if it's a child sitting down. Likewise where the Grand Canyon is about 2000m deep you can stand on the rim a clearly see people camping at the bottom, but if someone says "there is one person walking around down there, spot them" it may take you a minute to do so. Based on 3k2 hitting DC 25 at about 10% and counting a round as being about 10 seconds taking about 1- - 12 tries to spot a human at that distance works out.

    I think those numbers should be ok for normal people under normal circumstances. It'll get a bit silly at the 10k7 end of things but jumping, heck probably almost every skill, gets silly at that that end of the chart. I'm a bit on the fence about how to have size affect visula perception. It should, but dealing with the math at the table is something to try to keep as simple as possible without sacrificing believability.

    Whatever. On to the monsters. Zoanoids, werewolves mutated by the Warp, and modrons today. We got monsters here. Nice, shoot-first-no-regrets type monsters. I've used the zonaoids as random horrible beasties, actually as parasites/immune system of a megabeast that the PCs fought their way through. It works.

    Zoanoid thug, level 2, noted as possibly having other abilities not currently listed as the result of warp mutations. It has some stats in brackets because it has the werewolf warform transformation. Strength 3[6], constitution 4[6], fellowship 1 (not a beer buddy), composure 3, others at 2. Skills are essentially a beastial melee combatant spread, brawl, perception, inrimidate, weaponry, all at 2. No armor but does get useful feats, furious assault (bonus attack if an all out attack wounds), heightened smell, and iron jaw (save vs. stunning). No weapon proficiencies, but I think there may have been an assumption that unarmed/natural attacks are exempt? Speed 5[8], size/resilience 4/4[6/5], static defense 12[8], 6[8] HP. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get my players to stop doing "<roll> Oh, it's low. I missed." and actually tell me what they rolled? Years ago they fought D&D 3.5 barbarians with 6 AC, "Oh, it's low. I missed." Ghaaaah!

    Edit: Found an error, static defense is 2 points too low on both sides. I compared to the heavy and the difference was too much for a 1 point dexterity increase.

    Abilities are the werewolf powers of shifting, resilience, and silver bane, resource: 6 rage, and regeneration 1. Similar but significantly different from a power stat 1 werewolf exalt. The only gear is some shredded clothing and the attacks are given only for the warform (frankly there's no reason not to just use the 8k2 bite over the claws since it does more damage and they are otherwise identical).

    I'll note that the bite attack doesn't precisely match the werewolf exalt, it has an extra die kept. Without a power stat the warform transformation is limited to 6 rounds and the were-resilience gives no armor (not that it was anything special to begin with). However having regeneration separate from the were-powers makes it work on all damage all the time. However I don't think the regenration works against critical damage like the werewolf version does. Of course it also doesn't mention that the zoanoid gets Stuff of Nightmares while transformed either. Mostly I think it suffers from the overall werewolf exalt issues and trying to emulate an exalted monster without just having it be that. Still, a perfectly functional murder-critter.

    Zoanoid heavy, level 3, bigger and icky-er. Up strength and constitution to 5, dexterity to 3, and willpower to 4. Add +2 to all the skills except perception (+1 there). Add two HP of sound constitution and power attack. The combat numbers go up about 2 points, resilience by 1, static defense by 3, +2k0 on the damage dice, 10 resource points, more than double HP though. Really it's just a slightly tougher murder-critter. Although, all out attack throws in at 9k4 for 10k2 bitey damage that gets a second try if it wounds. Power attack can move that to 7k4 attack and 10k3 damage, base species as tiefling instead of human puts it at 10k3r1 for -3 static defense. You can always tweak things to be even more murdery.

    Monodrone modrons, the simplest and lowest modron is a level 3 "battle shell of unholy living metal". Strength 4, dexterity 2, constitution 5, wisdom 4, willpower 5, other stats are nil. Skills are perception and the fighting skills all at 3. They have nothing else. Speed 3, size/resilience 5, static defense 10, 10 HP. The only feat is true grit (1/2 crits). Unfortunately that leaves open the question of them being proficient with their own weapons. Again I assume that the writer/book is assuming that stuff is always proficient with their own "natural" weaponry. Weapons are a gauss flayer, 6k3 with 80m doing single shot 2k2 TEARING explosive damage at penetration 12 with unlimited ammo, and a 'melee attachment' for 8k3 rending damage (penetration 4).

    I'll note that I can in no way figure out how the static defense of 10 was derived. By the normal method it should be 18 [10 -(2x size) + 3x(dexterity + wisdom) -> 10 - 10 + 3x(2+4) = 18]. Frankly all it really does is move the monodrone from 'you will hit it' to 'you can possibly miss it', considering that they're at all of 1k1 for dodging because acrobatics is an advanced/trained-only skill.

    "Traits" (I'm not consistent with distinguishing traits vs. abilities, it's all just stuff they do or have as far as I'm concerned) are armor plating 4, aura 4, crawler (1/2 speed, unaffected by terrain), fear 2 (dc 20), mindless (immunities), regeneration 1, stuff of nightmares (ignores non-killing crits & +immunities). They're... durable.

    Actual abilities are: Their gauss weapon, if someone takes damage from their gun it inflicts 1 crit even if they still have HP. The fear triggers on charging and all out attacks, but only affects melee range. "We'll Be Back", which is if they've been 'killed' roll a d10 every round, on 8+ they teleport out, after three rolls they stand back up at zero HP. They're not only durable but they also don't stay down worth a dang.

    Duodrone modrons are a level 4 threat. Strength and dexterity are +1 over the monodrone, constitution and willpower are +3 over which puts them at freaking 8. Thou shalt not spook this bugger. Skills are up to 4, size/resilience +1 to 6, 13 static defense (still no clue, should be 19) and 16 HP, armor and aura both increase to 6. The only other difference is that their gauss flayer can throw down a 3 round burst and they have +2k0 more dice of melee damage.

    The two modrons are, as printed, pretty rough. Every shooting hit will do a point of damage and an explosive crit 1 (arm: drop item, leg: back 1m, body: prone and fatigue, giz: back 1d10m and multiple fatigue, head: blind & deaf 1 round), because 2k2 damage is really quite low to cause wounds but the 12 penetration will put damage through almost all personal armors so the tearing takes effect.

    I've worked out from the old AD&D modrons what a DtD40k7e tridrone and quadrone would be like (I did a pentadrone too but I'm not sure about it yet), and they're nasty too. I did do two changes to modrons in my game, one of which I like and one that I don't. I gave the modrons a number of half actions each round equal to their number. So monodrones get one half action, duos get 2, tris get 3... that's good, I can field the exponential numbers of lower modrons that the lore requires without totally overwhelming the PCs instantly. I also switched the gauss weapon criticals through hit points to the melee weapon. That was a mistake. It makes them much less effective because people just try to stay far away and exchange wounds until the modrons drop and teleport out. It makes combats long and drawn out. I also did a thing where I 3d printed some minis for them (fiddly, not very good, but it's not like anything is available anywhere else for them) and ended up with continually increasing numbers of limbs on them (mono=4, duo=6, tri=9, quad=12), but it doesn't actually do anything except give me an excuse for them to also be wall crawlers because of the ever increasing numbers of legs. They're so slow anyways that it just gives them a slightly more interesting movement because they can go over stuff rather than around, it's really minor.

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    Default Re: [Let's Read] Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th ed. v1.6

    Cultists and heretics oh my!

    Your cultist is a level 1 goober, based on a normal person. Wisdom down to 1, willpower up to 3. For skills take a couple lores, arcana, weaponry, and persuasion all at 2. Lucky, powerful charge, and ordinary weapon proficiency. Static defense is 12... 10 - 8 + 9 = 11. I'm getting tired of this. They get a random hand weapon (attack 3k2, damage 5k2 rending), some heretical writings, cheap robes, and a good luck charm. They're just as much of a pushover as a normal person. Except that they also have resource stat 6 in the form of favor. Of course by the rules you're limited to spending you power stat in resource each round, and they don't have a power stat... Lets look at the npc ability description for resource again "follows all the normal rules for resource stats". I know, I know, it's pedantic to insist on these things. But this is just sloppy. I wouldn't pay money for htis.. Oh wait, I didn't. Carry on then.

    Really, just give them the power stat 1 abilities of a chosen exalt. It's not that much of a boost (aura 2).

    Arch-heretic, what every cultist wan't to grow up to be, a level 3 threat that can't be reasoned with and gets to shout things like "Purge the unclean with fire!" and "Burn the witch!". Attributes are 3s and 4s except willpower 5. Skills go up a point or two and they add ballistics 3. Speed 4 (strength 3 + dexterity 3, ???), static defense 17 (10-8+18=20... plate @ -4=16, ???), resilience 5, 11 HP, lucky, powerful charge, weapon and armor proficiencies, true grit, divine ministration... Really? Divine ministration takes hero points. Fine, call it a 1/day 1d5 heal & remove 1 fatigue.

    Eight resource points, plate armor (but no helmet), dire flail, hand flamer, better robes, and the writings plus charm. So um... Same issues as the cultist. As far as I'm concerned same solution, add power stat and associated abilities. Plus, the only time they'll use that ballistics skill is if they grab someone else's gun.

    Heretek, a failed promethian, a SR cyber zombie, someone who just couldn't stop trying t upgrade themselves, supposedly a level 2 threat. Attributes 2s and 3s, with intelligence and constitution at 4. Skills are lores at 3s, tech use at 3, ballistics, piloting, and driving at 2s. Speed 5, resilience 4, static defense 12 (should be 14?), 7 HP. Some weapon proficiencies, 2 points of all over armor plating, a laspistol and wrench (no weaponry skill hand weapon), stuff of nightmares, immunity to death crits that aren't to the head or gizzards, and resource 3 as pyros. Equipment includes the gun, wrench, tattered clothes, combi-tool, data slate, illegal data, and a watch.

    Call it promethian 1 and they get an extra point of armor. Although perhaps the combination of stuff of nightmares and ignoring most death crits is more powerful than what promethians usually get.

    Dark mechanus, the successful heretek, also probably partially the basis for the tech priest class path in book 2. Supposedly this is a level 4 threat but I don't believe it, the PCs in my game ate one for a snack. Most attributes went up one or two points from the heretek, constitution 6 is the stand out but strength, intelligence, and willpower are all 5s. Exactly the same skills. Meaning no brawling or weaponry skills. Speed 8, resilience 5, static defense 17 (!correct this time!), and 14 HP. Weapon proficiencies, crack shot (weenie +2 damage on ranged attacks), 3x sound constitution, and iron jaw. Given that it makes 6k6 vs dc 10 + 5/round of stun I'm going to say this means pretty much immune to stunning... Wait, stuff of nightmares is immune to stunning. The iron jaw, it does nothing. Editing dude, EDITING! Otherwise you'll be like WotC where people made a joke of looking for a prestige class npc stat block that didn't have errors (I don't recall them ever finding any).

    4 points of subdermal plating, an integrated (unlimited ammo) plasma gun, and a power sword replace the heretek's stuff. The pyros resource is up to 9 (as per power stat 3), stuff of nightmares + some lethal crit immunity is still possibly better than a promethian, plus they get an extra half action each round from mechandrites (extra cyber-arms for the non-WH40K literate) that's limited to stuff the extra limbs could do.

    Ok, seriously, the dark mechanus needs brawling and weaponry. It has a power sword it's proficient in, you shouldn't be rolling 3k1 with that thing (my best guess at how proficient but unskilled combat rolls should go). Plus give it another gun so it has something to do while the plasma gun recharges. Just upgrade the guy to full promethian power stat 4, it's all of +3 resource, +3 armor, a few more integrated weapons, and a couple more useful powers. That would probably get it closer to a real level 4 enemy.

    What's next up? Daemons, some animals, and two robots.

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