A few months ago, I started writing about Rogue Trader, then didn’t finish the project. So I decided to just post my unfinished thoughts and writing, because I’ve moved onto other things. Consider this a design exorcism.

Part 1

A few years ago, I decided to work on Advanced Fantasy Dungeons live here on Playful Void, developing a paraclone of the monstrosity of a game that is AD&D 2e. That went well.

Yesterday, I read Rogue Trader. Just like AD&D 2e, I find Rogue Trader both deeply compelling and not very good. So here I go with Spacegod Pirates, my Rogue Trader paraclone.

This will be very different though: Rogue Trader is a profoundly simpler game. It has less moving parts. So, if I want to play the theoretical game I see there, I’ll have to do more of my own work: More design work, more world building, and maybe even some tactical combat (gasp!).

Of the top of my head, it will need to support interstellar and planetary exploration, sci-fi dungeons, faction play, and some kind of trade-driven gameplay. And a way to expand all of those galactic factions to facilitate interaction as well as combat.

But, I want to stick with the spirit of the game as best I can, and I’ll hold to the principles I used to develop Advanced Fantasy Dungeons:

• Be intentional with what dice to roll
• Draw systems to their logical conclusions
• Simplify system overload
• Remain in the intent and spirit of the original
• Use historical context to help to understand what that intention was
• Excise discrimination
• Consider the role of the expanded product line in the identity of the original

And from experience, there will be a lot of repetition and revision in the series. I’m also open to using parallel designs around contemporary contexts: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was contemporary, as was Megatraveller, and of course AD&D 2e. Dipping into these will probably be necessary, but I’ll take modern solutions to unsolved problems over contemporary ones. A quick wikipedia search shows that rules problems were fixed with the Battle and Vehicle Manuals, so I’ll avoid those (I’m not searching for the true wargame here), but the Realms of Chaos, Orks, and White Dwarf Compendiums are all on my radar as bases to touch.

Part 2

As a combat-forward game, Rogue Trader cares deeply about terrain, or as it calls it, scenery. Basically, we have a few specific types of basic terrain effects:

• Hard cover, which provides physical protection (walls, boulders)
• Soft cover, which provides visual obscurity (hedges, holograms)
• Obstacles, which uses half your movement (walls, ditches, doors)
• Difficult ground, which halves movement through it (woods, slopes, streams, stairs)
• Very difficult ground, which quarters movement (bogs, wreckage)
• Impassable ground, which you can’t move through

The referee should transparently adjudicate this.

There are also weirder terrains in the Advanced section

• Deadly ground (save or die each turn you’re in it)
• Boggy ground (vehicles become trapped)
• Slippery (units save or fall prone)
• Teleportation tubes (set foot at A, end up at B)

There are other weirder ones, too. The primacy of terrain in the game makes me really want to have tactical combat in this game, because obviously using those chunky minis is part of the appeal. But I’m not interested in a big table, this is going to be a roleplaying game, right?

When I think a tactical, terrain based game that complements role playing but still remains somewhat prepared, my thought is we make the arenas chessboard sized, and we place destructible terrain on the board to serve as cover and ground. Vehicles in this size board would be centrepieces: Taking up 2 or 4 squares and being really key to that area.

The nice thing about chessboard sized arenas, is that you could included a set of basically labelled arenas, and then vary them by biome in interesting ways.

I also think that making the code arena 8 x8 makes it easier to constrain combat to what I want it to be (not more than 50% of the gameplay, it’s an RPG after all), but also it makes other parts of the combat we’ll encounter later (like cover destruction and being pushed back) more meaningful in a smaller space. I strongly suspect we’d see examples of linked arenas (two stories of a building for example) or consecutive arenas (for a moving train raid or something) occur as core to gameplay, even with this restriction.

Part 3

rofiles are what Rogue Trader calls all the numbers that define your character. Really, it’s just these numbers and your equipment, making this a truly classic style role playing game. The characteristics are:

• Movement, how many inches you move
• Close combat, your to hit in close combat (so also for, say, pistols)
• Ballistic (your to hit for any other combat)
• Toughness (your defence)
• Wounds (how many times you can be hit)
• These are all for hand to hand combat:
  • Strength, punch strength (if your weapon doesn’t have its own)
  • Initiative, who punches first
  • Attacks, number of punches
• Leadership, which is really ability to follow orders
• Intelligence, which is really tech competency
• Cool, which is really morale
• Willpower, which is psionic toughness

I’d put it out there that there’s an encumbrance as well, and a base size stat in Rogue Trader. All of these feel like a bit of a repetitive mess that could be pared down.

The obvious ones: Initiative and the H2H state don’t need to be here. This is folded into weapons, special abilities, or feats or whatever ends up being attached to characters, and into side-per-side initiative. Leadership and Intelligence can be folded together, as can Cool and Will. That leaves me with these (renamed):

• Move for movement
• Smash for melee
• Shoot for guns
• Grit for defence
• Harm for number of hits
• Sharp for tech
• Cool for morale
• Will for psy defence

Nice, punchy names. But, if it’s an RPG, I kind of want these to double as like character descriptors.

• Quick for movement
• Brutal for melee
• Trigger for ranged
• Tough for defence
• Heart for wounds
• Tech for cleverness
• Cool for morale
• Spine for psionic defence

I dunno if these are right, but they sure do double duty.

Now, these are all determined by species in Rogue Trader, which I don’t hate to be honest. Your average human would be 4,3,3,3,1,7,7,7. The weird thing about these numbers is that they’re not on the same scale as each other. That’s a problem — it’s why for to-hit, you have to use a table to translate your Trigger to a to hit score. I’d rather they be the same. Movement and Wounds are on their own scales. It’s less of a mess than it seems, but it seems very messy.

My gut is that the base human move of 4 should be speed 2, but the rest we’ll have leave until a part 2, after we’ve figure out how Shoot, Weapon Strength, Toughness and Heart interact.

Well look at the attack process, and then come back.

Part 4

I’ll summarise the messy procedure:

• Weapons have a range. They have a bonus to hit in the bottom half, and a penalty in the top half.
• The attacker rolls 1d6. They have a Gunner-in-6 chance to succeed.
• The roll is modified by 1 for small advantages or disadvantages (soft cover, particularly small or large targets, you’re wounded, the weapon is improvised), or by 2 for large ones (hard cover)
• If 7 or more is required to hit (I can’t see how this would happen, as it looks like a roll that’s unmodified and bottoms out at 1-in-6 chance, which is 6+), your dice explodes on a 6, allowing this.
• Your damage is then applied if the roll is also above the number on the toughness – weapon strength matrix. Basically this works as, you have to roll over 4 to hit something whose toughness is equal to your strength, ±1 for something 2-3 bigger or smaller, ±2 for something 4-5 bigger or smaller, and otherwise you can’t harm them.
• The target, if damaged, makes a saving throw equal or higher than their armour to see if they take the damage. They still count as hit for anything other than damage.

Alright. I love this, but there’s too much going on. I want to preserve the density while simplifying the procedure.

• Check that the target is within max range.
• Calculate advantages or disadvantages. Add +1 for each advantage (such as being up to half range, high ground, the target is large) and –1 for each disadvantage (such as being over half range, soft cover, the target is small). Hard cover gives –2.
• Attacker roll their attack die. If the result is over your gunner score but under your targets toughness, it hits.
• Simultaneously the target rolls their armour die. If the attack roll is also over this number, the hit does not cause damage, but still counts as a hit for other purposes.

I’m going to stop this blackjack approach. The are too many variables I want to include, and it’s resulting in too many small modifications, and bonuses aren’t always bonuses in blackjack.

What I’m trying to preserve here, is the idea that some enemies will just be too tough for some weapons, and some weapons strong enough to hit anyone. Then the added wrinkle that armour can just negate damage altogether. How do I represent this in a more compelling way?

What if this is a dice-matching game? The attacker rolls a pool of their to hit, and then the defender rolls their toughness. Match successes. Where the defender rolls higher, that’s a hit. Ok, that’s more elegant. Advantages here simply add or subtract attack dice.

How does the armour happen, then? Armour here negates all damage on a success, normally. I’m trying to differentiate armour from toughness, here, so I can preserve the hit/damaged differentiation. What about this: Tier 1 armour, means that if you roll a 6 on your toughness, you take no damage. Tier 4 armour means you have to roll 4 sixes to take no damage.

I like this, because tougher enemies are more likely to benefit from armour even if it’s bad armour, so it replicates the big, naked tank trope.

But, like, it’s complicated. I don’t want that. I really really like that in Rogue Trader you just roll 1 die. Ok, so how to I overload the attack die here?

• Roll 2d6. If you’re in the top half of your range, take the lowest. a if you’re in the bottom half of your range, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, look at the lowest.
• If the lowest die is higher than the target’s Toughness, you hit. If it equals the target’s Toughness, cause half damage, round up.
• The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused. Armour is annotated with a + or a – (i.e. 6+). You must roll over 6 with 2d6 take the highest on an armour 6+; over 3 with 2d6 take the lowest in an armour 3–.

Ok, this hits the sweet spot for me. In my head, though, I’m starting to quaver on the 8 x 8 grid for combat, though. I want it constrained, but I’m not sure if it’s too constraining. 64 squares feels like enough movement though, for an arena. I wonder if just increasing the arena to 12 x 12, which doubles the arena size, but still keeps it small, might be the best middle ground here.

Part 5

So, Melee is a bit of a confusing mess in Rogue Trader, but there are a few interesting things about it that need to be maintained:

• Your weapon skill is an additional level of defence.
• You can’t fire into or out of melee, so by engaging in melee you’re giving yourself protection from most attacks.
• You can push your foes back, so it gives you a small amount positioning control.
• Initiative is more dynamic, meaning you can respond to attacks.
• You can attack multiple times
• You can follow up attacks if they’re pushed back
• Disengaging risks rout

Otherwise, I want to hit those points while maintaining parallels to the shooting procedure.

The tricky part is maintaining the weapon skill aspect.

• To open melee, you must charge your opponent. Your opponent has the opportunity to stand and fire (take a free shot) or run away (move their speed away from the attacker).
• Roll 2d6, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, check the lower die. If you have multiple attacks, roll an additional die for each additional attack, and check all but the lowest against your To Hit
• If the lowest die higher than the target’s toughness, full damage. If it’s equal, half damage. If the target has greater melee skill than the attacker, they may reroll this die, but must take the final result.
• The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused.
• If the target takes a hit, they are pushed back a distance equal to the their base size. The attacker can choose to occupy this space.
• If the target does not take a hit, they can make a melee attack back at the target in addition to any other attacks they take.
• Any fire into melee has a 50% chance of hitting an ally instead of your target. You cannot fire out of melee.
• To break off from melee, you must make a morale check or rout.

Ok, I think that covers everything I need it to cover to keep melee compelling and interesting.

The only thing to add is that there are two universal rules:

• You can only attack (melee or shoot) at an opponent you are facing, unless you have a special attack.
• Advantages (like attacking a big foe, or high ground) grant +1 to To Hit. Disadvantages (like attacking a small foe or soft cover) grant –1 to hit. Hard cover grants –2 to hit vs shooting.

Part 6

Ok, where we left off.

• Roll 2d6. If you’re in the top half of your range, take the lowest. a if you’re in the bottom half of your range, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, look at the lowest.
• If the lowest die is higher than the target’s Toughness, you hit. If it equals the target’s Toughness, cause half damage, round up.
• The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused. Armour is annotated with a + or a – (i.e. 6+). You must roll over 6 with 2d6 take the highest on an armour 6+; over 3 with 2d6 take the lowest in an armour 3–.

What cool things can you also do, shooting?

• Aim an area of effect (ie. grenade at a position) or scatter fire
• Areas of effect and scatter fire can miss and hit the wrong target
• Slow weapons cannot fire and move on the same turn
• Following fire weapons allow another attack if the previous hits, indefinitely (regardless of whether damage is caused)

Conclusions

Obviously, seriously incomplete. I really lost steam at the end, and moved onto other things. But it really felt like I was heading for an interesting mini wargame with trade elements, which I’d love to see someone else approach to be honest. Anyway, interesting potential that’s still really there.

Idle Cartulary,