[Help to design] In the 41st millenium there is only...

[Dangerious P. Cats]

Originally Posted by Tema69

That's kinda like playing a game where Orks paint there vehicles blue, and are lousy close combat fighters...?

The Adeptus Astartes have acid spitting abilities, superhuman strength and endurance, multiple extra organs, etc etc... It's their fluff, it's in the books (both rulebooks and noncodex "fiction").
I'd be extremely disappointed if Space Marines sucked (proportionally) in a 40k game. But if your players are cool with it, go nuts!

It's more like playing a game where the relative abilities of Space Marines and guardsmen are akin to how thye preform in the game rather than the fluff. The most 40K fluff I read the more outragious it becoes, but one of the things I really like about 40K is that everything is from the perspective of a brutal fasciest theocracy and the line between propaganda and reality is blurred.

In short I think it's very much in the theme of 40K's humour to have urban legends about the power of space marines passed around, about how they have 15 hearts, the abilty to regenerate their own head and a laser wang. To expand on the fluff Games Workshop once put out a Guardsman's handbook that advised if one found themselves in front of an ork with no weapons to wave their hands in front of it's face to confuse the beast enough to make a get away. The manual also praised the effectiveness of lasguns (which are ridiculed for being effective in game terms) indicating quite clearly that the fluff was a great exaduation of the setting's reality.

In this sense I would prefference the rules over the fluff in deciding how effective everything is. A single space marine would be more than a match for a squad of Guardsmen even with this mind.