Collected House Rules & Requests

Bit late on the train, bit ill try keep this brief.

A) The tree limit is good, however does not address the min maxing thing. Keep it, don't make it per school, because that just doesn't address the issue.

Using Nate as the Obvious example; 8 powers (excluding universal, of which he has about 3 or 4). 3 of those powers are Literally the exact same power on semi and full auto mode, making each of the lower two redundant, which is perfectly fine, that's how progression works, it balanced them. So effectively, he has 6 powers. 2 Trees. One Discipline. So compared to say, Farad who has many powers, we see power limitations are not the issue.

What is? Min Maxing. Forever a thing, same reason Gunny, Winters or Thorgrim are all also so damned powerful.

The solution, because I've already faced and solved this problem, comes in 2 parts.

1) That one month cool down rule for progression we have in Deathwatch. Use it. Seriously, it doesn't hamper players, I just makes spreading out xp spending into a wider range of ability's more appetizing, by taking away the temptation to just get the next best thing on the primary progression right now. The characters will get just as powerful, it will just take longer which stretches out how long a campaign can run for.

2) Give the party a wide range of problems, as a GM hit them from a variety of angles and involve the whole party. Large groups (5 or more) suffer risk of each char being min maxed for their role, but if they All find themselves interacting with tech, Running, climbing, being attacked (by weapons scaled to them), talking to people, needing to know something about their enemy and so on; they will feel inclined to spread out their skills - Something skits has done with Fariad to make such a well rounded char, Mara too.


Its also starting with the rest of us. Nate is learning to drive and aiming to learn more combat skils because he keeps getting nearly killed, but cant yet meaningfuly contribute without his powers, which open him up to risks and aggro. He also needs to learn to talk to people, as to teach and grow his Cabal, as well as growing the lore for said cabal.

Another recommendation? Use more Tokens but subtract them from endgame calculated xp - Having tokens of other gods will encourage players to spend outside the min-max path. That's why I liked them so much I made an aptitude version.

Final Note: Casters, psychers, Magic users in Any system in Any age are always the most powerful mid to late game. Look at dylans mage in my Pathfinder game, thing is - without the players of other classes supporting them they are almost always glass cannons. They may have bug protection spells but there is always a way around them, and its the warrior standing in front of the mage keeping peeps off him that alowes him to be so OP. Its the definition of Magic.

In terms of the Chaos game, I would hit you guys in your psychic powers more often if it:

a) Made sense in terms of the world; and
b) It didn't cripple the majority of the party.

Having a party where 4/5 characters use psychic powers and 3/5 depend on them to keep up with the space marines makes things a little hard. Also I try not to be a jerk too much so not all of the enemies wear Collars of Khorne or have Null Fields.

I strive for a reasonable level of consistency in the world and I don't want to be in situations where things feel like I'm pulling stuff out of my arse just to challenge you guys. As much as Chaos tries otherwise, I like things to be at least reasonably logical.

On a secondary note, the fact that inherent system bias to min-maxing has forced Dom to implement his limitations is a bit frustrating for me. I like the overall system but the fact that we have to lock off higher advancements until a higher experience so that we don't become too powerful too quickly makes me want to try and rejig the advancement structure entirely.

As mentioned last game, we've basically out leveled most of this zone, both individually and in that we have a sizeable army. There's things that can threaten us, sure, but the average surface population, not so much.

Yea, targeting the psy powers may be a thing some enemy's do, but is also not the way to go to throw a challenge.

Against what we can expect to face, any situation where we can set the engagement, we have a massive advantage over. That's just a fact of battle.

So with air and armour superiority, we've been able to take our time and engaged from a position of strength and pull apart the enemy.

But this won't always be the case, for example, in the underground of the Ring, we probably cant fit a Tank.

Gm advice from experience: Don't try nerf strengths (unless a particularly canny foe would try), make the strengths count, but be needed, and have a variety of threats.

Its all a bit much to type on my phone, I'll need to catch you in person/on skype to talk meta

I will mention this tho: Beware the butterfly effect. Small house rules are better than overhauls. That's why I've used the training cool downs, more than anything they are about a sence of realistic learning curves.

Something I've blatantly ignored with Nate, which reminds me: The chaos game is amazingly fun because its a bit silly, but that also makes it a terrible example to criticize the rules under. We wouldn't do this stuff in a sensible game, and no sensible game gm would let us

Also a better example of how to handle us humans, the smoke in last game almost stopped us dead in our tracks. We humans simply cant handle harsh environments like marines can.

Also it needs to be said for Black Crusade, it does a nice job of balancing Humans and Marines, but as a GM balancing obstacles for both Races is challenging since they are so vastly different in ability.