Rogue Trader: A Post Mortem

Welcome to the latest instalment of "Shit I mentioned i would talk about in a previous blogpost because I love to complain." Today I am going to touch a bit on what is one of my favourite RPGs of all time, and go into great detail about why exactly it is a total pile of shit.

The Core Rulebook. Just look at those tassles

Rogue Trader is one of the tabletop RPGs released by Fantasy Flight Games using the Warhammer 40k license, and is probably the most ambitious of the bunch in terms of scope. It came out in 2009 and re-used the name Rogue Trader, which was also the name of the very first instalment of the Warhammer 40k Tabletop Wargame.

A simpler time when men were men, the Crimson Fists were the posterboys and everyone had a fist larger than their head

In Rogue Trader the players take the role of a Rogue Trader (no shit) and his or her entourage. Rogue Traders are extremely powerful and influential individuals who are mandated by a very special and rare document called a Writ of Trade to push back the shadowy borders of the Imperium of Man, flying into the dark places of the galaxy and plundering anything you can get your hands on. Rogue Traders are the figureheads of their house or dynasty, and while a Rogue Trader and his ship carry out the brunt of the hard work they are inevitably followed by an army of merchants, bureaucrats and diplomats under their employ that deal with the particulars of interstellar diplomacy and trade and leaving them free to pursue whatever harebrained scheme or adventure tickles their fancy. A Writ of Trade can be passed down by birthright, powerful dynasties and houses existing for untold generations, or else gifted by the Administratum as a reward for exceptional service and even occasionally as a tool of political exile.

Rogue Traders are especially eccentric individuals in the context of the Warhammer 40k setting. In a galaxy under the thumb of a comically totalitarian regime where billions toil in obscurity and most never leave the few square kilometres around where they are born Rogue Traders have unprecedented freedom. They are not only permitted but indeed mandated to operate outside the scope of the Imperium, doing things that anyone else would be executed for including obtaining warp-tainted relics and conducting diplomacy with Xenos races. They are above nearly all scrutiny thanks to the provisions of their Writ as well as the considerable power both economic and military most can bring to bear. Only the stern disapproving gaze of the upper echelons of the Inquisition have any power to enact punitive measures on them, and even then they would be unwise to do so without significant military backing. This extends to a lesser degree to their entourage, as Rogue Traders are of sufficient means that they are able to surround themselves with individuals at the top of their fields and that are often as eccentric and unhinged as they are.

From a game design perspective RT is still a real standout for a couple reasons. The players start off at an EXTREMELY high level of power compared to most games, and while some of this is personal power a great deal of it is political and economic. Even the most impoverished Rogue Trader house is still an imposing institution comprising of thousands of individuals. The fact that the players head a starship means they have the ability to go anywhere and do most anything, as well as having a crew of literally thousands of menial workers toiling in the lower decks to keep it running. RT is a game where tracking anything besides your rarest possessions is a waste of time, where you buy boltguns by the crate, attend a fancy dinner one week and then delve an unknowably alien ruin for artifacts the next. The Writ of Trade is all about freedom of choice, and the gameplay in practice usually reflects this.

Brunch with the Governor at 11, cleansing an alien world for colonization at 5

The main "Goal" of the game, such as it is, is to increase your Dynasty's Profit Factor. Profit Factor is an abstract measure of how much wealth and influence you can bring to bear at a given time, and the game generally revolves around completing Endeavours that increase it. There is no currency tracking because within reason a Rogue Trader can bring great deals of currency to bear without even denting his finances, and acquiring items is more focused around finding someone willing to give you stuff rather than having the finances to purchase it. Unlike in games like Dark Heresy 2nd edition I find that Profit Factor is a good fit for item acquisition both gameplay-wise and thematically, and a canny GM will let his players basically purchase anything they can find for sale worth less than say, a plasmagun without a roll.

Increasing your Profit Factor can look like well, basically anything at all. Delving ruins for artifacts, colonizing resource rich worlds and engaging in trade, meeting alien empires for the first time and setting up profitable arrangements with them, engaging in minor wars to liberate items of value from those that own them, trading favours with other Imperial or Alien institutions to better leverage your wealth, all this and anything else the GM or the players can think of. This brings me to my first nitpick. I actually think this is a point in the system's favour but something prospective players need to be aware of. The system is so open ended by design that the GM has to be flexible and willing to adapt to what the players chose to do, and conversely the players need to be invested and sort of make their own goals. A listless group of players who have a hard time making their own goals and proactively seeking out plothooks will likely frustrate the hell out of an invested GM and conversely ambitious players with strong ideas will likely be frustrated by a GM who has a really concrete set adventure they want to follow to the exclusion of all else. Even moreso than other RPGs Rogue Trader needs a strong understanding between players and GM to work properly.

It is however all of these eccentricities that pulled me into the game in the first place. The strong themes of unshackled player freedom in a normally oppressive setting, the focus on form over function (Why bother doing anything if you can't look good doing it?) and the extreme danger and adventure are all extremely appealing to me, and in fact Rogue Trader was one of the first expensive RPG books I ever purchased with my own money in hard copy (which made it hurt extra bad when my mom's dog decided to shred up the rear cover in a neurotic fit not two weeks later).


All of that out of the way and done, let's get to the bad stuff. The issues both large and small that finally made me vow to never use the system as-is ever again, and the major reasons why I lamented so hard the fact that Fantasy Flight Games lost the 40k license and will therefore never release an updated edition.

I griped about this a bit in my post on Dark Heresy 1st edition (found here) but one of the immediate issues you will run up against in RT is that the levelling system is not good. In fact it is pretty actively terrible. Like Dark Heresy 1st edition each character class is divided into levels, called Ranks. Each Rank for each class has a table of upgrades you can buy in the form of skills and talents, and you advance in rank when you have spent the requisite amount of XP. Unlike Dark Heresy however you do not rank up from Rank 1 to Rank 2 until you spend a whopping 1500 XP (its actually 2k but you start off with 500 to spend at chargen). This isn't really much of an issue on its own, the real problem is that on the whole the Rank 1 tables fucking suck. There is very little that is terribly interesting for most of the classes and a lot of the "options" are things you actually cannot buy because you already got them as part of your career's starting package so its really just wasted space added for posterity. By contrast Dark Heresy's tables seem to have better options and because it is far less XP between Ranks you can avoid or ignore the things you don't want. I have only used the Rogue Trader tables unmodified twice and both times players were kind of miffed that they had no choice but to load up on abilities they really didn't give a shit about like certain knowledge skills just to meet the seemingly arbitrary requirements to reach the Rank 2 table with a couple other things they actually wanted.

Sure I may be gross, bald and have no eyes but just you wait until I get Telekinetic Bolt in two to three years!

However the issues with the class Rank tables are not more apparent anywhere than the not so humble psyker. Psykers are terribly dangerous individuals who can cast magic of a sort by tapping into the raw energy of the warp, but this is always done at great risk. The archetypal Imperial Primaris Psyker is a maddened individual tossing around fireballs and maelstroms of lightning in the midst of combat. There is another type of psyker, extremely important but not as interesting to most. Astropaths Transcendent are an order of psykers specialized in the school of telepathy, and more specifically the art of casting messages over impossible distances through the warp. This is the only method of FTL communication, holds the Imperium together and makes the caster a glorified telephone. For reasons unknown this is the only type of psyker you can play in Rogue Trader, at least to start. The book also contains powers for Telekinesis and and Divination, but that's it. No fire or brimstone, no lightning, just the (in my humble opinion) most boring schools, unless you can convince your GM to let you use the Dark Heresy 1st edition pyrokinesis and biomancy. The Navis Primer splat added some new powers and a cryokinesis power tree, but even so its just not the same. Even getting something like an offensive Telekinesis power requires you to first reach Tier 3 (10,000 total spent XP, or 4500XP from game start), spend a further 500 XP on a new discipline and then you can finally spend 100XP on the force bolt technique. To clarify there is nothing wrong with playing a cool utility psyker who can do lots of neat non-combat things and then break out non-damaging combat moves like terrifying your foes, but I don't understand the decision to not include the less subtle psyker powers.

The next item on my list of grudges is the Ship mechanics, and more specifically space combat. A Rogue Trader's ship is at once his greatest tool, his most powerful weapon and his home. The game and its splats give support for a massive variety of options for creating your own ship, starting with a hull and reactor that will have limited Power and Space and balancing these to buy essential and optional components to customize it. This is balanced at game start with an inversely proportional balance between your party's starting profit factor and starting Ship Points. Higher profit factor means your dynasty starts more powerful but your starter ship will be smaller/weaker, and high ship points means your dynasty will be weaker but will have a beefier ship to begin the game. Ship creation is extremely involved and I would not even attempt it without using an Excel spreadsheet to track point expenditures and remaining space/power as you put it together. It is a shitload of work but exactly the sort of thing I love, what I consider to be "good crunch". Mostly because it takes place outside of the game, will usually be done by the GM, and will not take time out of a session unless you waiting till gamestart to do it.

Actually using said spaceship to battle other spaceships is another matter entirely. Space combat takes place in void turns that are abstracted to about a half hour each. There are a ton of specific rules for how the ships can move and orient themselves, how to fire the guns or use any other piece of equipment, you need to track void shields and armor any time damage is dealt and it does not work the same way as personal combat in that Strength is the number of hits cause and you find out how many hits go through before rolling damage and subtracting armor. You also need to track crew population and morale as both will go down as you take damage, components can become damaged or get depowered, and to top it all off some player archetypes like clerics and arch-militants will often not really have anything to do as all of this is going on other than take generic actions.

Rogue Trader actually tested an ambitious new concept in tabletop realism where a half hour in-game turn actually takes 30 real life minutes to resolve

All of this adds up to make space combat extremely fucking slow. What is often a really badass spectacle in sci-fi movies and TV shows ends up dragging on ages even when people know what exactly they want to do, has so many different things to track, and to top it all off getting your spaceship damaged is an expensive setback even for a Rogue Trader so from both an IC and OOC perspective you are better off avoiding it at all costs.

The final and in my opinion worst part of Rogue Trader core rules as they stand that I want to discuss is the Endeavour system. Fantasy Flight attempted to gamify the act of doing anything that raises your profit factor, likely in an attempt to streamline what is in my opinion the last thing that needed to be streamlined in this slow motion trainwreck of a wonderful game. Endeavours are any sort of business venture you undertake, are classified as Lesser, Greater and Grand based on how involved they are/how much profit you stand to gain and are split apart into a number of Objectives. The way the rulebook tells you to handle these is to assign a points value to each Objective based on how important they are to its success with the total value of all Objectives based on the scale of the Endeavour. You gain these Achievement Points that you put towards completing Objectives by overcoming challenges related to said Objective, and you complete the endeavour when all Objectives have been resolved one way or the other. Excess Achievement Points from one Objective can roll over into the next and extra Acheivement Points in excess of the total needed to complete the Endeavour can grant extra Profit Factor.

This immediately chafes me. I suppose I tend towards what game designers call "Fiction first gaming" So the idea of basing what is ostensibly the core part of your gameplay around this weird point abstraction system is bizarre and I don't like it. To illustrate what I mean let's take a look at an example objective from the rules

So here the players are tasked with rooting out a Slaugth infiltrator from a colony. They need a total of 300 points to complete the objective. Now it does not say how many Human Infiltrators there are. Assuming there are 6 or more it would follow that the objective can be "completed" by killing 6 thralls and then bing bang boom xenos blown the fuck out next objective please. Which seems a little fucking strange given that the actual Alien they were supposed to be killing is still out there and around. It is likely the intent here is that there are less than six and taking them out is supposed to be a way to net extra points on top of the 300 you need for killing the big lad. I get where they are coming from, in that accumulating these extra points can be a good way to incentivize doing a job completely and properly, but when you think about the WHY of things it sort of starts to break down. We don't know the exact Endeavour this Objective is a part of but lets say the Rogue Trader is taking over a down on its luck colony to leverage it for their own profit and the Slaugth is one of many things going wrong. They kill the monster and two of its minions which gives an extra 100 cheivo points. They can either take these through to the end for an extra point of profit factor, or else carry them over to help complete an entirely unrelated objective. The big question is, how does killing slaugth thralls actually contribute to the colony making more money? Perhaps they would run amok if left unchecked with their leader dead? More importantly how does killing Slagth thralls help with an unrelated Objective, such as say clearing out pirates from the surrounding asteroid belt? If you accumulate extra points doing these extra objectives this would theoretically allow you to completely skip what would otherwise be critical Objectives and resolve problems without actually dealing with them. Say in this Slaugth example what if the Party came in with 200 extra points, killed the two thralls and then called that an even 300. They have not solved the core problem, the Slaugth is still there, but the Objective has been completed according to rules as written, and it seems intentionally created to allow scenarios like this to be possible. Perhaps it is supposed to be abstracted as the party's successes elsewhere somehow convincing someone else to deal with the problem but this is extremely unsatisfying in my opinion.

Slaugth are literally just humanoid masses of evil worms and I am pretty sure this is how they make thralls. Gross.

I feel like this system of handling Endeavours relies on quite a bit of abstraction that does not at all hold up under scrutiny. I do not think it has any advantages over simply handling Endeavours like you would any other RPG adventure. Rather than giving the party a laundry list of tasks on a dossier why not let them investigate for themselves, perhaps a senschal provides a list of important people to talk to or possible issues that need to be handled. Slaugth are fucking gross and extremely evil, why not have the party slowly realize something is very wrong here, let them discover the alien on their own and not bother tallying points. Rather than the party missing out on points for not rooting out the extent of the xenos corruption have natural consequences for leaving behind corrupted humans loyal to an alien that is now dead. Perhaps one of these infiltrators gets press-ganged when the Rogue Trader recruits new lower decks crew and is now on the ship. Maybe years down the line there is a string of sabotages that threaten the Trader's investments in the colony. If the party takes actions that might increase the productivity of the planet, regardless if they are things you as the GM forsaw them doing, provide some sort of reward up to and including increasing the Profit Factor gain.

Now you might be thinking why not just not use the Endeavour system if you don't like it? Or use it in your notes where the players can't see it? Fair points, and trust me when I say that I did just that when I used them, but it is not really quite that simple. The biggest part where the argument that these things are optional and can be kept entirely behind the curtain for the GM's benefit falls apart when you consider that there are several things in the game that directly support the Endeavour system. There are a number of starship parts such as the Cargo Bay and Trophy Room that clearly have function but from a rules standpoint all they do is give you extra Objective Points when pursuing certain Objective types. Obviously a lot of the time a Rogue Trader player would want a Trophy Room just as a place to keep his cool stuff, or a cargo bay for a lore justification to all the piles of loot they yank out of an alien ruin, but I find it kind of sucks that the only mechanical support is to give some extra funny points that might sometimes push you over the threshold to skipping an Objective you don't want to do or getting an extra point of Profit Factor.

"Yes Milord it says right here we have enough points to skip the "Eradicate Genestealer Cult" Objective entirely"

Obviously these criticisms are by no means insurmountable, especially given the other Fantasy Flight Materials published since. I wrote a small, slightly incomplete guide about how to use Dark Heresy 2nd Edition to play Rogue Trader which you can find here. Not using the Endeavour system is a fairly simple affair, but would ideally include reworking the ship components that give Objective Points slightly. Space combat being a mess is another matter entirely and not one I am keen to undertake.

This ended up massively more long-winded than I intended. I promise the only reason I take such issue with these seemingly small problems is because I love the system and the ideas so much. Few other RPGs have the default expectation of players being given such massive resources and power right out the gate and then being set loose in one of the most hostile settings ever made to go turn a billion dollars into as trillion dollars by divine mandate. I have played several games with this system as well as playing Rogue Trader games using completely different systems, and it has always been an excellent time.

Wrath and Glory seems like an obvious choice for running Rogue Trader style games given that it has taken a Kitchen Sink approach as far as what players can be which is thematically a good fit, but other than me not liking the core mechanics very much I am extremely skeptical of a generic system capturing the same laser focused essence of a Rogue Trader game that made me come back to RT time after time despite the mechanical issues. Who knows though, with Cubicle 7 at the wheel (thank god) maybe we will in time get a comprehensive Rogue Trader expansion for Wang that completely shatters my expectations. Either that or maybe someone will make a good home-brewed Rogue Trader 2nd edition, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

As always thanks for reading and I would love to hear your own experiences, especially if you disagree with anything I have said. Check out Rogue Trader if you find any of this interesting at all, seriously it's fantastic!