On a scale of 1 to Warp Gate Opening In My Head! how broken (if at all, despite comments across the webway), unbalanced or whatever is Deathwatch?

Is the errata as hideous as Nurgle's hairy arse? Is it minimal? Has there been a second printing to include such?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452201On a scale of 1 to Warp Gate Opening In My Head! how broken (if at all, despite comments across the webway), unbalanced or whatever is Deathwatch?

Is the errata as hideous as Nurgle's hairy arse? Is it minimal? Has there been a second printing to include such?

1. Deathwatch isn't unbalanced.

The errata isn't too bad. It's 6 pages + a cover and an FAQ, which is significantly shorter than Dark Heresy's was at this point in its development. Most of it is clarifications rather than outright changes. I've played two sessions out of two so far without the need to consult it for anything.

Dunno about second printings with the errata yet. Probably not considering how long it took for DH to get one that incorporated the errata.

Deathwatch marines are extremely powerful, and the rules reflect that. That doesn't make them "broken".

I'm thinking of getting it. All things considered regarding my feelings about ffg's approach. However there is one thing that really bothers me: the lack of adversaries.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452252I'm thinking of getting it. All things considered regarding my feelings about ffg's approach. However there is one thing that really bothers me: the lack of adversaries.

The basics are in the corebook already. Mark of the Xenos or whatever it's called is gonna have more. You can recycle enemies from DH and RT pretty easily with a bit of tweaking. Plus, it's pretty easy to make up your own monsters and enemies. I do it all the time.

The core book is very basic. One daemon, no chaos sorcerers, lords, other creatures, some heretics and random chaos marines. No orks, no eldar, no dark eldar, no kroot, no vespid, no necrons. That's not very encouraging.

I'll be honest I don't really want to make things up and I'd feel a lot better about it if there were official sources for these things as this is a combat game and these are core antagonists. So this is a big deal for me.

And i realise other people have made up stuff of their own, but i've no idea if it's balanced since there are no toolkits, afaict, to work from.

What do you need for adversaries?  Your characters run into orcs, genestellers, eldar whatever.  Just look at how tough their characters are think of how tough of an encounter you want to have and stat out your monsters accordingly.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452268The core book is very basic. One daemon, no chaos sorcerers, lords, other creatures, some heretics and random chaos marines. No orks, no eldar, no dark eldar, no kroot, no vespid, no necrons. That's not very encouraging.

I'll be honest I don't really want to make things up and I'd feel a lot better about it if there were official sources for these things as this is a combat game and these are core antagonists. So this is a big deal for me.

And i realise other people have made up stuff of their own, but i've no idea if it's balanced since there are no toolkits, afaict, to work from.

If you need a monster book, Creatures Anathema has a lot of what you're looking for.

Quote from: kryyst;452269What do you need for adversaries?  Your characters run into orcs, genestellers, eldar whatever.  Just look at how tough their characters are think of how tough of an encounter you want to have and stat out your monsters accordingly.

According to what?

I assume what you would need are equivalent stats (for attacking, interacting, whatever) and rules for any special abilities traits and powers they might have, be they Daemons, Chaos Sorcerers, giant robots, Squiggoths, or Vogon poets.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;452271If you need a monster book, Creatures Anathema has a lot of what you're looking for.

I will never understand FFG.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452277According to what?

I assume what you would need are equivalent stats (for attacking, interacting, whatever) and rules for any special abilities traits and powers they might have, be they Daemons, Chaos Sorcerers, giant robots, Squiggoths, or Vogon poets.

According to your characters.  If your characters are say on average 50's and 5's across the board and you want to create a tough encounter then there are the stats for your creatures.  If you want to have a mob make each one weaker, a boss make 1 a lot tougher and with more wounds.  You want them to be able to shoot lightning bolts out of their ass then have them do so.

Alternatively if you don't want to do so much on the fly take any opponent stat block in the book and use it for all similarly leveled creatures, perhaps tweaking out strenght/toughness or WS and BS.  Perhaps more agile vs tough whatever.  Slight tweaks and a reskin goes a long way.

Quote from: kryyst;452279According to your characters.  If your characters are say on average 50's and 5's across the board and you want to create a tough encounter then there are the stats for your creatures.  If you want to have a mob make each one weaker, a boss make 1 a lot tougher and with more wounds.  You want them to be able to shoot lightning bolts out of their ass then have them do so.

Alternatively if you don't want to do so much on the fly take any opponent stat block in the book and use it for all similarly leveled creatures, perhaps tweaking out strenght/toughness or WS and BS.  Perhaps more agile vs tough whatever.  Slight tweaks and a reskin goes a long way.

I don't want to do that. I want the game designers to give me this stuff. It's beyond absurd to design a SPACE MARINE game with piss all info on adversaries beyond 'do it yourself' or 'fudge here'. This is not why I buy game books.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452281I don't want to do that. I want the game designers to give me this stuff. It's beyond absurd to design a SPACE MARINE game with piss all info on adversaries beyond 'do it yourself' or 'fudge here'. This is not why I buy game books.

Since creativity ain't your thing, you should just buy the adventure book which has additional stats for antagonists, as well as prewritten adventures, so you can have the game designers do all the work for you.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;452284Since creativity ain't your thing, you should just buy the adventure book which has additional stats for antagonists, as well as prewritten adventures, so you can have the game designers do all the work for you.

And now for the snark.

I didn't say i wasn't inclined to creativity. I said that I didn't want to do all the work of creating balanced stats for 40k monsters and enemies when I could be using FFG's own efforts (which, presumably, would be balanced and accurate) to write and plot adventures. Expecting someone new to the game, and quite an involved game, to design, from scratch, necrons or whatever for himself is a tall order, and it's also unreasonable. I want to buy this game so I dont have to do all the work myself otherwise why bother.

Stats from different games are scaled differently and are hardly economical purchases. Buying an adventure book solely for a couple of pages of stats, which is what would be happening since i'm writing my own, is crazy, and it's also more than I can afford. Logistically it makes no sense either (and i bet there are a ton of GM's pirating these stats rather than paying full price for the entire book).

Unfortunately RT had the exact same problem. I don't understand this at all and it's seriously impacting my decision to buy thsi game. Supplements shouldn't be required, they should compliment the game not be an ad hoc necessity with a grab bag of essentially useful info.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;452281I don't want to do that. I want the game designers to give me this stuff. It's beyond absurd to design a SPACE MARINE game with piss all info on adversaries beyond 'do it yourself' or 'fudge here'. This is not why I buy game books.

I completely, 100% support Ghost Whistler and this has been my #1 complaint about the 40K line since the beginning.

I don't understand how you can get all the stats for everything in the entire 40K wargame right now and for a couple hundred bucks total; yet can't get even 5% of the stats for those same creatures by buying FFG's entire catalog (which runs you a whole lot more).

It's been what, five years now and we have maybe a total of two or three ork stats, two or three eldar stats, two or three tyranid stats?!?!  It's just plain stupid.

I can see how apologists could argue against including all the xenos, vehicles, etc, for the other two lines (though I still think those arguments are crap).  But for a Space Marine game not to include it?  It just means the people behind the game simply don't get it.

Either that or it's deeply cynical marketing.

But then everything is sold to the player/gm through the filter of FFG's version of the 40k universe, so stats for Jericho Reach specific aliens are given equal footing to Orks in the upcoming Mark of the Xenos, and the Tyrnaids invading are a specific Hive Fleet. That's all well and good, but I want the book to be saying 'here's how to create a Chaos army to fight against, here are the ruinous powers the archdaemon and his supplicant sorcerer can wield, here's the stuff for an Eldar strike team shadowing the Marines as both search for an ancient weapon, here's some Necrons you don't want to awaken'. All these cool things that are encompassed in stuff like Dawn of War - and I have to rely on the interweb to do it all for me, or buy a series of books at vgreat expense all at cross purposes in order to do it properly. I don't get it.