PensacolaWarhammer

Finally, got another new battle report filmed. This time using the new 8th edition rules. It was only my second game using the new rules, so I know mistakes were made. Let me know what you think.

Your Death Guard are truly awesome, and I'm finding myself using this thread as inspiration for my own Death Guard. I have to ask how did you make the Power Scythe for your Terminator Sgt? Also, what did you make the combi-weapon out of for your Praetor? Again, awesome stuff.

I have the errata, and have gone over it a couple of times. However, like any new game, there is a lot of information to sort through and remember. Our experience, I believe, was a huge mixture of inexperience, poor rolling, scale, and forgetting rules. The 1:1 scale did make for a very close quarter encounter, but we where fighting on a city street. I don't exactly classify that as close quarter. Although, I'll certainly make more of an effort to remember and apply modifiers. As for ambushes, I was looking for a way to handle them as they are not really covered in the book. My current plan is to make a player's handbook. That way the players can look over what actions they can take, what each piece of wargear does, how much each piece of equipment is, etc. That way we're not taking most of our time flipping back and forth in the rule book. @Jareddm Thanks for the clarification on Avenger. I wasn't clear on whether the bonus magnitude damage from a flame attack was added or not.

Thanks for the pointers. I ran the same game last night by myself. A round or so of concentrated bolter fire from one player character took the horde down enough that the Librarian had little trouble flaming the rest. I'm wanting to use ambushes and traps the same way, but don't really know how to handle them. What do I do to set one up? When looking for an ambush, how far can the squad see? What happens when they don't spot the ambush? and so on. My learning curve is reaching the point of trying to strike a balance between difficulty and entertaining, which is the eternal struggle. We are setting up to do another practice run this weekend.

My group sat down and did a small field test of Deathwatch this weekend. I have the full story up on Pensacola Warhammer. The quick and dirty of it is that it didn't go so well. Everybody came away with the feeling that something was wrong. I created a simple search and rescue mission in a small section of city. Between me and some of the people playing we had miniatures and a board to play everything out. I went with a 1 inch equals 1 meter scale. I tried my hand at creating an ambush situation. When combat came around that's where things devolved quickly. A Mag. 30 Hormaguant horde and a Shrike where in the buildings across the street and were on top of the kill team before they could do anything. We botched the rules for damaging a horde particularly with a Librarian, so the horde killed a player character and was challenging the others before it was destroyed. The Shrike alone almost killed the rest of the team. I ran the scenario again last night but did a 1 centimeter to 1 meter scale. I also factored in the rules for harming a horde with bolters and a psychic flame attack. The encounter was much easier: almost too easy. A single player character only suffered 6 wounds and 1 point of Insanity. My questions to the community: 1. How do you handle/simulate ambushes on a kill team squad? 2.If you play with miniatures, what scale do you use? 3. Our Librarian is a level 3. If she uses a pushed Avenger on a horde, does it count as 6 hits on the horde along with 1d5+8 hits that a flame weapon does to a horde? I would love to here suggestions.

@Cmdr Shepard You probably know, but those maps are created using Photoshop. The land area is grabbed from Google Earth. What that land area is; I don't know. It's then over laid with more images from Google Earth. The space port is any airport of your choosing. The PDF base is a image of the Pentagon and the surrounding area from Washington DC. The rest of the city is probably an assortment of city images, again from Google Earth. On top of that, the effects are layered on: the circles and names for the points of interests, the district boundaries, etc. I don't have Photoshop, but I would imagine that it's not very difficult. As for the Watch Captains character sheet, I'll probably begin working on it today. Check the blog post with his back story sometime today or tomorrow to see it.

@Jareddm Thanks for the suggestion. I have checked out these maps and agree they are nice. I've just been flip flopping between the different missions. @Cmdr Shepard I probably will make up a character sheet for the captain since I'm making a character sheet for any NPC that I think will become a recurring character.

@Cmdr Shepard This is the thinking and logic that I'm going with for the Blood Angel character. Besides, almost no chapter recruits from just one world. If they did, the recruit pool would be significantly lower than the already low number that they get. This would cause zero growth for chapter. Basically, the number of people they bring in would be less than the number of battle-brothers they lose in battle. Like I said, it's a very small detail that I'm not going to worry over too much. First off, he's not a player character. He's the persona that I, the GM, can player through and interact with the player characters, so this level of detail was probably not needed. Second, only three of the six people that will be playing the game know the 40k universe in any level of detail, and even we don't know that much about the Blood Angels.

Yeah, I saw that the Blood Angels recruit only from Baal and its moons a bit too late. It's a minor point as you pointed out, and one that I'm not going to worry or debate over too much. I didn't intend for him to be a Bruce Wayne when I wrote him, but I'll take it . Thanks for the complement though. The character actually just sort of came to me, and I was able to write him up in an hour.

Got another character up on my blog. It's the Watch Captain that I'll be taking on as the GM. Naturally, he doesn't have a character sheet. This is just to give me and the players an idea of who is in charge and calling the shots.

Check back tomorrow as I'll have a massive blog update with the Watch Captain's background, a Horus Heresy tactica, and a few house rules that I've developed for Deathwatch.

@blackoption The squad leader's reward will generally be given through Renown depending on the success (an increase in renown) or failure (a lose of renown). The squad leader will be eligible for extra XP at the discretion of the Watch Captain (GM). As to rewards for how the squad performs, it will be requested by the squad leader and then will be a consensus between the squad leader and Watch Captain as the Watch Captain will have little knowledge of what details happened on the ground. In your examples, the Watch Captain will not know that a brother my have covered another brother, or that a brother performed a move without being told that ended up syncing with the group's plan of attack. That will be in the hands of the squad leader and the small pool of XP he is given to dull out to the squad. He may not think that covering a brother is worth the time or effort to request additional XP from the Captain; however, he may fill that a brother taking the imitative and performing a move that helps the whole group should deserve a bit more. I think this will also be a helpful way of creating and awarding honors and distinctions. I think this also takes some of the responsibility and attention off the GM and puts it in the hands of one of the players. I can focus on playing NPC and being the enemy while the squad leader can focus on the actions and history of his squad mates. I think the ideas that I have are balanced and reasonable. It makes being the squad leader a bit more important, and it puts some of the destiny of the players and their squad in their own hands. Of course as the rule book states, the GM has final say.

Thanks guys for the support and suggestions. A quick update. The backstory for the first player character is up on my blog. The character sheet will be post as soon as the player gets a chance to roll for his armor history. As for campaign, I haven't settled on doing "Extraction" from the core rule book or "Final Saction" and "Oblivion's Edge" off of Fantasy Flight's support page. I've come up with a few ideas to extend "Extraction" and maybe even tie it into "Final Saction". I'd like to here your thoughts. @blackoption I have been working on a host of NPC, mostly ones that will appear in the game and possiblly do some fighting. The watch captian I figured would would just be me acting as the GM, but I like the idea of actually having a character and acting through the character. Different captians would have different personalities and therefore, I would basically be a "different GM" depended on the captian. A thought right now that may get tanked during actual game play. As for the squad leader and command, my mechanic that I think I've settled on is basically a Action cost and possible command check. If the player character can get the command out in 6 seconds or less, it's a free action. More detailed commands would cost either a whole action or half action and require command checks. To give players a bit of an incentive to follow orders, there would be small reward of XP to be dulled out by the squad leader. The reward would only be maybe 5 to 10 points, enough to make players follow commands, but not enough to force or railroad players into following every order. Let me know what you think.