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There have been several homespun online attempts to turn 40K into an RPG and finish the job the 80's edition half-started many years ago.
It seems, many of these crossovers were WFRP inspired, players (like myself) love the variety of the character career and advancement system, the nitty-gritty blood and guts dark Cthulhu-esque fantasy world, vs. the high fantasy typically found in D&D.
So, when an official update of Rogue Trader (RT) was announced, I, like many of my friends (and online fans whose responses I read on this and various forums), was thrilled to hear it. However RT falls short of delivering the WFRP experience in space. Both Dark Heresy (the first 40K rpg foray) and Rogue Trader pigeonhole the players – casting them in pre-determined roles. What was wonderful about WFRP were the myriad careers (albeit divided into four traditional genres – Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Academic) which offered a delicious variety of characters and was a welcome departure from other, more limited, games.
While RT does a nice job with character creation (they’ve adopted an origin system from other games where one rolls up birthright, motive, etc. – generating a nice background for your character), there are essentially only a half-dozen or so careers to choose from.
One of the players is supposed to play the “Rogue Trader” while the others form a support crew. All the players are tremendously powerful and affluent – in fact they’re descendents of a long line of rogue traders and their crews—in essence their fathers and grandfathers all grew up together and adventured together (how quaint).
If noone wants to play the rogue trader, then he/she becomes an NPC who controls the character’s lives (which in my experience disempowers the players and sometimes even demoralizes them), and also becomes the burden of the GM.
Having a player as the Rogue Trader also sets up that tricky “party leader” dynamic. If the player playing this character is a bully, he/she can throw around his authority as master of the ship.
If he/she is meek, then others will be telling the captain what to do—As a GM, I prefer a more egalitarian approach, where the party leader is chosen by the players and may change from encounter to encounter (The Dwarf fighter takes lead when dealing with the Dwarven King, the Wizard when consulting the Professors of a Collegium, The Footpad when facing the King of Theives, etc.).
Also, in strictly adhering to the 40K universe, gone are all the demi-human options. My players want to be Squats, Ratlings, Ogres, Eldar, that was half the fun and innovation of the original Rogue Trader book. Now half the races have been eliminated while the others have been stamped “Xenos” and rendered unplayable.
With a name and world like Rogue Trader, it baffles me why the designers didn’t simply create a fringe system world where Han Solo-esque pirates, traders, and adventurers zoomed about in manageable ships looking for excitement and treasure. The way WFRP was nitty-gritty AD&D, this should be more like nitty-gritty Star Wars.
I’ve been running games for over 20 years (ack!), and overall have found players don’t want to be told what to do, they don’t want to be told who their ancestors were, or who their friends are. Whether players want to be no good, dirty, rogues, noble warriors, religious fanatic, or cut-throat mercenaries… one thing is true, they don’t want their freedom of choice taken away (maybe it’s just an American thing).
Even if they’re all adventuring together, they’re all in it for different reasons – not just to improve the influence of the rogue trader and gain more money for the ship—One player is avenging his father and wants returns to his homeworld to lead a rebellion, another has a bounty on his head , another wants find a lost treasure , another hates his fellows, but needs them until he can strike out on his own, etc.
And speaking of the ships and ship combat —I don’t know why FFG went the Battle Fleet Gothic route. Surely there are a myriad of types of ships in the 40K galaxy and they’re not all monstrously enormous with crews of 200. Where are the Pintos and Smart Cars of the 40K galaxy? Surely theres something more affordable to fly than a battle cruiser. And if they don’t exist in the mythos, why didn’t the writers do they something cool called “make them up.”
Finally, in the playing the game section, it seems to me that several of the roleplaying elements have been reduced to mere dice rolling. One such example is the Acquisition Test. I’ve found players love shopping, they love hunting through markets, roleplaying the haggling, or going on quests to find the herbs/items/weapons they’re looking for (RT suggests this as an occasional adv. option in a corner box).
Of course most of my players like role playing games, not rolling play games (which many RPG’s seem to have become as they move closer and closer to Skirmish games-– a la D&D 4th Ed.).
I’m not saying the new RT isn’t a good RPG, it has many great elements, but I don’t believe it will satisfy the fans that have kept WFRP alive and continues to impress new players.
When one opened the old Rogue Trader rulebook, one was instantly drawn into a dark world of adventure – even though it was a hybrid RPG/TTG – it still managed to instantly evoke a frightening, dark, brutal world – The new RT seems far more Star-Wars-ish and less Cthulhu-esque.
In conclusion, despite the fact that RT shares the same system as WFRP, it does not deliver the WFRP experience in space, instead it seems more like a distant cousin, who feels familiar, but loses something in translation.
