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A.T. wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
I don’t know if there is an edition that evolved as much as 3rd

The latter half of 4e appeared to be trying to rein in a lot of it, albeit from what Gav Thorpe said it was in anticipation of a fresh wave of supplemental books that never materialized outside of the marine books. I think someone at GW may have realised that they had multiple factions approaching a decade without releases.

Forgeworld of course continued on their merry way with book after book of supplemental 3e-style material - a half dozen different ways to mount or tow a flak platform, pages of specialist ammo (for example a 4e FW leman russ had a one in three chance of one or more shells that would enforce an automatic fall back move on any hit), etc, etc

Heh, those rules were very much for peopke who like saying "Load AP! GUNNER! traverse turret 60 degrees clockwise and engage the battlewagon! FIRE!" *Makes pew pew noises*

Given they were optional rules that also came with a strict downgrade to the basic battle cannon rounds I think they were a fun little addition. Defilers had a 4+ chance of getting the infernus shells

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
To get back on track, there was nothing wrong with 2nd ed per se.

I'm sorry you saw the faction/subfaction stuff as being off track rather than seeing it as the genuine answer to your question about what was wrong with 2nd that it was intended to be. I myself said the rules of 2nd were fine. If you want to play 2nd in the modern era, updating the core rules isn't what needs to be done to make that possible: what needs to be be done is just writing the dexes for all the stuff that didn't exist during 2nd, and therefore has no rules.

I was going off topic ranting about the NPC-ification of non imperial/marine factions whilst GW bareface lying to new customers that they are all equally valued products to choose from. Hence my attempt to get back on track.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

However it was still more in the 1st ed RT paradigm of RPG heavy elements, just without a games master. We need to remember that 2nd ed was literally the first edition that didn't require a mandatory GM to play, but still tried to cleave closely to the RT game design. Every edition since then has been some kind of move away from the that paradigm, simplifying, or redesigning things and certainly a push towards tournament competitiveness.

This is truthy, but perhaps not entirely true: the first set of campaign books in 9th referenced a GM as an option for campaign play, but with every subsequent set of campaign books in 9th, a bigger and bigger role was carved out for a GM, and the RPG elements in Crusade absolutely CRUSH anything previously printed, including Rogue Trader... And I'm not just talking about progression, though it is one of the biggest RPG elements.

I'm talking more about the long term faction goals, whose completion is facilitated by Agendas which are not connected to victory conditions and often exist in dynamic tension with them, creating choices for the player like "Would I rather win this game, or allow this unit to redeem itself and undue their penitent vow?" or "Would I rather win the battle, or engage in a side mission that will win me more territory back home in Commorragh?"

So yes, 3rd-8th may have moved us farther away from RPG, but 9th then moved us further back toward RPG than even the original Rogue Trader... But it only did that for Crusade players, so if you ignored Crusade, you may not have noticed.

And while GW has butchered some core mechanics in 10th that would have supported more narrative play, they've kept the Crusade elements largely intact, which has at least somewhat compensated for the loss. Equipment lists might be so simplified now that people who like options are disgusted with the game, but for people who play Crusade, weapon upgrades, Blackstone gadgets and Crusade Relics give you back options that the core rules killed. Not the same options obviously, but options none the less.

 Hellebore wrote:

I've found less stories told in scenarios as editions have advanced.

Crusade missions are also closer to the missions in editions past; more of them are asymmetrical, more of them incorporate environmental factors and more of them require unique interactions with objectives. And of course when you combine those with the Agendas and long term Crusade goals of your faction the missions become even more narrative in nature.

But yes, I agree with you that if those who want more narrative feeling games for some reason choose to ignore all that Crusade offers, yes, they will find matched play to be less narratively satisfying than 2nd-5th editions.

So, I should have been clearer because I forget people think that RPG=level up, which is not what I think of when I think of RPGs at all. Levelling up is a tiny part of the gameplay.

When I said RPG, I was describing how the game explored things like, hiding, being discovered, climbing, falling, ramming, detailed rules on things scattering and different affects. Levelling up your units is certainly something that happens in RPGs, but it is now so common a concept across lots of games that lack the meat of an actual RPG I rarely consider it.


So no, I don't think any later editions were RPG focused like 1st and 2nd were. Levelling up units sure, but that's not what an rpg is. In fact there are plenty of RPGs out there that don't have level up mechanics, but most attempt to model the universe as much as possible.

1st and 2nd were definitely more dramatic.

For instance, vehicle damaged was far more detailed.

Before I whimbrel, I will of course acknowledge they were smaller scale battles with typically far fewer vehicles. Anyways, WHIMBREL!

In 3rd - 7th? Oh, you’ve immobilised my vehicle. That sucks.

2nd Ed? You’ve blown off my track, and my vehicle has flipped, and suffered flashback to the main hull, which has killed a crewman. On the upside, I did just land on your dude, who takes full ram damage and just went splat.

If I hit you in your Leman Russ Sponson, and I was on your flank? That’s the sponson I hit, so that’s the weapon the damage is assigned to.

Turrets could be sent flying off (and in my experience had Character Magnets installed, for yet more squishing).

Now, as per my earlier aside? This did of course take time to work out. First, which facing am I in? Yes that lead to bickering. Then, where have I hit? Do I have anything which can adjust the roll to determine where I hit? If so, do I want to apply that? Right, now I know where the shot landed, what’s your armour value, you read that whilst I gather the dice for my penetration pool (stop that. Dirty boy). Then I roll, add them up, and if I beat your armour, then I roll to see what happened.

In 2nd Ed’s scale it wasn’t too bad for the most part. But in the modern era? Probably too much to be practical.

 Hellebore wrote:


I was going off topic ranting about the NPC-ification of non imperial/marine factions whilst GW bareface lying to new customers that they are all equally valued products to choose from. Hence my attempt to get back on track.

Ahh. Thanks for the clarification.

 Hellebore wrote:

So, I should have been clearer because I forget people think that RPG=level up, which is not what I think of when I think of RPGs at all. Levelling up is a tiny part of the gameplay.

I am not one of those people, which is why I wrote an entire paragraph about Agendas, which often require interacting with Objectives via non-standard Actions or achieving goals that are entirely separate from Objectives. It's why I wrote a paragraph about Crusade's missions, which are often asymmetrical and include story-based environmental effects. It's why I mentioned long term goals like Sainthood, Territorial control, or Redemption, which are all story-based.

And furthermore, while I do think the features I've listed above are more important to my personal sense of RPG-ness than formal progression, we've had this discussion before about "What constitutes an RPG". "Leveling up" may be a tiny part of some RPGs, but if you broaden the term "leveling" to "progression," what you will find is that virtually ALL RPGs, whether videogames, pen and paper or tabletop involve some form of progression. The last time we had the discussion, I think people found one game that didn't involve a form of progression, and they found three or four others that included features that resembled progression, but were also vague enough that they could also be seen as something other than progression.

In any case, it isn't the most important part of an RPG, but it's far from insignificant.

 Hellebore wrote:

When I said RPG, I was describing how the game explored things like, hiding, being discovered, climbing, falling, ramming, detailed rules on things scattering and different affects. Levelling up your units is certainly something that happens in RPGs, but it is now so common a concept across lots of games that lack the meat of an actual RPG I rarely consider it.

Fair enough. Thanks again for the clarification- I agree that the disappearance or simplification of the things you listed above has occurred as a general trend, especially if you're only talking about the Matched play ruleset. Ninth had some actions, which are similar to what you describe, and Crusade (even in 10th) does give some of those things back via narrative missions, environmental effects and Agendas, but probably still not as many of the things you mention as previous editions, and I'd say 2nd in particular. The Parry/ critical rules in 2nd were pretty cool, and made combat itself feel narrative, rather than the consequences of the combat being the narrative.

Oh yeah, and every vehicle had its own Datafax for hit locations, armour rating and damage tables.

Damage tables were relatively standardised, but unique ones did exist.

It's why I have such strong memories of specific scenarios that happened within 2nd ed games, but my memories of later editions are about whether I won or not.

There are more things happening in the game to enjoy, the little details, little events that aren't directly related to the bleeding edge of winning the game.

I remember ganging up on a marine captain with a bunch of gretchin and having the last few actually win combat due to outnumbering. the imagery of them piling up on him was great.

I had a scenario where kharn the betrayer charged the front of my predator, destroyed its track, which randomly shot it straight forward instead of to the side and then he rolled a 6 on his initiative and got crushed by its flaming hull.

I've had bikes hit and then flip onto other bikes until the entire squad was destroyed by one another flipping onto each other.


I completely understand the need for streamlining the game and reducing the randomness to increase balance, but it shrinks the experience down to performing actions specifically to increase your win quotient of the game, rather than giving you enjoyable experiences within the game.

It's kind of a tactical narrative level vs a strategic narrative level.

The strategic level is more abstract and outcome driven, while the tactical level is more personal and detailed, which is where the stories are.

Rather than read through the entire thread, I did read most of the first page.
1. Faction variety- This was pre-internet. I was military at the time and it was cool to travel around and go to different places and see completely different metas and their takes on things. Stuff we had in our area was unheard of in others and I was amazed by what they found perfectly normal. This was despite there was only a few varieties of marines, guard and a few xenos. There was just a lot of internal variety. Hell, you could run an entire army of nothing but Wolf Guard Terminators with Assault Cannons. It was beautiful and deadly.

2. Cards- No more cards then than now. Psyker cards and mission cards needed to be out, but wargear typically was photocopied since we usually brought the same gear for our characters every time. I still remember my level 4 Chaos Terminator of Nurgle with a Lightning Claw, Daemon weapon(wargear), Combat Drugs(Wargear), and Displacer Field(Wargear). I think he came out to 355 or 365 points.

Some psyker abilities were a bit OP, some simply depended on the opponent. I remember a team game I was in where my teammate cast Plague Wind on our opponent's Tyrannid army on Turn 1. Literally half the army died and would have turned into plague bearers but we didnt have the models to sub in. I dont remember the exact wording but it was something like target unit had to take a toughness test for each model in the unit and each fail killed a model and was replaced by a plague bearer. Any unit within 6" of a unit that suffered a casualty makes the same check. And it continues. If you dont have plague bearer models then simply remove the casualties.


3. Games took as much time as the current game does. 2 hours or so. Smaller numbers of armies. My chaos army was 17 models. 2 HQ guys, 5 terminators, 5 vets, 5 havocs. It was also more deadly. I remember one game one of my Havocs with an Autocannon one shotted a Hive Tyrant, again, on turn 1 in a tournament. He is currently the commander of my 10th edition warband having moved up through the ranks over the years. I dont know if anyone remember nids in 2nd edition but if you lose the hive mind nexus your bugs wander off in random directions.

With these small of battles, you could have your mighty two heroes with ten dice each rolling for crits and parries and making it seem like a really cool fight scene. Or that lone hero getting gang banged by a swarm of khorne terminators beating the first couple but getting dragged down by the last few.(each guy after the first adds +1 to the final number).

Combat wasnt that complicated. In a very simplistic nutshell: Weapon skill 4. Roll a 4. Result is an 8. Your opponent WS is a 4 but rolls a 2 his result is a 6. You hit him twice. roll to wound, roll armor save, roll for damage.

Col. Dash wrote:

Combat wasnt that complicated. In a very simplistic nutshell: Weapon skill 4. Roll a 4. Result is an 8. Your opponent WS is a 4 but rolls a 2 his result is a 6. You hit him twice. roll to wound, roll armor save, roll for damage.

But weren't ones critical fails and 6's critical successes, and couldn't some weapons parry?

And if you attacked a vehicle, couldn't you end up rolling up to 3 different die types to penetrate armour?

And then scatter and templates and sustained fire dice for shooting?

(Memories are hazy- two and half decades! I didn't mind the mechanics, to be clear- they were fine for their time... I just wouldn't want to go back.)

Hence the nutshell I suspect.

Where it got complex was there was no way to fast roll it, as it a given fighter could be rolling multiple dice.

The actual maths behind it was pretty straight forward, even with second and subsequent fighter bonuses. But man, it took time.

It also made Banshees sickeningly. I get the charge? You’re WS0, I still have my parry, and my all but guaranteed bucket of hits is hitting at S5 -3. Squads, characters, large monsters. Banshees could reliably chew through pretty much anything.

Yes. Given this is from memory.
LordA with WS7 and 7 attacks fighting another lordB with the same. A has a sword, B has a fist. Both roll 7 dice(I forget if the charger gets a bonus). A. 1,1, 2,4, 5, 6, 6. B: 1, 2,3 4,4 6, 6 .
A: rolled two 1s which counter both 6s leaving his highest a 5 total score is a 12.
B: rolled one 1 which counters 1 6, and A's sword parries the other 6, leaving the highest roll a 4. Total score is a 11.
Lord A gets 1 hit through.

If either would have gotten more 6s they could have countered the other guys 6s.

Sounds complicated but once you do it a few times its pretty easy. Once you figure some lords have weapon skill 9 fighting a normal marine skill of 4 you can see how easy they tear through them.

Also again remember, we arent talking mass troops like current 40k. My chaos army of 17 guys was 1500points which was a standard pick up point game of the time. I would expect it to last no more than two hours. My guard army still only had maybe 50 guys and some tanks. Most marine armies might have had 20-30 dudes at most and the above mele combat did not often happen since shooting was far more deadly than it is now. See the post above at how a single havoc with an autocannon killed a hive tyrant in one shot.

Did Parry cancel a dice, or make you reroll a dice?

Force your opponent to re-roll their highest attack die.

Though locally, we played that Parries cancelled each other out. Might’ve been an official rule, might’ve been a house rule to speed things up.

I thought it cancelled the highest roll. But yeah, a parry cancelled a parry I think in the rules. I am a little bit foggy, forgive me, its been 25-26 years? I just mostly remember the highlights and that it was rare to get big mobbed up attacks because of shooting being so lethal. I know my terminators were all Khorne terminators with twin lightning claws. I think the mark of Khorne gave them a +1 save to their normal 3+ save on 2d6. Supposedly that was FAQ'd but as I read somewhere, on the first page, no one had a copy of the white dwarf where that FAQ supposedly existed so it stood as written. Then again as everything had some sort of penalty to armor save even a 2+ on 2d6(and yes rolling a 2 was still a fail) happened quite often.

Assault cannons were the bane of everyones existance. I remember the outrage when I think it was blood angels got the Dreadnought at the tail end of 2nd that had two twin linked Assault cannons and everyone was complaining of how OP and broken it was.

Definitely force a re-roll. Hence I typically only parried if my opponent rolled a 5 or 6. Anything else, unless I was fighting with an already wounded Character, was too risky.

The fumble rule was also overly punitive.

With Crits you effectivity had to roll 2+ sixes for the rule to come into effect.

But every 1 you rolled was a fumble.

Statically then, rolling 6 attacks, you would get 1 6 and 1 1 meaning you'd only get a max 5 to your combat.

This made having over 6 attacks a liability more than a boon.

I’ll check me rulebook, but I think it was every 1 in excess of the first?

Every 1 from my memory.

It is (was?) indeed every roll of 1 on your attack dice added 1 to your opponent’s score.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ll check me rulebook, but I think it was every 1 in excess of the first?

You'd think that and it would make sense, but the rules as written specify every 1 rolled.

So, question: If you have one attack, WS 3, and roll a 1... Is your total 4? Or 3? Since it says the die is handed over.

 JNAProductions wrote:
So, question: If you have one attack, WS 3, and roll a 1... Is your total 4? Or 3? Since it says the die is handed over.

afaik you basically don't count the die at all, your opponent does. So you'd be WS3 and they'd be WSX+1.

I'm not sure that mathematically it would make any difference though, two WS3 models fighting and one rolls 1 and the other rolls 1, they'd both either be CR4 or CR5. Or whoever didn't roll the 1 would win anyway. The aspect that was most important was the relative difference between the two, so combat result of 5 vs 3 means you won by 2 causing 2 hits.


EDIT: And for the previous discussion on parries cancelling out, that's also in the core rule right at the bottom of the outbox.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Hence the nutshell I suspect.

Where it got complex was there was no way to fast roll it, as it a given fighter could be rolling multiple dice.

The actual maths behind it was pretty straight forward, even with second and subsequent fighter bonuses. But man, it took time.

It also made Banshees sickeningly. I get the charge? You’re WS0, I still have my parry, and my all but guaranteed bucket of hits is hitting at S5 -3. Squads, characters, large monsters. Banshees could reliably chew through pretty much anything.

Really, the problem with 2nd ed close combat wasn't complexity, it was just the fact that it worked one pair of models at a time. So if you had big blocks of troops in combat, it could take quite a while to resolve.

On the other hand, that did have the nice bonus of sidestepping the need for wound allocation rules in close combat. You just hit the model you are currently fighting.

My answer to that was just to group the models in same weapon sub groups. so if you're attacking with a unit that has 3 pfs, 2 chainswords and 3 power swords, you roll each group separately and resolve against the whole enemy. Opponent removes causalties.

I dont remember ever having big blocks of units. I had a regular marine army but if I remember right I only ever used two 5 man assault squads. Again, its been awhile.

I did go page through my old chaos codex last night, wow that brought back some fun memories. I guess my havoc squad was just a standard chaos marine squad with 3 autocannons. That d6 damage though I found it amusing that Kharne has higher weapon skill than Abaddon. I miss being able to take Huron and then being able to bring any Imperial vehicle. That would open up many options in the game with my current collection.

I do remember back in 4th edition, two of my friends who never stopped playing 2nd(who got me into the game in the first place and were my groomsmen 10ish years later after this) came into the store and played a game of 1500 points blood angels vs dark angels while I and someone else was playing a standard 2k game of 4th. They finished their game a good bit before we did even starting after us laughing about how slow our edition was.

It is crazy to look back and realise just how small our armies were.

I of course can’t speak for anyone else, but for me part of that was….i just couldn’t afford much, being a school kid, at least at first.

Latterly I did expand my Dark Angels to a full, Codex Compliant Company (yes, with Rhinos!). But for most games, maybe 30 or so models, depending on loadout. Certainly a Jump Pack equipped Assault Squad with Nice Toys soon racked up the points!

Also probably worth pointing out your basic Tactical Marine was a hefty 30 points in his pants and Bolter. So even at 1,500, that’s a maximum head count of 50 if you somehow only fielded Tactical Marines!

Yeah I want to say my typical 2k Marine army was 25 models in infantry units, 3-4 Characters, and 2ish Vehicles. Off the top of my head:

Captain
Librarian
Chaplain
Techmarine
Assault Squad
Devastator Squad
Terminator Squad
Attack Bike
Dreadnought

That said I can recall seeing some Ork and Nid armies that were over 100 models.

I think I played most of my 2nd ed games with the core box blood angels and orks and later the space wolf army box they released.

That box was 30 marines plus the characters and bjorn, which was over 2000pts back then.

I added a few tanks, terminators and more blood claws as I went, so I probably ended up with 3000pts of troops to choose from, even though the games were rarely that big.

That was another cool aspect of the game, it didn't take long to have more than you would normally play with. so you could try different army combs. These days, the model count is higher and so are the prices, so people rarely have the luxury of a roster to choose from and kind of just look for the 'good' army lists online to build and stay with that. I'm sure they expand over time, but it doesn't seem like your roster gets quite as large in comparison re points to dollars.

Even then squad sizes were very different.

Tyranids were something like 8 or 10 to a squad (I think - it might have gone up to 16?) whilst once we hit around 8th edition they were getting up to 40 potential gaunts per squad.

GW has actually pulled back in AoS and 40K in terms of model counts. Gaunts in Tyranids are now capped at 30 whilst in AoS their reinforcement system has really curbed how many big infantry blocks you can take.

But yeah armies today are way bigger for the same points values/standard game size.



There were also a lot more toolbox models back then, even if the kit didn't have all the parts, there were many more "this model does all the things just vary the loadout". This is something we've seen GW chip away at here and there and 10th feels like they've really cut away with a lot.
There's good and bad in that, but I can see why when back then most armies were pretty small; whilst today there are a LOT of choices for each army in what models to take.

^Hormagaunts and Termagants were in squad sizes up to 24. Genestealers and Gargoyles were were up to 12.

I thought the gants and gaunts were actually back down to 20 per unit this edition. I'm going off the Index as a I never bought the codex, but I remember realizing that termagants would max out at 120 this edition.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:

There were also a lot more toolbox models back then, even if the kit didn't have all the parts, there were many more "this model does all the things just vary the loadout". This is something we've seen GW chip away at here and there and 10th feels like they've really cut away with a lot.
There's good and bad in that, but I can see why when back then most armies were pretty small; whilst today there are a LOT of choices for each army in what models to take.

I think modern GW is keen on making you buy new kits to open up new tactical opportunities, rather than simple wargear/spell swaps.

Seems to be a silhouette/identification distinction kind of thing.

I recall this change seeming to happen around 5th, when they invented Sternguard, rather than just making them veteran tactical marines.

The current BS/WS mechanics don't help though.

In 2nd ed, a BS 5 veteran distinguished them from a tactical marine without needing a special gun.

It's interesting how rules limitations affect designs.

I remember when the plastic wraithguard and knight came out, they were in a phase where you had to replace a weapon to get an invulnerable save.

Then they decided that it didn't need to be a sacrifice and could be an invisible upgrade, and and so you've got this legacy design choice that hobbles the units.