Special Characters: Yes or No?

[Commanderkais01]

i hardly use special characters even though i have 2 i play tau so there isn't really a use for them all they are doing is ading a couple more weapons that have the same stats as the normal weapon.

[The Dinosaur]

the traits were great, but sadly thats all over.
from a SM prespective i enjoy that i can now use a special character in my army without them being blue/yellow/green. oh the joy i felt when i read i could use vulkan without painting everyone green... (my housemate plays DAs).

Using characters is all well and good, but i agree with the point that if you start crossing chapters of the original characters (calgar+vulkan+telion etc) you've gone to far.
if you're a subchapter - your're a subchapter. not a hall of fame..

[the one]

[Ignoring all previous posts]

No.

[pgmason]

I'd prefer it if special characters weren't tied to army specific rules in the way they currently are. I think the traits/doctrines system was a far superior way of handling the differences between forces, at least in theiry. the implementation could have been better though. The problem came with the separation of advantages and disadvantages, making it possible to maximise the advantages while choosing disadvantages that didn't really affect the army anyway (such as 'no allies' when you weren't planning on using any). If each advantage had come with in-built disadvantages, I think the system would have been much more successful.

I prefer the idea of special characters being for special scenarios, but anything you can do army-wise with a special character, you should be able to do with an unnamed one as well.

That said, I'm a big proponent of counts-as in all its forms - be it for individual characters, different models or whole armies. I'm currently working on some conversions of counts-as characters for when I want to use my IG as Traitor Guard - an Alpha Legionnaire as a counts-as Straken (T4, 3+ Sv) to lead it, and an Operative as counts-as Marbo (appears out of nowhere for sabotage/assassination). There's no way I could afford to build a second guard army, so I'm using these characters to get more variety out of the models I have, and enable me to play the army in different ways. The army is painted as the Cadian 8th, so they can't be full on traitors - but it's not too much of a stretch to imagine they've been duped or subverted by an Alpha Legion cell. In Large games (generally 2,000+) I do use Creed, when using them as loyalists, but in smaller games they're led by a normal company commander.

I'm also planning on experimenting with using Kantor to represent a Deathwatch captain to lead my drop-podding (Sternguard) Deathwatch kill-team in my marine army, since he has the funky gun etc. It will make the team a scoring unit, but at the same time it's a huge amount of points which turns up on turn 1 in the middle of the enemy army, and stands a good chance of getting wiped out before the rest of the army can help them out.

In all these cases though, I'd much rather there were options which fitted within the normal army lists, without having to use named characters and count them as something else. I prefer to see the named heroes in apocalypse games or special narrative scenarios, rather than just used for mechanical effect. I'm not as bothered by it as I used to be though.