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As a Daemon player who routinely took 60 Daemonettes, 10 Seekers, and a love for torture and destruction, I really loved the randomness of Daemons. Hypocritically, I loathed the randomness of Chaos Space Marines.

Chaos Space Marines struck me as an excuse to sell more miniatures by having your marines potentially turn into Daemons or Spawn. The forced challenges forcing you into it was even more ridiculous, and it made forging a campaign narrative a nightmare when your Chaos Lord Valgun Whisperwrack had to stop his campaign to turn into a spawn (he got better...). Turning into a Daemon Prince often meant losing wargear you paid for too, and it was woefully intrusive on your designs.

The flipside with Chaos Daemons is you're playing the maelstrom, as opposed to serving it. I do think maybe warp storms should be something you can opt to activate (and if you do, they never stop). The random wargear stops every daemon army taking the same optimised items and leaving the ugly stuff at home. I just don't think random should be the focus of Chaos.

Daemons should be Silent Hill horror tier, insanity and reality warping lunacy. Walls melting. Buildings becoming dangerous. Genocidal violence and fonts of bloody terror. I feel they're a missed opportunity in some respects, and come off more weird and random for the sake of it, but I still love them. In the hands of someone not out to break the game completely, they can offer a very unique vibe. I think the biggest problem is though, with all this random, how do you playtest it at all?

Both Chaos Codexes were the unfortunately result of GW trying to make them similar to the old fantasy versions of Warriors of Chaos and Chaos Daemons. That's where the mandatory challenge and rewards table came from (I still keep calling it the Chaos Boon Table), and the challenge thing worked a lot better in fantasy where the whole system was more ingrained in the history of the game.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:

 GoonBandito wrote:
I never said it makes you roll less, I said it helps mitigate randomness.

I'm not really sure what the point of trying to make you roll as little as possible is. The OP was talking about having an Imperial Guard Platoon and FRFSRF - any extra rolling that a Tzeentch Demon army does in the psychic phase is offset by rolling next to nothing in the Shooting phase...

Rolling dice period isnt the problem. I was running an infantry horde and consistently having my turns be shorter than him even though I out numbered him 2:1 and was moving up the board while he mostly stsyed still. I could play much faster because my army was constant.

The problem is having the guy have to roll on so many tables. I brought up FRFSRF as an example because thats an order, a special thing only IG gets. At the start of the game, I do not randomly roll to determine if I get that order, I just get it along with every other order the IG get. I dont randomly have to roll at the start of the game to see if my command unit can take a standard. I dont have to randomly determine which war hymn my Priest uses in assault, I just get to pick. I dont randomly roll to see if command nukes half my army on turn 3 because I came from a different planet than him (bit extreme but you get the idea) I rolled for one random table, warlord trait, and that was it. We also rolled the mission and deployment but I dont even count those since thats always been a thing.

I just cant imagine having to deal with your own codex actively fighting you as being fun. We were playing a casual game but it didnt look particularly fun or relaxing to him. Granted from what I understand he's kind of new to daemons and he definitely had bad luck with dice, but if so it still shows its a pretty poorly designed book if people struggle that much with it at first.

I think you have a misconception of the Chaos Demon codex. Yes there is book-keeping to do at the start of the game, more so than other armies (but not really that much more than any other Psyker heavy army imo) but that is easily managed by the use of the Psychic Cards and your own home-made Demonic Reward cards/tokens. But you're not 'fighting' against the codex - the Greater Demonic Rewards, ie the ones that you will normally be taking on your Demon Princes/Greater Demons, are almost entirely great (the 'worst' one is a S8 AP1 Lance shot, which is still decent, and if you don't like the one you rolled you swap it for one of the awesome Greater Magic Weapons). I've never felt cheated by having to roll on that table. The Lesser Rewards are pretty crap however, which means you simply plan in advance to swap them out for the quite good Lesser Magic Weapons (Etherblades, Axe of Khorne, Staff of Change etc). And the Exalted Rewards are probably also going to be swapped for one of the Relics anyway, ie Grimoire of True Names, so the roll doesn't really matter there either.

The only table you really have to roll on during actual gameplay is the Warpstorm Table. But keep in mind that unless you are running some Soul Grinders, the Warpstorm Table is basically the entirety of the Demon's Shooting Phase. Yes its random, but there are plenty of ways to help mitigate it. Sure you can have a game where your Warlord explodes due to a failed 3d6 Demonic Instability test but then you'll have the odd game where your opponents Farseer gets possessed by a Slaanesh Herald. And when you're running a Demonic Incursion detachment, have a Warlord with the Lord of Unreality trait, and have Instruments of Chaos scattered throughout your units then you have alot of control over that Warp Storm table.

As far as Im concerned the only real problem with the Chaos Demon codes are the Tzeentch Psychic Powers and how they interact with the 7th Edition psychic phase. Psychic Shooting is crap when you're dealing with the fickle nature and limited number of Warp Charge dice, especially when it is further burdened by the Warpflame rule which Tzeentch Demon powers got saddled with. Buffs/Summoning are so much better.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
Both Chaos Codexes were the unfortunately result of GW trying to make them similar to the old fantasy versions of Warriors of Chaos and Chaos Daemons. That's where the mandatory challenge and rewards table came from (I still keep calling it the Chaos Boon Table), and the challenge thing worked a lot better in fantasy where the whole system was more ingrained in the history of the game.

It also worked better in Fantasy because Chaos characters generally were designed as character killers. There's very little that's going to match a tooled up Chaos Lord 1v1, and even a basic Chaos Warrior unit champion can match blades with many other races Heroes. In that sense, the challenge thing fit because it reinforced their tabletop and background role and status. In 40k however, a Chaos Lord isn't any better than a Space Marine Captain, and is usually in fact less impressive, while an Aspiring Champion isn't any different than a bog standard Space Marine Sergeant, and the rule doesn't have the same reinforcement of the tactical role and becomes a hindrance rather than an incentive.

 Vaktathi wrote:
It also worked better in Fantasy because Chaos characters generally were designed as character killers. There's very little that's going to match a tooled up Chaos Lord 1v1, and even a basic Chaos Warrior unit champion can match blades with many other races Heroes. In that sense, the challenge thing fit because it reinforced their tabletop and background role and status. In 40k however, a Chaos Lord isn't any better than a Space Marine Captain, and is usually in fact less impressive, while an Aspiring Champion isn't any different than a bog standard Space Marine Sergeant, and the rule doesn't have the same reinforcement of the tactical role and becomes a hindrance rather than an incentive.

Indeed. It also helps that in fantasy, Chaos didn't have a "loyalist" counterpart at all (the closest you could say would be Dorfs or armored empire knights) so there wasn't a direct comparison. I'm willing to bet that if Sigmarines were a thing in old fantasy, Chaos Lords would also be laughing stocks of the game rather than the pole to which everyone else is measured by.

@GoonBandito: The real issue with Psychic shooting, and which hurts Tzeentch most of all, is the 7th ed core rules that outright prevent "psychic units" from attempting to cast the same power more than once per phase.
Most of the time it's a non-issue since outside of Daemons, no one else is reliant on psychic shooting for nearly the entirety of their ranged damage potential, nor does anyone else outside of typically Eldar/GK's even run a unit with 2 or more psykers in it! (Deathstar builds being the lone exception)

Really, the rule was just plain botched, as it should have simply been no individual psyker may attempt the same power more than once per phase.
Otherwise, Tzeentch desperately needs a special rule to exempt our units from this farce, since we're supposed to be specialised magical artillery. (or else, you know, just give those poor Horrors a ****ing shooting attack!)

Warpflame on it's own isn't that much of an issue really.
The only reason it's really bitten me in the arse so much since 7th, is because I've lost over half my psychic shooting power!
The dice constraints of the WC aren't so bad to deal with, but when I can only get 1 Flickering Fire/turn from both the combined 18 Horrors AND attached Tzherald, that's when I'm completely boned!

 koooaei wrote:
Sometimes it's mindbogging how reliably such a random army gets access to 2++ re-rollable.

My thoughts exactly.

I'm the deamon player.

I actually had fun overall, only time I got irked was when I got the -1 to invulnerable saves 2 times in a row. It was for me only 2nd time playing deamons with this codex, most of my previous experience was when it was 1 chaos book not CSM and chaos deamons, and I took away from it many changes I need to do. For example I plan on making my own cards for each reward tier, Loci, and specific special rules with specific page numbers so they could be verified if need be.