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Ha that's a good depiction, pure propaganda and tradition which fits the Imperium to a tee. They're akin to those administratum divisions that are churning out reports and putting them straight into the shredder division to destroy immediately, no one ever questioning them.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

But you see, that's CLEARLY when the story is non canon and fake. Malum Caedo on the other hand is peak 40k accuracy.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Breton's point, I think, is that we're supposed to assume a named character like Calgar is never actually taking a direct hit thanks to the power of plot armor. When you remove his model from the table, it can be assumed that a near miss from a railgun was still enough to knock him out or that a d-cannon caused some wonky warp lightnign to arc out and fry his nervous system even though he wasn't dragged into the warp.

Not just Calgar. Its a question of scale - Using the main turret of the USS Iowa to kill a rat 20 miles inland isn't very likely. Sure you might concuss the thing if you get within 10 yards, but a direct hit from a 16" shell on a 2" rat is pretty unlikely. So the big giant Instant Death Weapons designed to take out a 40 foot tall Knight is unlikely to be accurate enough to really snipe an 8 foot tall dude.

While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.

The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.

The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.

Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.

GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...

 Hellebore wrote:

GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...

Most campaigns aren't even a whole edition long - perhaps half that at best. So you're looking at models that have - in this market - a tiny lifespan.

It could work if they were generic style models so they'd just "retire" to being a leader with a specific custom loadout from the codex; or a random trooper in a squad. Otherwise people would fast dislike such rapid cycling of models in this market and it would 100% feel like GW were just doing it to print money and nothing else.

Even if they lasted the 3 years of an edition that's not that long - esp if you come in part way along the edition.

Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad. And if they weren't required to be set in the last seconds of the 41st millennium...

Also, if they released them uthar the destined style, with generic plus specific, it would also come across ok.

But it would also go back to encouraging people to play throughout time in the setting, rather than feeling like they could only play at the bleeding edge 10 seconds to midnight point which GW has become slaved to.

ie, they release the Macharian crusade as the next campaign and we get Macharius, unique other characters etc, but it's set thousands of years in the past. Opportunities to do new guard regiments, add interesting unit types etc.

Then they launch their next campaign which may or may not be in the 41st millennium.

Sergeant Namaan is an example of a character that was introduced in a campaign and then killed off later. Macharius never got a campaign - he was literally introduced as a dead character....


EDIT: To be more specific on the 'killing off' component, the setting should just move on without them and they die from the passage of time, whether in a battle or whatever. But the setting itself should never be tied to the life span of a character, which is what's happening when the plot can't move without characters acting first.

You get just as much stagnation of plot by having a bunch of characters everything revolves around and none can die, as you do not having a 'moving narrative'.

 Hellebore wrote:
While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.

The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.

The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.

Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.

GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...

What is firing the 20KG magnetically accellerated Tungsten rod? If you want to switch to some Dark Reapers with anti-tank missiles we're no longer talking about an Instant Death weapon and Calgar spent most of his life in a Personal Tank suit of Terminator Armor.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad.

Yes it would. $60-80 for stuff that's going to get squatted is bad.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

That game did have one accurate bit. Ever tried to kill a marine with your honor blade?

 Hellebore wrote:
The numbers of marines are at odds with the sheer number of large weapons in 40k that can kill them. Marines may be resistant to small arms, but they will die to lascannons, plasma guns and krak missiles.


And although there are more lasguns than lascannons, the sheer number of lascannons outnumbers the marines by substantial amounts. And that doesn't include every alien or chaos faction's anti tank weapons that will kill marines.

This just highlights more contradictions in 40k - either there are small numbers of marines and every army has even smaller numbers of AT weapons that could kill them, or there are plenty of marines and those weapons aren't that rare.


It's like the setting is a whole bunch of multiverses that overlap, where in one marines can one punch a tank and bounce of lascannon and in the other, an enemy force has a hundred lascannons that will incinerate a whole marine army.

But where the quantum super position of each collapses always in favour of the marines.

Or it could just be an often enough fun game with alot of poorly written fiction too many take too seriously....

I like the idea of elevating characters who would usually die by the end of the campaign.

But make their load outs generic, either during or after their time.

Breton wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.

The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.

The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.

Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.

GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...

What is firing the 20KG magnetically accellerated Tungsten rod? If you want to switch to some Dark Reapers with anti-tank missiles we're no longer talking about an Instant Death weapon and Calgar spent most of his life in a Personal Tank suit of Terminator Armor.

I think the previous examples of hammerhead railguns and d-cannons were pretty decent examples to bring up. A d-cannon isn't super long-ranged (comparable range to a bolter). A hammerhead's railgun *is* quite long-ranged, but will frequently see use much closer than the "20 miles inland" example. It's fair to say that if <insert character here> is appearing in a number of battles featuring such weapons, eventually they have a really good chance of doing some kind of permanent damage.

A near miss from one d-cannon that leaves you incapacitated for the rest of a fight is certainly plausible. *Several* such near-misses in a single campaign, all resulting in incapacitating levels of harm, gets a bit harder to swallow. I chalk it up to a conceit of the setting. The same way blaster shots and explosions almost never seem to finish a named jedi off, characters in 40k are similarly suspiciously death-proof.

But I *do* interpret it as suspiciously frequent near-misses/non-lethal hits. I don't interpret Calgar getting taken out by a railgun as him literally taking a direct hit to the torso and soldiering on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad.

Yes it would. $60-80 for stuff that's going to get squatted is bad.

Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.

Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead. Lhykis being immortal can't really die, but can be inactive.

The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.

THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.

Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.

No one had a problem with Macharius being dead - he was being used in games all the time while he was in the guard codex. But none of the narrative was slaved to his actions because he was dead. In fact him being dead gave players far more freedom to use him however they wanted than a 10 novel bloated narrative going nowhere ever could.

 Hellebore wrote:
Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.

Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead.

Canon deaths come with some limitations on the stories you can tell with those characters. If they had killed Karlaen off during the Shield of Baal (idk if they did or not), then you couldn't have him participating in any events that occurred after that point. Pre-retcon, if you liked Eldrad's story but wanted to play a campagin where he came to terms with his own savior complex, you kind of couldn't. Because he died on the blackstone fortress during the 13th Black Crusade with savior complex still in full swing.

The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.

THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.

Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.

There are options other than killing characters off or making the whole galaxy revolve around them. At their best, I think named characters serve as an *example* of *some* of the cool things going on in the setting. You can have Farsight rebelling against the tau empire and raising questions about the intentions and authority of the ethereals without making him the galaxy's last hope against chaos or whatever. And you can stop telling stories about him for a while as you jump over to see what Lelith is up to in Commorragh or what shenanigans Snikrot is getting into.

You can move on to new stories without killing off old characters, and you can make a character's story exciting/impactful without the whole setting hinging on the outcome. I'd say you *should* do the former because inspiring people with evocative plot hooks and making them want to play out the "what ifs" on the tabletop is kind of the point of those characters. I'd say some characters do the latter pretty well. I'm super invested in Ahriman's ongoing (doomed) struggle to de-rubric his brothers. But even if he were to succeed, the setting as a whole could continue on.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

True but it was pretty terrible

Dai2 wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

True but it was pretty terrible

But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?

I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.

 Hellebore wrote:
Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.

Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead. Lhykis being immortal can't really die, but can be inactive.

The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.

THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.

Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.

No one had a problem with Macharius being dead - he was being used in games all the time while he was in the guard codex. But none of the narrative was slaved to his actions because he was dead. In fact him being dead gave players far more freedom to use him however they wanted than a 10 novel bloated narrative going nowhere ever could.

That would be even worse. Tycho drove me absolutely bonkers sticking around so long after he died. Might as well have tried to play the game with a fingernails on chalkboard sound track.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.

Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead.

Canon deaths come with some limitations on the stories you can tell with those characters. If they had killed Karlaen off during the Shield of Baal (idk if they did or not), then you couldn't have him participating in any events that occurred after that point. Pre-retcon, if you liked Eldrad's story but wanted to play a campagin where he came to terms with his own savior complex, you kind of couldn't. Because he died on the blackstone fortress during the 13th Black Crusade with savior complex still in full swing.

The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.

THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.

Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.

There are options other than killing characters off or making the whole galaxy revolve around them. At their best, I think named characters serve as an *example* of *some* of the cool things going on in the setting. You can have Farsight rebelling against the tau empire and raising questions about the intentions and authority of the ethereals without making him the galaxy's last hope against chaos or whatever. And you can stop telling stories about him for a while as you jump over to see what Lelith is up to in Commorragh or what shenanigans Snikrot is getting into.

You can move on to new stories without killing off old characters, and you can make a character's story exciting/impactful without the whole setting hinging on the outcome. I'd say you *should* do the former because inspiring people with evocative plot hooks and making them want to play out the "what ifs" on the tabletop is kind of the point of those characters. I'd say some characters do the latter pretty well. I'm super invested in Ahriman's ongoing (doomed) struggle to de-rubric his brothers. But even if he were to succeed, the setting as a whole could continue on.

And to some extent the characters that SHOULD be getting stories should be getting, you know, stories. Guilliman, Johnson, Angron, Magnus, and Morty have returned to the setting. Johnson only got an upjumped catalog blurb. Hasn't met Guilliman yet. And that's a pretty big deal as the only two Loyalist Primarchs who aren't really all that fond of each other trying to find their new place in the old world. Instead we get stuff like this Dawn of Fire series. I've played Ultramarines for 30-35 years now, and even I'm thinking we didn't really need yet another series about yet another Ultramarine. Pick another chapter, or do the characters we already have.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Dai2 wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

True but it was pretty terrible

But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?

I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.

In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.

Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).

Damn that'd be fun, a Tau suit game in the style of the Mech Assault X-Box games.

 Overread wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...

Most campaigns aren't even a whole edition long - perhaps half that at best. So you're looking at models that have - in this market - a tiny lifespan.

It could work if they were generic style models so they'd just "retire" to being a leader with a specific custom loadout from the codex; or a random trooper in a squad. Otherwise people would fast dislike such rapid cycling of models in this market and it would 100% feel like GW were just doing it to print money and nothing else.

Even if they lasted the 3 years of an edition that's not that long - esp if you come in part way along the edition.

I think it could work if GW brought back proper wargear selections and just made special characters have specific loadouts. So special characters are always options you can take, they just don't get oodles of special wargear and rules that aren't available to any other character because no one else in the setting is allowed to rival their awesomeness.

I'd note, too, that WHFB had numerous characters who were canonically dead but still available to be used (most of the characters in the Vampire Counts book were very, very dead in the setting). So there's certain some precedent in GW games for using characters even after they've died in the setting.

If this isn't desirable, I think the best alternative would be for most special characters to take a back seat in the story. They exist but it's a huge galaxy and they're either taking a more strategic role (i.e. not putting themselves on the front line) or otherwise so rare as to practically be a myth. By all means still name-drop them once in a while and indicate that they're doing stuff elsewhere or behind the scenes. But have the focus on a lot of new characters, to emphasise that it's a huge galaxy and the big names simply can't be everywhere at once.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Dai2 wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.

True but it was pretty terrible

But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?

I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.

Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.

Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).

Gah. Bugger about the bolters then. The pulse rifle being better than a bolter is/was such a key feature in 40k.

Dai2 wrote:

Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.

To be fair, I cannot remember whether or not I enjoyed it because that was 20 years ago (ugh!). I probably thought it was "fine" for a console shooter on a PS 2(?), and then went back to CS 1.6 on my PC.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.

Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).

Gah. Bugger about the bolters then. The pulse rifle being better than a bolter is/was such a key feature in 40k.

Dai2 wrote:

Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.

To be fair, I cannot remember whether or not I enjoyed it because that was 20 years ago (ugh!). I probably thought it was "fine" for a console shooter on a PS 2(?), and then went back to CS 1.6 on my PC.

The strength of pulse rifle and bolter had more to do with the campaign progress. If Space Marines had featured right at the beginning I guess the rifle would have been better than the bolter. Just like the Chaos Bolter was a pip better than the loyalist bolter because you encountered Chaos after the loyalists .
The game was good for its time. A nice shooter of the type like Medal of Honor Frontline or Half life 1, meaning most of the time you'de be running around on your own and kill enemies 1 on 1. It needed Call of Duty to come out to give us the feel of mass battles and allies that wouldn't stop at the next corner, telling you to move on alone because they're securing the area...

I think having characters be canonically alive for all of 18 months is kind of insane. People are vaguely aware say Eldrad exists because he's been running around doing stuff for decades. I don't see "Farseer blinkandyoumissedme" really doing anything for anyone.

Tbh I didn't really get the special character hate all the way back in 5th edition - and I don't get it now. I think special characters are cool and thats why people buy them. From a DE perspective, it seems more fun to be a faction with characters, rather than watch them all be scrubbed.

 vipoid wrote:


I think it could work if GW brought back proper wargear selections and just made special characters have specific loadouts. So special characters are always options you can take, they just don't get oodles of special wargear and rules that aren't available to any other character because no one else in the setting is allowed to rival their awesomeness.

I'd note, too, that WHFB had numerous characters who were canonically dead but still available to be used (most of the characters in the Vampire Counts book were very, very dead in the setting). So there's certain some precedent in GW games for using characters even after they've died in the setting.

If this isn't desirable, I think the best alternative would be for most special characters to take a back seat in the story. They exist but it's a huge galaxy and they're either taking a more strategic role (i.e. not putting themselves on the front line) or otherwise so rare as to practically be a myth. By all means still name-drop them once in a while and indicate that they're doing stuff elsewhere or behind the scenes. But have the focus on a lot of new characters, to emphasise that it's a huge galaxy and the big names simply can't be everywhere at once.

Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.

I would love a one-per-army option to build a custom character to lead your army.

Let the player choose loadouts, special gear, special rules, etc.

If you are worried about game balance, slap the Legends tag on this, and let all of us non tourney people have a blast.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I would love a one-per-army option to build a custom character to lead your army.

Let the player choose loadouts, special gear, special rules, etc.

If you are worried about game balance, slap the Legends tag on this, and let all of us non tourney people have a blast.

I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini. Use that to fill out the rest of the factions/subfactions with the pivotal people. That means you need a little more than The Lion, The Son of The Forest. It was an OK book, but it was pretty obviously a "Buy my mini" book.

Breton wrote:

I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini.

No, no, I'm sure that it's totally organic that Mira Lensk is really so popular that she's had TWO miniatures now...

 Lord Damocles wrote:

Breton wrote:

I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini.

No, no, I'm sure that it's totally organic that Mira Lensk is really so popular that she's had TWO miniatures now...

Minka, not Mira. She has no relation to Mira from Space Marine 1.

Breton wrote:
Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.

And this is exactly the issue. In a vast galaxy, and in a game that (at least in the past) had a heavy emphasis on 'Your Dudes', it seems ridiculous to say that there is only one of these jetbikes in the entire galaxy. No one else can have either that jetbike or their own jetbike that's close enough to be represented with the same rules. And said jetbike is never destroyed, damaged beyond repair etc., even against enemies who use the equivalent of naval-guns or molecular-disintegration weapons.

The idea of a given Space Marine wielding a completely unique, one-of-a-kind sword or such seems more suited to imperial propaganda.

More importantly still, if special characters were only permitted wargear available to generic characters, then that might encourage designers to give generic characters a decent selection of wargear. As opposed to the current tosh.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

Breton wrote:

I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini.

No, no, I'm sure that it's totally organic that Mira Lensk is really so popular that she's had TWO miniatures now...

That's why I said Ventris not anyone else. Ventris was organic. Let the writers earn their keep by creating some characters. The characters that do take off on their own, naturally, organically then get a mini to fill out the other (sub)factions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vipoid wrote:

Breton wrote:
Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.

And this is exactly the issue. In a vast galaxy, and in a game that (at least in the past) had a heavy emphasis on 'Your Dudes', it seems ridiculous to say that there is only one of these jetbikes in the entire galaxy. No one else can have either that jetbike or their own jetbike that's close enough to be represented with the same rules. And said jetbike is never destroyed, damaged beyond repair etc., even against enemies who use the equivalent of naval-guns or molecular-disintegration weapons.

The idea of a given Space Marine wielding a completely unique, one-of-a-kind sword or such seems more suited to imperial propaganda.

More importantly still, if special characters were only permitted wargear available to generic characters, then that might encourage designers to give generic characters a decent selection of wargear. As opposed to the current tosh.

I'm pretty sure the wink-wink-nudge-nudge fluff is that the Dark Angels have an entire storehouse of his jetbikes, but only give them to him and one at a time. In editions past, you also had him as the Captain of the Successor Chapter Ravenwings and they had his wink-wink-nudge-nudge jetbike. You were just supposed to change his name from Sammael to something of your own - like Asmodeus, Azazel, Apollyon, Mephistopheles, etc.

 Lord Clinto wrote:
Personally, I think the worst SW inconsistences happen after the HH ends.

Crusades era: SW have reportedly anywhere from 80k-200k marines.

HH: SW did not take part in the SoT, engaged elsewhere; inconclusive data.

Post-HH: Legions are broken up into ~1000-man chapters. SW, historically referred to as a smaller legion, only have the troop numbers to make 1 Second Founding Chapter, the "ill-fated Wolf Brothers".

So...the SW lost ~78-198k Marines from the height of the Crusade to implementation of the Codex Astartes?

The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.