Better at WH40K than WH40K

Space Marines in the WH40K universe are bad ass. They come, they kill, they dominate, and they crush their enemies like bugs beneath their feet. Seven feet tall, hugely strong, wrapped in battle suits that can shrug off cannon rounds and armed with guns that can take out tanks, buildings and anything in the way.

Then you get the official WH40K books, like Deathwatch,

After you've spent an hour building your awesome Space Marine player-character and are ready to start striding across the battlefield laying waste to the Emperors enemies, you get to your first encounter with the enemy and ...

Referee: "Roll to hit the enemies."

You: "So I've got my base to hit chance that's 32%. You said they were grouped together, so I can use my 'hordes bonus', that gets me to 36%. They are the declared enemies of my chapter, so that's anther 2%, so that's um... 38%. I was blessed by the chapters chaplain that puts me on 39%. Rodrick is suppressing them so that gets me to 42%. I roll ... 56. Gosh darn it I missed."

And that's where the official 40K games leave me. I'm looking at the beautiful books filled with glorious details and lore of a universe that is hideous and alluring, a place I want to game, but with a bittersweet taste. The actual game play especially combat, crawls at a snails pace. Instead of wiping swathes of enemies to jelly in an instant, I'm adding up small percentages that if I'm lucky allow me to hit one bad guy and maybe taken him out.

It fails, blocks your might say, the story you are trying tell. Its simply not fit for purpose.

Contrast to the game: Three Sixteen: Carnage Amongst the Stars

After you've spent the full 30 seconds creating your character you dive into the action

Referee: "Roll to hit the enemies."

You: "7 on the D10, that's a hit, rolling 2D8 for kills, I kill 9."

Clearly you see the difference. 

Deathwatch is a traditional detail orientated , methodical, plodding game, where as Three Sixteen is a rapid, rules-as-tool system that's almost entire story focused.

The background of Three Sixteen is almost a null, so combining the rules of it with the lore and background of Deathwatch is the way to go if you want that "feel" of Space Marines". Go ahead, mash them together, two great tastes in one!

3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, session report

Last night was my first game in quite a while of 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, and my first time GMing it with remote players. Three brave players dared the adventure with me, and all of them newbies to the system.

We started the session in a Google Hangout. This gave us the audio visual link, and then I opened up Roll20 where I had what they call a "campaign" set up to play. I normally just roleplay in the Hangout, without board and without minis, but 3:16 has an abstract map that is core to the play and without visuals I thought newbies would be struggling.

So I set up a Campaign in Roll20 with the range map on screen and counters for each of the players characters.

I'd also set up a series of "HandOuts", these are documents that I could flash on-screen for the players. I had one for a rules run-through, one for each rank detailing weapon choices and one for the domination results table (as I can never remember how that works).

We met up in the Hangout, I posted a link to the Roll20 campaign into the chat box and everyone joined me over there. Thus we had Roll20 in one window and the Hangout in another. It is possible to open Roll20 within the Hangout, but when I've tried this I found the Roll20 window is far too small and cramped.

We had a couple of problems the first of which was that one player was suffering a lot of interference. Fortunately one of the other players knew what was happening and advised that we should all turn off the audio/visual setting within Roll20. Once they were turned off the sound settled down nicely.

Then I tried to show the players the handouts I'd made and run into another problem. This time it was what I'd not-done within the settings of the handouts. Again another of the players stepped in and put me straight, telling me where I'd gone wrong. What I'd not done was set the "In Players Journals" to all players. This had to be done for all the handouts. It's a neat feature allowing handouts to be shown to some or all players. Sadly I didn't know that at the time and so no one could see it for a few minutes.

I'd previously posted a link to an audio introduction (the link) for the game into the Hangout and I checked that everyone had listened, thus I was able to avoid reading a long boxed-text.

The adventure was Mission 1 from my published campaign Death Bringers. In this mission the players are set to battle aliens within the rings of planet, so no gravity, no up, no down and lots of fun.

I like this mission because it's an unusual. There are living sentient ice-rocks within the rings, that can throw themselves at the good guys.

Hilarity ensued. The Sergeant only had an Non Fighting Ability of 4, the highest of the bunch, so anything they tried not related to fighting was like watching the three stooges at work. Feet were frozen to an asteroid, ropes caught around codpieces, and being stuck head first in a giant snowball with legs kicking in the vacuum.

The story eventually moved on. From battling moving space rocks, they bussed over to a moonlet and battled sentient ice-trees that threw ice-trunks into their ranks. Then it was time to find the L.T. who had disappeared. Turned out he had been captured and dragged down a tunnel. They found him in the centre of the moon a prisoner of a blobby beast. Three vivid incidents here have stuck in my mind.

A trooper punching his fist onto the end of an ice-spike.
A corporal ripping a massive living vein from a cavern wall.
A sergeant being bloodily blinded by an impact with his face plate.

From here they returned to the 3:16th capital ship and discovered that the 3:17th had crowded on board as their ship had been taken over. The heroes rearmed and headed over to 3:17ths ship to clear it out. Things didn't go well. For the first time ever in a game I've played, the aliens got an ambush, which they followed up with further hits. The PCs were about to die when a Strength was used that ended the scene and saved all their lives. There ended the game.

Sadly I brought the session down a bit at the end. On Sunday nights I have a strict two hour window for playing and I had to rush the players through what should have been the climactic ending thus ruining the pace. I'd been so wrapped up in the game that I'd lost track of the time. If I'd been concentrating I would have cut that last encounter and built up the previous one into the climax. If we'd had one more player and one less encounter, it would have been timed perfectly. Hopefully that's a lessen learned.

I really enjoyed getting back into 3:16 and if the opportunity comes up again I'll be playing again and hopefully some of these players will come back, they were brilliant!
 

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

A promo for my 3:16 campaign

Christmas is the time for sharing with your family, the giving and receiving of gifts... or if your me, the time to set up all the family computers as a render-farm for your animated promotion video!

Here's a new little promo video for a campaign book I wrote a couple of years back.