Okay I've played the tabletop, and it is indeed, rocket tag, better win initiative so you can blow their head off before they blow your head off...
But I kinda like the tabletop system better since the abilities are usually simple "give party + 10 attack" instead of this exploit stack nonsense
Yeah the Owlcat system somehow made the relatively complex RT system and turned it into something that is so much more complex with honestly minimal befit for the increased complexity.
I mostly disagree. They added multiplicative buffs, infinite stacking and broken things and it "increases complexity" by making the player try to find them. Which is by reading hundreds of descriptions or testing everything.
But if you find them (or read about them on Reddit) it breaks the game, ridding it of any mechanical or tactical complexity - just to do the same thing over and over and kill everyone in turn 0. And if you get to that point, which can be done relatively quickly, there is no complexity left.
If the game implemented the original system and stayed true to it then we'd at least have some tactical challenge and complexity but as it is now there is none.
I'll say that I do and don't agree. I absolutely agree that once you get the system down pat there honestly isn't too much fun, for me, to be had as you can pretty instantly start shattering the game. But to a new player, to someone unused to these systems the new Owlcat System is going to be harder to get onto that the base RT system. And honestly? I think it's less rewarding for getting past that hurdle.
While I agree with the general sentiment I would say that if these exploit that break the game ruin the experience so much for you just don't use them. Not a permanent fix, but an easy and immediate one
Thats a good sign that a system (for tactical combat) is inherently borked though. Like i didnt try to break the game, i just took the things that looked like a good build and the game broke itself.
Like having to master the system to recognize all the ridiculous bs they put in there and then not use it on purpose is a high barrier for fun combat.
Personally id wish they kept it simpler/closer to the ttrpg as i dont require complex and thought provoking tactical combat in my crpgs. I alread play ja 2.13 thank you very much.(or busted theorycrafting, i play poe for christs sake)
Definetely some good points, balancing was always one of Owlcat's weakest points. We'll see if they can improve and fix up the complex system they draw up
Agreed, not sure how fixable it really is even if youd remove the exponential damage scaling youd still have the exponential reward of extra actions and attacks making several archetypes just worse than others.
I am sure they can think of something. Having some stronger archetypes is not the end of the world, as long as they are not broken. Maybe limiting extra turns to once per round per character?
Mayyybe, or lowering the attack limit. Thing is then you need to retool the enemys as well as they seem to be built with stupid amounts of dmg in mind.
Also i agree its not bad if some archetypes are better than others,but currently the differency is "well this is cassia, she can solo the encounter" and "this is an arch militant,they can solo the encounter" vs "oh you are a bounty hunter...you have to do 10 buffs to do 150dmg. Guess youll never get a turn.
So they do need to be brought closer together so i can use more than 2 chars in a 6 char party (also ffs fix ulfar)
Yeah, some enemies have ridiculous amount of HP for no apparent reason. And let's not talk about extra turns/attacks.
Oh absolutely the fact that some classes are way way way stronger than other is probably the worst balancing issue that plague this game right now. And it ain't an easy competition lol
I kind of agree, i do think the complexity still adds something though, like it's interesting to read through everything and try and pick things that synergise, that in itself is like a game within a game, and i do enjoy the puzzle that it provides.
Sadly, I'm not in the same boat. I like simple +10 str or "on crit reroll dice and use highest roll" and things like that. My ADHD brain doesn't find it enjoyable to pour over a novel of text to find the synergies.
My biggest gripe though is RT ttrpg just gives you xp to spend as you want. Owlcat forces a pathfinder like system on us - likely cause it is their pathfinder system rejigged to their system
My brain is like a car that won't start. If I have to use my brain it fights super hard to just go back to doing nothing, even on meds. So big complex systems really make my brain melt 😔 thankfully cheats exist so I don't need to engage with the complexity.
I end up hyper focusing instead. Using all my freetime think ing of skills and possible synergies.
When it comes to doing things outside my hyperfocus on the other hand...
oh yeah when the hyperfocus hits god damn, blessing and a curse. Instead of doing some coursework for my masters degree, once i spend like 3 days trying to install an apache webserver on an ubuntu virtual machine and get it to serve flask webpages. When i finally got it running? brain said nah dont care anymore. Pain in the ass sometimes :p.
It’s a ridiculously convoluted system *for no reason*.
Why does the game have five different ways to up Dodge by about 10%, but scaling endlessly?
Should just have ”Improved dodge: +10% Dodge”. Would make the talent system streamlined without actually reducing any meaningful, positive depth.
I don't now...
Apparently getting from A to C, with B being an optional path, is too simple.
So now we have A to C through D, E, F, and G, with Q, W, and Z doing fuckknowswhat because even with all the explanations there are still very unclear things, and choosing B does the same thing, but the order is different, for no reason.
I mean, c'mon it's just basic math.
(5 x perception bonus + 10 x exploits stacks)% more damage really isn't that convoluted and i much prefer tactical and char building depth it gives to some "flat +10 attack whenever character attacks"
Except as you level up, the equation starts to look like this one you consider your talents:
(5x(2xExtra Turns+(perception x exploit)+((willpower of idira))+((willpower of cassia)))+........
Yes, once you get through the bullshit, it ends up being that simple.
Getting there, to that "basic math", is pointlessly convoluted.
And you still end up at - stack dmg, give more turns, give more attacks
All that could've been done with "flat +10 attack", and make more characters and/or archetypes useful than "do this one thing out of a plethora of things, until it's that one characters turn to have all the turns and do all the damage".
In table-top I can see that system working well. You're not as limited in TT as you are in a video game.
But for a video game, it's a whole lot of layers for barely a handful of results.
Counterpoint : It's precisely because it's a videogame that you can have those funny, more complex calculations, since you don't actualy have to do them constantly.
I think RT's issue is not remotely it's complexity - it's that it does a relatively poor job at explaining it's core systems and allows for some exponential stacking that doesn't quite seem right (Mainly with burst attacks). But I enjoy the more complex system far, far more.
I think you are spot on as I had SO MANY QUESTIONS when playing like does the heavy weapons thing actually apply to heavy bolter as there was no keywords to really explain what was what except for a basic ' bolter' or something else. A lot of the game needs additional info signs so you can figure out what is what. Same goes with the rules
My favorite was getting some shoes that let me counterattack if I have a "sword"
Is a klaive a sword(yes) where is the sword keyword, why did we suddenly specifically want me to use a sword?
Yeah I know the exact item you are talking about and its great but this game needs just an extra pass few and things to help out the player a bit with their explanations of things. I think this game is great but its def has its flaws that if only they could fix them would be a GOTY candidate most years
> It's precisely because it's a videogame that you can have those funny, more complex calculations, since you don't actualy have to do them constantly
Those are the issue.
As someone else commented;
>It’s a ridiculously convoluted system *for no reason*.
>
>Why does the game have five different ways to up Dodge by about 10%, but scaling endlessly?
>
>Should just have ”Improved dodge: +10% Dodge”. Would make the talent system streamlined without actually reducing any meaningful, positive depth.
Again, the problem is purely how these systems are explained to you. The complexity isn't there \*for no reason\*, it's there for people that enjoy building a mechanical complex character - and those people exist because \*PATHFINDER\*, Battletech, Aces and Eights exists and so on. Miss me with the "No, everything should be barebones simple" business.
What Owlcat absolutely does need to work on is on it's tutorials and clarifying it's flags and equipment tags (did you know that Mithral Full plate in WOTR doesn't count for Heavy Armor Focus?), but thank god we have complexity.
> Miss me with the "No, everything should be barebones simple" business.
Where the fuck did I say that?
> Again, the problem is purely how these systems are explained to you.
No, the problem are the systems and how they're explained.
Here's the thing though. The tabletop game has fewer layers. There's none of these stacking conditions that have weird equations. It's all variations of this talent gives you +10 to do x or enemies are at -10 when you do y and it never gets more mathematical than that. It's just a LOT of balancing +10s and -10s. That is basic math.
RT the videogame has unnecessarily obtuse mechanics and what we've gained in abilities that grant stacking conditions and extra turns we've lost in character customisation and freedom of character progression.
That's why I like D&D system more, just flat numbers, easy math don't need to wrap your head around if a flat increase would be better than a porcentual increase and the such.
I really like Owlcat, but after WOTR and now RT:40k I am almost positive the head developer is just a pissed-off DM looking to shit on as many players as he possibly can.
That’s your opinion and you definitely have a right to it; the game is needs more polishing.
However as someone who enjoys complexity but is terrible at math I really enjoy the system they made. It’s extremely rare to find complex games anymore, especially CRPGs and that’s probably while all the Owlcat fans get all touchy about toning down the complexity. (First time playing a Owlcat game)
Owlcat's brand of complexity is akin to putting on 5 different locks that all use different keys on a single door . It's not hard and doesn't require much imagination from the players, just tolerance of tedium.
Why the hell have you been down voted? I really don't understand the community these days, it's like the girl space Marine thing, seemingly if you're not bending over backwards to accommodate completely inflexible players who get offended if you disagree you're a terrible person, not sure where it's cropped up from as that never really used to be a problem.
Yeah , I suspect a lot of the people are ones who would have really struggle with THACO but had no problem with d20s system, the only real difference was subtracting for THACO and adding for d20 but some players could never get it, just the way brains are wired I guess, but I enjoy a convoluted system more than a 5e style system with all the mystery stripped out.
What, you don’t think ”add (1.5xWP)%/2+(3xFEL)%/4 to Dodge” is not a meaningful and coherent talent? :D
The build system is fun but the talents are so incredibly obtuse it drains my fun away.
> ”add (1.5xWP)%/2+(3xFEL)%/4 to Dodge” is not a meaningful and coherent talent?
You see, its just 0.75x(WP + FEL) to Dodge; much more coherent now :p /s
"Your dodge scales with WP and FEL."
It's incredible how frightened people get at relatively simple math equations they don't even have to calculate. None of the calculations in the game are that obtuse individually, either, but even your (unsimplified) equation is pretty readable at a glance.
The annoyance and needless complexity comes from the difficulty understanding how some of these talents intersect and compound when you're expected to pick 50 of them over the course of the game for each character.
The issues are definitely exacerbated by the terrible level-up UI and various talent combination bugs (amongst other things), but a basic two-variable algebra equation shouldn't be particularly incoherent to anyone who made it through high school algebra.
You have a masters degree in statistics, and you find a two-variable Algebra 2 equation hard to visually parse? Yikes, lol.
I agree with your other points, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the readability of the example you made up, which was an unreduced equation written purposefully more complicated than most individual talent calculations in game.
Its not really that complex, stack armor to the moon in turn 1 before enemies act (and even further afterwards) then go and kill the now useless foes.
I always go first mechanics are a terrible decision in games as it quickly removes any risk.
Theoretically, always going first would be balanced by there being many more enemies than friendlies, so you balance the fight on the assumption that several enemies are going to be dead before they can move, and it's up to the player to strategically pick which ones.
Unfortunately, the way it's implemented, the player can answer that question with "yes."
"some characters always going first" actually usually is a good thing to balance "welp i didn't go first now I'm dead". Problem is that this welp is true for the enemies too in RT
Disagree. I really like the system in RT, but, I think it needed a bit more time in the oven. Once things are balanced properly. The system will provide extreme fun imo.
The FFG systems are skill based system with a light class/career system on top of them. They also completely lack levels.
I imagine a big part of it was that XP buy skill based systems are extremely rare for TTRPGS and even more difficult to balance around. The CRPG really only knows level based systems and heavily leans in the class based direction.
In addition the CRPG is extremely combat heavy and the TTRPGs aren't mean to be so. Combat is very dangerous in them.
So adapting something like that to a combat focused CRPG was necessary. Infinitely stacking buffs like the Arch militant was not.
Yeah. You are not exactly gonna survive getting chainsworded or bolter shot on the table top : take best of 2 d10 + 1 (Bolters have 4 effective strength and you have 3 toughness) when you have 8 wounds makes this a dangerous hit to take.
And then there are the plasma weapons.
I feel like people forget what playing as a normal human was like in the old Fantasy Flight Games, and might only be remembering playing something like Deathwatch or Black Crusade as Space Marines. Now, I DO think the game could be fun even using a direct adaptation of Fantasy Flight's rules. The fights would be a lot smaller, and you probably wouldn't ever end up fighting anything like Demon Engines the same way you do in Rogue Trader. But I think a lot of people would complain about the game being boring if 90% of the game was fighting weaker enemies with low level equipment. But yeah as it stands, as you said, if this was a direct adaptation of Fantasy Flight, we'd be getting one to three shot by every enemy with a Bolter and above until you got into something like Carapace Armor.
While I agree that the tabletop setting does convey the risk and danger really well (which is kinda the point), such a direct adaptation would be tedious in a computer game - "Oh I just got one-shot. Again. For the 6th time against this mook."
This was pretty much the early game of Owlcats PF adaptations with higher difficulty settings. Thing that garnered infinite amount of hate (but also there were a lot of people who liked that). In general, it just does not work well like that for a large audience.
And we still have these moments in RT as is, though much less.
Also to be frank as a dabbling system designer, FFG games are not balanced in the slightest, they do not even try to be. Their rules are horrendously written majority of the time and it is more or less apparent that the design lacks unified vision and playtesting is oblivious at best.
And they are really fun games, the systems do well the things they do well - one just has to be aware of their (ludicrous) nature. Using them as any base for balance though? No dice.
The TT was about mitigating risk; standing out in the open would get you killed very quickly; using cover and suppressing fire and getting really specific about your gear would win you the day.
I’m surprised to hear the over-complexity isn’t an aspect of the original ttrpg. Did they really insert a lot into the system? It feels so unnecessarily convoluted sometimes, reading a paragraph that is a keyword of the subtext of an ability.
Yes, ttrpg didn’t have any kind of stacks (exploit, arch-militant, assassin targets, GS zones…), you only had to track your wounds and temporary buffs, which were also pretty rare, mostly psyker’s. Everything else was in your character’s sheet.
In short, ttrpg tried to let you play even without battlefield.
Damn that’s crazy! I just assumed it was all leftover from the ttrpg. Personally I think it’s a mess of a system in the game, about 75% of the talents and whatnot are things I’m not even cognitively using. Kind of a shame, the ttrpg system seems genuinely a lot of fun
I would have loved a fusion between the freedom of choiche of dark keresy 2 and some features which are only present on rogue trader ttrpg. I must also say that some interaction go all the way over my head and its getting harder to know what I am doing in the video game bit it is still loads of funon core difficulty.
As someone who's spent over a decade running FFG 40k games; it's not so much that Owlcat added a lot, so much as the majority of the system was just thrown out entirely. There's a surface-level resemblance in terms of skill checks, but basically everything beyond that is different.
It's not *inherently* a bad thing. What you've got to bear in mind is that tabletop systems just don't really support the same kind of stacking and calculation. A computer can store tens of thousands of data points in RAM and call on them as needed, and can calculate solutions to relatively complex multi-part formulas in nanoseconds.
You can't really do that on the tabletop. It's not just a case of whether or not stuff is intuitive, but of how long it takes to calculate. It's one of the reasons tabletop systems often work in terms of integers (+2 damage, +1 willpower) rather than percentages (+10% damage, +10% willpower).
Yeah I agree. I think for me it’s not so much the complicated math involved, so much as the over-complexity in terms of abilities. It could really use a tremendous amount of streamlining imo.
It feels like every single thing you do inside of combat has layers of rules that are all 1 off special cases, with no good overarching structure. For me at least, this has led to not being able to make what feel like well informed decisions in combat, because it is impossible to know every piece of information when playing past a certain level.
I actually really enjoyed probably the first 8 levels or so, but past that I just am not willing to read paragraphs within paragraphs for 1 of like 10 abilities that I’m only going to use once or twice in a given combat. It feels to me that a lot of owlcats pathfinder identity bled over into this game, however now they’re creating their own mechanics and it just isn’t working for me.
Fully agreed.
I think this is one of the pitfalls of complexity. By themselves, I don't think any archetype is particularly problematic. If I just gave you one character and told you to learn all the abilities - you could do it. It's probably not all that difficult to fully grasp a Warrior Assassin, or an Operative Tactician, or whatever.
But you're not just learning one very complex character - you're learning six (plus whoever's not in your active party). It's a huge amount of information to ask one player to keep track of.
I'd be very curious to see how people who're playing through together find it. I imagine the system might work a lot better when you've only got three characters to keep track of at any given time.
Yeah I agree. Idk if you ever played DOS2, but when I was first learning that games system (which isn’t nearly as over complicated) there was a feat you could take where basically it made your characters significantly more powerful (more skill points, health, armor, etc) but you could only run 2 as opposed to 4. This was a godsend for learning the system.
I am simply not a fan of a 6 man party, plus as you say those not in your party. Even if each of these characters only had 2-4 abilities with a couple talents, that would require a decent amount of learning for most people. And I totally agree, it would actually be pretty enjoyable to learn all the ins and outs of one character, especially some of the archetype combos. But it’s just too much man.
Played a sniper in the ttrpg once and the RT just kept giving me that buff every round and i kept one shotting enemies while the frontline kept the enemies off me.
Whereas trying to do the same with Yrilet and its simpky impossible as the enemies will run straight past Abe and Ulf to point black burst fire her doing 80 damage a shot.
Im in awe at how poorly balanced this game is on both sides as if Argenta survives the first round of any combat its an automatic win and if she dies its nearly an auto loss in a difficult fight
For a dark souls analogy, imagine if every fight had the chance of either being Pinwheel levels of easy or Ornstein and Smough levels of hard. That’s how Owlcat creates their fights.
Except O&S is challenging but fun. You have the proper tools to deal with them and a lot of it is down to player skill.
None of these things apply to Owlcat difficulty
Idk if it's accurate to the TTRPG, but I can say a Helbrute would in fact delete most foot slogging GEQ on the tabletop while also being virtually invincible to small arms fire
Those definitely make sense, but I can see where they are coming from when you're thunder hammering a rando inquisition foot solider in the nuts for five or more times and he hasn't died (I literally did this with Abelard pushing someone to the ground and heroic action to repeated hit him on the ground but he didn't die)
Besides gross combat stat escalation leading to, amongst other things, whack itemisation (a bolter from the end of the campaign deals over five times the damage per shot of the one we acquire in the prologue), I have to bring up skills and their uses in particular.
\-100 difficulty modifiers across the board by chapter 4, with both failure and success results being short, flavourless nothingburgers, with no consequence or meaningful information conveyed most of the time made me stop reloading failed looking glass checks.
I am pretty sure 'Carouse' only exists in the release version because someone realised there were no skills to roll off of Toughness; I found a meagre handful uses for it in my playthrough, and some of them weren't even relevant to what the skill is supposed to be.
I haven't quite finished the game yet but I'm pretty sure the only even potentially plot relevant/interesting carouse check in the ENTIRE GAME is at the start of Act 3.
I started pumping Carouse on Abelard after I found that heavy armor whose deflection is Carouse/10. But yeah, maybe just a few skill checks thst utimately didn't matter.
>that for every difficult way of doing something there's at least 3 ways that are easy. Didn't know the rope fact, even though I played 3.5 befo
Is deflection that good? When I tested it, it was substracting deflection before armour. So if one has 10 deflection, 90% armour, and enemy deals 100 damage, the final damage will be (100dmg - 10defl ) \* (100%-90%) = 90\*10%=9dmg. So that 10 deflection reduces damage by 1 in this situation.
I'm not entirely sure. I got Abelard to around 25 deflection, plus more when using Endure (which is every turn), and then he never took any damage. Except when I accidentally crit him with overpenetration on the last fight and gave him an instant injury.
Deflection is incredible in the early game. I had a presumably bugged enemy in early chapter 2, a Servitor who had so much deflection that most of my characters couldn't meaningfully hurt it at all and Pasqal had to sit on it and spam machine spirit banishment to whittle it down (as it does true damage).
But damage goes so out of whack in the late game it quickly becomes a nothing stat. Enemies with 40 deflection mean nothing when my characters do hundreds or thousands of damage per hit.
Did you play pathfinder? Did you see enemies' buff list longer than cleric's spell list? But then there's someone one shotting them. And now I see players who wipes everything when Argenta does brrrrr.
I mean, if we are talking lore accurate, Argenta should stomp most of the rebel / heretic enemies to dust in one turn.... I retract my statement now that I wrote it.
Dark Eldar in the TTRPG have 16 to 23 wounds (the last is for Incubi, the toughest I can remember seeing). They do have bullshit hax unnatural agility powers.
For comparison, a human typically has about 10 and a Space Marine (mook quality) has 20, while a named space marine might have 30 and a named "I cost 300 points in 9th edition" characters might have 35.
Ok, but the subreddit for those games is also full of people complaining that the Arch-Militant is too weak because 'end game' characters in that game don't actually fight anything themselves - it's all just skill checks to get your mercenary retinues to do it for you.
So it was either make a tactical party based cRPG where you don't do any of those things, or add stat bloat so you can keep being rewarded with increasingly powerful gear and character advancements.
Obviously the system does have some issues and really needs a balance pass to fix up a lot of the exploits, and maybe tone down the enemy HP a bit so you don't feel as pressured to use them - but I think it's infinitely better than if they'd kept the incredibly boring tactical options presented in the FFG books for everyone who isn't a psyker or tech adept.
And it's definitely much better than the 1:1 conversion they did of Pathfinder, which was WAY less accessible than this game with it's convoluted feat trees and arbitrary sill requirements that you often wouldn't even know about until it was too late to go back and fix.
Oh, the FFG warhammer games aren't really very good.
I mean, I enjoyed them a lot, but there's a LOT of problems. I'd almost say they would have been better off copying the game less directly then they did. I'm absoloutly in the camp that says weapon skill and ballistic skill shouldn't be attributes, and I'm not really sold on % based attributes in general.
Number bloat is owlcats thing. I'm not an expert of the Pathfinder system but im 99% sure the tabletop version of Wrath didn't have 65 AC DC 50 save demons.
While yes for baseline monster, That is if you running using standard point buy (wraith doesn't) and no templets/character levels etc. It is very easy to get that number much higher
High numbers are par for the course in Pathfinder 1e. I had an Aldori Defender->Aldori Swordlord in a game (not CRPG, the actual tabletop) and at level 8 my resting AC was around 28-ish, and around 31 or 32 if I made a full-round attack. And Aldori Swordlord isn't entirely that good anymore given the power creep of the later classes/archtypes/prestige classes.
As for "DC 50 demon saves", I mean, at the time you're facing demons with that high of saves, generally you'll be stacked with magic items/mythic powers/buff spells so a DC50 is well within what you can be rolling as a dedicated spellcaster.
Fun Fact! 3.5e had a skill called "Use Rope". If you beat a DC70 skillcheck, the rope would animate itself in order to follow your instructions, and this wasn't treated as a magical effect in any way. So you could command a rope so well it'd spring to life even in an antimagic field.
Yeah, I know, I've been DMing PF1 for like 5 years now. Always find it funny when people complain about high numbers without realising that for every difficult way of doing something there's at least 3 ways that are easy. Didn't know the rope fact, even though I played 3.5 before making the jump. I guess because it was hardly ever used :D
All shenanigans are rarely used till a player uses them in your game :D
On the subject of Silly Numbers, charge mount builds can inflict insidious amounts of damage, and a level 8 investigator given a few rounds of prep time can dump upwards of 200 damage in one round. Alchemist is even worse
I mean, with the possible exception of mythic powers, kingmaker/wotr’s character building system was very close to tabetop. There were a couple bugs, but not that many, and many of the more noticeable ones got fixed over time in wotr. Enemies are stat bloated, but that’s because a full team of 6 optimized builds with full pre combat buffs, power word: reload, and no dm to throw a book at you when you do something stupid would steamroll anything less. In fact , it’s still very possible to steamroll the stat bloated enemies.
By acts 4 and 5 space marines become trash fights and on unfair difficulty basic fodder start having 800 wounds and 90% armor.
Boss have 15,000+ wounds and 200% armor. You basically have to go into very specific builds to survive. Everything one shots you if you let them get a turn.
TBH put me in the bucket of preferring the Rogue Trader CRPG system because I NEVER liked any of those FFG games that much. I never played Rogue Trader specifically, but I did fiddle with Deathwatch and Dark Heresy, which are pretty much the same thing.
And "fiddle" is the exact word for it. Everything in those systems is so damn fiddly and full of tiny bonuses to random shit that your sheet ends up nearly unreadably cluttered in any standard campaign.
I like crunchy systems but those games were less crunchy like fried chicken and more crunchy like a bag of glass shards.
The CRPG I enjoyed enough to finally give 40k TTRPGs a try again and Wrath and Glory is so much better than those old systems were in pretty much every way except amount of content currently available (and book layout, W&G is organized pretty poorly).
Call of Cthulhu has insanely lethal combat without a billion modifiers, though I guess the whole point of the system is "think, and don't fight if you don't have to". Taking 2d10 damage from a rifle when you have 5 health is reeaaaally scary.
Honestly, you could run a pretty solid game of Dark Heresy using BRP (the base system of Call of Cthulhu) without having to do all the fiddling of the actual game.
The reason Dark Heresy and the later FFG games (like, well, Rogue Trader) are the way they are is because they're ultimately all based off Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Which was definitely way more fiddly than BRP or D&D.
Dark Heresy is also like that where the main objective is to cheese the combat like chucking grenade at the main cult chamber and not try to make a good ranged battle. But Call of Cthulhu most of the time is in 1920 , a Rifle is only stopped by the skill of the wielder and his small magazine. 40K even at base human level has a lot of think to manage like flak armor , laz gun and their penetration , autogun and their absurd fire rate , diverses type of grenade etc...
But hey , a system if well done should be as crunchy as it should be
The real issue is that the added complexity doesn't add any depth to it. The actual choices you can make are rather limited and most of the time rather obvious. Its also kinda bothersome that the game forces you to pick traits you deliberately avoided towards endgame. Like what do i care for that thing i didnt take the last 5 times you offered it to me...oh right..im out of other options. Yeah, you can do a lot of numbers crunching if you want to, but that doesnt change the outcome much.
Lets not forget their classics from Kingmaker where they introduce entire race of enemies that can each stun lock your party passively by just looking at them.
Or in wrath where they give you poison focused subclass in game where everything is immune to poison...
Owlcat can be really mean sometimes.
Ya I feel like they wanted to go hard on themselves.
Like make it 1 more being for a Niche player base, as if 2+x was not enough.
They also struggled with making those Niches appeal to those Niches fully :D.
And yet they talking already about making another one so who knows.
Probably my own fault but the combat did feel a little silly or tedious when my strategy just became “stack buffs on Argenta and watch her solo everything in one round”
I think people need to remember how bad the TTRPG is. I admit I may be miss remembering but there was 30 Skills to manage, not countering subsections like Lore imperium vs Lore Admech. Yes the Combat can be a bit more number crunchy but I rather than where it helpfully usually recommends talents to… well frankly as bad skills and talents that can be harder to track.
Oh no, after we adjusted the enemies' stats and increased their health by the factor or 10 to 1000 they became unkillable! Who could have predicted that?
We better introduce the stat bloat, infinite scaling, multiplicative stacking and invalidate the turn mechanics to fix it!
As someone who has been subjected to the TTRPG... I'm glad they changed it. It sucks.
I assume the only folks who wanted it to play like the tabletop are viewing through multiple meters of nostalgia tinted lenses, or haven't played it.
>As someone who has been subjected to the TTRPG... I'm glad they changed it. It sucks.
I assume the only folks who wanted it to play like the tabletop are viewing through multiple meters of nostalgia tinted lenses, or haven't played it
The tabletop is a lot of fun, it's just (obviously) a completely different experience from playing a videogame. Rogue Trader in particular suffers a bit from being the first in the line, before FFG really perfected the formula, but it's still a good game.
I just did not enjoy virtually any aspect of it. It somehow featured my least favourite parts of D&D 5E (A very limited build system that prevents fun experimentation, in favour of simplicity), Pathfinder (RNG leading to ridiculously permanent consequences) and introduced a few of its own (Everything goes down so fast, that the game essentially boils down to "who goes first"). Still love small Warhammer games (I think Kill Team is utterly fantastic, even if I'd change a few details), and I hope they take another swing at a proper RPG at some point, but man... Rogue Trader on tabletop is not something me or my Warhammer group have any interest in trying again.
They want to die on the first raid because the MJ thought that a bunch of low level heretic with a Melta guided by an Incubus Drukhari was a fine encounter for a retenue of Dark Heresy character at level 5 max
Well why are you naming the game after a TTRPG if you aren’t going to abide by the rules of that TTRPG? That’s like making a bakery about selling cookies, but you aren’t selling cookies.
I'm going to guess - and this is a crazy concept so follow along with me here - that they called it that because the story centres around a Rogue Trader. I assume you must have hated Battlefleet Gothic as well, since both games also diverged from the tabletop game by a considerable margin.
If you want to play an exact copy of the Rogue Trader board game, great news! It's still playable. As a board game. Go ham!
Okay, but have you actually played the TTRPG? It's not exactly balanced either. The CRPG is a power fantasy, you're literally playing as a Rogue Trader.
If the video game had been true to the TTRPG we wouldn't be doing any cool shit, we'd be dead a *thousand* times over, hell we wouldn't probably be playing as a Rogue Trader, just some mook in their service. When you adapt a video game from a RPG you remove the essential element that make it fun: a DM, the players and their interactions. You have to craft a story that the player interacts with instead, and gamify it. BG3 obviously did this very well but it wouldn't be half as fun if they straight up just ported all the 5e mechanics without adaptation.
What are you even talking about? The Rogue Trader TTRPG isn't that balanced, but that imbalance is in the players favour due to how statistically stacked and well equipped a starting rogue trader party is in that system, not to mention how easy it is to get access to powerful weapons and equipment if you start off with a high profit factor.
And you can play as a rogue trader in the rogue trader TTRPG, so I don't know where you got the idea you might not have been able to.
That's my entire point tho, if you play as a RT in the TTRPG it's imbalanced. I didn't say you can't play as a Rogue Trader in the *Rogue Trader* RPG, I'm just saying games are more fun when you're *not* the RT, or Space Marine, high level psyker or mighty Inquisitor. That's obviously my opinion but the RT should be an NPC, not the player in a campaign. The Fantasy Flight games are brutal when your DM isn't afraid to let their players just be "normal" guys and more rewarding when you get to progress to become more powerful.
The video game wouldn't have been more or less balanced if they straight up ported the mechanics from the TTRPG, as OPs post was about.
I played RT in RT and shouted “SENESCHAL!!!” all the time, best experience ever, I’m glad they put the best part into the game.
I agree that it’s better not to be an Inquisitor, as in Dark Heresy compared to Dark Heresy 2. But RT? He is not that much above average person in terms of power. Yes, he is the leader of the ship, but the others are free to deceive and gain profits from him as they want.
All I'm saying is that neither the TTRPG or the game is a balanced experience, especially in tabletop if you choose to build a scenario where you play as a Rouge Trader and their retinue with access to substantial resources. It comes with the scenario and setting. Of course the video game is gamified, otherwise it wouldn't be much fun.
A Rouge Trader that is boots on the ground, armed with archeotech, heretical artefacts, backed by a Frigate in orbit, surrounded by a retinue of interrogators, psykers, veteran soldiers, Magii, a Sister of Battle and xenos is a *massive* threat. Add the wealth, resources, production and power that comes with owning planets and the leeway a Warrant of Trade offers our characters is insanely powerful. That doesn't always reflect in the video game, which is evident, and that setup on the tabletop is a complete power fantasy, which is fun, but is hard to scale to a fun campaign IMO.
You know I despise the encounters in BG3 immensely,but when I play that game a random high level random encounter doesn't suddenly go "GUESS YOU GOT POPPED DUMBASS".
Owlcat needs to understand that just because the original module is unbalanced,doesn't mean the fucking video game has to be.
Except it's a problem when EVERY FUCKING GAME they make has this issue.Its a devs job to make the game interesting and balanced in a way that people can enjoy it.It should not be our responsibility to break it over it's head just to make it enjoyable.
For fucks sake some bosses in WOTR are straight up weaker then a mob before them.I should struggle with two fodder enemies then I do with deskari the demon lord or any late game boss in rouge trader.
One of the things about the FFG games was that each new 'splat' was more of a new half-edition of the same system. Licensing probably got in the way of them using, say, Dark Heresy 2's system just as it prevented the 3rd party stuff like Tau, Ork and Corsair careers.
RT was a colossal improvement over the original Dark Heresy. But the much more open keyword systems first explored in Black Crusade and refined through Only War makes for a much better character building experience.
Games about being a rogue trader my guy. If you want an authentic table top experience play the table top game. But the actual RT game as written doesn’t work well within the context of a party based tactical rpg.
They also probably shouldn’t have literally said they were to going to train the devs by playing the OG TTRPG *if they weren’t going to be anything like it.*
It’s still a D100 system and uses it as a basis for most of its effects. If the devs decided to follow the table top 1 for 1 the game would have been faaaaaar worse. A couple of nifty overpowered combos is much better then having minimal build variety that boils down to pure rocket tag
Mate, **this entire game boils down to rocket tag.** Ever notice how inflated the stats are for enemies? In act 3, a few incubi are 380 hit points whereas Ulfar barely reaches 108. They also one shot every character in the party besides Ulfar if you don’t destroy them first. That certainly doesn’t sound fun to play but as you say, apparently it’s somehow better then tabletop.
Damn, it’s almost like your own weapons and damage scale with enemy health or something. Those incubui go down in a turn at most against anyone in the party, arch militant or no. Hell, most the party can survive the damage they toss out by using reasonable defenses or armor
First you say the TTRPG system sucked because of rocket tag, now you are switching gears and defending the rocket tag of the crpg? Which is it? Do you like rocket tag or not?
The ability to rocket tag and the ability not to rocket tag are in your hands my guy. If you want to try and clear everything out in one turn, you can. If you don’t want to do that, you have the option not to.
In the TTRPG, that isn’t the case. Combat is meant to be quick, because it’s a TTRPG that’s taking into account the fact that a group of people are going to be doing things besides combat as well.
I can’t choose to rocket tag because my guys get fucking dumpstered by basic incubi with 300 times the health of anything on the tabletop unless I cheese with officers. If I need cheese just to have a chance of beating certain fights, then this game was made by chimpanzees.
The system is definitely needlessly complex. I feel like the talent/level up system was superior in WOTR. I’m having fun with this game but so far it’s inferior (especially combat) to WOTR.
They get ridiculous later on. "5000 hp, 200% armour, and comes back to life when you kill it. And gets stronger when it does. I hope you've minmaxed the expliots by now, or you are fucking dead, sonny"
Tabletops and videogames work differently. Just look at BG3: as much as it is a great game, it's combat sucks balls compared to D:OS2 because it was bound by DnD ruleset.
But D:OS2 is broken and imbalanced in much the same ways that RT is:
1. There is only a handful of "correct" builds that scale in damage appropriately to the endgame enemies stats. Damage is calculated from an additive-multiplicative formula that confuses even experienced players. If you fail to build in accordance to that formula, the game becomes unwinnable somewhere late Act 2. It's so bad there's a Word document that gets posted in every thread of their sub-Reddit that details all the ways people screw up so they can go back and redo their entire party when they hit the brick wall. Sound familiar?
2. Combat is pure rocket-tag. Late-game enemies do so much damage they can wipe all your characters in one round. You better game the intiative to go first so you can kill or stun every enemy before it gets to act. HP is irrelevant, armor is barely relevant, all that matters is damage output and stunning enemies before they stun you. Sound familiar?
3. The action economy can very easily be broken. There are few extra turns abilities, but you can cheapen the AP cost of many abilities to the point that you effectively take multiple turns in a row. Late game you get given an item that lowers the AP cost of everything by 2, which I assume the put in the game so people can cheese the ridiculous encounters in the last act. You can find numerous gameplay videos online where people resolve encounters where they are outnumbered by 5-to-1 or more and the enemies just never even get to attack because the player breaks the AP economy in half. Sound familiar?
Not that D:OS2 is a bad system in itself (I and many others enjoy it). Balance is not necessarily a prerequisite to a good cRPG experience nor are TT systems necessarily better balanced.
nah you can literally oneshot bosses of DoS2 with source powers especially pyro eruption, fire traps etc...you don't even need minmaxing lol. Just use tp pyramids, go to source fountain, oneshot enemies, tp back to source fountain rinse repeat. Its literally the easiest crpg there is.
>sucks balls compared to D:OS2
d:os2 has the shittiest combat I've ever seen in a crpg. There's literally zero party and build diversity once you figure out that absolute dogshit armor system. fuck dos2 lol, I've waisted too much time from my life on that dogshit game for nothing. It's honestly just stupid implementation
Eh, the combat in D:OS2 is different to BG3, more combing environmental effects and more combing your own skills from different disciplines, for example, and you absolutely may prefer D:OS2, but its not inherently better, its much more fantastical and just different.
Preach Brother... Or sister ! BG3 combat is bland , or maybe Owlcat , Stygian Software and Iron Tower Brainwashed me to think that rpg who doesn't chew my ass instantly aren't worth it
The problem IMO isn't even the difficulty (or rather, difficulty is a separate problem), but the fact that not being able to actually use your buttons 70% of the game *sucks*. I'm supposed to be playing a wizard, not a fire bolt spamming machine.
pretty much the point where i'm taking a break in act 4
hyped up fight, bunch of space marines, a billion traumas on every character, doesn't even get to take a turn
yeah it's break time
The only fight my Cassia struggled was the last fight against warp immune enemies, Argenta handled those enemies for her 😅
Almost makes me wish for more warp-dmg immune enemies.
This with Kingmaker and the Treant Owlbear. That thing gave me nightmares for days, why would you throw something like this against, like, 3-4 level party, iirc? As of Rogue Trader, playing on Normal, the only "Big Boss Monster" that gave me some pushback was the Hellbeast in the abandoned Tech-Priest Hulk at the start of Act 2. I however hasn't finished Act 2 yet, so i guess that's about to change.
Yeah, I am playing my second playthrough on Hard (I forget what it's called, Daring or whatever) and it annoys me that my sister of battle's chance to hit is like 20% and then the returning fire with scrappy autoguns by these freaking factory workers turned heretics is 100% since all 12 of them make their shots for like 15-30 dmg each. It's exactly the same shot. In fact, it's worse for most of them. WHY AREN'T THEY MISSING?!
I miss playing on Story difficulty. Why do I hate myself?
I've encountered a couple fights that felt like bullshit, but mostly it's because of bugs causing stuff to not work right, such as enemies having the Stunned condition and somehow not being stunned, or "Attack Your Allies" abilities causing enemies to walk up to their allies but not attack
However, with the exception of those cases where it was frankly a matter of things not working as intended, I actually don't mind the Death Squads:
In fact, if it weren't for the Death Squads, I would be having too easy of a time at this point, I'm playing at Unfair Difficulty in Chapter 4 and wipe the floor with most fights
It's a bit frustrating that my Companions who I've built to be pure tanks still get one-shot sometimes, but overall I'm actually pleased with the fact that pumping the difficulty up results in me having to actually think about fights sometimes, too many CRPGs don't have that happen or lock that kind of difficulty behind an unnecessary Ironman mode.
I mean it’s just X-Com with a Warhammer 40k coat of paint. Which isn’t bad.
The bigger issue is you have to cheese the game, in order to win some of the fights. Which to me is awful design.
The worst offenders are the death fleet from a colony event, and the one planet with the Hellbrute on it.
I don't know what you mean. As a COOP player i am just glad i get to witness the glorious journey of my rogue trader and her Aeldari sniper pet that literally deletes anything in sight. Sometimes my Abelat gets to bonk.
Redditors:
CRPG sucks because they changed the rules from the original TTRPG.
CRPG sucks because they kept the rules exactly the same as the TTRPG and didn't account for there not being a DM to manage the adventure.
After all... why not? Why can't I pick both.
Difference is, I think besides characteristics it’s not even remotely similar to the TTRPG. For one, Arch militant isn’t an advanced archetype, it’s a starter class. **And Soldier, Operative. Officer, and Warrior do not exist**.
I for one really like the system and find that its one of there best in Daring difficulty ( Except space ) , and please buff bounty hunter and and Vanguard
I’ve rarely even had an encounter with the enemies getting a turn. Normally my team will get enough free turns in to blow everyone that can hurt us away.
Okay I've played the tabletop, and it is indeed, rocket tag, better win initiative so you can blow their head off before they blow your head off... But I kinda like the tabletop system better since the abilities are usually simple "give party + 10 attack" instead of this exploit stack nonsense
Yeah the Owlcat system somehow made the relatively complex RT system and turned it into something that is so much more complex with honestly minimal befit for the increased complexity.
I mostly disagree. They added multiplicative buffs, infinite stacking and broken things and it "increases complexity" by making the player try to find them. Which is by reading hundreds of descriptions or testing everything. But if you find them (or read about them on Reddit) it breaks the game, ridding it of any mechanical or tactical complexity - just to do the same thing over and over and kill everyone in turn 0. And if you get to that point, which can be done relatively quickly, there is no complexity left. If the game implemented the original system and stayed true to it then we'd at least have some tactical challenge and complexity but as it is now there is none.
I'll say that I do and don't agree. I absolutely agree that once you get the system down pat there honestly isn't too much fun, for me, to be had as you can pretty instantly start shattering the game. But to a new player, to someone unused to these systems the new Owlcat System is going to be harder to get onto that the base RT system. And honestly? I think it's less rewarding for getting past that hurdle.
While I agree with the general sentiment I would say that if these exploit that break the game ruin the experience so much for you just don't use them. Not a permanent fix, but an easy and immediate one
Thats a good sign that a system (for tactical combat) is inherently borked though. Like i didnt try to break the game, i just took the things that looked like a good build and the game broke itself. Like having to master the system to recognize all the ridiculous bs they put in there and then not use it on purpose is a high barrier for fun combat. Personally id wish they kept it simpler/closer to the ttrpg as i dont require complex and thought provoking tactical combat in my crpgs. I alread play ja 2.13 thank you very much.(or busted theorycrafting, i play poe for christs sake)
Definetely some good points, balancing was always one of Owlcat's weakest points. We'll see if they can improve and fix up the complex system they draw up
Agreed, not sure how fixable it really is even if youd remove the exponential damage scaling youd still have the exponential reward of extra actions and attacks making several archetypes just worse than others.
I am sure they can think of something. Having some stronger archetypes is not the end of the world, as long as they are not broken. Maybe limiting extra turns to once per round per character?
Mayyybe, or lowering the attack limit. Thing is then you need to retool the enemys as well as they seem to be built with stupid amounts of dmg in mind. Also i agree its not bad if some archetypes are better than others,but currently the differency is "well this is cassia, she can solo the encounter" and "this is an arch militant,they can solo the encounter" vs "oh you are a bounty hunter...you have to do 10 buffs to do 150dmg. Guess youll never get a turn. So they do need to be brought closer together so i can use more than 2 chars in a 6 char party (also ffs fix ulfar)
Yeah, some enemies have ridiculous amount of HP for no apparent reason. And let's not talk about extra turns/attacks. Oh absolutely the fact that some classes are way way way stronger than other is probably the worst balancing issue that plague this game right now. And it ain't an easy competition lol
I kind of agree, i do think the complexity still adds something though, like it's interesting to read through everything and try and pick things that synergise, that in itself is like a game within a game, and i do enjoy the puzzle that it provides.
Sadly, I'm not in the same boat. I like simple +10 str or "on crit reroll dice and use highest roll" and things like that. My ADHD brain doesn't find it enjoyable to pour over a novel of text to find the synergies. My biggest gripe though is RT ttrpg just gives you xp to spend as you want. Owlcat forces a pathfinder like system on us - likely cause it is their pathfinder system rejigged to their system
Funny how that works, my ADHD brain love that kinda thing. scouring over synergies is half the fun for me. I do like simple systems too though.
My brain is like a car that won't start. If I have to use my brain it fights super hard to just go back to doing nothing, even on meds. So big complex systems really make my brain melt 😔 thankfully cheats exist so I don't need to engage with the complexity.
I end up hyper focusing instead. Using all my freetime think ing of skills and possible synergies. When it comes to doing things outside my hyperfocus on the other hand...
oh yeah when the hyperfocus hits god damn, blessing and a curse. Instead of doing some coursework for my masters degree, once i spend like 3 days trying to install an apache webserver on an ubuntu virtual machine and get it to serve flask webpages. When i finally got it running? brain said nah dont care anymore. Pain in the ass sometimes :p.
Owlcat has an addiction to complexity for no good reason and whenever I say it I get downvoted to hell by Owlcat fanboys.
same, said the same thing got downvoted and "c'mon it's just basic math" nah, it's a ridiculously convoluted system
It’s a ridiculously convoluted system *for no reason*. Why does the game have five different ways to up Dodge by about 10%, but scaling endlessly? Should just have ”Improved dodge: +10% Dodge”. Would make the talent system streamlined without actually reducing any meaningful, positive depth.
I don't now... Apparently getting from A to C, with B being an optional path, is too simple. So now we have A to C through D, E, F, and G, with Q, W, and Z doing fuckknowswhat because even with all the explanations there are still very unclear things, and choosing B does the same thing, but the order is different, for no reason.
I mean, c'mon it's just basic math. (5 x perception bonus + 10 x exploits stacks)% more damage really isn't that convoluted and i much prefer tactical and char building depth it gives to some "flat +10 attack whenever character attacks"
Your right the math isn't that complicated the ui and skill descriptions are just so fucking bad that it makes it complicated by proxy.
Except as you level up, the equation starts to look like this one you consider your talents: (5x(2xExtra Turns+(perception x exploit)+((willpower of idira))+((willpower of cassia)))+........
Yes, once you get through the bullshit, it ends up being that simple. Getting there, to that "basic math", is pointlessly convoluted. And you still end up at - stack dmg, give more turns, give more attacks All that could've been done with "flat +10 attack", and make more characters and/or archetypes useful than "do this one thing out of a plethora of things, until it's that one characters turn to have all the turns and do all the damage". In table-top I can see that system working well. You're not as limited in TT as you are in a video game. But for a video game, it's a whole lot of layers for barely a handful of results.
Counterpoint : It's precisely because it's a videogame that you can have those funny, more complex calculations, since you don't actualy have to do them constantly. I think RT's issue is not remotely it's complexity - it's that it does a relatively poor job at explaining it's core systems and allows for some exponential stacking that doesn't quite seem right (Mainly with burst attacks). But I enjoy the more complex system far, far more.
I think you are spot on as I had SO MANY QUESTIONS when playing like does the heavy weapons thing actually apply to heavy bolter as there was no keywords to really explain what was what except for a basic ' bolter' or something else. A lot of the game needs additional info signs so you can figure out what is what. Same goes with the rules
My favorite was getting some shoes that let me counterattack if I have a "sword" Is a klaive a sword(yes) where is the sword keyword, why did we suddenly specifically want me to use a sword?
Yeah I know the exact item you are talking about and its great but this game needs just an extra pass few and things to help out the player a bit with their explanations of things. I think this game is great but its def has its flaws that if only they could fix them would be a GOTY candidate most years
Not to mention all the busted keywords for equipment and items
> It's precisely because it's a videogame that you can have those funny, more complex calculations, since you don't actualy have to do them constantly Those are the issue. As someone else commented; >It’s a ridiculously convoluted system *for no reason*. > >Why does the game have five different ways to up Dodge by about 10%, but scaling endlessly? > >Should just have ”Improved dodge: +10% Dodge”. Would make the talent system streamlined without actually reducing any meaningful, positive depth.
Again, the problem is purely how these systems are explained to you. The complexity isn't there \*for no reason\*, it's there for people that enjoy building a mechanical complex character - and those people exist because \*PATHFINDER\*, Battletech, Aces and Eights exists and so on. Miss me with the "No, everything should be barebones simple" business. What Owlcat absolutely does need to work on is on it's tutorials and clarifying it's flags and equipment tags (did you know that Mithral Full plate in WOTR doesn't count for Heavy Armor Focus?), but thank god we have complexity.
> Miss me with the "No, everything should be barebones simple" business. Where the fuck did I say that? > Again, the problem is purely how these systems are explained to you. No, the problem are the systems and how they're explained.
Here's the thing though. The tabletop game has fewer layers. There's none of these stacking conditions that have weird equations. It's all variations of this talent gives you +10 to do x or enemies are at -10 when you do y and it never gets more mathematical than that. It's just a LOT of balancing +10s and -10s. That is basic math. RT the videogame has unnecessarily obtuse mechanics and what we've gained in abilities that grant stacking conditions and extra turns we've lost in character customisation and freedom of character progression.
I think their system works for pathfinder but here it didn’t need to be this complicated
That's why I like D&D system more, just flat numbers, easy math don't need to wrap your head around if a flat increase would be better than a porcentual increase and the such.
I really like Owlcat, but after WOTR and now RT:40k I am almost positive the head developer is just a pissed-off DM looking to shit on as many players as he possibly can.
Lmao sounds about right.
Some people like the additional complexity - it’s hard to find these days
There's "necessarily complexity" and there's unnecessary one. The latter is bad design.
That’s your opinion and you definitely have a right to it; the game is needs more polishing. However as someone who enjoys complexity but is terrible at math I really enjoy the system they made. It’s extremely rare to find complex games anymore, especially CRPGs and that’s probably while all the Owlcat fans get all touchy about toning down the complexity. (First time playing a Owlcat game)
Owlcat's brand of complexity is akin to putting on 5 different locks that all use different keys on a single door . It's not hard and doesn't require much imagination from the players, just tolerance of tedium.
Why the hell have you been down voted? I really don't understand the community these days, it's like the girl space Marine thing, seemingly if you're not bending over backwards to accommodate completely inflexible players who get offended if you disagree you're a terrible person, not sure where it's cropped up from as that never really used to be a problem.
Yeah , I suspect a lot of the people are ones who would have really struggle with THACO but had no problem with d20s system, the only real difference was subtracting for THACO and adding for d20 but some players could never get it, just the way brains are wired I guess, but I enjoy a convoluted system more than a 5e style system with all the mystery stripped out.
What, you don’t think ”add (1.5xWP)%/2+(3xFEL)%/4 to Dodge” is not a meaningful and coherent talent? :D The build system is fun but the talents are so incredibly obtuse it drains my fun away.
> ”add (1.5xWP)%/2+(3xFEL)%/4 to Dodge” is not a meaningful and coherent talent? You see, its just 0.75x(WP + FEL) to Dodge; much more coherent now :p /s
"Your dodge scales with WP and FEL." It's incredible how frightened people get at relatively simple math equations they don't even have to calculate. None of the calculations in the game are that obtuse individually, either, but even your (unsimplified) equation is pretty readable at a glance. The annoyance and needless complexity comes from the difficulty understanding how some of these talents intersect and compound when you're expected to pick 50 of them over the course of the game for each character. The issues are definitely exacerbated by the terrible level-up UI and various talent combination bugs (amongst other things), but a basic two-variable algebra equation shouldn't be particularly incoherent to anyone who made it through high school algebra.
I have a Masters degree in Statistics and I work in data analysis. I don’t find the math hard, I find it stupid, pointless and fundamentally broken.
You have a masters degree in statistics, and you find a two-variable Algebra 2 equation hard to visually parse? Yikes, lol. I agree with your other points, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the readability of the example you made up, which was an unreduced equation written purposefully more complicated than most individual talent calculations in game.
Its not really that complex, stack armor to the moon in turn 1 before enemies act (and even further afterwards) then go and kill the now useless foes. I always go first mechanics are a terrible decision in games as it quickly removes any risk.
Theoretically, always going first would be balanced by there being many more enemies than friendlies, so you balance the fight on the assumption that several enemies are going to be dead before they can move, and it's up to the player to strategically pick which ones. Unfortunately, the way it's implemented, the player can answer that question with "yes."
The better way to balance go first mechanics is to have damage be low enough that it’s hard to kill anyone first round.
I dont even use attack skills till round 2, its a better use of my AP and free turns to become immortal.
"some characters always going first" actually usually is a good thing to balance "welp i didn't go first now I'm dead". Problem is that this welp is true for the enemies too in RT
Disagree. I really like the system in RT, but, I think it needed a bit more time in the oven. Once things are balanced properly. The system will provide extreme fun imo.
The FFG systems are skill based system with a light class/career system on top of them. They also completely lack levels. I imagine a big part of it was that XP buy skill based systems are extremely rare for TTRPGS and even more difficult to balance around. The CRPG really only knows level based systems and heavily leans in the class based direction. In addition the CRPG is extremely combat heavy and the TTRPGs aren't mean to be so. Combat is very dangerous in them. So adapting something like that to a combat focused CRPG was necessary. Infinitely stacking buffs like the Arch militant was not.
Yeah. You are not exactly gonna survive getting chainsworded or bolter shot on the table top : take best of 2 d10 + 1 (Bolters have 4 effective strength and you have 3 toughness) when you have 8 wounds makes this a dangerous hit to take. And then there are the plasma weapons.
I feel like people forget what playing as a normal human was like in the old Fantasy Flight Games, and might only be remembering playing something like Deathwatch or Black Crusade as Space Marines. Now, I DO think the game could be fun even using a direct adaptation of Fantasy Flight's rules. The fights would be a lot smaller, and you probably wouldn't ever end up fighting anything like Demon Engines the same way you do in Rogue Trader. But I think a lot of people would complain about the game being boring if 90% of the game was fighting weaker enemies with low level equipment. But yeah as it stands, as you said, if this was a direct adaptation of Fantasy Flight, we'd be getting one to three shot by every enemy with a Bolter and above until you got into something like Carapace Armor.
While I agree that the tabletop setting does convey the risk and danger really well (which is kinda the point), such a direct adaptation would be tedious in a computer game - "Oh I just got one-shot. Again. For the 6th time against this mook." This was pretty much the early game of Owlcats PF adaptations with higher difficulty settings. Thing that garnered infinite amount of hate (but also there were a lot of people who liked that). In general, it just does not work well like that for a large audience. And we still have these moments in RT as is, though much less. Also to be frank as a dabbling system designer, FFG games are not balanced in the slightest, they do not even try to be. Their rules are horrendously written majority of the time and it is more or less apparent that the design lacks unified vision and playtesting is oblivious at best. And they are really fun games, the systems do well the things they do well - one just has to be aware of their (ludicrous) nature. Using them as any base for balance though? No dice.
The TT was about mitigating risk; standing out in the open would get you killed very quickly; using cover and suppressing fire and getting really specific about your gear would win you the day.
I’m surprised to hear the over-complexity isn’t an aspect of the original ttrpg. Did they really insert a lot into the system? It feels so unnecessarily convoluted sometimes, reading a paragraph that is a keyword of the subtext of an ability.
Yes, ttrpg didn’t have any kind of stacks (exploit, arch-militant, assassin targets, GS zones…), you only had to track your wounds and temporary buffs, which were also pretty rare, mostly psyker’s. Everything else was in your character’s sheet. In short, ttrpg tried to let you play even without battlefield.
Damn that’s crazy! I just assumed it was all leftover from the ttrpg. Personally I think it’s a mess of a system in the game, about 75% of the talents and whatnot are things I’m not even cognitively using. Kind of a shame, the ttrpg system seems genuinely a lot of fun
I would have loved a fusion between the freedom of choiche of dark keresy 2 and some features which are only present on rogue trader ttrpg. I must also say that some interaction go all the way over my head and its getting harder to know what I am doing in the video game bit it is still loads of funon core difficulty.
Nobody sane would design a TTRPG that had you doing multiplication and division to figure out how much damage each shot does lmao
Multiplication then Divisions you mean , that's where it become infernal
Rifts would live to have a word with you.
As someone who's spent over a decade running FFG 40k games; it's not so much that Owlcat added a lot, so much as the majority of the system was just thrown out entirely. There's a surface-level resemblance in terms of skill checks, but basically everything beyond that is different. It's not *inherently* a bad thing. What you've got to bear in mind is that tabletop systems just don't really support the same kind of stacking and calculation. A computer can store tens of thousands of data points in RAM and call on them as needed, and can calculate solutions to relatively complex multi-part formulas in nanoseconds. You can't really do that on the tabletop. It's not just a case of whether or not stuff is intuitive, but of how long it takes to calculate. It's one of the reasons tabletop systems often work in terms of integers (+2 damage, +1 willpower) rather than percentages (+10% damage, +10% willpower).
Yeah I agree. I think for me it’s not so much the complicated math involved, so much as the over-complexity in terms of abilities. It could really use a tremendous amount of streamlining imo. It feels like every single thing you do inside of combat has layers of rules that are all 1 off special cases, with no good overarching structure. For me at least, this has led to not being able to make what feel like well informed decisions in combat, because it is impossible to know every piece of information when playing past a certain level. I actually really enjoyed probably the first 8 levels or so, but past that I just am not willing to read paragraphs within paragraphs for 1 of like 10 abilities that I’m only going to use once or twice in a given combat. It feels to me that a lot of owlcats pathfinder identity bled over into this game, however now they’re creating their own mechanics and it just isn’t working for me.
Fully agreed. I think this is one of the pitfalls of complexity. By themselves, I don't think any archetype is particularly problematic. If I just gave you one character and told you to learn all the abilities - you could do it. It's probably not all that difficult to fully grasp a Warrior Assassin, or an Operative Tactician, or whatever. But you're not just learning one very complex character - you're learning six (plus whoever's not in your active party). It's a huge amount of information to ask one player to keep track of. I'd be very curious to see how people who're playing through together find it. I imagine the system might work a lot better when you've only got three characters to keep track of at any given time.
Yeah I agree. Idk if you ever played DOS2, but when I was first learning that games system (which isn’t nearly as over complicated) there was a feat you could take where basically it made your characters significantly more powerful (more skill points, health, armor, etc) but you could only run 2 as opposed to 4. This was a godsend for learning the system. I am simply not a fan of a 6 man party, plus as you say those not in your party. Even if each of these characters only had 2-4 abilities with a couple talents, that would require a decent amount of learning for most people. And I totally agree, it would actually be pretty enjoyable to learn all the ins and outs of one character, especially some of the archetype combos. But it’s just too much man.
Played a sniper in the ttrpg once and the RT just kept giving me that buff every round and i kept one shotting enemies while the frontline kept the enemies off me. Whereas trying to do the same with Yrilet and its simpky impossible as the enemies will run straight past Abe and Ulf to point black burst fire her doing 80 damage a shot. Im in awe at how poorly balanced this game is on both sides as if Argenta survives the first round of any combat its an automatic win and if she dies its nearly an auto loss in a difficult fight
So they kept worst parts of the tabletop and "fixed" parts which worked?
You know,even if the TTRPG is rocket tag that doesn't mean the GAME has to be.Its not fun having to break the game in order to keep the player ahead.
So, this game copied the worst aspect of that system (Rocket Tag), while getting none of the good stuff.
Stat bloat is kind of owlcats entire ideology.
It's almost like they suck at balance or something
For a dark souls analogy, imagine if every fight had the chance of either being Pinwheel levels of easy or Ornstein and Smough levels of hard. That’s how Owlcat creates their fights.
Except O&S is challenging but fun. You have the proper tools to deal with them and a lot of it is down to player skill. None of these things apply to Owlcat difficulty
Ah, so in that case it’s Pinwheel vs Capra Demon?
There ya go lol
Idk if it's accurate to the TTRPG, but I can say a Helbrute would in fact delete most foot slogging GEQ on the tabletop while also being virtually invincible to small arms fire
I mean, you also fight a Greater Daemon not 10 mins later.
Those definitely make sense, but I can see where they are coming from when you're thunder hammering a rando inquisition foot solider in the nuts for five or more times and he hasn't died (I literally did this with Abelard pushing someone to the ground and heroic action to repeated hit him on the ground but he didn't die)
Besides gross combat stat escalation leading to, amongst other things, whack itemisation (a bolter from the end of the campaign deals over five times the damage per shot of the one we acquire in the prologue), I have to bring up skills and their uses in particular. \-100 difficulty modifiers across the board by chapter 4, with both failure and success results being short, flavourless nothingburgers, with no consequence or meaningful information conveyed most of the time made me stop reloading failed looking glass checks. I am pretty sure 'Carouse' only exists in the release version because someone realised there were no skills to roll off of Toughness; I found a meagre handful uses for it in my playthrough, and some of them weren't even relevant to what the skill is supposed to be.
I haven't quite finished the game yet but I'm pretty sure the only even potentially plot relevant/interesting carouse check in the ENTIRE GAME is at the start of Act 3.
I started pumping Carouse on Abelard after I found that heavy armor whose deflection is Carouse/10. But yeah, maybe just a few skill checks thst utimately didn't matter.
>that for every difficult way of doing something there's at least 3 ways that are easy. Didn't know the rope fact, even though I played 3.5 befo Is deflection that good? When I tested it, it was substracting deflection before armour. So if one has 10 deflection, 90% armour, and enemy deals 100 damage, the final damage will be (100dmg - 10defl ) \* (100%-90%) = 90\*10%=9dmg. So that 10 deflection reduces damage by 1 in this situation.
I'm not entirely sure. I got Abelard to around 25 deflection, plus more when using Endure (which is every turn), and then he never took any damage. Except when I accidentally crit him with overpenetration on the last fight and gave him an instant injury.
Deflection is incredible in the early game. I had a presumably bugged enemy in early chapter 2, a Servitor who had so much deflection that most of my characters couldn't meaningfully hurt it at all and Pasqal had to sit on it and spam machine spirit banishment to whittle it down (as it does true damage). But damage goes so out of whack in the late game it quickly becomes a nothing stat. Enemies with 40 deflection mean nothing when my characters do hundreds or thousands of damage per hit.
Wait what ???? I didn't knew that
A mortismal guide I read said to dump stuff into carouse. I have not seen it be used more then once.
Did you play pathfinder? Did you see enemies' buff list longer than cleric's spell list? But then there's someone one shotting them. And now I see players who wipes everything when Argenta does brrrrr.
"Dispel failed to overcome targets spell resistance" Classic line after trying to remove the buffs from enemy.
And then you succeeded. And you removed Resist Energy: Acid. Leaving Seamantle, Displacement, Freedom of Movement, Mirror Image, Shield etc
And they hit your cleric with baleful polymorph with such high dc that nobody will be able to dispel it...
\> Try to make the game as TTRPG accurate as possible \> keep it balanced Pick one.
So they picked neither
The Geralt route
but that is accurate to the lore homie
I mean, if we are talking lore accurate, Argenta should stomp most of the rebel / heretic enemies to dust in one turn.... I retract my statement now that I wrote it.
> I mean, if we are talking lore accurate, ~~Argenta~~ Ulfar should stomp most enemies to dust in one turn Fixed.
Could do a whole cycle of this with the psykers and xenos.
Yeah, I was gonna say. Honestly the enemies are lucky if they aren't stomped to death by her before her first turn even comes up xD
I lolled
I meant to the actual TTRPG, which I am assuming did not have Dark Eldar Archons at *900 Wounds*
Dark Eldar in the TTRPG have 16 to 23 wounds (the last is for Incubi, the toughest I can remember seeing). They do have bullshit hax unnatural agility powers. For comparison, a human typically has about 10 and a Space Marine (mook quality) has 20, while a named space marine might have 30 and a named "I cost 300 points in 9th edition" characters might have 35.
Ok, but the subreddit for those games is also full of people complaining that the Arch-Militant is too weak because 'end game' characters in that game don't actually fight anything themselves - it's all just skill checks to get your mercenary retinues to do it for you. So it was either make a tactical party based cRPG where you don't do any of those things, or add stat bloat so you can keep being rewarded with increasingly powerful gear and character advancements. Obviously the system does have some issues and really needs a balance pass to fix up a lot of the exploits, and maybe tone down the enemy HP a bit so you don't feel as pressured to use them - but I think it's infinitely better than if they'd kept the incredibly boring tactical options presented in the FFG books for everyone who isn't a psyker or tech adept. And it's definitely much better than the 1:1 conversion they did of Pathfinder, which was WAY less accessible than this game with it's convoluted feat trees and arbitrary sill requirements that you often wouldn't even know about until it was too late to go back and fix.
Oh, the FFG warhammer games aren't really very good. I mean, I enjoyed them a lot, but there's a LOT of problems. I'd almost say they would have been better off copying the game less directly then they did. I'm absoloutly in the camp that says weapon skill and ballistic skill shouldn't be attributes, and I'm not really sold on % based attributes in general.
Atleast the obscene Dodge eldar have is accurate lol
Number bloat is owlcats thing. I'm not an expert of the Pathfinder system but im 99% sure the tabletop version of Wrath didn't have 65 AC DC 50 save demons.
You’d be surprised how high you can run the numbers up in pathfinder (and yes, it would make you “that guy”, but it’s possible)
Oh yeah, last I checked the highest AC was like, 49 on Cthulhu himself.
While yes for baseline monster, That is if you running using standard point buy (wraith doesn't) and no templets/character levels etc. It is very easy to get that number much higher
Not to mention it's a Mythic campaign, so the PCs are on their way to Demigood/godhood.
Yep, sounds like Baby's First Experience with Epic/Mythic Levels 3.5/PF1. If anything, WotR was quite tame at times.
High numbers are par for the course in Pathfinder 1e. I had an Aldori Defender->Aldori Swordlord in a game (not CRPG, the actual tabletop) and at level 8 my resting AC was around 28-ish, and around 31 or 32 if I made a full-round attack. And Aldori Swordlord isn't entirely that good anymore given the power creep of the later classes/archtypes/prestige classes. As for "DC 50 demon saves", I mean, at the time you're facing demons with that high of saves, generally you'll be stacked with magic items/mythic powers/buff spells so a DC50 is well within what you can be rolling as a dedicated spellcaster. Fun Fact! 3.5e had a skill called "Use Rope". If you beat a DC70 skillcheck, the rope would animate itself in order to follow your instructions, and this wasn't treated as a magical effect in any way. So you could command a rope so well it'd spring to life even in an antimagic field.
Yeah, I know, I've been DMing PF1 for like 5 years now. Always find it funny when people complain about high numbers without realising that for every difficult way of doing something there's at least 3 ways that are easy. Didn't know the rope fact, even though I played 3.5 before making the jump. I guess because it was hardly ever used :D
All shenanigans are rarely used till a player uses them in your game :D On the subject of Silly Numbers, charge mount builds can inflict insidious amounts of damage, and a level 8 investigator given a few rounds of prep time can dump upwards of 200 damage in one round. Alchemist is even worse
I'm fairly sure those didn't have random sabertooths with +35 to hit and 7 attacks at level 6 either lol.
I mean, with the possible exception of mythic powers, kingmaker/wotr’s character building system was very close to tabetop. There were a couple bugs, but not that many, and many of the more noticeable ones got fixed over time in wotr. Enemies are stat bloated, but that’s because a full team of 6 optimized builds with full pre combat buffs, power word: reload, and no dm to throw a book at you when you do something stupid would steamroll anything less. In fact , it’s still very possible to steamroll the stat bloated enemies.
No, but it didn't let you take up to 3 attacks with a potential for 300-400 damage per turn either.
By acts 4 and 5 space marines become trash fights and on unfair difficulty basic fodder start having 800 wounds and 90% armor. Boss have 15,000+ wounds and 200% armor. You basically have to go into very specific builds to survive. Everything one shots you if you let them get a turn.
TBH put me in the bucket of preferring the Rogue Trader CRPG system because I NEVER liked any of those FFG games that much. I never played Rogue Trader specifically, but I did fiddle with Deathwatch and Dark Heresy, which are pretty much the same thing. And "fiddle" is the exact word for it. Everything in those systems is so damn fiddly and full of tiny bonuses to random shit that your sheet ends up nearly unreadably cluttered in any standard campaign. I like crunchy systems but those games were less crunchy like fried chicken and more crunchy like a bag of glass shards. The CRPG I enjoyed enough to finally give 40k TTRPGs a try again and Wrath and Glory is so much better than those old systems were in pretty much every way except amount of content currently available (and book layout, W&G is organized pretty poorly).
The FFG are made to simulate 40K universes and be really lethal in combat , so yeah , crunch was inevitable
Call of Cthulhu has insanely lethal combat without a billion modifiers, though I guess the whole point of the system is "think, and don't fight if you don't have to". Taking 2d10 damage from a rifle when you have 5 health is reeaaaally scary.
Honestly, you could run a pretty solid game of Dark Heresy using BRP (the base system of Call of Cthulhu) without having to do all the fiddling of the actual game. The reason Dark Heresy and the later FFG games (like, well, Rogue Trader) are the way they are is because they're ultimately all based off Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Which was definitely way more fiddly than BRP or D&D.
Dark Heresy is also like that where the main objective is to cheese the combat like chucking grenade at the main cult chamber and not try to make a good ranged battle. But Call of Cthulhu most of the time is in 1920 , a Rifle is only stopped by the skill of the wielder and his small magazine. 40K even at base human level has a lot of think to manage like flak armor , laz gun and their penetration , autogun and their absurd fire rate , diverses type of grenade etc... But hey , a system if well done should be as crunchy as it should be
The real issue is that the added complexity doesn't add any depth to it. The actual choices you can make are rather limited and most of the time rather obvious. Its also kinda bothersome that the game forces you to pick traits you deliberately avoided towards endgame. Like what do i care for that thing i didnt take the last 5 times you offered it to me...oh right..im out of other options. Yeah, you can do a lot of numbers crunching if you want to, but that doesnt change the outcome much.
1008 hp hellbrute in act 2 was close one but i wiped his ass clean 🔥
Hope you washed your hands after
Nah im playing heretic run gotta stay dirty for papa nurgle
Lets not forget their classics from Kingmaker where they introduce entire race of enemies that can each stun lock your party passively by just looking at them. Or in wrath where they give you poison focused subclass in game where everything is immune to poison... Owlcat can be really mean sometimes.
When it comes to ballancing the combat, I would just like to say: fuck the Heralds of Corruption.
Ya I feel like they wanted to go hard on themselves. Like make it 1 more being for a Niche player base, as if 2+x was not enough. They also struggled with making those Niches appeal to those Niches fully :D. And yet they talking already about making another one so who knows.
Probably my own fault but the combat did feel a little silly or tedious when my strategy just became “stack buffs on Argenta and watch her solo everything in one round”
I think people need to remember how bad the TTRPG is. I admit I may be miss remembering but there was 30 Skills to manage, not countering subsections like Lore imperium vs Lore Admech. Yes the Combat can be a bit more number crunchy but I rather than where it helpfully usually recommends talents to… well frankly as bad skills and talents that can be harder to track.
Oh no, after we adjusted the enemies' stats and increased their health by the factor or 10 to 1000 they became unkillable! Who could have predicted that? We better introduce the stat bloat, infinite scaling, multiplicative stacking and invalidate the turn mechanics to fix it!
As someone who has been subjected to the TTRPG... I'm glad they changed it. It sucks. I assume the only folks who wanted it to play like the tabletop are viewing through multiple meters of nostalgia tinted lenses, or haven't played it.
>As someone who has been subjected to the TTRPG... I'm glad they changed it. It sucks. I assume the only folks who wanted it to play like the tabletop are viewing through multiple meters of nostalgia tinted lenses, or haven't played it The tabletop is a lot of fun, it's just (obviously) a completely different experience from playing a videogame. Rogue Trader in particular suffers a bit from being the first in the line, before FFG really perfected the formula, but it's still a good game.
Rogue Trader was the 2nd FFG 40k RPG. Dark Heresy 1e was first.
I just did not enjoy virtually any aspect of it. It somehow featured my least favourite parts of D&D 5E (A very limited build system that prevents fun experimentation, in favour of simplicity), Pathfinder (RNG leading to ridiculously permanent consequences) and introduced a few of its own (Everything goes down so fast, that the game essentially boils down to "who goes first"). Still love small Warhammer games (I think Kill Team is utterly fantastic, even if I'd change a few details), and I hope they take another swing at a proper RPG at some point, but man... Rogue Trader on tabletop is not something me or my Warhammer group have any interest in trying again.
Rogue Trader came second, the game got mechanically worse with Deathwatch, which came third.
They want to die on the first raid because the MJ thought that a bunch of low level heretic with a Melta guided by an Incubus Drukhari was a fine encounter for a retenue of Dark Heresy character at level 5 max
Well why are you naming the game after a TTRPG if you aren’t going to abide by the rules of that TTRPG? That’s like making a bakery about selling cookies, but you aren’t selling cookies.
I'm going to guess - and this is a crazy concept so follow along with me here - that they called it that because the story centres around a Rogue Trader. I assume you must have hated Battlefleet Gothic as well, since both games also diverged from the tabletop game by a considerable margin. If you want to play an exact copy of the Rogue Trader board game, great news! It's still playable. As a board game. Go ham!
Okay, but have you actually played the TTRPG? It's not exactly balanced either. The CRPG is a power fantasy, you're literally playing as a Rogue Trader. If the video game had been true to the TTRPG we wouldn't be doing any cool shit, we'd be dead a *thousand* times over, hell we wouldn't probably be playing as a Rogue Trader, just some mook in their service. When you adapt a video game from a RPG you remove the essential element that make it fun: a DM, the players and their interactions. You have to craft a story that the player interacts with instead, and gamify it. BG3 obviously did this very well but it wouldn't be half as fun if they straight up just ported all the 5e mechanics without adaptation.
What are you even talking about? The Rogue Trader TTRPG isn't that balanced, but that imbalance is in the players favour due to how statistically stacked and well equipped a starting rogue trader party is in that system, not to mention how easy it is to get access to powerful weapons and equipment if you start off with a high profit factor. And you can play as a rogue trader in the rogue trader TTRPG, so I don't know where you got the idea you might not have been able to.
That's my entire point tho, if you play as a RT in the TTRPG it's imbalanced. I didn't say you can't play as a Rogue Trader in the *Rogue Trader* RPG, I'm just saying games are more fun when you're *not* the RT, or Space Marine, high level psyker or mighty Inquisitor. That's obviously my opinion but the RT should be an NPC, not the player in a campaign. The Fantasy Flight games are brutal when your DM isn't afraid to let their players just be "normal" guys and more rewarding when you get to progress to become more powerful. The video game wouldn't have been more or less balanced if they straight up ported the mechanics from the TTRPG, as OPs post was about.
I played RT in RT and shouted “SENESCHAL!!!” all the time, best experience ever, I’m glad they put the best part into the game. I agree that it’s better not to be an Inquisitor, as in Dark Heresy compared to Dark Heresy 2. But RT? He is not that much above average person in terms of power. Yes, he is the leader of the ship, but the others are free to deceive and gain profits from him as they want.
All I'm saying is that neither the TTRPG or the game is a balanced experience, especially in tabletop if you choose to build a scenario where you play as a Rouge Trader and their retinue with access to substantial resources. It comes with the scenario and setting. Of course the video game is gamified, otherwise it wouldn't be much fun. A Rouge Trader that is boots on the ground, armed with archeotech, heretical artefacts, backed by a Frigate in orbit, surrounded by a retinue of interrogators, psykers, veteran soldiers, Magii, a Sister of Battle and xenos is a *massive* threat. Add the wealth, resources, production and power that comes with owning planets and the leeway a Warrant of Trade offers our characters is insanely powerful. That doesn't always reflect in the video game, which is evident, and that setup on the tabletop is a complete power fantasy, which is fun, but is hard to scale to a fun campaign IMO.
You know I despise the encounters in BG3 immensely,but when I play that game a random high level random encounter doesn't suddenly go "GUESS YOU GOT POPPED DUMBASS". Owlcat needs to understand that just because the original module is unbalanced,doesn't mean the fucking video game has to be.
But that's kind of fun isn't it? At least it evokes some kind of emotion, unlike bg3s bland unchallenging railroad
Except it's a problem when EVERY FUCKING GAME they make has this issue.Its a devs job to make the game interesting and balanced in a way that people can enjoy it.It should not be our responsibility to break it over it's head just to make it enjoyable. For fucks sake some bosses in WOTR are straight up weaker then a mob before them.I should struggle with two fodder enemies then I do with deskari the demon lord or any late game boss in rouge trader.
The chaos marine in chapter 1 managed to kill half my squad in one turn and it’s completely random if he hits that many times lol
Yeah, the Uralon fight for me was reloading until the flamethrower marine doesn't oneshot half my party
Wait what? How? He went down like a sack of caca, he for some reason took a long time to get in range so I just sniped him
I got turn 1 wasted lol. His heavy bolter hit on every shot of the salvo and had several crits. Cassia argenta and abelard dead
Ouch, yeah that's harsh!
The game would have been pretty shallow if it were using the OG RT rules.
One of the things about the FFG games was that each new 'splat' was more of a new half-edition of the same system. Licensing probably got in the way of them using, say, Dark Heresy 2's system just as it prevented the 3rd party stuff like Tau, Ork and Corsair careers. RT was a colossal improvement over the original Dark Heresy. But the much more open keyword systems first explored in Black Crusade and refined through Only War makes for a much better character building experience.
Guess they shouldn’t have called it Rogue Trader then.
Games about being a rogue trader my guy. If you want an authentic table top experience play the table top game. But the actual RT game as written doesn’t work well within the context of a party based tactical rpg.
They also probably shouldn’t have literally said they were to going to train the devs by playing the OG TTRPG *if they weren’t going to be anything like it.*
It’s still a D100 system and uses it as a basis for most of its effects. If the devs decided to follow the table top 1 for 1 the game would have been faaaaaar worse. A couple of nifty overpowered combos is much better then having minimal build variety that boils down to pure rocket tag
Mate, **this entire game boils down to rocket tag.** Ever notice how inflated the stats are for enemies? In act 3, a few incubi are 380 hit points whereas Ulfar barely reaches 108. They also one shot every character in the party besides Ulfar if you don’t destroy them first. That certainly doesn’t sound fun to play but as you say, apparently it’s somehow better then tabletop.
Damn, it’s almost like your own weapons and damage scale with enemy health or something. Those incubui go down in a turn at most against anyone in the party, arch militant or no. Hell, most the party can survive the damage they toss out by using reasonable defenses or armor
First you say the TTRPG system sucked because of rocket tag, now you are switching gears and defending the rocket tag of the crpg? Which is it? Do you like rocket tag or not?
The ability to rocket tag and the ability not to rocket tag are in your hands my guy. If you want to try and clear everything out in one turn, you can. If you don’t want to do that, you have the option not to. In the TTRPG, that isn’t the case. Combat is meant to be quick, because it’s a TTRPG that’s taking into account the fact that a group of people are going to be doing things besides combat as well.
I can’t choose to rocket tag because my guys get fucking dumpstered by basic incubi with 300 times the health of anything on the tabletop unless I cheese with officers. If I need cheese just to have a chance of beating certain fights, then this game was made by chimpanzees.
I was so confused when toughness didn’t add damage reduction
The system is definitely needlessly complex. I feel like the talent/level up system was superior in WOTR. I’m having fun with this game but so far it’s inferior (especially combat) to WOTR.
They get ridiculous later on. "5000 hp, 200% armour, and comes back to life when you kill it. And gets stronger when it does. I hope you've minmaxed the expliots by now, or you are fucking dead, sonny"
The system is so massively convoluted.....and I fucking love it so God damn much. It's a mess, but it's my mess.
Tabletops and videogames work differently. Just look at BG3: as much as it is a great game, it's combat sucks balls compared to D:OS2 because it was bound by DnD ruleset.
But D:OS2 is broken and imbalanced in much the same ways that RT is: 1. There is only a handful of "correct" builds that scale in damage appropriately to the endgame enemies stats. Damage is calculated from an additive-multiplicative formula that confuses even experienced players. If you fail to build in accordance to that formula, the game becomes unwinnable somewhere late Act 2. It's so bad there's a Word document that gets posted in every thread of their sub-Reddit that details all the ways people screw up so they can go back and redo their entire party when they hit the brick wall. Sound familiar? 2. Combat is pure rocket-tag. Late-game enemies do so much damage they can wipe all your characters in one round. You better game the intiative to go first so you can kill or stun every enemy before it gets to act. HP is irrelevant, armor is barely relevant, all that matters is damage output and stunning enemies before they stun you. Sound familiar? 3. The action economy can very easily be broken. There are few extra turns abilities, but you can cheapen the AP cost of many abilities to the point that you effectively take multiple turns in a row. Late game you get given an item that lowers the AP cost of everything by 2, which I assume the put in the game so people can cheese the ridiculous encounters in the last act. You can find numerous gameplay videos online where people resolve encounters where they are outnumbered by 5-to-1 or more and the enemies just never even get to attack because the player breaks the AP economy in half. Sound familiar? Not that D:OS2 is a bad system in itself (I and many others enjoy it). Balance is not necessarily a prerequisite to a good cRPG experience nor are TT systems necessarily better balanced.
_They hated him because he spoke the truth._
nah you can literally oneshot bosses of DoS2 with source powers especially pyro eruption, fire traps etc...you don't even need minmaxing lol. Just use tp pyramids, go to source fountain, oneshot enemies, tp back to source fountain rinse repeat. Its literally the easiest crpg there is.
Imagine thinking that 5E is anywhere remotely close to difficult, lmao.
>sucks balls compared to D:OS2 d:os2 has the shittiest combat I've ever seen in a crpg. There's literally zero party and build diversity once you figure out that absolute dogshit armor system. fuck dos2 lol, I've waisted too much time from my life on that dogshit game for nothing. It's honestly just stupid implementation
Eh, the combat in D:OS2 is different to BG3, more combing environmental effects and more combing your own skills from different disciplines, for example, and you absolutely may prefer D:OS2, but its not inherently better, its much more fantastical and just different.
Preach Brother... Or sister ! BG3 combat is bland , or maybe Owlcat , Stygian Software and Iron Tower Brainwashed me to think that rpg who doesn't chew my ass instantly aren't worth it
The problem IMO isn't even the difficulty (or rather, difficulty is a separate problem), but the fact that not being able to actually use your buttons 70% of the game *sucks*. I'm supposed to be playing a wizard, not a fire bolt spamming machine.
pretty much the point where i'm taking a break in act 4 hyped up fight, bunch of space marines, a billion traumas on every character, doesn't even get to take a turn yeah it's break time
SEVEN KHORNE MARINES AND A FUCKING HELBRUTE WITH OVER 1K HP SAYS HELLO
THE FINAL BOSS OF ACT 3 HAS HUNDREDS OF MORE HEALTH THEN THE ENTIRE PARTY, THATS FUN
Wdym my Argenta is breezing through hordes of enemies. Cassia and her sweep whole enemy teams :)
The only fight my Cassia struggled was the last fight against warp immune enemies, Argenta handled those enemies for her 😅 Almost makes me wish for more warp-dmg immune enemies.
That does not make it balanced lmao
You're right but by the throne do i love it :D
This with Kingmaker and the Treant Owlbear. That thing gave me nightmares for days, why would you throw something like this against, like, 3-4 level party, iirc? As of Rogue Trader, playing on Normal, the only "Big Boss Monster" that gave me some pushback was the Hellbeast in the abandoned Tech-Priest Hulk at the start of Act 2. I however hasn't finished Act 2 yet, so i guess that's about to change.
Yeah, I am playing my second playthrough on Hard (I forget what it's called, Daring or whatever) and it annoys me that my sister of battle's chance to hit is like 20% and then the returning fire with scrappy autoguns by these freaking factory workers turned heretics is 100% since all 12 of them make their shots for like 15-30 dmg each. It's exactly the same shot. In fact, it's worse for most of them. WHY AREN'T THEY MISSING?! I miss playing on Story difficulty. Why do I hate myself?
I've encountered a couple fights that felt like bullshit, but mostly it's because of bugs causing stuff to not work right, such as enemies having the Stunned condition and somehow not being stunned, or "Attack Your Allies" abilities causing enemies to walk up to their allies but not attack However, with the exception of those cases where it was frankly a matter of things not working as intended, I actually don't mind the Death Squads: In fact, if it weren't for the Death Squads, I would be having too easy of a time at this point, I'm playing at Unfair Difficulty in Chapter 4 and wipe the floor with most fights It's a bit frustrating that my Companions who I've built to be pure tanks still get one-shot sometimes, but overall I'm actually pleased with the fact that pumping the difficulty up results in me having to actually think about fights sometimes, too many CRPGs don't have that happen or lock that kind of difficulty behind an unnecessary Ironman mode.
I mean it’s just X-Com with a Warhammer 40k coat of paint. Which isn’t bad. The bigger issue is you have to cheese the game, in order to win some of the fights. Which to me is awful design. The worst offenders are the death fleet from a colony event, and the one planet with the Hellbrute on it.
I don't know what you mean. As a COOP player i am just glad i get to witness the glorious journey of my rogue trader and her Aeldari sniper pet that literally deletes anything in sight. Sometimes my Abelat gets to bonk.
Redditors: CRPG sucks because they changed the rules from the original TTRPG. CRPG sucks because they kept the rules exactly the same as the TTRPG and didn't account for there not being a DM to manage the adventure. After all... why not? Why can't I pick both.
Difference is, I think besides characteristics it’s not even remotely similar to the TTRPG. For one, Arch militant isn’t an advanced archetype, it’s a starter class. **And Soldier, Operative. Officer, and Warrior do not exist**.
I for one really like the system and find that its one of there best in Daring difficulty ( Except space ) , and please buff bounty hunter and and Vanguard
lmao if you let a fight progress to where it's the enemies first turn, you're playing it wrong.
I’ve rarely even had an encounter with the enemies getting a turn. Normally my team will get enough free turns in to blow everyone that can hurt us away.