Seventeenth Session Part Three - The Big Battle

A Meeting With Fate

So after dealing with the psychic storm that was unleash by a billion (not exaggerating the numbers) orcs all lining up for a WAAAGH! ... the Explorers trudged on through space, pushing their way towards the Undred-Undred Teef.

Then, they encountered something unexpected. Aid, of sorts.

The Rogue Trader Dynasty ran into a lone raider, slowly plodding its way from the Undred-Undred Teef. It turns out that the raider was part of a convoy. The very convoy of lost ships the Explorers where looking for. It was making its way slowly across the Koronus Expanse with small jumps, entirely lacking its Navigator.

It turns out that the warp storm which caused the fleet to be lost also fried the brains of the fleets' navigators, psykers, and astropaths. When the fleet finally dropped out of the Warp in the Undred-Undred Teef, they had no way of getting back, even though all ships' systems were nominal.

Stranger still was the fact the Sirocco was captained by one Adara - a woman who looks exactly like Sitara, the astropath that was killed while visiting Vedic. This was quite troubling for the Rogue Trader, who had had a illicit relationship with the astropath.

Getting even weirder, it turns out that Adara and Sebastian, the crew's Senechal had a past relationship that he doesn't remember. If you recall, Sebastian was once part of the lost Holocene Dynasty fleet. However, his ship was recovered, though he was missing large chunks of memory.

Finally, however, I was able to drop the big bombshell. One of the vessels of the missing fleet was a ship known as the Pantocrator - a mighty Grand Cruiser. A true prize for the dynasty if there ever was one.

What Should Have Been Epic...Was Kind of Epic

So, the storytelling events of the big, big session went very well. What didn't go so well was...the big battle itself. If you recall, I had a giant poster printed up of the Pantocrator and used that as a battle mat for the huge fight. The players got to bring out their Titan Walker and their Fury Interceptors. And we got to use the vehicle system in Into the Storm for the first time! Yes!

But that was the problem. Because it was the first time using that system for me, aaaaand the player had never seen the system, the battle was clunky, slow, and dry. I learned a big, big lesson here and that's if you're going to stage something big and massive, don't try to introduce "new" mechanics into it. Don't try to do too much. Stick with what you know you can do.

I put "new" in quotes because using the Battlefleet Gothic rules worked out much better for us, but I'll get into that much later.

Seventeenth Session - Part 1: Journey to the Undred-Undred Teef

What I Had Planned

So this was going to be the last session that we had before the holidays. I was really trying to make it a big one. As it turned out the group was about to embark on a tremendous endevour - a journey to the Undred-Undred Teef to rescue what they believed to be 10 missing vessels from their Dynasty's fleet. A successful rescue would mean that the Explorers would now actually have a fleet of ships, not just a single frigate.

The set pieces I had planned out were:

1) A fateful meeting with a lost vessel - one of the Holocene Dynasty's lost ships. And a chance to spotlight the Seneschal and Rogue Trader.

2) An interactive cutscene.

3) Big space battle where the PCs had to get their ship into position against a large number of ork vessels. It would feature ork ram ships which would be raiders who attempted to just ram the PCs ship over and over.

4) A vehicle battle where the PCs would deploy vehicles onto the hull of a giant space cruiser and fight across the hull to get to a particular point.

5) A boarding mission to get to a critical part of the ship.

As I type this up, I can see now that this was entirely too much to try to cram into one session. Well, live and learn.

The Tau and a Warning

As the Explorers set out for the Undred-Undred Teef, the passed by the Lucin's Breath system and there learned that the Tau were performing massive excavations of the planet that they had raided, evidently looking for something big and buried in the ground. It wasn't hard to make a connection to the hidden alien vault on Vedic.

The Rogue Trader himself spent his time while traveling to the Undred-Undred Teef aboard the allied vessels of the rag-tag fleet they had assembled. Basically consorting with the other captains, making preparations for the raid, coordinating plans, etc.

Then, deep into their journey, they suddenly ran into a strange vergence in the Warp. A massive, rapidly expanding bubble of psychic energy. Large as a supernova, and rolling across parsecs of space.

The crew's Astropath was skilled enough to basically function like a lightning rod and ground the psychic phenomenon - preventing the entire crew of the Ferral Wolf from going mad. However, as I told the players, the other vessels following them into the Undred-Undred Teef might not be so lucky. After a few rolls, I determined that they had lost some of their allied ships had been lost.

That's when the Seneschal's player said, "Wait. Which vessels were lost? Remember, the Rogue Trader was on one of them."

I let the players make a luck roll...and they blew it. Which meant that the Rogue Trader himself was on one of the vessels that had been lost. Not only that, he was on the Nihontu, a statted-out NPC vessel. Captained by Lady Kitsune. (Both the Nihontu and Lady Kitsune [appearing as Lady Sun Lee] appear in Lure of the Expanse.)

I inwardly winced. I liked that NPC and that ship. I had had plans for it. But, for me, part of the fun of roleplaying is dealing with the unexpected. Dealing with loss. Wrestling with stuff that throws your plans to hell.

Madness Aboard the Nihontu

What happened next was a desperate, off- the-cuff adventure. The Rogue Trader himself was aboard the bridge of the Nihontu when 50% of its crew suddenly went mad with the power of the psychic disturbance. The ship's Astropath was able to prevent the other 50% of the crew from succumbing to insanity, but that was sadly not enough.

As comrades and even family members turned on each other, Lady Kitsune made for way to the Navigator's chambers. I had the Rogue Trader basically make a Skill Challenge roll to see if they could fight their way there. (Basically, I had him make a series of tests, needing X number of degrees of success total.)

He failed, so I ruled that in the ensuing battles to get to their goal, he took some wounds. 3d10 worth. I rolled the dice and the wounds were enough to actually put him in critical wounds. He went unconscious. When he woke up, their was Lady Kitsune, barely alive but disemboweled. There was nothing to be done for her. For me, this stung again because she was a named NPC who I had some plans for. But, I thought to myself, if you're going to have a player roll and that player fails, there needs to be some tangible consequences.

To honor her, the Rogue Trader made his way to the room where the Nihontu's Warrant of Trade was kept, intending to give it back to her Dynasty. There, he meant the Nihontu's own Arch-Militant, deep in the throes of madness and singing to his own power sword.

Now, the Rogue Trader found himself with Critical Wounds facing down an unscratched arch-militant in power armor and wielding a power sword. Fortunately for him, the arch-militant was quite mad and not fighting his best (he neglected to parry or dodge), but all the same, a single hit from the power sword would easily have cleaved the Rogue Trader in two. The Rogue Trader did have an edge, however. The Luminous Reproach - an artifact weapon the crew had gained in a previous session.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Explorers made a mad dash to attempt a rescue of their captain. I had them make a Skill Challenge test and they passed it to find the Nihontu, and then I had the Arch-Militant of the Ferral Wolf make another one to see if he could get there in time. Patrick (the AM's player) blew his test out of the water, so I let him describe how the rescue attempt went.

He proceeded to describe his great, hulking character plowing through the walls of the Nihontu itself, shearing away bulkheads, and power-fisting through beams to save his lord and master. Upon their arrival, they came upon the Rogue Trader who had just put down the rival Arch-Militant with two solid strikes of the Luminous Approach. They took the Warrant of Trade from the Nihontu and left to return to the Ferral Wolf.

Thoughts on Using Skill Challenges

While Skill Challenges are not in the Rogue Trader rules specifically, they are hinted at in the form of Exploration Challenges in the game. They also appear somewhat in the form of Social Challenges from Into the Storm.

The whole Skill Challenge thing came about with 4th Edition D&D and has been quite controversial every since. There are some who praise it for allowing more free-form, free-flowing storytelling; but others decry it for being used to throw dice instead of roleplay. (Some cool comparison of 4e vs. Rogue Trader skill challenges here.)

Unfortunately, I have seen it used far more for the latter rather than the former. Stuck in a swap with your buddies? Skill challenge! Okay, you're out. Need to sneak out of a city? Skill challenge! You're out!

In my case, what I've tried to do is to use Skill Challenges to fulfill some of the core themes of Rogue Trader. This is one of the harder aspects of running a Rogue Trader game - capturing the spirit of the game itself. The game that is implied in-between the lines of text in the core rulebook. One of the ideas that I gleaned from the Rogue Trader Core Rulebook was the idea of "fast-fowarding to the good stuff".

The whole idea of an Endeavour (collapsing large, board actions into a simple card or list), really points to the idea of campaigns in which you can participate in world-shaking events such as conquering a planet, but each of these Herculean tasks is only supposed to take a portion of your campaign.

To that end, I've often used Skill Challenges - not to bypass the cool roleplaying in the game - but to essentially fast-forwards to the most exciting and climactic parts. For example, I could have rolled out the battlemaps and allowed the Rogue Trader to move his mini up the hallway, fighting as he went, and then the rest of the players could have watched him for over an hour. And then he could have sat idly by while the rest of the party marched down the miniatures map in an attempt to rescue him, all the while fighting crazed crew members. Such an encounter might actually have been very cool with the proper maps and figures. However, it would have also taken the entire session and most likely the next one as well.

Instead, I used the Skill Challenges to get to the good parts of the story so that all of the players could move on to get to what they were aiming for in the first place...the Undred-Undred Teef. In the end, it seemed to work out well for us. Everyone had a good time.

Glorious Failure

Now, for most of this blog I've been crowing about my own successes here. And overall, the campaign has been a tremendous success. My players have said as much.

But it hasn't been all Hollywood Blockbusters and Oscar Awards all around. There have been a great deal of problems in the game. It's easy to celebrate your own successes on a public forum. It's sometimes a bit more difficult to talk about what you did wrong. Especially out in public.

But let's talk about that. My failures in this campaign. I was going to write a single post about the subject, but then I found myself writing pages of text. Clearly, this isn't going to be something I tackle with a single post. So, we'll probably see a series of these throughout the blog.

A Tough Game

The Rogue Trader campaign has easily been the hardest campaign I've run in recent memory. The only other game that gave me this much trouble dates back to '03-'04. Yeah. Seven to eight years ago. I still remember it vividly. And no, that was not any game that I played with the Minions of the Monster Master. With the Minions, we were fortunate enough to knock it out of the park almost every time. (Much love to the Minions, BTW, for mentioning one of our old, great campaigns. They even put up pics!)

But even though I remember the '03-'04 campaign being fraught with mistakes, misfires, and downright failures - I also remember having a really good time, and learning a lot from what went wrong. More than I learned from my more successful campaigns.

Outside Problems

One problem our campaign has faced (and we've been extremely lucky to weather this) is a changing player roster. We lost players. Gained players. Had players come and go. Thought we were going to lose players, but then didn't.

The game started out with the loss of Casey, one of our most energetic and enthusiastic players. Losing a good player is very difficult, especially if that player brings a lot of energy to the table. A player who is like a cheerleader for your campaign is, in my opinion, invaluable. Players like that get everyone excited about the game, and maintain its momentum.

Then, we had another player Nick, who had to leave the game for months at a time due to work. We had another player, Doug, who thought was going to have to leave. To fill his spot, we invited another player, Rob, into the game. And then, it turned out that Doug didn't have to leave.

All of this resulted in a game that eventually got too big. At the top, it had a total of seven players. In my opinion, that's too many for a game like Rogue Trader. Because of the way I'm running it (sort of like Birthright), each character has to command either a sizable group of people, or make key decisions about important parts of the ship. This means that often, the game will focus solely on one character. In a big group, it's very difficult to get that spotlight onto every single person. Also, a game of this kind is going to feature a lot of long periods of political discussion and interplay. In a big group, quieter players can lose out.

I don't know if I would call this a mistake per se, because it was no one's fault, but it was probably one of the biggest problems in our game.

Now, luckily, this continually changing roster of players did not kill our campaign, as it might have with many groups I've been in. I think we can credit that to the fact that our group as a standing, set-in-stone, gaming night. But making game night a regular thing, our campaigns don't tend to die off before the end. As a result, so far, we've completed three different campaigns in about six years. That means that we seen the beginning, middle, and end to three different campaigns.

How the Game is Supposed to be Run?

In my opinion, if you read the adventure in the back of the Rogue Trader core book, or read through Lure of the Expanse, the designers seem to want you to run the game like Star Trek. Even though you command 30,000 or even 100,000 people, you and the command crew are the only ones that really count. So, of course you deploy to the unexplored planet with your Navigator. Of course you enter the ruins with your lead Astropath. Can you run a Rogue Trader game like that successfully? Of course you can. And I think you can do it very well, because the game is designed to support that sort of play.

However, we had already run a game very much like this in our previous campaign in the Iron Kingdoms. I wanted something different. I wanted a game that felt like you were in charge of a dynasty, not just a ship. A game that would be like Battlestar Galactica, but where you don't play Starbuck or Apollo...you play Admiral friggin' Adama.

Now, a game like that can have it's problems. Like T-Bone of the Minions stated, you can end up with a game where all you do is manage people. As T-Bone manages people in his day job, he surely didn't want to do that on game night! So you have to be careful. Another problem that I ran into was that I've never run a game like that. Nor are games of that nature ubiquitous.

At that point, what I wished I had understood was that I was now taking the game in a direction far outside the confines of the rules and how the rules were even organized. Sure, there are things like the Endeavour System or Profit Factor which help create a sense of epic-ness, but there simply aren't (currently) solid rules on mass combat or mass ship combat. There is a small write-up on squad-based combat, but it's very short and unfortunately shallow.

What I wished I had done was....

What I Should Have Done

I should have done was understand the game a bit more before running it. And then implemented some solid, defined house rules. Things like house rules for mass combat. Mass ship combat. Things like that.

The reason I say that is that often I've had to do these things sort of on the fly. And while it has worked, the small sub-systems I've come up with have not been consistent. It sort of cheats the players, because they have a hard time knowing what to expect. We'll see how I do implementing these things from here on out.

Why Rogue Trader?

Rogue Trader has to be one of the most interesting and innovative table top RPGs I've come across in a while.

The game mechanics for the system itself are not really that revolutionary. It's a straight up percentile system - something - fans of Call of Cthulhu should be familiar with. If you ever played the old RPG Inquisitor by Games Workshop, much of the Rogue Trader's system will be familiar.

However, what makes Rogue Trader so innovative for me are the various ways the designers approached campaign design and structure.

First of all, let me say that Rogue Trader is very different from many other table top RPGs in its very premise. In many pen & paper RPGs, you begin with the premise that you are nobody, or at least lower-level operatives in the world at large. However, through time, effort, story, and perhaps some experience points, you can rise to become a potent force in your character's environment.

Rogue Trader does away with that and presumes that the characters you play are already powerful individuals with long and turbulent histories. In this game, you are the members about a Rogue Trader ship, a vessel of grand size and vast power. You begin the game commanding large forces and troops. It's certainly a different approach to table top roleplaying than what I'm used to.

Characters for Rogue Trader start with a lot of experience under their belt, and their backgrounds are determined on a large flowchart. The flowchart allows the players to find commonalities between their characters, possibly sharing backgrounds. Perhaps your player character and the guy next to you fought on upon the death world of Woe. Or perhaps you both served on the same freighter.

What is really interesting about this for me is that in ye olden days, all of that was determined by you and the players. The player characters may have know each other at the start of a campaign. Or perhaps they just met at a tavern. More importantly, there was very little in the way of aid for the Game Master or his players when it came to establishing relationships and commonalities between the different characters. You were just supposed to know how to do this and do it well.

When you go it alone, much of what happens is trial and error. In my past, I think a lot of table top gamers can relate to experiences in which a party or campaign collapses because the characters made for the game don't mesh. Or perhaps the characters are trying to go off and pursue their own agendas.

Rogue Trader is one of the few games I've ever seen where the implied rule is that everyone sits down and makes their characters together. I've seen RPGs encourage this, but the implication in Rogue Trader is that this is almost necessary.

Besides that, there is also an implied system for campaign creation and plot. The Rogue Trader game has a number of tools which allow players to drive the story, not the GM. While plenty of people prefer games where the player characters drive the story, again, it's always been the GMs job to set up a system to let this happen.

In Rogue Trader, however, this is a system of Endevours, which are small, self contained story arcs. The GM is expected to create Endevours for the PCs to tackle, assigning them point values, and creating objectives. Each objective should bring a rogue trader party closer to completing the Endevour.

While this may seem a bit video-gamey to some, I love it. It means that, at the start, I can lay out on a map what missions there are out there and what it may take to complete each one. But also, it's implied that the players themselves might be able to suggest their own Endevours, at which time the entire table might hash out the objectives through discussion and consensus.