Deathwatch campaign thoughts

Being a play-by-post my campaign is not speedy but we just got through a pretty easy fight that I wanted to give a few quick thoughts about. It was basically “here’s a huge mess of orkz, CLEANSE, PURGE, KILL” with a few secondary objectives based around ending the engagement more quickly and dramatically for everyone.

•Space Marines are incredibly tough. I know, duh, but it’s hard to realize when you’re so used to Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, that these dudes are reducing all damage by like 18-20 and have 25-30 Wounds right off the bat, the vast majority of the game up to this point cannot harm them at all. You do not have to baby these guys, they are armies of one.

•I did not observe tactical movement in this encounter and I don’t think I will for subsequent encounters. I did uphold range and we did use cover, and everything was abstract and mapless, and worked well. It feels just a bit petty and pointless to tell the Emperor’s own Space Marines that “no, you’re 5 meters off sorry you can’t melee shit.” No, the Assault Marine jumps right into killing and there are things to kill.

•Enemies are basically paper against Space Marines, my game’s Librarian can torch a Magnitude 30 horde in 1-2 rounds pretty effortlessly, and if we had a Devastator it’d be even more hilarious. Hordes are one of the only ways that monsters from Dark Heresy creature books like Orkz and Eldar can stay relevant, since the size of the Horde gives them not only extra attacks and damage that they will need to do anything to the Marines, but it also gives them rules so they won’t get killed as fast as they would one on one. So with that said I’m going to fiddle with the numbers. I’m basically using Dawn of War and Dawn of War 2 (particularly Dawn of War 2) as my inspiration for this campaign, and in DoW2 Orkz don’t insta-die when a Marine looks at them, they can actually do harm. I’ll be messing around with weapons, stats, talents and such to try to make more dangerous enemies. My players were already consulted and they agree that as they stand, a lot of iconic enemies would just be really pathetic against Space Marines except in Hordes of 50+, and we don’t really want every fight to be against a nebulous blob of enemies.

•In the battle the PCs fought, they were trying to secure some Imperial Guard landers full of tanks and stuff from falling into Ork hands. The Assault Marine leaped up on top of a lander, fought a Nob, and then used his ungodly strength to force open the lander and release a Leman Russ Exterminator from within it, which routed the remaining Orkz (now down from a Magnitude 120 Horde to a Magnitude 30ish Horde). This felt cool to everyone. Not every fight has to be about “kill every enemy you see.” Having things like “capture this objective” or “trigger this event” helps keep these fights from becoming endless slugfests, and it feels Dawn of War 2-ish to boot, which is good.

•Righteous Fury = dead enemy. The Techmarine in the party smashed a Stormboyz nob with his servo-arm, got a Righteous Fury, did so much damage that the guy was basically dead. I described it as the Techmarine smashing the stormboyz’ rocket pack and sending it flying into the sky, exploding in the air overhead.

Once the mission is actually complete I’ll talk some more about the story so far and everything. These are just quick idle thoughts about the combat so far. I feel satisfied with it – I liked setting it up, the PCs liked playing it out. I might do a post briefly describing each Marine, since the players did a really good job of coming up with interesting characters, and they’ve done a great job so far of roleplaying them. Briefly, we have a Storm Wardens Techmarine who loves tanks, an Ultramarines Librarian, a Black Templar Assault Marine who hates the Librarian, and an NPC healbot apothecary who is likely going to die so I can introduce the 4th PC once the mission is over and that player is ready.