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The Psychic powers and Warlord Traits all say that you can pick one or randomly generate one using a d6.

Does anyone ever randomly generate their warlord traits or powers?

 vipoid wrote:
The Psychic powers and Warlord Traits all say that you can pick one or randomly generate one using a d6.

Does anyone ever randomly generate their warlord traits or powers?

Nope.
**edit** Only if we have to.

Never.The randomness of 7th was one of the things I loathed about it.
Thank God GW decided to remove a decent proportion of it.

I had a daemon army, Quite a horde by design from myself.
Rolling randomly for powers made most games so unfun most players just told me to pick before hand and have them on my sheet ready to go Back then

As far as i am concerned random powers are just for hiding bad design >.<.

Not a chance. When GW first said you could pick your WT and powers in the run up to 8th you could hear the collective rejoicing from around the world.

Only if I’m playing a casual game against a new player (plus, it gives me a chance to try psychic powers that aren’t Guide or Doom) and am intentionally weakening my list.

Exception for Freeblade Knights, where rolling can have an advantage vs. picking (think C’tans are the same?).

Rolling for a warlord trait or psychic power is a handicap imposed on yourself, simple as that. There are legitimate reasons to do so, like challenging yourself, a game against a new player, or some narrative scenarios.

In general it is better to pick though, no questions asked.

You can't min/max properly if you have to randomize your abilities.

Shock horror having to play with something other than the 1-2 broken ones

tneva82 wrote:
Shock horror having to play with something other than the 1-2 broken ones

Because playing with the 4-5 really useless ones makes the game, so much more enjoyable.

Yes, makes for different games even with same armies. The amount of control the player is given over their force make up is one of the negatives of this edition for me.

I can plenty of narrative instances where you'd get a kick out of randomly determining it. Particularly for NPC style characters, or as a kind of handicap --- but I don't think I've seen anyone ever do it.

What a nightmare that used to be. We developed some House rules about that BS from 6th and 7th. Roll 2 dice, pick one. Or for warlord traits it was roll first, then pick the result off any of the 3 BRB tables.

I can pick and choose my mix of factions, units and wargear. But powers and traits are random? Heck no.

I play a lot of solo games. My characters have fixed "fluffy" traits and the psykers know all of the powers in the discipline. I have fun with that.

The local admech player rolls for his canticles or whatever they're called now because (as I understand it) he can't choose the same one twice in a row if he picks them but CAN if he rolls for them.

I've been tempted (but never convinced) to roll for wych drugs for similar reasons. If I roll well, I can skip taking leadership or movement drugs in favor of something stronger.

But powers and warlord traits? Nah. Even if I'm not trying to build a cut throat army, the powers and warlord traits I have can dramatically impact the play style of my army. If I field a harlequin troupe on foot, then I'm really going to want the psychic powers that let them double move and make them harder to hit.

Plus, powers and traits tend to be very characterful. I typically already have personalities in mind for my characters, so rolling for powers and traits just presents them with an opportunity to be LESS fluffy.

 auticus wrote:
You can't min/max properly if you have to randomize your abilities.

Nothing to do with min/maxing. It was constantly frustrating in 6th edition rolling a Warlord Trait that conferred an ability that my army commander already possessed, or that was completely useless to my army. The introduction of Warlord Traits was one of the best things about 6th edition. Making so much stuff randomly determined was one of the worst.

I won a tournament game once, not through any action of my own, but because three quarters of my opponent's army was eaten by the trees as a result of randomly generated dangerous terrain. That wasn't fun for either of us. (And yes, I had a completely useless Warlord trait in that game... lucky I didn't need it, I guess.)

Dai wrote:
Yes, makes for different games even with same armies. The amount of control the player is given over their force make up is one of the negatives of this edition for me.

Yeah, it's just awful that people get to pick what they want to bring to the game instead of having to roll to see if they can have fun.

No self respecting Tzeentch player should ever choose their traits. Only the Lord of Change himself knows the outcome of all things. For the rest of us, the universe is unpredictable, random and mercurial.

I played a campaign where at the start we randomized psychich powers and warlord traits. This made us really try to get some use out of some we had never even tried before (because they seemed lame). It was a fun challange.

The amount of control the player is given over their force make up is one of the negatives of this edition for me.

Can you explain this some more?
How is it a negative? Random rolls/abilities/traits fundamentally detract from actual generalship because you have zero control over them.
One might as well play snakes and ladders.

Random warlord traits and pysker powers was awful, I'm sorry but there's just no way around that. It sucked for competitive and narrative. Competitive players could be saddled with useless abilities through no fault of their own, and narrative players would go through all this work on a backstory for how their general was an aggressive commander only to get an ability that helped him defend or a commander skilled in combat would get a shooting ability for his bolt pistol. It needed to be replaced and thank the emperor they did. The fact that we suffered that nonsense for two edititons says a lot about how out of touch GW was.

Now other abilities like canticles for admech or the freeblade table for knights is a cool compromise and I think an interesting mechanic. Either you pick a result you want but are limited to how many times you can take, or you get to pick but take more downsides. Whereas if you roll you can keep getting a good ability but run the risk of being screwed, or you get less downsides for more benefits. It's a known factor vs a gamble that can pay off big and I like games that make you consider those choices. Usually with admech I'll pick for the first two turns then roll after.

My one complaint is that some of these abilities are completely useless, making rolling feel needlessly tense. Admech has one canticle that is so incredibly useless I've never even heard it matter, scourge of the electromancer or something. You roll a dice for each enemy unit in combat with you on the start of the round and on a 6 they take D3 mortal wounds... I've never seen it actually do anything. You basically lose your canticle that round. Especially since if you roll it first round it can't even do anything. It's just a poorly designed table result that you'd never pick in a million years

If they were all equally useful all the time, then it wouldn't be a potential handicap to randomize.

I suspect in most Codex's only a couple of them are used the vast majority of the time, the rest only for 'fluff' reasons, or because you are fighting that one army that it might actually be useful against.

Rolling randomly for your powers and traits was certainly annoying in 7E. So much so, that I built my lists around the "default" Powers.
Thank the Dice gods that's gone for 8E

-

No, I always found that to be a dumb rule in 6th and 7th. Why would my captain or librarian randomly have a new specialty or power set each battle.

 Ratius wrote:

The amount of control the player is given over their force make up is one of the negatives of this edition for me.

Can you explain this some more?
How is it a negative? Random rolls/abilities/traits fundamentally detract from actual generalship because you have zero control over them.
One might as well play snakes and ladders.

Some people think any attempt to play in an intelligent way is power gaming. Seriously, unless your army is gimped and crippled and terrible, some people just think you're a WAAC guy who is beneath them.

I've randomly generated powers before if I was new to an army and just throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, but I usually don't.

 Ratius wrote:
Random rolls/abilities/traits fundamentally detract from actual generalship because you have zero control over them.

I'd argue that 'actual generalship' is being able to use your decision space to respond effectively to randomness and make the most with what you have, and inflexible theorycrafting/listbuilding shouldn't be mistaken for generalship.

FWIW I agree that warlord traits shouldn't be randomized, but I do think the game could use a little less emphasis on the pre-game mechanics (particularly listbuilding), and the relative determinism of army composition and deployment is part of that.

Wouldn't random tables help mono lists and weaker armies though? An eldar or orc army would have to be constructed differently, if the person building it, wouldn't know before the game which power or craftworld would they get. At the same time armies that did not get different rules for companies or subfactions in their books, wouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. Same with warlord traits or relics. Armies that don't really care which one they take or with relics that are worthless or even impossible to use, would get a slight boost, over those with power options in their codex.

Karol wrote:
Wouldn't random tables help mono lists and weaker armies though? An eldar or orc army would have to be constructed differently, if the person building it, wouldn't know before the game which power or craftworld would they get. At the same time armies that did not get different rules for companies or subfactions in their books, wouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. Same with warlord traits or relics. Armies that don't really care which one they take or with relics that are worthless or even impossible to use, would get a slight boost, over those with power options in their codex.

It wouldn't, it's just incredibly dumb.