Do you play with special characters?

[Demonus]

I love special characters and use them mixed with regular characters all the time.

[Sonikgav]

It depends on the Army and the Charachter being used.

I dont mind people taking Charachters against me, but it kinda stands out if theyve just taken it for the power increase. I appreciate if it adds something to their army they cant get elsewhere, moves around their FOC, or if a Charachter solves a problem in the list somehow.

What does piss me off are those that just CANT leave a Charachter out of it.

Of all the Armies i play i use maybe 6, and 3 of them are Tyranids:-
*Obyron in my Necrons to add that Mobility and surprise element
*Khan in my Space Marine all biker force for FOC (more cost effective than a SM Biker Captain)
*Castellan Crowe in my Grey Knights to move Paladins to Troops
*Swarmlord, Ymgarls and Doom in my Tyranids for the only lvl2 Psyker in the book and the Ymgarls/Dooms ability to disrupt and get in peoples faces faster than anything else in the book.

Ive also experimented with Deathleaper and Parasite in different builds (Leaper again is brilliant disruption and a 90 Gargoyle list headed by the Parasite is kinda funny to see ) but there are plenty of armies i play including my Orks, Tau, Daemons, Chaos Marines (basically every other army barring Dark Eldar since i dont play them) that dont use any.

There are some people i regularly play against though, that just cant comprehend a list without a Charachter. I havent seen an Eldar army without Eldrad in months. Theres one guy that allies a single 5man Blood Angels Tac squad in every list he runs so he can take Mephiston. Infact his actual BA list has Mephiston, Dante, Lemartes and Corbulo (possibly Astorath too but i havent played him in a while) so its safe to say he likes his Charachters.

Im about to start collecting the new Eldar and unless I need a special Charachter for the Wraithguards to be Troops then i doubt ill be using one in that army either.

[Houghten]

With early warning overide your broadsides with rail rifles have a decent chance of taking out if you hit it with all 3 railguns and it fails 1 out of 3 of the wounds.

Only one model in a Broadside unit (the Shas'vre) can take an early warning override. Are you spending all your heavy support slots on them?

[Sonikgav]

Only one model in a Broadside unit (the Shas'vre) can take an early warning override. Are you spending all your heavy support slots on them?

Every model can take any Support item they want. Being a Shas'vre doesnt really change anything for the Broadsides besides an extra point of Leadership.

[chicop76]

Every model can take any Support item they want. Being a Shas'vre doesnt really change anything for the Broadsides besides an extra point of Leadership.

That is correct. Broadsides always had one open slot. I miss having A.S.S. target lock an or early warning in my opinion is the best way to go.

[Sonikgav]

That is correct. Broadsides always had one open slot. I miss having A.S.S. target lock an or early warning in my opinion is the best way to go.

Personally i run 2 Salvo-Sides and 1 Rail-Side in a unit. The 2 with missiles have Interceptor, the 1 with the Railgun has Target Lock.

Id also give some thought to the Advanced Targeting System though, especially in a list low on Markerlights. Overwatch on a 5+ can make a difference when everything you have is Twin Linked.

[Houghten]

Apparently I misread. Good to know.

[Asuryan]

I play elder and I always use Eldrad, because it allows me have one hq's that does job of two which frees up another for an avatar or another farseer. Is Eldrad extremely useful yes, but he is not broken in any shape. Trying to kill him with his almost guaranteed rerolling 3++ save is difficult, but if you want to beat him just ignore him. shoot or attack the non fortuned units, and if hes only using guide and doom then his units should be easy to kill and effectively cripple the army.

[Power Klawz]

I don't like special characters and it has nothing to do with how they impact gameplay. In a way the shift in attitude and treatment of special characters is indicative of what has happened to this hobby specifically, and imagination based hobbies generally.

Special characters were, at one point, singular personae who had a historical impact on the setting. They were fun little conceits thrown in by the designers, almost like Easter eggs. For a role playing game (and that is basically what 40k was, albeit one which focused on large scale combat to the exclusion of minutiae that most other role playing games find themselves getting bogged down with, although obviously not immune to it. Anyone remember anti-plant grenades and troops without environmentally sealed armor?) the emphasis should always be on expanding potential.

What potential stories can the players tell? what sorts of tactical decision can they make?

You define only as much as is needed to give the setting form. Most long time role players will take it from there, just describe the setting and the rules and they'll create their own characters and stories to populate it. Of course some people will need a more handholding introduction, and some people will appreciate more depth to the setting vis a vis the detailed army lists and descriptions we've seen in codexes since the early ages of 40k. There does come a point, however, when exposition becomes dictation and when people stop trying to create something and instead just start playing with something.

Role playing games are, of course, games at heart. They are not jobs, they do not make you money or meaningfully enrich your education or knowledge base. They don't perform any particularly useful function other than entertaining, however what they do accomplish in a rather unique way is a blending of play with art. When you sit down and build a communal narrative with friends you are creating art, whether that narrative is something as simple as Warboss Bogruk Tha Drilla mounting an offensive against the hapless tau outpost on Kul'amus 7 or as complex as a sector wide war involving shifting alliances and global destruction. You are building a story, a fiction that involves far more than simply adding together points and rolling dice.

When special characters stopped being interesting little extra bits and became just another army list decision was when the role playing elements of the game went by the wayside. When the emphasis went from a fun and quirky universe in which to battle out your own farfetched war scenarios and planted itself firmly in the realm of narrative free tactical simulation. The names and faces and histories became stifling certainties instead of interesting suggestions, now instead of using Mephiston as inspiration you use him as your HQ choice because he fulfill some specific gameplay necessity, not because he would realistically be involved in the conflict that you're not actually enacting, because none of the armies have any real personality left, they're just rules and numbers with a few poorly written stories to go along with them, purely optional content of course.

Special characters providing unique mechanics and gameplay options was the design studio finally giving up on supporting creative storytelling as a main component of their game. I guess they just peered out over the vast vista that is wargaming and found that it had lost its soul, and instead of trying to perform some alchemical miracle to breathe new vigor into that ancient beast they set about the grim business of harvesting what remained of its corpse. I can't say that I blame them, but I do mourn their decision.

Perhaps sadder still is that what is lost is paltry compared to what will be lost if this trend continues. I myself am a grown man with my childhood memories all ready generated, I was able to visit the realms of fantasy and wonder that seem to exist only in a child's mind. I was afforded the opportunity to explore my own imagination without restraint or cynical comment. I never felt ashamed of any of this.

Maybe these are just the first weezings from an inevitably old man, but the world seems to be changing into something terribly literal for children. I grew up in the heyday of the video gaming industry of course, I witnessed the transition from simple, pixelated graphics to full 3d gameplay, from simplistic or non-existent narratives in games to writing and character building on par with most Hollywood productions. (which isn't to say that either is a very high bar of quality.) As a child and as a younger man I could find myself absorbed by these games, but always found myself returning to more freeform entertainment, always I found myself constrained by the limitations of technology, limitations which the human mind does not suffer from.

I fear that children today are so inundated with pre-fabricated entertainment that they might never even know what they are missing. When such things as photo-realistic graphics and complex (but not infinite) gameplay are just a part of your everyday reality from the first moments of dawning sentience I wonder when you find the time to imagine something else, something new. If you spend your childhood playing World of Warcraft, or copying net lists to beat your friends without any thought to creating a narrative I feel like you've missed the point entirely. The human mind is quite susceptible to addiction, repetitive rewarding actions cause habits that can be stifling to all other endeavors. If you sit in front of a computer screen for 5 hours a day playing the same game and only use your imagination to think of better ways to accomplish the same goals you might find that your imagination shrivels, you are trapped in the box and might never even contemplate such a thing as outside of it, let alone figure out how to conceptualize that concept.

When you remove the soul of a role playing game, when you are no longer playing a role or building a character (in the narrative sense) you are approaching this sort of mindless ideal of perform proper action, get appropriate reward. Maybe in a professional context such sentiments are appropriate, you don't want to risk too much on a poor business decision. But for children and for those times when your life or livelihood aren't on the line why would you wish to stifle your imagination so? There is no magic in figuring out the best method to deepstrike terminators, or how to balance your checkbook. These are just skills with a very mundane purpose; win games, build wealth, avoid litigation. The magic exists only in those rare spaces where the impossible is conceived, where new life takes form in the mind.

[zenjah]

You can make up just as much narrative around a special character as you can a generic one.

In fact, I see the special characters as interchangeable with generic characters. There is no reason at all to get caught up worrying about why Marbo is always running around with your Vostroyans. He isn't. A sneaky loner of your own creation is running around with the Vostroyans. He just happens to use the Marbo statline. The fact that the statline was presented for an individual named Marbo doesn't matter one bit. Think of Marbo as a perfect example of the type of rare loner you'd expect in an IG army. But not the only one imaginable.

If your vanilla Captain can have a creative back-story and an ongoing narrative, so can your Captain that uses the statline of a special character. If you see a limit there, it is self imposed. You are curtailing your own creativity because of incorrect assumptions about the intent of special characters.