![]() I've tried to approach this with my players, but they don't seem to really understand where I'm coming from, or are more interested in what they're allowed to play rather than what they'll actually be doing during play. On occasion, I've been asked by the GM to provide some sort of long-term goal for my character, and I've actually been at a complete loss and wasn't the only one either - most of the group struggled to come up with anything that seemed fitting, often settling on some vague placeholder like 'gather forbidden lore' or 'get rich'. They've all met similar fates of having far too many special snowflakes (which is a separate problem) and falling into the Screwing Around Cycle within a session or two. I've personally played in a handful of Rogue Trader games, but never as the Rogue Trader of the group (strangely most RT groups that I've played in don't seem to have anyone taking the RT character class, often with an Explorator or something leading instead). I don't have that for Rogue Trader at all, and it's not like there's a ready source of employment/adventures for Rogue Traders contact like in any other game setting. In Shadowrun (for example), there's an assumption that typical gameplay will be 'meeting the Johnson, planning and legwork, executing the job, dealing with the consequences, then returning to the Johnson for payment' - there's a sort of expected progression for gameplay to work from. I guess I don't really even have a blueprint of what PCs are expected to be doing in a typical session. Without really understanding what a Rogue Trader can/should do to build their fortune, it's difficult to plan for what someone else would do in that position. I've put a lot of time into thinking, going around and around - if I were playing a new Rogue Trader who had just taken over command of the last ship left to the dynasty with a dwindling fortune and a Warrant of Trade that has no real prestige left to it (basically a generation-level PC), what would I do? I honestly can't think of how I would go about building my fortune, I don't even know where to start. I haven't just had this experience with one group of poor players, I've had it with every sandbox I've ever played/run, even groups with a history of solid games. And before you say "Just get better players," this has applied to groups of otherwise good roleplayers, groups of bad roleplayers, groups from comic book stores, groups from conventions, groups that normally LARP, etc. Most sandbox games that I've been in as either a player or a GM seem to always end with either the PCs being shot to death by law enforcement, or dropping out from boredom, lack of direction, or just bitterness over being trolled. After a dozen or so attempts with different groups and different systems/settings, my typical experience with running a sandbox seems to be: Now, I don't have a good history of running sandbox games, and RT seems to be a game that can only be run as the sandboxiest of sandboxes. Rogue Trader, however, is a whole different animal, and I'm at a loss. ![]() Both of these games have different levels of openness, but are still fairly linear, and I can write adventures for them with no problem. Dark Heresy is a lot more work-intensive but still entirely doable - I make a huge list of NPCs, give most of them secret love affairs, feuds, blackmail, or leverage to use against each other and heaps of greed, spite, and hubris, then set up who the villains are likely to be squeezing the hardest, and then let the Inquisition find out about it when something gets squeezed too hard. Only War is easy - command sends the PCs on a mission to do something and then have them screwed with by enemy forces - that writes itself, and lack of inspiration can be replaced with watching a war film or two. However, as a GM I'm left wondering exactly how I'm supposed to prep this as a game. On a whole, we know the 40k universe pretty well, but most of us have little experience with Rogue Trader specifically (mostly having played Dark Heresy and Only War for long-running campaigns). ![]() So with the demise of our current game, I'm looking at perhaps taking up the GM mantle again and running Rogue Trader, mainly because people don't want to agree on any other setting. ![]()
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