Rogue Trader

[weismonsters]

One of the things that struck me even as a kid picking up RT as my first ever tabletop wargame was that the points values assigned to the stats seemed all out of whack. By all appearences, it was a game of futuristic gunfights, but only 1/4 of a point for BS and 1/2 a point for WS?? and 4 points for A, same as wounds. I mean wounds are really useful, they mean you have to get killed all over again before you are really dead. Whereas attacks are those mythical things you might get to use if you dont get shot to cr*p the moment you step within bolter range. In my first games people got shot to bits long before they got into close combat, perhaps mainly because we didnt have hardly any terrain. I later discovered that the points values were taken wholesale from WFB 3rd Editition, where they may have made a bit more sense. I started gaming with the plastic orks and kitted them out with all the stuff, power gloves and whatnot that came in the game, and got panned every time because i had effectively spent a load of points on stuff that was not worth a damn  . In principle close combat was viable-ish if you could persuade the opponent to put some serious amount of terrain down on the table. Not easy when he has a whole army of heavy weapons and artillery and is as stubborn as a mule at rules-lawyery.

There were many ways to loose with orks. Same for genestealers, zoats, chaos, all of which I dabbled in... Lots of fun troops, but if some clown teleports a bombot with X27 virus bomb right into the middle of them on turn 1, they may as well have stayed at home.

That was my experience of it, and I think we persisted with it just because we liked collecting the figures, the source material was fun and there was always this feeling that if the rules would just work properly it would be awesome, and simply we didnt know any better. However, i think if someone was in a more well organised gaming group with experienced GMs and so on, the experience would be very different.

Regarding a miniature for Abdul Goldberg, there is a Reaper Chronoscope mini called Turk who might be suitable.

[thebinmann]

One of the things that struck me even as a kid picking up RT as my first ever tabletop wargame was that the points values assigned to the stats seemed all out of whack. By all appearences, it was a game of futuristic gunfights, but only 1/4 of a point for BS and 1/2 a point for WS?? and 4 points for A, same as wounds. I mean wounds are really useful, they mean you have to get killed all over again before you are really dead. Whereas attacks are those mythical things you might get to use if you dont get shot to cr*p the moment you step within bolter range. In my first games people got shot to bits long before they got into close combat, perhaps mainly because we didnt have hardly any terrain. I later discovered that the points values were taken wholesale from WFB 3rd Editition, where they may have made a bit more sense. I started gaming with the plastic orks and kitted them out with all the stuff, power gloves and whatnot that came in the game, and got panned every time because i had effectively spent a load of points on stuff that was not worth a damn  . In principle close combat was viable-ish if you could persuade the opponent to put some serious amount of terrain down on the table. Not easy when he has a whole army of heavy weapons and artillery and is as stubborn as a mule at rules-lawyery.

There were many ways to loose with orks. Same for genestealers, zoats, chaos, all of which I dabbled in... Lots of fun troops, but if some clown teleports a bombot with X27 virus bomb right into the middle of them on turn 1, they may as well have stayed at home.

That was my experience of it, and I think we persisted with it just because we liked collecting the figures, the source material was fun and there was always this feeling that if the rules would just work properly it would be awesome, and simply we didnt know any better. However, i think if someone was in a more well organised gaming group with experienced GMs and so on, the experience would be very different.

Regarding a miniature for Abdul Goldberg, there is a Reaper Chronoscope mini called Turk who might be suitable.

All true, when we played we didn't even use PVS, we just used the minis we had! ut as we played Orks against amry it was fair, then one day some one turned up the the Harlequins box set.....

Still I think the game was geat and more about a shared exprience that trying to win. But I suppose we came at it as roleplayers.

[thenamelessdead]

Rogue Trader is by far the most fun and atmospheric of all the books I've seen.  The 6th Ed book will be added to my collection (got the rulebooks from 1st to 5th so for completeness' sake) as soon as I can nab it disgustingly cheaply off some unsuspecting eBayer.

[Westfalia Chris]

Rogue Trader is by far the most fun and atmospheric of all the books I've seen.  The 6th Ed book will be added to my collection (got the rulebooks from 1st to 5th so for completeness' sake) as soon as I can nab it disgustingly cheaply off some unsuspecting eBayer.

Actually, I consider 6th Edition the best in a long while, possibly the best since they made the switch from 2nd to 3rd (and all the other ones have been "improved versions" of 3rd). There's a lot of decent rule concepts in it, the fluff part is rather sufficient as a primer, and there's a lot of eye candy.

I must say that I miss the whimsy of 1st and 2nd, but concerning gameplay, 6th is a nice, fluid base that has some fun elements thrown in (deadly terrain etc.) that can be fun.

It could just be a case that I am getting too old to remember all those special rules, and the overall game still suffers from the folks that want to play competitively.