Tag: Warhammer 40k

This week, my players ended up exploring the byzantine bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man. Maybe it’s fitting, then, that most of my thinking this week has been about bookkeeping.

Character bookkeeping, I mean. It’s not an especially sexy topic, but it’s something that really makes a difference for how easy it is to run a roleplaying session. You want to be able to tell, at a glance, just what rules apply to a character – what their abilities are, what modifiers are affecting them, what they can and can’t do. Because having to stop all the time and flip through the rulebook is freaking annoying.

One of the charms of Powered by the Apocalypse style games is that they seek to make bookkeeping easy. Rules are kept as modular as possible, so that you usually just deal with one paragraph of text at the time, not three or four different ones that are spread throughout the book. When that isn’t possible, information is often repeated so that it appears everywhere it needs to be, even if that means adding to the page count. It’s part of what makes these games so smooth to run.

As I’ve mentioned before, when porting Dark Heresy I eventually had to admit that I couldn’t make it quite that nice. I’ve tried my hardest to not make rules depend on other rules that depend on still other rules, but it’s still a big, sprawling, messy game set in a big, sprawling, messy world.

For example, one thing that I struggled with in today’s session was constantly having to adjust the options available for fighting for the particular weapon the players were using. You see, my rules for ranged combat go like this:

When you unleash the fire and fury, roll +Ballistic Skill. 10-14, choose 1 option below. You may spend Righteous Fury to choose additional options, 1 for each Righteous Fury spent. Each option can only be chosen once. 15-19, choose 2 options. 20+, choose 2 option, and hold Righteous Fury.

• You manage to disengage from melee and get onto at least a range of reach to the nearest enemy.
• You hit a single enemy within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.
• You inflict 1 damage on an enemy Horde within range of your weapon.
• A single enemy who has you within range of their weapon does not hit you and inflict weapon damage on you.
• An enemy Horde who has you within range of their weapons does not hit you and inflict weapon damage on you.
• You are not forced to retreat or to take or stay in cover.
• You cause a single enemy within range of your weapon to find or stay in cover.
• You establish overwatch; the first single enemy within range of your weapon to leave cover (including to fire a shot of their own) takes 1d10 damage, reduced by Armour.
• You do not need to reduce your Ammo by 1. This can not be chosen for an Ammo-S weapon.

Examples: Firing a lasgun, throwing a knife, sniping from ambush.

But when you’re wielding a weapon with the Blast tag (such as the frag grenades my players were flinging around), the following extra rules apply:

When you unleash the fire and fury with a weapon with the blast tag, you may also choose the following options:

• You inflict 1d10 damage on an enemy Horde within range of your weapon.
• You hit every character in a group standing closely together (such as enemies engaged in melee, allies covering each other’s sides, etc) within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.

However, when you unleash the fire and fury with a weapon with the blast tag, you may not choose the following options:

• You hit a single enemy within range of your weapon and inflict weapon damage on them.
• You cause a single enemy within range of your weapon to find or stay in cover.
• You establish overwatch; the first single enemy within range of your weapon to leave cover (including to fire a shot of their own) takes 1d10 damage, reduced by Armour.

So while I can normally just copy-paste in the list of a player’s options as they succeed at something, neat as you please… here I have to edit the whole thing on the fly every time (okay, so after the first time I guess I should have saved the edited list, but I didn’t think of that at the time). And there seems to be no easy solution to it, beyond writing up the full list of options for every single weapon in the book… and that seems a little much even for PbtA.

And then there are all the things that players can do, which are adjusted when they take certain Advances, and the things they implicitly can’t do because there are other Advances that allow you to do those things… It’s a lot.

I think maybe I should restructure the port into a more traditional format. Man, Warhammer 40,000 fights back hard against being PbtA-ified! Possibly it thinks that it’s heretical or something…