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Just wondering. It particularly occured to me while I was reading Deathwatch by Steve Parker and his short stories that while some of the characters made me cringe a little (I guess I kind of liked them by the end, but I still can't stand how there's a giant obvious Legolas and Gimli in the squad) and the action in some places can be summed as up "and then they killed them" (taken to extremes in Exhumed where he has the squad kill 40 something Skitarii in a sentence with less than 10 words) I kept reading because I found the plots to be really quite interesting and the tension managed really well.

Characters.

The bolter-porn aspect, to me, can go. I don't really care for it, as it is highly unlikely that anything is going to happen in these two pages of Space Marines killing fools that didn't happen in the previous 300 pages of Space Marines killing fools.

Why can't we have both/all?

I enjoyed Cadian Blood greatly and you have a lot of character, a plot that'll do and plenty of action

Same for Dead Men Walking, really.

I find characters to be extremely important.
A great example of excellent work with characters was "Horus Rising". It's crazy how well they were portrayed and that I ended up rooting for Horus and Abaddon the freaking despoiler himself.

If a book has only one of those things it is a bad book. If it has all three, I find the characters to a most important. More so then in other series I have read.

Characters, without a doubt. How much of the specific stories does anyone remember from the Ciaphas Cain novels? They remember Cain and Jurgen and Valeria, because they're good characters. The Night Lords novels took a warband/legion I didn't really care about and made me care immensely for the characters because Aaron Dembski-Bowden can write some damn good brooding villains. I remember a few story beats from them, but I remember the character moments best. In damn near any story, characters are paramount.

 Rippy wrote:
If a book has only one of those things it is a bad book. If it has all three, I find the characters to a most important. More so then in other series I have read.

This.

Any one of those things on their own will not make a good 40k story. You need all three.

Both plot and characters are important to me, but a book can get away with poor plot if it has great characters and vice versa.