So, I know that RoB likes to say we can't have a Librarian become a Dreadnought, so RAW no, but has anyone here found themselves giving the book the finger, and saying "yeah, but canonically, they DO have Librarian Dreads", and let it slide? I'm assuming that the game's motive was to prevent such a powerful ability from hiding in an unbreachable shell, raining doom and apocalypse on the enemy, but I'm not sure. I do know that certain Chapters, I believe the Blood Angels, do have Librarian Dreads, of the Furioso caliber, with incorporated force weapons in their Dread CC weapon. Would they really turn out to be really broken? Has anyone attempted it?

Official pic from Games Workshop, Blood Angels Space Marine Librarian Furioso Dreadnought

I haven't attempted it, but Librarian and Furioso Dreadnoughts are added to the Blood Angels in First Founding. Their Psy-Rating is reduced to 2 due to their distance from the world of flesh and such.

I thought it was reduced by 2… Otherwise there would really be no reason to have psychic powers in a dread chassis. They would be incredibly weak.

…oh shoot, I'm crazy, that wasn't even close. The Librarian Dreadnought has all Focus Power Tests at a -20 penalty, but can still purchase things off their Librarian table, albeit at double cost.

While on the subject why is it that, since a character can only choose one advanced specialty, that Dreadnoughts count against this number? You lose your specialty tables anyway. I suppose that means you might keep a special ability or two, but… wouldn't the First Company Veterans, Sword Brethren, and Honor Guard be the EXACT people you put in Dreadnoughts? I mean, it's not like they're preventing you from just chugging along being more powerful than before, you're already a frikkin' Dreadnought!

Let's call a spade a spade: Blood Angels flying psychic dreadnoughts are only a thing because Matt Ward power creep. They've never existed before. And in the wargame they are really good, because Dreadnoughts rock and so do Librarians, so add them together…

Yeah, it's sorta broken. Focus Power at -20 is no big deal when you're PR 6, Unfettered, and have base WP in the 60s.

Dreads explicitly don't count against it for Tempest Blades (who can always take Dreadnought if they're shattered in battle). I'd say that logic should apply to things like Iron Hands Iron Fathers, Honor Guard/Sword Brethren, etc. It's more a matter of worry about rules-stacking than anything based in fluff.

Because it simplifies gameplay and prevents players from spending all of their XP on advanced specialties. Which cost a crap ton.

DJSunhammer said:

"Cost a crap-ton" for a permanent new ability, access to a new table, and typically free signature wargear, while being able to buy stuff off their old specialty tables still (unlike DH/RT where you lost access to stuff of that rank). The real logic is power stacking which can get quite nasty.

I'm not crying for anyone who dumps XP into advanced specialties. Most of the buy-in costs get you some kind of amazing permanent ability.

Kshatriya said:

Potential abuse of Advanced Specialities was one of the driving forces for me to homebrew a new system without them. Seriously. Deathwing veteran? No. Just No.

Because of the Termie? Meh. Easy enough to work around IMO.

Or you can do the hard work around and rewrite everything over the course of a month - who's laughing now?!

It's you, isn't it.

****.

Kshatriya said:

Kshatriya said:

Well, you're right about the "flying" part, but Librarian Dreadnoughts did used to be a thing. And, as usual, the Eldar were the best at it. Wraithseer IIRC.

venkelos said:

I made it very clear to the player of a Fleshtearer Librarian that I could not stomach the idea of a Librarian Dreadnought in the campaign. I have offered a possible compromise since if his character is on the way out and has reached the requirements: internment into a Furiouso model but with the loss of his psychic powers.

Why my dislike?

IC: Because the idea of keeping a Librarian on ice for centuries and then slapping them into a horrendously powerful armoured shell should give most space marines nightmares. If a Librarian got posessed or went mad from visions of the warp between missions, they could wreak total devastation upon a watch fortress from within.

OOC: Too much power stacked and with little to no justification in universe. I don't count Matt Ward-style cheese as justification by the way.

I don't understand the hate for Ward written lore. None of it is any more ridiculous than literally everything else in 40k.

Mostly much of it is not just rediculous, but mind-numbingly dumb, as if created by a 5 year old ("Everything's more AWESUM if it's bigger, badder and more unkillable!" That stupid Grey Knight character is a perfect example of that), utterly out of character for the background as established (Blood Angels feeling it would be a bit iffy stabbing Necrons because they both fought Tyranids on the same planet), or just plain wrong and stupid (Grey Knights wearing Sisters of Battle as hats of anti-chaos protection).

Also moronic ideas like throwing land raiders out of the back of aircraft to land on the battlefield.

Necron stuff, as far as I can tell, is actually not that bad, just it was such a radical departure from the established background.

borithan said:

To be fair, maybe he was watching the A-Team movie when that part got written. It was a pretty entertaining scene.

borithan said:

Land raiders are tough? Idk, I usually tend to gloss over anything that doesn't interest me.

Decessor said:

Decessor said:

I sort of thought that if GW said it was doable, we can't really just call it "some bad author's crap" (no idea if Matt Ward is really a good, or bad author), and Furioso Dreads are a legit part of the tabletop game, at least for Blood Angels, but probably available in some other Chapters.

I'm not sure how much more uber a Librarian is than every other Space Marine; I've heard some threads where people complained about their Librarians constantly Pushing their nastier powers, but I thought DW was supposed to have done a much better job balancing psykers vs everyone else, especially when you take a Space Marine's physique into consideration. Add to that the Furioso gives up ranged weapons, so their ONLY ability to hit distant foes is psychic powers (and I'm not going to pull out my DW books to see what powers BA's get), so I would think it could balance out. Of course, I don't know; I've never been in this situation, either.

Is it an honor to be a Dreadnought? Do non-Grey Knights not often look forward to being able to continue to fight for the Emperor? (I know GKs actually don't, and they hope to just be interred on Titan, so as not to become the first to fall to Chaos.) It would seem weird if the Chapter/Watch Fortress said "well, you are a Dreadnought candidate, but you are also a Librarian, so we decided to Requisition a Commissar instead. It's for your on good…)

I suppose I wouldn't complain if they had to lose some/all of their powers. Becoming a Dread would greatly change how a Techmarine, an Apothecary, or most any Space Marine who isn't Tac or Dev-spec, but it seemed a bit weird to me for Librarian to be the only restricted spec-type, especially when many come to Dreads for their ancient lore, maybe even more than their combat skill, and Librarians are the most Lore-bearing Space Marines.

Kshatriya said:

In the rules section where it actual says that you can't take two advanced specialities except in certain circumstances it actually lists the dreadnought as one of the examples that it may allow.

DJSunhammer said:

No, it really is. There is a distinction.

There are howlers such as Xanthite Grey Knights and Blood Angels cheerily teaming up with Necrons, which are only the most obvious examples of Ward ignoring existing background.

Mechanically, his last few wargame codexes have been stockpiled with cheesy and outright broken rules.

Frankly, apart from a handful of interesting ideas such as psychically powered weapons, I'm hard pressed to see anything to like about Ward's work.

Luckily for me, I only play the RPGs so I don't *have* to use anything influenced by the man hence why I rarely feel the urge to talk about it.

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"In the rules section where it actual says that you can't take two advanced specialities except in certain circumstances it actually lists the dreadnought as one of the examples that it may allow."

I have no problem with a character taking dreadnought on top of an existing speciality and stacking either or both with Black Shield. I find it more plausible that the Deathwatch would want to preserve heroic specialists and Black Shield is effectively an alternate chapter option.

That said, a dreadnought character is going to be quite limited and even the player discussing the possibility in my game would prefer him as a NPC if that came to pass for his character.

Decessor said:

GK's <shrug>, for BA that instance has gets mentioned all the time. I don't see it particularly out of character for a Space Marine, there's already a slight habit for anthropmorphasising robots amoungst the Imperials, 'You fought with honor Robot. We will give you a break THIS time.'

'Beep'

It was clearly a taster of the new more cerebral Necrons rather than anything about the BA's.

Decessor said:

Space Marine codex, it's supposed to be full o cheese isn't it?

I presume you mean weapons other than Force weapons in general.

Decessor said:

Yeah there is that, plus it's not like Dreadnought suits are lying around waiting empty for a PC to die. I would imagine that plenty of vets are kept in stasis for a while waiting for a dread to become available.

Plus of course excepting that Librarian Dreadnoughts (or any other chapter specific specialist stuff) exist doesn't mean that Deathwatch has an empty Librarian dreadnought in the sector waiting for him. The advanced Deathwatch rules cover things for which there are a handful in the entire Imperium including the parent chapters so having all those things within one sector of deathwatch coverage is ridiculously small.

Face Eater said:

I will accept that with hindsight it does show more about the new necrons than anything else, but at the time the Necrons were just life hating, exterminating killing machines… no one, particularly ragetastic xenophobes like Space Marines, is going to feel the slightest bit iffy at doing a number on them, no matter how much their objectives lined up for a few seconds.

I still don't think it makes that much more sense with the new background either, but I agree it fits more than it did. It is really the bit about some Blood Angels not liking the idea of turning on the Necrons that is the problem. I don't think there would have been much of a response if he had just left that bit out, as it could have just been chalked up to exhaustion of the forces involved forcing a temporary withdrawal.

On the Space Marine codex: I wouldn't really include it in "his last few codices" . He has done Blood Angels, Grey Knights and Necrons since then, and they have generally been considered to be a bit cheesy (ok, Necrons not so much, but decidedly competitive, and it was written with 6th edition in mind, and seems to have received boosts because of it). Even without the rules cheese, its treatment of the background (particularly non-Ultramarines) and the pushing of a certain "MOAR IS AWSUM. WEEZ CAN TAK IT!" approach to the Ultramarines was…. not well received by some.

borithan said:

I really mean't Space Marine Codices in general, they are all a bit cheesy but get worse.

I think there's more nasty gamey and downright cheesy stuff in Space Wolves than in the Ultra Marine codex (oh was that supposed to cover other chapters, I hadn't noticed) and they get steadily worse.

And I agree with the Nec codex, I was quite disappointed but it fits 6th ed much better, don't really know how far that goes but seems to be the right direction.

Yeah Necrons were meh under 5e rules, their new codex was definitely written with 6e FAQ-changes in mind and it is very good. I personally loved the fluff change. If I needed "mindless rapacious murderhost with no distinct personalities" in 40k, I'd just look at tyranids.

Really it's the ASTARTES UBER ALLES fluff. I like to think each codex is supposed to be writted with an obvious bias to those units being the best in the game just for braggadocio or machismo but it didn't seem like it ever occurred to the authors/editors that presenting that as true doesn't mean it needs to be true. Yes, it does get to the absurd in ways that prior fluff did not. It's gotten to be less about a chapter being awesome than THIS ONE GUY ONLY ever gets stuff done.

Bad fluff aside, the power creep of the crunch is pretty obvious when you look at SWs, BAs and GKs, but that's perhaps viewable in light of the new rules being down the pipeline. The necrons needed a boost, and every army should be competitive in 6e (I think a well-designed wargame should be generally beyond factional tier-ranking so no one army is the Obvious One True Path).

Yeah Dreadnought Librarians are OP, but sometimes that's what you need. Played a game as a DA devastator a while back with a Space Wolves Tac and Blood Angels Librarian. Final mission, we all kicked ass and got serious injuries - w/ release of First Founding, GM invited us back, saying we'd taken the apocryphon oath again, or someat. BA guy went Librarian Dreadnought, spent most of mission in orbit, while me and now Wolf Priest royally screwed things up on the ground, pretty much guaranteeing the entire system we were in an Exterminatus and the main villain to get away. Librarian Dreadnought, now with us, casts unfettered Wings of Sanguinus, and with us perched on him takes off after Chaos Thunderhawk with big bad on it, and evidence that will save system. Literally, we went from in such deep excrement you would have needed an oil rig to pull us out to winning in about half an hour because of him. I totally support them - but GMs need to scale up their campaigns appropriately.

I've no issue with upping the ante in a campaign to match powerful and well-coordinated characters, who should reasonably be expected to deliver results on tougher missions. But that does not mean I will include every single idea on 40k produced to date in my campaigns. Frankly, I'd be happier introducing a primarch as a plot element than allowing a titular dreadnought librarian.