TDA as troops or counts as troops?

[Wolf Lord Durgann]

I am curious about the TDA SW army. As I live in the mountains and the nearest shop is about an hours drive away.. I was wondering if anyone could explain how this works for me.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Ryzouken]

You take a special character. It lets you take a unit that's normally elites as troops. That unit can take TDA armor for a certain number of points. You can take multiples of this unit as Troops, but no longer as Elites. It costs a lot of points.

 

Beyond that, the minutiae are such that the codex is needed.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

It upsets me that you apparently have to take Logan to do this though. I love Termies and I would love to field an all termie army, but I absolutely hate using pre-conceived cahracters, and I refuse to use them. I really think they should make some other option for wolves to make an all Termie or mostly termie army for wolves.

[Forseti]

That's just how it goes, I'd rather the option of taking full TDA with grimnar than not taking them at all, even DA need Belial to take full deathwing.

 

It's just an attempt to balance things.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

Which is, again, why I hate over-balancing.

 

Oh well I can still make a nice psudo-termie army if I want by nabbing up every point I can with Terminator-clad guard I can and giving them more wargear with points while cutting back on the number of other troops I have/use.

 

Havent seen the codex though so I don't know if we are still limited to 20 guard per great company but if you are like me and hate using 'characters' then that might be the option for you too.

[Redbaron997]

Yup WG counts as troops for all purposes, so you can only have 6 of them, but they are all scoring.

[Wolf Lord Durgann]

I don't mind... You don't have to use the model and you can call him something else... just use the counts-as rule. Thats what I'll be doing. After all.. I am playing a lost company..

 

Thank you for the quick responses!

[Askari]

Well it would be really unfluffy for anyone but Logan Grimnar to be able to command that many Terminators.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

Well it would be really unfluffy for anyone but Logan Grimnar to be able to command that many Terminators.

 

I also think its unfluffy to have Logan, or Ragnar, or anyone else in a great company unless it WAS their great company, and why on earth would you want to play a canon great company?

 

Still if they are keeping us from doing it normally I am all for working out a list to use as many Terminators as possible without incorporating him, once the new dex is out naturally.

[Vash113]

I also think its unfluffy to have Logan, or Ragnar, or anyone else in a great company unless it WAS their great company, and why on earth would you want to play a canon great company?

 

Still if they are keeping us from doing it normally I am all for working out a list to use as many Terminators as possible without incorporating him, once the new dex is out naturally.

 

As I understand it the rule is Logan pulling together the Wolf Guard of his own Company and several others in a large campaign to do a sort of indomintable blitz. What's so unfluffy about that and what do you have against using a canon Great Company? The only reason I'm not is I don't think my freehand skills are up to painting any of the various GC symbols properly and I'm not so fond of transfers. Playing a canon Great Company is a lot of fun and makes dealing with the fluff easy and pretty painless. If you like the all-terminator concept then use Logan as somebody else, refusing to use a Special Character when we have the wonderful concept of "counts-as" is frankly pretty darn silly and pointless in my opinion.

 

Besides the whole beauty of it is you get Scoring Terminators, otherwise minimizing troops and maximising on Terminators is going to be horrible for objective based missions.

 

After all if ANYBODY is going to happily romp around with another Great Company while his are dispersed elsewhere it's Logan, he did a lot of that during the 13th Black Crusade. You can't keep a good wolf down, not even with the shackles of command. :)

[Wolf Lord Durgann]

Well it would be really unfluffy for anyone but Logan Grimnar to be able to command that many Terminators.

 

 

Not necessarily... My wolf lord could have been a great wolf at one time. Whos to say there have not been other companies like the 13th that have gone off and been lost?

 

Vash said it better. Thank you Vash! :)

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

I also think its unfluffy to have Logan, or Ragnar, or anyone else in a great company unless it WAS their great company, and why on earth would you want to play a canon great company?

 

Still if they are keeping us from doing it normally I am all for working out a list to use as many Terminators as possible without incorporating him, once the new dex is out naturally.

 

As I understand it the rule is Logan pulling together the Wolf Guard of his own Company and several others in a large campaign to do a sort of indomintable blitz. What's so unfluffy about that and what do you have against using a canon Great Company? The only reason I'm not is I don't think my freehand skills are up to painting any of the various GC symbols properly and I'm not so fond of transfers. Playing a canon Great Company is a lot of fun and makes dealing with the fluff easy and pretty painless. If you like the all-terminator concept then use Logan as somebody else, refusing to use a Special Character when we have the wonderful concept of "counts-as" is frankly pretty darn silly and pointless in my opinion.

 

Besides the whole beauty of it is you get Scoring Terminators, otherwise minimizing troops and maximising on Terminators is going to be horrible for objective based missions.

 

After all if ANYBODY is going to happily romp around with another Great Company while his are dispersed elsewhere it's Logan, he did a lot of that during the 13th Black Crusade. You can't keep a good wolf down, not even with the shackles of command. :)

 

Well for one thing because he is a character somebody else made. He has his own history and his own background. Its like doing a D&D game and deciding to put Elminster in the party. Logan is probably going to take any opperutnity he can to fight, but odds are good with 12 great companies on all sorts of different campaigns that he won't be going out with every one of them on every 'menial' little mission. Frankly I am very much opposed to using 'characters' in general and I refuse to do it for that same reason. They belong in the book where they were written and out of teh actual workings of the game. Now I would love, absolutely love to have scoring terminator units for wolves, Frankly that is one of the main things I have always wanted and I thought it was crap that the DA can get it and we can't. However I also think its crap to use a character to do it. I think its wrong to use characters and I don't want to use 'count as' because thats frankly the same basic thing.

 

Call it silly if you want, but I refuse to use Logan or a 'count as' Logan even if it would give me the one thing I have always wanted out of wolves. 'Count as' just makes your character a knock-off copy of the great wolf and that is just as bad as using the character in the first place.

 

This is why I am disappointed that they have 'wasted' (in my humble opinion) so much codex space with special characters instead of giving us things like Ironclads, or better yet give us the point-cost TOOLS to build our own wolf lord so that he can have two sagas or one saga and one 'count as' rule. That would have given us more customization and let us have lords of our own creation with a bit more distinction.

[Wolf Lord Durgann]

Hrathnar, Thats fine. I respect your opinion. But I was just asking if they were counted as troops or just troop choices. Like I said before I will be running a lost company. It is allowed through fluff. Who is to say that after thousands of years of fighting away from The Fang that they would be nothing left but TDA clad wolves? Or enough TDA suits to go around to fill out the company? This is one of the few rules about Space Wolves that drove me to them in the first place. The ability to be a lost company. To make the storyline of your own company and still be part of the whole. I don't like codex chapters so much because there are only a few choices. You can't legally field 1st company with a codex chapter. So your left with 2nd-5th or 6th.. This is not the case with Space Wolves.. hell for all anyone knows they could be bigger than a legion in strength. The only other chapter that has this mystery are the Black Templars. Which I may very well make after my TDA army of Wolves.

 

I have also wanted a TDA army since the DA codex. I just refuse... REFUSE... to play Dark Angels. I don't like their lore and never will. The fact that half their legion turned to chaos is sign enough to me to erase them all from the books.

 

So in ending.. My wolves will be all clad in TDA. This is something I've wanted and I will not let Logan stop me from doing it.

 

 

Thank you everyone that posted constructively!

[WolfLordLars]

By Russ, I missed that!

 

Guess my pro-painted Logan model will be seeing the table more come October! I have a TON of Terminators... and a debate to settle with a resident Deathwing player...

[Hergrmir]

They're troops if you take Logan/Counts-as Logan.

 

I'm just not sure why there seems to be so much hostility from Space Wolf players to the idea of counts as. Fluff /= rules, and it never has. I mean, don't do it if you don't want, but I'm still not seeing at all how Logan Grimnar having his own story somehow means that Angryface McViking who's also a Wolf Lord with a badass artifact that he can use as a powerfist or a frostblade is a lame knockoff. It's no more creative to choose your own Lord's wargear options than it is to use Grimnar's - the creativity comes in painting, modelling, coming up with your own background. And if you don't want to be creative, then go ahead and don't be, that's perfectly fine too.

 

The rules? If you really want to be creative with rules you'd be making your own, not using some pregenned stuff. But I'm not a game developer and I have no eye for balance (insert snide comments about some GW decisions here), and what I pay for is a reasonably balanced set of rules with some somewhat inspiring background, but it's the latter that I riff off to creative.

 

I'd prefer it if list modifications weren't tied to special characters too, but only from a rules standpoint, I like modularity. The background's great, but I'll leave established background alone and go off and be creative.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

Well I for one am at least trying to be a game developer, but that is another matter entirely.

 

It might be best to avoid any more discussion about hostilities in characters and such, but frankly it seems like GW does need to do more towards making the game itself more DIY.

 

But as I was saying my own frustration on what I consider inadaquite design really isn't the issue here. I think the topic itself has been answered, if our brother does not mind a count-as then he should be all set. Of course if all else fails its important to remember the wonderful Apoc Data Sheets that can be written up. Just remember that those are more a matter of casual play.

[Wolf Lord Durgann]

Well I for one am at least trying to be a game developer, but that is another matter entirely.

 

It might be best to avoid any more discussion about hostilities in characters and such, but frankly it seems like GW does need to do more towards making the game itself more DIY.

 

But as I was saying my own frustration on what I consider inadaquite design really isn't the issue here. I think the topic itself has been answered, if our brother does not mind a count-as then he should be all set. Of course if all else fails its important to remember the wonderful Apoc Data Sheets that can be written up. Just remember that those are more a matter of casual play.

 

 

My apologies if I came off a bit brash. I too am one for DIY stuff. If I had any other way to legally field a TDA force for Space Wolves I would. But, I don't. I do agree that point costs could have been asigned to all the abilities and then allowed all lords to pick and choose, and if that had happened I would have been extremely happy.

 

Anyway, I hope you forgive me of my reaction to your post.

[Vash113]

Call it silly if you want, but I refuse to use Logan or a 'count as' Logan even if it would give me the one thing I have always wanted out of wolves. 'Count as' just makes your character a knock-off copy of the great wolf and that is just as bad as using the character in the first place.

 

I'm not trying to be mean or anything I just can't seem to figure how you justify that kind of immense prejudice against Special Characters, seemingly without justification. Perhaps if you felt all their special rules were overpowered, underpriced and unsportsmanlike that would be one thing and in some ways many characters are like that. But the chance to build the exact kind of army you want and you can even create your own model and fluff to go with the rules and you won't do it because it's not just a Character it's a Special Character... lets just say that sounds like the equivalent of shooting your own foot. It only hurts you and there's no reason to do it. :blink:

 

Seriously, you finally have the chance to build pretty much the exact army you want, so do it. Make your own model, make your own fluff, heck in Apocalypse and/or friendly games make up your own rules to go with it. It's just sad to see a perfect opportunity passed up so readily.

 

As for more DIY in the rules, I wouldn't hold my breath. Traits are gone, doctrines are gone, GW is making the game more streamlined, increasing the importance of DIY army concepts, but not in the rules. It's too complicated, leads to too many headaches and rules disputes and makes organising tournaments and writing FAQs a living nightmare, not to mention it's intimidating to newer gamers.

 

I have also wanted a TDA army since the DA codex. I just refuse... REFUSE... to play Dark Angels. I don't like their lore and never will. The fact that half their legion turned to chaos is sign enough to me to erase them all from the books.

 

Yea I had a small DA army for a while and wound up converting them into Ultramarines, just couldn't stomach the DA for very long, their fluff just nagged at me.

 

So in ending.. My wolves will be all clad in TDA. This is something I've wanted and I will not let Logan stop me from doing it.

 

That's the spirit, have an ale!

[Quillen]

Man, it's a special model they make. For a game they rewrote from a game they bought the rights to way back when. If you take said charctor you can then field Termies as troops, cause said Charctor runs the whole show. Cause that is the writen fluff about him. He is Logan. And that is what Logan does.

 

I run D&D campaigns all the time. We just got through with some role playing just now. Your mixing up 2 completely different things.

 

Picture Games WorkShop as the DM, and they have a toon named Logan Grimnar, and he is an NPC and in a battle you can use said NPC for your side. But the game is a WARGAME! Not RPG.

 

If you want originality you need to just get the smurf book and make a smurf chapter, cause that would be as original as making a Space Wolf army one.

 

See GW wants to sell those Logan Models and o do it they will give him special rules.

 

You can try and sorta kinda, but not really be origianl, or you could embrace the fluff of the Codex and Field him. Make Logan Grimnar and his Wolf gaurd and a few other Wolf Lords and their Wolf gaurd and have a big old kick butt termy force. Cause that is why they made him that way. So you can play him. Not like this is an RPG. So it doesn't hurt to use the named heroes with fluff.

 

Infact that is what they are leaning toward in 5th edition. It's a throw back to Heroe Hammer 2nd edition. So embrace the game.

 

 

 

 

I to will be making my own wolf lord and Rune Priest and Wolf priest. Even a kick ass iron priest. I will also have a Logan (personally scuplted) Model so I can use my 40 termies if I chose.

[Vash113]

I to will be making my own wolf lord and Rune Priest and Wolf priest. Even a kick ass iron priest. I will also have a Logan (personally scuplted) Model so I can use my 40 termies if I chose.

 

Nice, I wish I had that many termies, I've just got 5 right now, gonna be adding more and I have a Logan model that was missing the axe head so I made one from chopped up Chainswords and I may use that model to represent my own Character with Logan's rules so I can field Terminators as troops and I'll deffinitely be getting more Termies. They are just so cool aren't they? Maybe not always that effective but they look sweet doing whatever they're doing.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

I am sorry for my brashness and anger brothers, or at least anything that comes off as such. I feel as if I am being obtuse and really that is not my intention. I need no forgiveness, as you are all in the right to wonder why I feel the way I do, and my frustration is not. I humbly ask for your forgiveness.

 

However with that being said I would like to explian now why I feel the way I do in a calm and rational manner so that It is understood and any potential bad blood or misunderstandings are dealt with in the open.

 

Hrathnar fliintfang is my wolflord. This is fairly apparent I assume considering the Screen name, but Hrathnar also has alot of history behind him. I have spent quite a bit of time working to cultivate that history and that background into something I really want to use and something I am happy with, and in fact I have spent about as much time on him as I have with the eight or nine custom chapters I am just now starting to put down and fine tune. The one key thing about Hrathnar is, quite simply, that he is not Logan Grimnar.

 

If I take a 'count as' Logan and call him Hrathnar then really there is no uniqueness to him. As I said before He is not Logan, his frost axe is just a regular frost axe even if he has a strong attachment to it. He spends most of his time tooling around looking for Greenskins to kill whenever he would have a free moment. He is similar to Logan in some respects but only insofar as one space wolf is similar to any other. Now if I take Hrathnar 'as logan' then in the end I would either have to make massive stipulations based on the diffrences in the end or I would have to just bite the bullet and accept that I can't change things around form how Logan is laid out. Its the same with all of these characters, where they make special named characters of their design that are more powerful for more points, but don't give you the tools to build something simlar, even if they are not as powerful in the end. In my mind every game should have a toolkit, it should be set up so that you can customize things to match what your imagination can reach within reasonable extent. I understand that they like the special cool things they make, and they want to make money on minis, and they want to hand hold people when it comes to balance. I can even accept the latter more than I would in a tabletop game because this is the type of thing you can do competitively. On principal though I think it is a very poor idea to make these characters who have things that you can't get out of the codex and tack on to your own creations.

 

In most Role playing tabletop games the special characters are often made using more or less stock classes, feat, skills, powers or whatever the game might have. Sometimes they may have a few trinkets that are pretty snazzy but by and large you can do it yourself and still come out with something just as interesting and if needed just as powerful.

 

Now I get that for fluff reasons you can't have someone 'just as powerful' as Logan (though the others are debatable) But still I think that the tools to make them should be there. Maybe you can make a Wolf Lord who has the "counts as" axe/fist of doom or one who can select what unit type counts as troops but not both. Maybe just make his stat line better.

 

I realzie I am bias though, since as I said before I will give my army away before fielding a character (I may not have said that specifically, but that is basically my feelings) but the core of it for me is that even war games, should not push their cool ideas and their cool characters down your throat. It should be more like lego where they give you some peices (often very cool ones) and you build what you want, and the smaller you can get each block so to speak the better it is.

 

Also, to respond to the last thing Hergrmir said, I think that is the thing which angers me the most in terms of trying to make money by pushing Hero Hammer on people. Its symptomatic of more and more game designers now days and it flat out cheapens the art of game design. I refuse to embrace something that I think is ruining just about every game on the market right now, and frankly I encourage others not to buy into it either. If they can't figure out how to make more money by letting people be creative then they frankly don't deserve the money.

[Grey Mage]

Well it would be really unfluffy for anyone but Logan Grimnar to be able to command that many Terminators.

 

I also think its unfluffy to have Logan, or Ragnar, or anyone else in a great company unless it WAS their great company, and why on earth would you want to play a canon great company?

 

Still if they are keeping us from doing it normally I am all for working out a list to use as many Terminators as possible without incorporating him, once the new dex is out naturally.

 

*shrugs* Instead of Logain Grimnar take a SW "emperors champion" in the defense of the Fang.

 

Im willing to be wed field every terminator in the armory then.

 

Frankly though, unless its a scenario or apocalypse battle I will never field an all TDA force. 1) I dont have the models and 2) I dont think its a good way to go tactically. With the loss of Runic Charms I feel naked throwing TDA onto the field.

[Vash113]

This is not an RPG however. And while Character building is an awesome part, and your army's leader in many ways represent you it is not the be all, end all focus of the games mechanics. They are two very different mind sets and it seems like you are hindering yourself in a significantly unnecessary way because of it.

 

After all at the end of the day what really is the difference between Logan and your character? Does your Character have a Frost Blade and Storm Bolter? Does your Character wear a Wolf Pelt and have a Wolf Tooth Necklace? Does your Character wear Terminator Armor? If you answered yes to these three very basic questions... then you can use Logan's rules no problem.

 

So what if you can't change his gear around, what is there really that must be different? After all with many armies and many character builds there will be hundreds if not thousands of completely identically equipped HQ's running around. The difference really comes down into the way you imagine the model and the fluff you build for him (or her as the case may be). It does not hinder the fluff for your character in any way to use Logans rules. The power fist thing, well he grips his Frost Axe in a 2 handed manner and puts all his force behind the swings. Much less finese but much more power. Easy, simple, straightforward and doesn't impede the fluff at all. Actually that's exactly how I'll be justifying my own "counts-as" Logan Grimnar.

 

The rules are merely the simple way in which your kick butt character operates on the tabletop. As long as he is mostly WYSIWYG, your liscence with the model is almost unlimited and if anything even more so with the fluff.

 

So when you say:

 

If I take a 'count as' Logan and call him Hrathnar then really there is no uniqueness to him.

 

All I can say is that truthfully, there is no uniqueness in the rules of any unit you will ever, ever, ever choose to field in Warhammer 40k as someone, somewhere will be doing it exactly the same as you. There aren't enough options in any given unit for true uniqueness to be possible. So really, why should the HQ's be any different? Maybe in D&D or another RPG where you have upwards of hundreds of traits, characteristics and thousands of abilities to draw upon then you probably could make a truly unique character, but this ain't the same thing, and it ain't gonna happen no matter how hard you try. So restricting yourself from building the army of your dreams because of a lack of unique rules just seems well... impractical, unrealistic and unbelievably self detrimental. It's your army after all, I really don't think you should let a handful of rules keep you from making the army you really want.

[Hergrmir]

My apologies if I came off a bit brash. I too am one for DIY stuff. If I had any other way to legally field a TDA force for Space Wolves I would. But, I don't. I do agree that point costs could have been asigned to all the abilities and then allowed all lords to pick and choose, and if that had happened I would have been extremely happy.

 

Anyway, I hope you forgive me of my reaction to your post.

 

 

Well, technically there is. You could use the Deathwing list. :blink: Sure, it's lame and gimped, but you only have to pay points for a character with no special rules other than that terminators are troops and he doesn't cost more than anyone else with the same stats and equipment and has no unique wargear. Sure, you give up on Wolf Claws and cheaper terminators and acute senses and counter-attack, but you... get Fearless?

 

EDIT: @ Hrathnar Flintfang

 

I agree with most of what you have to say. GW SHOULD give us a toolkit rather than what they have now, or just go the other way and have what's now Logan Grimnar as an unnamed character who just has a series of rules, and it could represented any famous Wolf Lord. I mean, I just think the way it's setup now with weird-rules SCs and normal rules non-SCs is just some unfortunate half-decision between sandbox play and abstraction without doing either very well.

 

But that said, that's what we have now. I'm also with Vash on the uniqueness claim - there's nothing particular unique about being able to kit out your Wolf Lord the way you want it, simply because 40k isn't modular enough any more to let you build a statline (within limits) and pick wargear (within limits).

 

On the other hand, yes, giving in is very much telling GW 'yeah okay, we want your half-baked development decisions to continue', so I sympathise with your position. I think counts-as is great though, because it means we don't have to buy those models which we use for counts-as. My count-as Logan will probably look nothing like him whatsoever (and be made of sweet sweet plastics) and I'm not going to buy Logan.

[Hrathnar Flintfang]

I think we must agree to disagree, brother Vash. True it is not an RPG, but that does not mean customization should not be an important part of the design. Genre is no excuse for inhibiting peoples creativity.

 

To be pefrectly honest in terms of wargear there is little to no diffrence between my character and Logan, and in all honesty I would love to have Termies treated as troops, but the fact of the matter is that it is, in my opinion, wrong. I won't stop any other brother from fielding Logan or anyone else, that is their choice and they are welcomed to it. However I would rather inconvenience myself and miss out on something I want and be true to myself than simply justify it and cop out and feel unhappy about my army.

 

Of course there are always going to be people who would do the same or similar things, but the inability to choose is just so stifling. Even if I would be taking more or less the same wargear, the fact that it 'counts as' Logan still says in a very real way that its ok to produce these characters like this and write the special rules to 'pimp' the 'special models' rather than letting people have more options in the codex. I for one don't think thats right, and I refuse to be a part of it.