Has anybody else noticed that in your games certain classes go unloved for the majority of your games? I usually play with a pretty diverse and ever changing group of people but a few trends have popped up.

Dark Heresy

Actually pretty balanced, but almost everybody wants to play either the Assassin or the Psyker. Usually the 'newbies' to the 40k universe will go for the Guardsman due to its relatively simple "He's a soldier, duh!" makeup of him. Adepts and Clerics are usually avoided. In fact I don't think we'd had one where the former was ever used.

Deathwatch

Apothecaries and Tactical Marines are avoided like the plague. I think this might be due to the idea of "You're a big, muscular, hunking death dealing machine. Brother Sebastian go and put a band aid on the Assault Marine's knee!". As for the Tactical, it seems that my groups have a crippling fear of being put into a position of authority and that ending up as a designated Kill-Team leader (as per the Tactical's strength) leads to them shying away from it.

Aside from that, it's pretty diverse though the Librarian is always the first one people pick out.

Black Crusade

Chaos Marines. Chaos Marines everywhere. More specifically, everybody wants to go for the Sorcerer straight away, followed by a bit of sulking and "Aww…" from the people who don't manage to get it in time, usually falling back upon the Chosen. Humans? What the heck are Humans? You practically have to force somebody to play one if they're not a female.

Only War

Commissars. Oh my, Commissars. I think the 2012 Apocalypse is going to be brought about by our gaming group arguing over who gets to play this guy. Ironically enough, everybody is terrified at the prospect of playing the Sergeant. Apparently playing authority is fine only so long as you get a fancy cap. Surprisingly this seems to be the only line where people are quite eager to take on the role of the Medic and after the Commissar is the first one called dibs.

Weapon Specialists aren't popular, nor are Ministorium Priests. I assume the former is due to the misconception of being a generic redshirt and the latter from not being the most 'known' of the forces the Imperial Guard can bring to bear, though firing off the description of them is usually enough to get at least one person interested.

I'm interested in hearing what stories you have about your groups, what trends have emerged when it comes to picking out your classes, who gets to do what. Any bloodshed?

Dark Heresy: Tech-Priests. Everyone wants to be the **** Tech-Priest. It's not even a matter of group; I joined one IRC game that had 3 Tech-Priests (there was a 4th, but the GM didn't let him) and another that had 2/4 players as Tech-Priests. Newbies traditionally enjoy playing Assassins and Guardsmen. I'll agree that almost nobody wants to play the Cleric.

Rogue Trader: Xenos careers everywhere. I can't say I blame them.

Deathwatch: Assault Marines and Librarians are easily the most popular. It's the clash of people who want to do something badass every fight (Assault) and people who want to be mechanically the best (Librarian).

Black Crusade: Chaos Space Marines are a lot more popular than the regular Heretics. I see a lot of Chosen, and quite a few Forsaken. Only ever met one Sorceror and never seen someone play a Champion.

Only War: No real disposition here towards any one. I've noticed that people shy away from the Ratling, but everyone else seems to get a lot of love. People seem to flock to the Weapon Specialist and Heavy Gunner in my experience, though. You can get some **** nice equipment with the right regiment.

Arbitrator said:

As a 18 year veteran of the 40K universe, I would say I take offense to that, but not really

I played a Guardsman my first DH game and he was easily the strongest character, especially starting off. 4 armor everywhere? TB 4 from Feral World and a decent role? I was the tank of out Assassin, Scum, Arbitrator, Psyker group. Ironically I decided to focus on Sniping and was always in the back, but I dominated the game in that position as well. And this was before Accurate gave bonus dice to damage. I was the bane of our GM, one-shotting "bosses" and surviving mass amounts of fire thrown against me.

And once we hit Ascension and I spec'd into Vindicare? To quote the Ghosts from Star Craft,

"Never know what hit 'em."

Yuri03 said:

While I have to agree that Guardsman are awesome, they do cater easily to newbies. They're stuck with the same role Fighters get in D&D; they don't need to know anything or talk to anyone, just shoot the bad things until they die. The things you cited as great (armor, toughness, great weapons) make the Guardsman easy to play.

Yeah, I get that, but just because the Career is a big focus on combat, doesn't mean you can't have fun role-playing the character. In fact, his abysmal Fellowship and lack of social graces where the best part of playing him.

I haven't run a lot of 40k campaigns because my group mostly plays D&D. So these are my experiences based on not a lot of playing.

Dark Heresy: Psyker was avoided after the first time someone played it because it was too easy to die accidently with no control over it. The most common ones were assassin, guardsman, and cleric.

Only War: My players so far have gone with the medic, weapon specialist, enginseer, and psyker. Now that you can avoid killing yourself psyker isn't a bad choice.

I've been running the games but if I ever had a chance to play I'd probably go with arbitrator for DH and storm trooper for OW.

For Dark Heresy we have a Psyker, Scum, Guardsman and Arbitor. The Scum character came to dominate pretty much every aspect of the group, being better at everything. The Psyker was my favorite character because the guy who played him looked like a shipborn psyker already, and was a really wierd dude who RPed it great. But he did blow himself up A LOT, and got a lot of rules-enforced changes to his character that weren't really what he would have wanted.

In Rogue Trader, We have the Rogue Trader (Scum in DH), an Ork (Arbitor in DH), a Navigator (Psyker in DH) and a Militant (Guardsman in DH). Our very short lived RT game showed my players being the same type of characters STAT wise, but RP wise they were definately unique characters. I would love another shot at RT.

We haven't started Black Crusade yet, but I as GM am going to enforce that it is either ALL HUMAN or ALL CSM. I don't like the mixed party because it seems too hard to judge what they can and cannot accomplish, and while some characters will get stomped others will breeze through. Surprisingly, I believe most of my players will vote to go All Human, but its up in the air.

We don't play Deathwatch, because roleplaying as Space Marines is retarded. "Kill for the Emperor"… Roleplaying complete, lets Stats on Paper destroy hordes of stuff. Boring.

We probably won't play Only War because as active duty soldiers, there is no need to RP what we already do. Plus, the description is too depressingly similar to being in the US Army: "Throughout your adventures, you and your fellow Guardsmen will also contend with paralyzing bureaucratic apathy, a leadership that often views you as expendable, and the fickle political maneuvering of those far beyond your humble station." Yea, Only War looks good, like Deathwatch but with personality. Bu tnot for my group.

We just recently got into 40k rpg's and thus only Deathwatch and Only War so far.

In DW, we started with 4 players, one going assault marine space wolf, another going dark angel librarian (though at times complaining about not taking blood angels.. apparently they have more damaging spells?), a storm warden devastator and me as Ultramarine Tactical marine. Yeah, I'm always squad leader.

People tend to miss the thing about squad leaders in DW though, that they aren't the real leader, only in a tie they would decide. More or less, as far as I understand, if you have 4 people, the "leader" wants to go to the east and the 3 others want to go west, you go west. If it had been 2 east and 2 west, the leader would be the tiebreaker though, to ensure the group never gets stuck cause they can't decide among themselves. So it's not really a full leadership role. With that said in my group I still get to do all the tough decisions and take all the crap for it anyways… teamwork ftw..

Anyways we got a 5th player that works as an apothecary blood angel as well. But as we are a big group it's no wonder we got most of it covered.

In Only War we are a drop trooper regiment, with a medic, sergeant, two weapon specialists and started out with a techpriest but he died and became a psyker. Ratlings are dead in our universe, and commissars we're voted out as a choice since it didn't seem right for a noob squad to be led by a commissar who should be doing his work for the whole regiment not a small group of people out in the jungle. It'll open up as playable later on though.

Well so far we have played only one game of Dark Heresy and now we are starting Only War.

During our DH game we were also in the process of forming the group. It finally settled on 4-5 players and GM. Game lasted for a whole year and the core of the group had one character from the start. Only the "come and go" players managed to kill they characters and eventually left the group. Our group ended up with:

Guardsman/Adept - I played this character and eventually found out I want some detective aspects to it, so I was allowed to buy adepts advences for extra XP. From the start to the end he was the leader of our group - main speaker, thinker and pretty good soldier.

Psyker - Another very important character in our group

Scum, Guardsman - more or less just cannon fodder

As our group heavily favours detective story and undercover action we would never again allow Tech-Priest in our group. In a new game I would probably go for the Arbitr or Adept.

Right now we are starting with Only War and we have 4 players plus GM, our starting classes are: Medic, Operator, Heavy Gunner and Psyker

From the start we decided we would try to avoid support classes as much as possible and focus on regular guardsman. Only two support classes were wanted - Priest and Psyker. After discussion we decided that Psyker would bring more fun into the game with all his phenomenas etc.

But we are not a regular group…we create a lot of home rules and don't stick with the rules every time…they are really more like a guideline for us…so in theory almost everyone can do anything. This reflects especially in the interactions where we have to interact with our GM…dice rolls are pretty rare as we either fail as players or success.

Dark Heresy: We actually randomly generated our characters when we began our long-standing campaign a few years back. We've got an Assassin (Moritat melee monster), a Tech-Priest (Secutor battle platform), A Psyker (telekine and bio) and a Scum (probably taking Storm Trooper, who has just been mind-wipped in preparation for our upcoming Ascension). We're all pretty Puritanical. However, I'm looking forward to a reboot so I can finally play the Radical Schola Progenium Adept I've had ready on the back-burner. My sense from my fellow players is that we'd pick a completely different set of careers the next time around. They're all interesting to us in different ways.

Rogue Trader: We have a Rogue Trader, a Navigator and two arch-militants. (One of the players only plays with us occasionally and based on our story, the second arch-militant made the most sense for an occasional character.) I'm planning to run an RT game with a very different feel, and it sounds like I'm going to end up with a Missionary, an Explorator, a Sceneshal and likely an Astropath or Void Master.

Deathwatch: We cycle through the role of GM for this one every so often, so in order to make sure that we didn't double up on too many roles, we all picked sometihng different: Tactical Marine, Devastator, Librarian, Apothecary and Assault Marine. the only one no one is playing is the Techmarine. I personally love (Also BlueLlama777 : I was a DW sceptic as well, but I've found myself roleplaying a LOT more than I anticipated. Yes, we kill the enemies of the Emperor, but we've found that SMs can be just as different in style, outlook and character as any other character. In fact, our fear that we'd all be the same pushed us to make some pretty strong and varied characters, I feel. Worth a try for sure.)

Only War: We just played the "11th Hour" adventure so far. We selected the Ogryn, the Enginseer and the Heavy-Weapon. I'm planning to (re-)rolling up another Enginseer when we get underway with OW for real, but depending on the regiment I may opt for the psyker.

I don't feel that we favour one over another. Most of us like to switch it up, so eventually, all sorts of characer types get represented. (And I have a strange fascination with finding unpopular character types and careers - and trying to find ways to make them awesome.)

My groups characters usually last very long. What I can say is that every group I've GMed for has had a psyker of some sort, all other careers are equally distributed.

We've been playing something in the line of "Inglorious Bastards" with DH, then changed to OW. Initially we had a Psyker (me), a Tech-Priest, 2 Assassins and an Arbitrator. Now we got a Commissar (me), Heavy Gunner (was a Weapon Specialist, killed by the next guy), Ogryn (former Psyker, went full push-derp and killed half group with mass possession) , Medic (new player), Operator and Tech-Priest.

RT: had a DH group before, changed to RT. Former Tech-Priest (me), Arbitrator, Sister of Battle, Psyker and some Guardsmen. In RT, we got a Rogue Trader, Arch-Militant (me), Navigator (never finds a stable warp route), Void-Master and 2 Explorators (sigh).

DW: As I'm the GM (and a very crude person in such role), we played only once, creating some arenas for fun. An Apothecary, Assault and Devastator Marines showed up.

BC: This game totally rocks. We play a mixed group: 3 CSM (me as TS Sorcerer, a Khorne Berserker and Astral Flames Traitor Chosen of Tzeentch. Have a Slaaneshi Champion, but he's studying for his finals) and 2 humans (a Slaaneshi Apostate and a Nurgle-y Heretek. A Khornate Renegade showed up last night, but we don't know if he'll continue, as being new to 40k.)

Only played one game of Only War so far, and it was a fairly balanced group (Psyker, Commissar, Weapons Specialist, Stormtrooper, Medic). I was the Commissar, which made people feel better because they figured I was less likely to execute players (it helps that I was an Optimistic Krieg Commissar).

Most of the other classes were considered by one person or another, except the Ratling. Even I would prefer to somehow make a Weapon Specialist Sniper over a Ratling, even though its not as efficient, simply because I'm not a fan of Ratlings.

In Rogue Trader, the most popular careers in my groups are Arch-Militant, Explorator, and Navigator (this last one doesn't last, but initially a few people are interested). There's a Rogue Trader in every game too, but that might be changing to being NPC'd soon. On the other hand, I've only seen 1 Astropath, and never seen a Kroot or Missionary be played.

In Deathwatch, its Assault Marines, we've had about 6 - 8 Assault Marine characters (admittedly, at least 3 were from the same player) in only 2 campaigns. Tactical Marines are actually fairly popular in my group, although I suppose you can't really call a Wolf Scout a proper Tactical Marine, and both Techmarines and Librarians are often looked at.

There's only been 2 Devastators and 2 Apothecaries in those campaigns so far. The former is because the first player to play a Devastator ended up becoming so strong in such a short amount of time he was almost single-handedly winning fights, and my group didn't want to see that always happening.

The latter I think is simply because everyone else does so much better in combat, and the Apothecary players mostly feel they were only there to heal after each combat (although the first Apothecary, a Storm Warden, did start requisitioning items to make himself more useful, such as Storm Bolters or Missile Launchers, as well as Storm Shields when possible that has seen him 'tank' Tau Battlesuits and at least one Carnifex).

In my campaigns tend to flock to the Psyker, Assassin and Tech Priest type classes…especially the last one.
I got so fed up with TP's that I outlawed them for the coming campaigns…

The problem is most players don't play TP's but Cyber Enhanced Tanks…

Me and another one of the players have been switching between GMing and playing numerous titles via skype. Thus far, the player characters have been:

Black Crusade
Sorcerer that shamelessly min-maxes and then doombolts every combat encounter ever into a one shot kill.
A Alpha Legionairre from Tome of Fate because I'm a scumbag.
A Champion of Khorne, no wait it's Nurgle now, actually I'm now playing a Nurgle Sorcerer.
An Acolyte of Nurgle.
Renegade
Chosen

Deathwatch
Black Templar Assault Marine.
Blood Angels Sanguinary Priest.
Space Wolf Librarian that'd rather be Blood Angels because Dweadnaught.
Ultramarine tactical that managed to roll all the high stats. >.><.<
Dark Angels Devestator.

Only War
Is currently being played with a seperate group. Going through the two premade Scenarios (Against the savages and a modified Eleventh Hour to work as a continuation) to get a feel for the system before going custom Regiment.
Operator
Commissar
Medic
Sergeant
Tech-priest Enginseer

Prior to the group swap, the Only War was played with the Black Crusade and Deathwatch group. The players were:
A Psyker who had a strong lack of 'eadpops.
Heavy Gunner
Commissar
Medic
Sergeant