Converting Only War

As I've noted before (here), we found FFG's Only War to be an very safe and easy game. It's also a very broken one mechanically making the common design error of stacking bonuses resulting in PCs shrugging off anything short of anti-vehicle weapons .

While the marketing for the game is the complete opposite (i.e. promising death around every corner and uphill battles), the reality plays to what I've decided is majority mindset in RPG circles today, easy and quick wins for the plays with lots of loot and other goodies although most won't admit to it (as a talked about here).

So my group is something of an oddity. They get bored real quick with that sort of game.

As a result I've been working on expanding Age of Heroes to cover sci-fi settings in general and 40K specifically. It's a fair amount of work to say the least, but we reached the point where the draft Science-Fantasy Expansion and the 40K campaign supplement can manage some adventures.

Being test games, I used encounters that would have been a cake walk for beginning characters in Only War. Even so, The resulting change in style of play was as expected day and night.

These first two sessions ended up being violent and dangerous battles that saw two characters nearly killed, others knocked out of the battle, and the destruction of the team's M41 multi-laser (getting a replacement is far from a certainty). The PCs only managed to edge out a victory in the second one due some very timely and important Orc weapon malfunctions. As hoped, the course of the battle was like something out of a Hollywood war movie.

Compared to the previous cake walks, this was far more satisfying.

I don't really expect the rate of character deaths to increase over anything but the long term. Age of Heroes has very decisive and bloody combats with a high rate of PC incapacitation and injury, but still keeps PC death unlikely to support long campaigns. Unlike most modern RPGs however, character deaths are possible and indeed become likely if unless the players keep their heads about themselves.

At this point I'm very happy with the result.