In which I talk about a bunch of games that are not, in fact, Dungeons and Dragons, but are only grouped with Dungeons and Dragons for the Rubes.
So I've been running for my friends (you can hear them on the Podcasts) a bunch of Rogue Trader games over the last year, about once a week. This is Warhammer 40k, of course, the idea that the players are the officers of a napoleonic space ship cruising, well, space for fun and profit.
It has been an unholy mess. Don't get me wrong, I've loved the setting since it was just a crude sci fi expansion of Warhammer Fantasy, though I find my interest in it has waned over the last decade, peaking sometime around 1999-2000 or so, and slowly dropping ever since. No small part of the issue is simply how BAD the intellectual property has been managed.
Now, if Citadel/Games Workshop were some small 'fly by night' company operating out of some dudes garage, I could forgive them for many of their many problems. You know: Releasing a new edition when only half the army books have been released. Not releasing new versions of core army books (codex for the rubes...) until three or four new editions, going to cheaper plastic models and doubling the price over the old lead (white metal, a lead free version of pewter, actually) models, or more and other general fuckwittedness are just some of the problems.
Look: you employ a small army of writers and designers, you are mostly recycling (or were) models that were designed and molded over a decade ago. You have NO excuse not to put out codices (the plural of codex, natch) fast enough to get them all out the same year as a new edition. Doubly so, since at least HALF of any given codex is recycled fluff text from the last release!!
And don't give me that bullshit about 'game balance'. Not only is 40k among the worst ever tabletop games for balance (Lessee::: Broken unkillable/ghosting Necrons, Stompy bug armies... four editions of Tyranids that were nigh well unbeatable by any normal army.... then the Demon-bomb army, and greater demons that can win most battles single handedly (taking out six to eight times their point value if they do!)... yeah, you guys are really worried about balance, mate), but if you haven't 'balanced' the core armies before you've released the new edition, well maybe you aren't ready to actually release the new edition, are you?
Now, Privateer Press, at least when it comes to the RPG version of Iron Kingdoms is damn near as bad, releasing a single fucking book about once a year. Ironically, since their war-game gets damn near a whole new edition in the same time frame, this means by the time IKRPG gets its third book, the first two books may well be rendered obsolete from a setting standpoint. Yet, why? I could easily produce a single book of the IKRPG, to their standard of page count and quality in a single year... working alone and subcontracting art. Privateer Press lists some sixty people in the credits of their own books, meaning any given person is either a fucking leech on the corporate teat, or is responsible for approximately five pages of content.
And its not like they are making up huge mounds of shit, either. Most of the books are drawing extremely heavily on existing content, and the 'careers' are damn near boilerplated.
But back to Rogue Trader and why it was a fucking nightmare to run.
Well, from a basic setting standpoint the game sort of contradicts the setting. See, Warhammer 40k operates under a sort of 'great man of history' setting assumption. Titans stride forth on mighty battlefields, accomplishing all sorts of shit, and attracting followers in vast numbers by sheer dint of their badassness. I mean, if you are inherently bad-ass enough, eventually an army will form around you, as if by magic, and wage war on your behalf.
This is hard coded into every bit of game fiction. Assassins have to be selected by destructive weeding out of thousands of potential applicant/children, then trained their entire lives, given nearly entire body makeovers using superhuman and nearly lost technologies in genetic modifications and cyberware, and unique equipment held as almost holy relics from the lost golden age... just to be able to do their jobs, that's how bad ass every person of interest is in the setting. Some random, dissipated noble lord, with a thousand years of inbreeding and inheritance decides to cede from the Imperium? As pathetic a specimen as he sounds, you can damn well bet he can eat entire regiments of infantry and shit the bones like artillery shells. Anything less than a demigod level killing machine is doomed to failure if you send them to do the job.
Except, in Rogue Trader, the captain of the ship is insanely fragile and nearly useless when not at the helm of the ship... which makes running the game an exercise in frustration or reduces everything to ship to ship combat. In fact, the more disposable anonymous you are the more bad ass you are, apparently, allowed to be.
That's a minor beef, however. I could simply chose to make the ship captain a Non-player character who never leaves the ship (Picard, calling Picard!), and let everyone play 'cool characters'... sure.
But then we're dealing with the system. See, RT is the second in a series, and its pretty obvious that Fantasy Flight (The publisher of the RPG) and the Black Library (the arm of Game's Workshop responsible for non war-game IP), are still working out kinks in the system, so much so that by Only War the games start looking seriously non-compatible.
Only, they aren't really tinkering at all with the fundamental game play. No, at best they tinker on the margins of that, preferring to spend all their energy on character progression. Sigh. Progression is mostly fine, if you accept the premise of 'class' based leveling (or if you don't, as of Only War).
No, the real problem is that roughly three quarters of the combat rules are in the Talents chapter of character building. You can't evaluate a bad guy until you've memorized three hundred fucking Talents so you know exactly what he can and can't do in a fight! For players it is nearly as bad.
Then there is the oddity of combat itself. I mean, reduced to its simplest elements it is fairly fine, though it really does favor specialized characters. However, some weapons can prove nearly useless in combat (lasguns, which we found almost never wounded even the comparatively fragile space elves!), while others are so lethal that if you use them against even heavily armored player characters you are pretty much asking to reset the campaign (oh... rocket launchers, plasma guns... that sort of thing...).
Let just say it was turgid but still managed to be like playing catch with a live grenade and leave it at that, the worst of all worlds.
But it was, ironically enough, starships that killed the game. Oh... not too much the ships (though I could rant on them long enough...), but warp travel. The core book is reasonably fine, in that it more or less glosses over everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING... except ship to ship combat (which... ugh... though STILL better than watching your players struggle to kill one nameless, unimportant space elf because...reasons.) No, my mistake was using the Navis Primer rules for warp travel. Things were fine when the trips were short-ish, though the lack of a player character navigator meant the ship was nearly constantly lost in space due to really pathetic crew rating rules. It was the first reasonably long trip that killed it for us. Something like twenty or thirty dice rolls later, and an hour into the evening they were roughly half done with the trip, several areas of the ship were uninhabitable due to 'space gribbly infestations', a warp beast was stalking the halls, and the entire crew was suffering delusions of mutation... sigh. This was, for the record, with the benefits of a warps bane hull (making them much less likely to suffer awkward results), and a 'fast' ship engine, reducing the total number of rolls per trip to about sixty percent.
Even just waving my hands and saying they arrived with 20 percent of the crew lost wasn't enough to recapture the 'magic' of game. We'd had enough.
I might say the issue is tables. The game is full of tables, but they are all small, and frequently refer to other small tables. Some people swear by random tables. I'm not really one of them, but if you're gonna do random tables, you have to put a substantial amount of work into them. Splitting everything into smaller tables just makes for shitty results and tons more time spent rolling and flipping pages. Better one big table, really.
So we're gonna try traveller for a bit. I've been given fair warning that my players don't want to get bogged down in ship logistics, which kinda makes me sad, because, well.... Traveller, but there you have it. Still, for all the books I have, I know this much: There is no bog in Traveller nearly so boggy as ANYTHING in Rogue Trader.
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