Hell, in Star Wars we literally have a high ranking Imperial military officer in the form of Admiral Motti who personally knows and goes to work meetings with Darth Vader, one of the only 2 sanctioned Force users in the Galactic Empire

And even HE doesn't believe supernatural powers are real!

All that to say, because we see most fictional settings from the perspective of the special and the powerful its easy to get an idea that knowledge about magic or supernatural things is way more common than it supposed to be.

*cloistered not clustered. But the point remains that Joe Imperial isn't likely to have ever met a psyker because why would he have any reason to? Even if you work on a ship you'd only know the Navigator if you directly worked for them or you were the tiny fraction that work the bridge.

Even 40k, where every citizen is supposedly taught from birth to fear witches and psykers will probably never interact with one or have any concept of why they have powers or what they can do. If they aren't being carted off on black ships they're in highly clustered positions like Astropaths.

The Force is so poorly understood by the average person in Star Wars that they literally do not know the difference between Jedi and Sith. You could have told everyone Palpatine was a Sith Lord flat out and most people would shrug and say "his religious views aren't my business."

Wizards or magical powers are rare enough even in D&D that having them sets you apart from the average society and despite being able to roll a wizard at level 1, is explicitly supposed to be difficult and time consuming to learn even 1st level magical competency.

I think now there's almost too much lore about the missing two legions for players to feel comfortable using them. Like, if you claim to be representing one of the missing two it seems pretentious or like main character syndrome even though that was the intent originally!

I think the intent is that people can make up their own chapters. And thats an unequivocally good thing. But theres no harm in getting Iron Snakes or Blood Ravens or Lamenters now and again instead of endless Blood Angels, Ultramarines, and Dark Angels focus.

And this will only get worse as more Primarchs get pulled out of retirement from 30k to 40k. Imo almost all 40k Space Marine fiction should focus on successor chapters just by weight of numbers but I know that the og 9 sell books because fandom.

Successor chapters outnumber the ones that still carry the original name and color scheme of their parent Legion by an incredible amount. There are around 1,000 total chapters of space marines and only 9 of them are First Founding.

9.

Of 1,000.

And they get all the focus.

I don't even dislike Titus, its just that in the grand scheme of the lore he's neither tremendously original as a character nor is he all that important compared to the outsized amount of attention he gets from being the face of many people's first exposure to 40k.

Ahhh maybe that's the exception as I've not gotten the chance to play Kill Team. It does seem to make sense that it would work for shorter range, cqb situations. It also looks cool as hell lol.

On tabletop, why equip a melee unit with dinky pistols when you could give them shields for invulnerable saves in melee or a second melee weapon to get more attacks in melee. If the unit isnt melee focused, why give it a pistol instead of like...a plasma gun or something?

In Rogue Trader, why split your loadout between a pistol and a sword when you can just carry a bigger sword and like, a heavy bolter all at the same time without sacrificing anything to do it?

Whether youre playing the tabletop game, Rogue Trader, Darktide (where this loadout isn't even an option), even Space Marine 2 the only reason to have a pistol in one hand and a melee weapon in the other is that the game won't let you have a two handed weapon or a 2nd melee weapon as an option.