Special characters, yay or nay?

[Colonel Voss]

sadly some of them are pointed pretty cheap for what they can do. why take a blood angel captain when you can take dante?

Because Dante still costs 100 points more and you are playing a 750 point tag team game where you want to take cheap characters to get the first turn?
Why take a BA captain at all? BA chaplains are a better choice, or Librarians.
Maybe you want a powerfist/stormshield combo so you can actually hurt your enemy or even inflict instant death?
Maybe you hate painting gold.
Maybe you want to model your captain on a bike.
Maybe you dont have the model.
Dante is expensive and by no means unbeatable.

Exception which proves the rule. There are special rules you put into the tournament that made it better to choose otherwise.Further the librarian is not to be compaired to a captain but to Memphiston who seems to show up more than any librarians I have seen. Other points are based off of personal preference or concerns over avaliability (though I will point out that Dante is cheaper to buy than the space marine captain). But I do remember two blood angel players who both brought Dante two years ago. And if I recall both loss one game as did I and we all tied together in the end (or it was me, MiJ and the dante only player, can't remember which) at third.

[Primarch]

yeah, you're probably right prim,

hear that danguinius? hope that helps with the nightmares.

The thing is though, is where do you draw the line?
Banning choices like Mephiston and Abaddon seems fairly reasonable, they are both massive beat sticks that bludgeon your opponent into submission. Vulkan, yeah ok. How about Death Company Tycho? He's remarkably useless for what you pay for him. This year one team brought Draigo and Mephiston along and got beaten by a force using 2 Dark Eldar Haemonculi, should we ban them?
If you look at the big tournament elsewhere, it isnt special characters who make the lists, it's spamming long fangs and razorbacks? Should those be banned? Twin autocannon dreads? Dark Eldar Venoms?
You complain that characters are one of the things you hate about 40k, you also claim to hate Matt Ward. Should we simply ban every book written by him?
Surely it would just be simpler to ask people to bring fun, balanced lists along with whatever they like in them and just ban the players who do try to powergame every time.

If you want to run an event/campaign/tournament and place limitations on what people can and can't use, it is fine and I can happily field 40k armies with no characters. But at the same time, no-one forces you to use characters if you dont want to and certainly no-one forced you to bring that tag team of doom.

[Primarch]

Exception which proves the rule. There are special rules you put into the tournament that made it better to choose otherwise.Further the librarian is not to be compaired to a captain but to Memphiston who seems to show up more than any librarians I have seen. Other points are based off of personal preference or concerns over avaliability (though I will point out that Dante is cheaper to buy than the space marine captain). But I do remember two blood angel players who both brought Dante two years ago. And if I recall both loss one game as did I and we all tied together in the end (or it was me, MiJ and the dante only player, can't remember which) at third.

M_i_J and FeeltheAdrenalin won I think. (Dark Eldar and Tyranids if I recall correctly).

[Colonel Voss]

Yeah sounds right, I remember trying with the two Blood Angel players. Felt good for my lowly demon book to tie with such a vaunted codex.

[Admiral-Badruck]

Do you think we should disallow special characters for the next 40k tourney

I think we should allow them but we do not need to limit them in tournaments.

[ashmie]

Maybe it depends on how special the character is. The model is usually cool I guess that's why people include them in their lists. I always buy the models first and then make the lists.

[Konrad]

You complain that characters are one of the things you hate about 40k, you also claim to hate Matt Ward. Should we simply ban every book written by him?

Now that makes sense.

[Spevna]

yeah, you're probably right prim,

hear that danguinius? hope that helps with the nightmares.

The thing is though, is where do you draw the line?
Banning choices like Mephiston and Abaddon seems fairly reasonable, they are both massive beat sticks that bludgeon your opponent into submission. Vulkan, yeah ok. How about Death Company Tycho? He's remarkably useless for what you pay for him. This year one team brought Draigo and Mephiston along and got beaten by a force using 2 Dark Eldar Haemonculi, should we ban them?
If you look at the big tournament elsewhere, it isnt special characters who make the lists, it's spamming long fangs and razorbacks? Should those be banned? Twin autocannon dreads? Dark Eldar Venoms?
You complain that characters are one of the things you hate about 40k, you also claim to hate Matt Ward. Should we simply ban every book written by him?
Surely it would just be simpler to ask people to bring fun, balanced lists along with whatever they like in them and just ban the players who do try to powergame every time.

If you want to run an event/campaign/tournament and place limitations on what people can and can't use, it is fine and I can happily field 40k armies with no characters. But at the same time, no-one forces you to use characters if you dont want to and certainly no-one forced you to bring that tag team of doom.

Doesn't matter what you ban or allow. It is 40K so Jus will find something to whine about.

[Danguinius]

Well, mission and size of the game also have a lot to do with how powerful characters are. The Dante/Mephie combo was in a game where no unit could move more than 6" if it want to drag a counter (and I had no vehicles and all jump packs. Further, both armies HAD TO meet in the middle, which Mephie just loved, as that was where we had to drop the counter. And, it was only like 1500 points, so there weren`t a lot of options for dropping both of those sepcial characters.

If it was 5000 points a side Apocalypse, no one would mind Mephie and Dante....there`d be plenty of lascannons and such to blast them into oblivion.

I used to be totally anti-special character, but it just sort of became excepted by everyone in 5th edition. So, eventually I gave in and bought some of them.

BTW, what is with everyone assuming BA are one of the mightiest codices? You Nagoya guys seem really afraid of them. The BA codex isn`t bad, I`d rank them 4th or 5th in the current power rankings, but unless someone is running razor spam with Mephiston, their nothing to fear.

Danguinius

[Admiral-Badruck]

In 500 point games ban HQs says I other than that they are fun to use in big games. Some of them are necessary for certain army builds. Like death wing.