"Rogue Trader vs 40k(current)" Topic

In the TMP thread "Best Sci-Fi ever" I see lots of mentions for Rogue Trader. But not so much 40k? How different are the systems really? As far as I know,(not a 40k player) they use the same core mechanics. Is it the open ended-ness of RT vs the Codex shackles? What is it about RT?

Thanks for playing, Xin

RT is geared towards platoon-level actions and as you say, have far less formal systems of organization. I also think Rogue trader was an actual game system. Current 40K, to me at least, is a poorly disguised marketing tool.

the current version of 40K is focused on a company level with heavy vehicle support(but with mechanics which have the complexity of a platoon-level system). and the rules are different. RT and 40K 2nd edition had a lot in common, but 3rd edition changed a fair amount of rules, and 4th/5th editions are essentially 3rd ed with tweaks.

my personal reasons for enjoying 2nd edition and Rouge trader of later editions are little things like cover rules. in modern 40K, the more armor you wear, the more likely any given enemy is to hit YOU as opposed to the tree you are behind( since you only get cover saves that are better then your armour). To me, if a bolter hitting a tree will protect the ork/kroot/guardesmen behind it, the tree will also protect the space marine who is behind it. I'm also a firm believer that if a weapon can ignore a 3+ armour save, it could ignore a cover save of equal level.

I stopped playing 40K after 3rd edition came out. I bought back in because of the modeling aspects, and have recently found myself really loathing the rules quite a bit.

The mechanics are fairly different at this point – even 2nd edition (which is better than either RT or 5th to my mind) diverged significantly from RT when it came to close combat resolution, and 5th ed is radically different. 5th is much more stylized, has no real build-your-own options and less opportunity for realistic small-unit tactics to actually work in game play – it's more of a game and less of a simulation of anything, even the admittedly unreal 40K universe. Rogue Trader was more freeform and IMO it both showed and allowed much more creativity – but it was also annoyingly random and structureless at times, and easily abused in spots. 2nd ed took many of the elements that made RT good, applied some structure in the form of fairly open army lists, and polished up some of the game mechanics – it had flaws too (that Virus strategy card, for ex) but arguably fewer than any of the later editions, which are too simplified and bound by straightjacket codex lists for my tastes.

RT did have the privilege of being first, though, and it did have some wonderful artwork that really defined the 40K setting for many people, even today.

EDIT: Crucible Ork types afster than I do, but I'll agree with most of his points. "What he said!" then.

As far as 40K 1st Edition (RT) vs. 2nd Edition vs. 3rd/4th/5th editions, it really depends on how you like to play. RT and 2nd Ed. are what I call 'tactical RPG's' in that your army can be composed of small units of ubermensch special characters by spending most of your points to kit them up with wargear, special abilities, etc. And the Vortex Grenade was the great equalizer; for 50 points you can take out a Special Character many times its points cost. I used to love watching my opponent's face when I 'take out' his 250-point character model with a Vortex Grenade. 2nd Ed. also has the infamous Overwatch Rule. Some people like it, but most don't because it slows down the game and invites players to play conservatively and not be aggressive.

40K evolved into an entirely different animal staring with its 3rd incarnation. Gone are overwatch and wargear cards (including the Vortex Grenade). Gone are the super psychic powers and the separate 'Psychic Phase' which interrupts the flow of the game. You can no longer customize your own 300-point special character 'one-man army' by combining various wargear, weapons, and powers. 40K has transformed into a 'conventional' wargame with the introduction of a universal Army List which forces us to have an HQ and at least two 'rank-and-file' squads (Troops) before we can even consider getting the other cool units we want, and we are limited to the number of slots (usually 3) for each type (Elites, Fast Attack, Heavy Support). The Army List is familiar to wargamers because it attempts to reflect real world Orders of Battle (OOB or ORBAT) and Tables of Organization & Equipment (TO&E).

4th and 5th editions refined the revolutionary changes of 3rd edition, not all of them for the better, but 40K in its current incarnation (5th) has become my favorite. It is a simple, fast and elegant set of rules which incorporated the lessons learned from the mistakes of its predecessors, and even though I don't like some of the direction it is taking (such as how each new Codex seems to unbalance the other codices before it, the latest being the Blood Angels), it is still far better than how it was back in its RT and 2nd edition days.

Troopwo and i personally used 2nd edit for the degree of combat resolution fire mods ,site specific vehicle damage tables,grenades as weapons …If you were willing to do the extra admin you can play 2nd edit easily with battalion strength….just invest time…very rewarding.

Also in 2nd edit ,the whole psyker -psionics could be easily omitted without affecting play,well tuned armies dont need the wierdboyz copper staff and eldar magicraft.More dakka dakka!

Rogue Trader was also the only version of the game AFIK that had a third player referee who was privy to special scenario information and adjudicated disagreements over the rules.

When we play we play a mix of RT and 2nd.

With earlier editions ,weapons ranges were far greater than the 4 by 4 gw store demo table..if your army had long range capcity demand it,it levels the field for what those crunchy bugzs and orks want to do.I have played on boards 10 feet across,8 feet deep.

Longer ranged weapons are an encouragement to have lots of terrain on the table.

I agree with a lot of what's been said so far, but I'd add that what you get out of RT depends a lot on your approach to it.

The thing I love about RT is that it's ideal for quirky missions composed of oddball selections of combatants – pirates, mercenaries, smugglers, rioters, inquisitors, mutants – even farming families feuding over the rights to herds of Grox! RT is ideal for creating in-depth, local-scale scenarios populated by truly individual forces.

Where RT falls down, in my opinion, is when you try to use it to field 'armies' in the modern 40k sense. The army lists published for RT are both clunky and unbalanced, and it's easy to create massively overpowered individuals. Also, fundamentally, RT is geared towards the freedom and variability of individual combatants, and it starts to wobble and fall apart when you apply it to larger forces.

If I want to play a game which has two actual 40k armies duking it out, 2nd edition is, to me, a much better choice than RT. The system is just much more streamlined and tuned to that sort of battle.

However, I would ignore all the expansions (Dark Millennium and all the individual codices) and use only the core rules and the "Codex Army Lists" booklet that came in the boxed game. Everything that came after that core set just added endless special rules, 'codex creep', and dozens and dozens of cards…

Rogue Trader was a great game for a Space Marine Sgt. and his squad to tackle an Ork Boss and his Mob or an Exarch or Warlock and his attendant squad (which didn't appear until later, but the analogy is still good…) truly a quick and fun skirmish game. Once the larger force orgs started to appear in White Dwarf (about issue 100, did I just make myself old?) the game started breaking down under the weight of organization. I don't think it has ever really recovered from that. I always thought that it was more fun as an anarchy than a government.

RT is great for smaller sized games and is thus better than the clunky-monster that is the 3rd to 5th editions.

The later versions are just not fun for these larger games and have no detail for the smaller games, although Kill Team and 40K in 40 mins did much to readdress this shortcoming.

The biggest problem is that the later versions 2nd-5th have no profile designer, no robot designer, no dreadnought designer and only a now defunct vehicle designer. RT has all this and the only thing that stops it being nigh-on perfect is that it has no weapon designer.

As to playing with an GM, I have never had a GM in the game but I do throw in random occurrences every now and again.

Rogue Trader is by far the best version of 40K, sure it can be clunky, but as long as you don`t expect tournament-tight rules (they are still not that good in the current versions are they?) it is still a great ruleset and I will never go back to Rubber-Mallet 40K LOL!

AS

I agree with what most of the other posters have said.

I prefer smaller quirky skirmish games, so RT is perfect for me.

I bought into the Texas Rangers vibe of the original Space marines – one Marine to subdue an entire planet – so the idea of hundreds of Marines with accompanying vehicles, artillery, and air support *on the table* just leaves me cold.

But give me a small squad of Marines, or a Rogue Trader and his retinue, or a maniple of robots, or a team of scientists fighting off an Ork raid with makeshift weapons, while Ambulls, Jokaero, a Planetary Governor and his family, and a crew of vid reporters roam the battlefield, and I'm there.

As long as you play with like-minded gamers, who are in it to have fun and *not* to win at all costs, a GM isn't really necessary.

Rogue Trader had Zoats. That's all you need to know! ^_^

No, a GM isn't necessary, but can make for some fun scenarios if you've got one.

Zoats and Zoatabix. :)

Three a day…..

I enjoyed RT. I have had fun with other editions although haven't played the new one. I find the term elegant used with 40k to be an oxymoron though.

Thanks,

John

Since I have all 5 rulebooks, I can say that Rogue Trader is really very much like Infinity the game. A small force of mixed troops, sent to accomplish a specific mission. No more than 20 guys per side, and real tactics work.

The Role-playing aspects of RT come out in a game, and 10-20 guys per side is about the limit of what an individual player can comfortably keep track of and still keep the game moving.

The 3ed+ incarnations are trying to play Flames of War with 28mm figures and individual action resolution. Too much stuff happening, and a focus on individuals instead of squads. The compressed weapon ranges don't help. It's become Napoleonics in SPAAAAAAAACE! (Line up, shoot, hit with hammer). No real sense of fire and maneuver, bounding overwatch, or other real-world tactics. In fact, using real-world tactics gets armies bashed because they're not 'FAIR' or fun to play (Eldar and Tau).

You have to make some fundamental shifts in perspective to appreciate where 40K 5th edition is versus Rogue Trader. Rogue Trader was a Role-Playing game masquerading as a tabletop wargame. You could build "characters" which were so powerful they would literally waste everything on the board, 2nd Edition was no better, very unbalanced as a game, great as a tabletop RPG. 3-5th Edition 40K is more of a tabletop battle game, where they have moved back and forth on the issue of "characters" in balance with the game, 3rd Edition favored high powered characters and psykers more than troops, 4th Edition toned down psykers, but tuned up the non-troop choices, and 5th Edition has toned down the favoritism to making troops the most valuable option in the army and most armies have options to allow you to field some of the non-troop choices AS troop choices. The rules are vastly different in aspects of creation. However, you are not going to have some wonky Eldar player or Chaos player create the "uber-character" who takes out whole armies like you could do in Rogue Trader or 2nd Edition.

You could build "characters" which were so powerful they would literally waste everything on the board

You could but you didn't have to… and I don't see much in RT that encourages that sort of play.
Most rules have some little corner that's open to exploitation by folks who don't care about anything but 'winning'… the problem is best solved by avoiding those folks.

I agree wholeheartedly with venusboys3. All this stuff about building super-characters in RT or 2nd ed says much more to me about the players than the game.

Bad players will attempt to exploit the weaknesses, ambiguities and loopholes in any rules system in a way that makes the game in question unenjoyable for others. That's a universal truth, not a weakness specific to RT or 2nd edition 40k.

Count me in with venusboys3 and Parmenion. No one I ever gamed RT with ever played a super-character, and if they had I wouldn't have played a second game with them. It's one reason I've never played in a WH or WH40K tournament – too many win-at-all-costs players, not enough emphasis on just having fun.

Yeah super-characters only ever make an appearance as uber-baddy NPCs……

AS

weaknesses, ambiguities and loopholes in any rules system

Good rules minimize those situations. As great they were neither RT nor 2nd, stand the test of time rules wise.

When one is confronted with a rules system that is open to exploitation as much as RT is, how does one decide what is too much? Two people coming to the game with the same attitude of 'game play is better than winning' could have totally different expectations on what is appropriate for 'character' generation.

Thomas that is why you play with like minded people who want to relax and have a good time. There is not such thing as a perfect rule set (just head over to the napoleonic boards and you can see all kinds of grown men getting angsted up over the best set of rules). But as long as two people are looking for the same thing RT is a great and fun set of rules that really is just as entertaining now as it was 20 years ago

I still love dreadnoughts that can use jump packs and then take a single hit and fall on their faces and explode. Just a fun game that I don't get to play nearly as much as I would like.

I've got the rulebook for Rt but never yet had a chance to play it :(, but I'm quite a veteran with 2nd edition. What drew me to 2nd edition way back when, and to RT more recently was the scope to actually play out stories instead of just two sides playing to win. What makes a good game is how much fun players have, not how easy or difficult it is to win. This is why as far as GW goes I really only play the more RPG-oriented games like Mordheim etc. RT fits very nicely into this! :)

It seems to me that if Rogue Trader didn't stand the test of time then far too many people are still playing it!

Quite right Saxon Dog, quite right!

If people are still playing it, it is not quite a dead-system.

I own & have tried all of the following: 40K 2nd to 5th Ed's, 5150, CR3, Defiance VG, Stargrunt I & II, FAD, Kryomek (which I do like), Supersystem, and quite a few others that the names escape me at present.

And you know what? I still keep coming back to RT. Sure its old fashioned and its not covered in chrome, but it makes for a good skirmish wargame that is fun and has lots of options.

For me this beats the win at all costs with the most models on the table mentality that I find with the current 40K rules.

For me wargaming has always been about having fun with no arguments and where players can sort out little rules niggles between themselves.

Just have fun and do what you want.

AS

I put too probably put too much hyperbole in my statement. I like the conciseness of the current rules* of 40k and the fact I can drop into any store and get a game in. Our group tried RT a year ago and felt it was just too cumbersome. And I just don't see people playing it. Around here, we have a lot of players that swear by RT but don't ever play it. Back to our group, we all thought, "RT is great, why don't we play it?" Then we played it and remembered why. At this point, I firmly believe nostalgia is the primary driving factor in ‘RT is the Greatest' movement and only a scattered few are playing it.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is great people like LeadLair76 and Agent Smith are still playing it (even if not as often as one would like.) I just don't agree it is still the best and I don't care for the ‘players of the current version are mindless minions' bs that goes along with half the ‘RT is best' statements.

*there are things about the current rules that are irksome but overall I enjoy them.