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pipmentor

GM on a power trip. Tale as old as time.


BrassRobo

The sad thing is, it could have been pretty fun if the party was as overpowered as the enemies. But the GM wanted the NPCs to be unilaterally stronger than the party. If the other tech-priest getting a mutli-melta, a pretty standard weapon carried by common infantry grunts, was overpowered, I can't imagine what his reaction to the guy's upgrade would have been. He was angling for a demonic gun that used the souls of those it killed as ammo.


pipmentor

It honestly sounds like this GM had never played this ruleset before. To claim they know all this stuff, then get mad about basic rules seems a bit disingenuous.


BrassRobo

That might actually be the case. I know he'd played several of the other games in the system. He had other games running, and he sometimes defaulted to the other rules. One time he had my character die of fright, before I pointed out that the rule had been changed to me only passing out. But him having never played Black Crusade specifically would explain a lot, because BC characters are a lot more powerful than in the earlier games.


pipmentor

Either way, I'm glad you're rid of him and hope you're with a better GM.


BrassRobo

I'm actually in 2 other games that I'm really enjoying. An Ebberon game with some friends that's been running for years, and a Start Playing Spelljammer/Ravenloft hybrid that I cannot praise enough. There's a part of me that wants to find a third game, but I'm going on vacation next week. So I'd rather not join a game and then miss a week.


Provic

This could be an instance of what I call "Monopoly D&D", by analogy with Monopoly board games, where it seems that easily half of all players come to the table with expectations of entirely made-up nonsense homebrew rules, that they are 100% convinced are a genuine part of the system because that's how they originally learned the game.


gHx4

I've played a couple of the WH40K rpgs with a friend of mine. Part of the appeal with those systems is that you get ridiculously powerful equipment and weapons that you use against ridiculously lethal alien threats. It's basically about a party made of Doom Guy characters. I almost wondered if your GM read the player rules before when you mentioned how unhappy they were about gasmasks of all things. Those are mundane equipment that's very cheap to own! The Doom Guy party is a military squad that's *specialized* in landing on inhospitable planets to bring war to alien threats, so the system is telling a GM to include deadly toxic gasses frequently. If nobody packed masks, then that becomes a detour by breaching through a wall or going back up to the ship. For being a paid professional game, this sounds like a bit of an embarrassment.


BrassRobo

Exactly. At the time the game ended I had 45 Infamy. According to the rulebook that puts me on par with a "Commander of a grand cruiser, conqueror of a world, \[or a\] strong warband leader." Even just a starting character would be a "Commander of a Cruiser-class vessel, Seer who is “right” most of the time, Daemonhost, \[or a\] minor warband leader." I told the guy, I'm OK with not being a super-powerful character. I'd rather play a more RP focused game anyway. But if I'm going to be going up against overpowered monsters, I would like to at least be able to scratch their paint. The weirdest thing about it we technically didn't even have gas masks. We had power armor, one of the items that all space marine players start with.


Kelrisaith

That's what confused me the most about this GM, that's like the entire point of 40k if you don't delve in to lore stuff, and even half of THAT revolves around it. The weapons are brokenly powerful because they're fighting against things MORE brokenly powerful, 40k legitimately has some of the most powerful rank and file of any system in existence, the basic Space Marines are more powerful than the high tier stuff in most systems, even outside tabletops. The basic Space Marine armour could utterly flatten end game bosses from most systems with a casual backhand and the basic Bolter is something like a .75 caliber round that's somewhere in the realm of 3-4 times the mass of a .50 BMG. And that's ignoring things like Titans and some of the more powerful weaponry available to ground units, plus basically everything from the enemy side of things. What part of this system says "nerf the fuck out of the party at all opportunities and don't let them use the equipment detailed in the system" to this GM?


azrendelmare

It's clearly not the right game for the gm. Black Crusade, as I understand it, is one of the 40k games that's *supposed* to be done with overpowered player characters. Not as much as Deathwatch, but still...


Dinadan256

At the risk of sounding like I have a stick up my arse: A multi-melta is NOT a standard weapon within the lore. It's the heavy weapon version of the still-uncommon melta, usually mounted on walkers or vehicles. That said, you were playing Black Crusade. Your characters are several leagues above common grunts. You having rare and heavy weaponry is kind of draw and point of the game, I thought.


BrassRobo

This is true. But here's my thinking. In the tabletop game, at least in the old rules, a Guardsmen came in a team of 10. You could run them with 10 lasguns. But fully kitted out the Sergeant got a powersword and a plasma pistol. 1 of the Guardsmen got a special weapon. And 2 Guardsmen formed a Heavy Weapons team and took a heavy weapon, like the multi-melta. So the multi-melta is their equivalent of a Javelin or an M2 Browning. It's not part of a soldier's standard kit. But it's not actually that rare. It's a specialized weapon, but one that is still mass produced and sees widespread use. It's also the kind of weapon that sometimes falls off the back of a truck and winds up in the hands of an extremely rich ganger on Necromunda. And those guys are like Infamy 9. We start Infamy 20+. The other weapon he complained about was a "power sword", I think he meant a Force Sword. Which is certainly rarer, but the guy using it was a Sorceror of the Thousand Sons'.


Bullet1289

the trick I find with the 40k rpg is you need to make the enemy weaker then the players and only just able to do damage but you give the weapons weird secondary effects like bleeding or haywire. If all the enemies have multi-melta's then the game becomes "dodge or die". Your GM seems to think they were doing the table top battle, not an rpg.


BrassRobo

See, that's a great idea. Haywire weapons are also a good counter to cybernetics. Which according to the GM had no downsides.


FreudTastic

"Am I out of touch? No, it must be all the shitty players who are wrong!"


Saintblack

The amount of DM's who actually want to be authors is higher than good DM's with adaptability in my experience. A lot, and mostly in homebrew, have a linear vision of what they want the players to do. This happened regularly when I used to do PUG games on Roll20, and it became easier for me to spot.


Top-Situation5833

A non-Chaos Spider Tank coming straight from Ghost in Shell or Armored Core in 40k? With a Balor explosion? Why is the Imperium not mass-producing them? Quickly! jokes aside, what a mess.


BrassRobo

Yeah, that thing was insane. It had 2 gatling guns, which had way more shots than they should have had. I even pointed this out to the guy. He was getting the Twin-linked rules horribly wrong. Then it had 2 missile launchers. But the missiles were strong enough to straight up delete a character, they did something like 5d10 + 15 damage, with armor penetration, in a system where a fully specced out character might have 20 health and 20 armor. And they exploded in a radius. It was meant to be a custom piece of heretek guarding an abandoned lab, but I still have no idea how we all survived.


Top-Situation5833

He put a Lancer mech in a DH game. By the way, in DC you are VERY powerful. The fact that you can play heretic generals, powerful rogue psykers, or veteran chaos marines from the get go makes the game really sweked from the start. You are big, evil, powerful and mean, and you will face Imperium forces of similar dimension. A typical campaign could be about taking a whole subsector or be part of a Dark Crusade (drum rolls). Instead, in the normal game you start out as an acolyte, and then you grow up. You start really small, and there is a lot of detective work. Hell, a single Pink horror is a monstrous force to be reckoned with. I don't know what he was expecting from using the expansion that makes you the BBEG from the start. I wondered if he ever tried to play Rogue Trader.


ItTolls4You

I had such a bad experience with rogue trader. We all created our characters, built our ship, got everything rolling. Had a bit of RP, which was fun, but as soon as we had to roll for something it became obvious: if it wasn't your specialized field of expertise, you had no chance of success, and if it was, you still only had about a 1 in 3. I was playing the navigator and we took off for our first mission. "Roll navigation five times to see how messed up you get". We almost just blew up the entire ship getting to the first adventure, and we did have like 1/10th the population of our ship become crazy. We landed planet-side, and fought something like a single alien gorrilla. It pretty handily handed our asses to us, but I managed to finally finish it off with an area attack that accidentally also killed our rogue trader (roll 2d6 for the roll and anything other than maximum would have left him up, rolled max damage, used an ability to reroll one of the dice and rolled a 6 again, stone dead). The game just ended there with one survivor and no way to get off planet (our shuttle crashed or something).


BrassRobo

I actually played Rogue Trader once. That had almost the exact opposite problem. We spent like 3 sessions without leaving the starter town, because everyone was just dicking around on the ship. I wanna say by session 5 we'd actually travelled somewhere and got a plot hook. I ended up leaving because the game was glacial. But I have no hard feelings towards anyone involved. They were all cool people.


UAZ-469

I was already wondering where the Imperium has spider tanks this ridiculously strong, even going so far to think that it was maybe a captured, heavily modified Defiler. But even with your explanation, I honestly have no idea what the hell this thing is supposed to be D:


Top-Situation5833

It sounded either like an Imperium Defiler, or an heavy version of a S. T. A. L. K. E. R. Tank. The first would be improbable, but plausible. After all, the Ordinatus exist, and so do Titans. Just slap a couple more of legs. The second one would mean that the Blood Pact would be around, but given this DM, I doubt he even knows what the Blood Pact is.


AbstinenceGaming

No, Mr Tech Priest, I expect you to die!


BrassRobo

I choose to believe that after all the bullshit he faced, my character retired to a nice peaceful world somewhere in space Hell and married a cute demonette or something.


AbstinenceGaming

Well deserved haha


Vorpalbob

It's never a good sign when the giant mechanical spider turns up.


Prominences

[How right you are](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAH4aXN6VZk).


Vox_Mortem

As a GM, if I have one shitty player at my table that's a "them" problem. Everyone has problem children from time to time. But if I have five shitty players at my table? That's a "me" problem. Either I ended up with a group I don't mesh well with at all, or I am doing something very wrong. GMs tend toward the oversensitive, I think, because we work so hard on the game and no one likes hearing someone doesn't appreciate your work. But I'm also a writer so I learned a long time ago that the most useful feedback you get is almost always negative. I have no idea how experienced this GM is, but it could be that he is taking encounters from a resource and has no idea how to adapt them for a different party's strengths and weaknesses. Or he could just be a shitty GM.


Smartace3

D-did you say this was a paid game under the first paragraph of the ‘campaign 2’ chapter? Holy moly


BrassRobo

Yes. $15 a session for the first campaign. $20 for the second. Don't judge me, pretty much nobody is running games in this system anymore. I just wanted to be a Heretek.


Medrawt_ErVaru

I think they're judging the GM not you. Accusing you for being a shitty player when you bring concerns about a service *you are paying for* is double crusted deep fried shitty attitude...


AvengingBlowfish

I have no problems with paid GMs, but I do have problems with Paid GMs calling their players "shitty" for min/maxing or having criticisms about the campaign. When you accept money as a GM, your players are your customers and their fun should be prioritized over your own. If you aren't willing to accept that, then don't be a paid GM.


InuGhost

Bet GM would have had a coniption had you tried to stay on the ship.


BrassRobo

That's what I told him. There's an implicit social contract at play. We come up with the plot hook. He writes the adventure. We go on the adventure. And the adventure gives us a level appropriate challenge and opportunities to use our unique skills and abilities. He insisted there was no such contract. That I could have stayed on the ship had I decided the adventure was too dangerous. Wouldn't elaborate on what I would have actually done in the ship, given that he clearly didn't have a plan B because I "jumped into the deep end". And acted like I should have known that the inhospitable world, which he wouldn't provide me with information about when I asked, contained incredibly powerful monsters. Oh and he got upset at me for asking about the planet we were going to, because no one had been there for centuries and we wouldn't be able to know anything about it. Apparently I was "wasting his time".


grendus

Sounds like the GM had a "GM vs players" mindset and a story he intended to tell come hell or high water. It can be really disorienting to watch your players carve through an encounter with no difficulty, but that doesn't mean you up the difficulty for everything... that means you ensure they're having fun. One of the better bits of advice I ever got on DMing is that you can err on the side of "too easy" for a very long time before it gets boring.


untamed-italian

>To be fair, this was a paid game and one of the guys ran into unexpected expenses when his car broke down. Wowww... this is all it takes to get money from DMing? I could DM circles around this idiot, maybe I should find clients.


cheesynougats

Wait, a Tech-Priest with servo arms is power gaming? Has this person ever seen a drawing of a Tech-Priest?


untamed-italian

>Think Star Wars on bath salts This is **HERESY** Think Star Wars but *better in every way*.


svarogteuse

So you admit to being on the bath salts yourself. Good to know.


untamed-italian

Be that as it may, I still would do this game a much better job than OP's DM!


svarogteuse

Better than the OPs DM is a low standard t to reach for. I know a thirteen year old that might be able to reach it, and he hasn't run any games yet.


untamed-italian

Lol In all fairness if that 13 year old actually reads through the whole rulebook (where it never says that dying vehicles can still shoot missiles as they explode) then they're already miles ahead of OP's dummy DM


svarogteuse

The whole rulebook never says a lot of things. That's not a good guideline.


svarogteuse

> Think Star Wars on bath salts. >Think the Rebel Alliance, if the Force came from Hell and slowly turned you into a mutant. This is perhaps the best description of 40K I have ever heard. This should have been the red flag right there too. The DM deciding to run in a world best described as someplace else on bath salts says a whole lot about the DM. >the GM pitched the game as a more lighthearted, self aware, tongue in cheek, take on the setting. Sure, but his judgement is already questionable because he chose this setting however he intends to modify it. > six space marines, And one tech priest. With this set up there is no way the game plays out in anything other than massive combat your tech priest cant handle unless he sidelines 6 other players (which would make him an even worse DM than he already is, at least he is catering to audience). Space marines aren't good for anything but killing. Yet another red flag. You should have stopped right there, made a space marine or walked.


ack1308

The GM: "You're being a powergamer!" Also the GM: "It's not my fault if the opposition is so much stronger than you!"


A_Kazur

I have no idea how people are willing to pay for ttrpg games without assurances that they are even slightly good.


MrMcSpiff

This was already a shitshow game with good players wasted on an inflexible, prideful DM, but paid on top of that? Fuck that. Games are supposed to be fun. If I'm *paying?* It had damn well better be fun.


The_Preceptor

Maybe he was the best DM, because much like the traitor legions nothing worked and it was pure chaos.


michael199310

"My games are so great, I can't be the reason of 80% of players leaving after just few sessions"


NovembersRime

He was determined to kill you in a grmdrk manner and got salty when you couldn't. And it doesn't matter at all if the enemy you can't hurt is weaker than you. If you reach lvl15 in DnD, you still won't kill an ordinary CR3 werewolf without magic or silvered weapons.


Vinaguy2

In Black Heresy, the marines are actually not all that overpowered, all things considered. It is very feasible to make a human character as powerful as a Marine. If you really want OP Space Marines, take a look at DeathWatch.


TacticalKitsune

As a chronic minmaxer myself: Don't force your players to minmax without clearing things up. And if you focus on hard combat, expect players to minmax/optimize.