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After spotting the rulebook for the Fantasy Flight Games Rogue Trader at my local Barnes n' Noble, I instantly became addicted to the game. Today, I went to the same store with my fellow 40k players, and the first thing I did was take this book out and show it to them. The next thing I knew, the ONLY thing my friends were doing while I was browsing other books for the next hour or 2 was sitting around this book, so I'm confident that I'm starting to get enough of my friends into it that I can finally get to start playing!

However, even after reading through most of the rules for character creation/weapons/skills/etc., I feel like I'm really missing something completely, and after finding many answers that were so vague that I shouldn't even call them answers, I have to show some humility and ask this question that just seems extremely stupid:

Although I do know that worlds you play in are scenarios you create however you want, I still have no idea as to the physical gameplay, if that makes sense. Do you play the game on a normal table and move around freely(such as in 40k) or do we play on some scaled grid where the GM decides where you start, where certain objects are, where enemies are, etc.? I would love any info anyone can give me.

You can actually do whatever best suits your group.

Some groups don't use any sort of visual representation. They just have their character sheets, their dice, and do everything via description. That puts a lot of emphasis on the GM's ability to describe things.

Some groups do everything via visual representation, be it through miniatures or simple tokens on a map, physically moving pieces around a board (be it on a grid, or more open measurement or whatever).

And then you can do everything in between, doing all the combat on a grid or on a table, using miniatures/tokens/whatever, and then all the non-combat stuff without any visual element to it.

Generally speaking most people do combat with some sort of visual representation as it is often an easier and more efficient way of tracking everything, but at the end of the day there's no real 'right' way of doing anything. When we play Dark Heresy or Deathwatch, we do pretty much everything with miniatures other than the briefings and whatnot that occur before the team gets sent out on whatever assignment they've been given. Sometimes things are abstracted out into more role-play areas, where players have to describe what they are doing before rolling the dice (there's a section of the upcoming Dark Heresy supplement, The Chaos Commandment, that has a pretty good example of that - NDA's prevent me from actually talking about it or describing it in any level of detail, but you'll see if when the book comes out).

In the case of Rogue Trader, there are a plethora of star ship models out there - not just the BFG ones - which makes doing the ship side of things much easier. But what you need to do first is work out what sort of players you have. Our group all comes into this via 40K, so we have vast collections of miniatures and therefore have a more visually orientated view of how things should go. Only one of us is a traditional role-player (most of us have never played D&D or anything similar in our lives, so the 40K RPGs were our first true experience with an actual P&P RPG). We don't approach it like a wargame though, but we still try to have miniatures for almost everything we do, where feasible.

Oh wow, great, thanks a lot!

I haven't played any of the FFG RPGs, but for other RPGs my group tends to primarily use description for everything aside from combat, and when combat occurs even then it's generally a pretty abstract map built on the fly on a whiteboard we have set up on our table, with some dry erase markers that are passed around.

When everyone already has minis from 40k though, it'd probably be an easier transition for you with minis. Grid maps aren't too expensive and are easy to come by in most gaming stores.

We tend to use models for combat(or those delicate situations leading to it in which the where everyone is is important) and showing how the party is organized.

Past that, it's all description.

We decided to use our friends Heroscape tiles for battles, since the map we can make with all his tiles can be massive. And we did get together to start playing last week, but after it took 3 hours to make our characters(even me and the one other player in our group that read the entire book beforehand were confused), we gave up(got to starting the base mission in the book, thats where we really got stuck).

But since we did complete all our characters(except me, obviously, since I'm the chosen GM), we decided to try again once me and the other guy who read the rules(and because I'm tired of explaining him like this, I shall from now on call him Khmer, since I just finished reading Emperor's Mercy ) work out how to go about the mission. Do we seem inexperienced enough?

I'm going to stop now since I think I broke the limit on parenthesis.

You will get things wrong. Trust me. Before we started playing 'properly' I did three demo games for smaller groups of people, so by the time we started we all had a basic grasp on the rules. We, of course, got better over time.

That said, we were still getting things wrong over a year into playing. We got Flamers and Psychic Phenomena completely wrong for over a year.

H.B.M.C. wrote:You will get things wrong. Trust me. Before we started playing 'properly' I did three demo games for smaller groups of people, so by the time we started we all had a basic grasp on the rules. We, of course, got better over time.

This is good advice. The main thing to keep in mind is that the GM has to have something of a split personality in play: You're the moderator and neutral or even slightly for the players, as well as the adversary, and against them. The moderator has an unlimited credit balance at the monster bank, while the adversary is much more likely to get in over it's heads and be hoist on it's own petard with a little nudge from the players.

The first game kill all the players right away to remind them who is in charge.

Think of it as a way to tell a story together where you make the world and the players are the heroes, and you can't go far wrong. The "mission" is whatever you and the players want it to be.

Ahtman wrote:The first game kill all the players right away to remind them who is in charge.

No, no!

You gain their trust first. Make them enjoy the game. Give them what they want, feed them out of the palm of your hand, until they're fat and content.

Then, you crush them!

A bit like this:

Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy is spoilt in that most opponents for the characters can be lifted by one person or anothers army collections.

With most RPG's that ends up meaning a lot of monsters bought for small purpose. With RPG's based on miniatures universes you are generally spoilt for choice. Need orks et al, the army sets have lots of different types per packaged.

therefore one you get the player characters sorted out, read conversion jobs you are set to take on most things.

One snag is GW is light on selling boxes of Imperial citizens and heretics. But you dont need to get the miniatures out because the PC's are going shopping at the agora.

I use a grid map with each square being 1 m long. I use markers to draw the scenery of the map and 28mm sized figures for the players and adversaries. It seems to work well since it makes movement and range of weapons easy.

Yes the lack of any sort of readily available sci-fi civilian model is a bit of a pain. There are a few around, but most civilian models are medieval in design. Heretics and the like can be done most easily with Necromunda models, but they’re harder to come by than back in the day.

for civilians I typically use star wars miniatures. They are the same scale as the gw ones so they look ok on the field. I much prefer the gw miniatures since they highlight the fluff of the warhammer 40k world.