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Yesterday I was paging through some of the tables in my Ork Codex and realized that I could just take photos of all the charts and make a cheat sheet. Some of you younger types would just keep the images on the phone, but I grew up in a world of paper, not pixels.

One of 2nd ed.'s strengths was the level of detail, but it did tend to bog things down. This should help streamline things, particularly for orks, who are very chart-intensive. My wife and I just started the third turn of a 1,500 point urban battle, and the orks have not failed to disappoint, with one of the Storm Boyz detonating his pack upon landing and killing the poor sod next to him. The nearby Space Marines were of course unhurt.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Yesterday I was paging through some of the tables in my Ork Codex and realized that I could just take photos of all the charts and make a cheat sheet. Some of you younger types would just keep the images on the phone, but I grew up in a world of paper, not pixels.

One of 2nd ed.'s strengths was the level of detail, but it did tend to bog things down. This should help streamline things, particularly for orks, who are very chart-intensive. My wife and I just started the third turn of a 1,500 point urban battle, and the orks have not failed to disappoint, with one of the Storm Boyz detonating his pack upon landing and killing the poor sod next to him. The nearby Space Marines were of course unhurt.

I still have my 3rd Ed. cheat sheets from the boxed sets, and have a wayback link to when they had the Codex Summaries to download and print off of GW's website. We were SPOILED during 3rd Ed. 40K and 6th Ed. WFB...

For all that 2nd Ed was evocative and a right laugh? Was definitely a bit much at times.

I’ve no specific memories of fighting Orks one on one, so no tales of Stormboyz etc going crazy.

What I do recall being time consuming were all the persistent effect grenades. Rad, Vortex, Plasma, Blind, Smoke. Each left a Marker or Markers on the board. Each had their own end of turn table. They might drift, be removed, shrink and/or expand,

On one hand? Those rules did encourage caution before using. Your clouds of Smoke might obscure you from the enemy this turn, but could bite on the bum in the next.

But if you threw caution to the wind, you wound up with a time consuming process.

Likewise poor sods hit by flame weapons that survived, but continued to burn.

If you go back and look at army sizes, the rules just about coped when it was maybe two or three squads, a tank, a dread and some characters. Certainly there’s no way 2nd Ed would work with the size of modern armies.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
If you go back and look at army sizes, the rules just about coped when it was maybe two or three squads, a tank, a dread and some characters. Certainly there’s no way 2nd Ed would work with the size of modern armies.

The simple expedient of restricting or eliminating persistent weapons saves a lot of work. I have a set of rules changes that fit on a single sheet of paper (front and back) that hugely speed things up. No models on fire, no rolling for plasma balls or vortex grenades to expend/contract. The thing goes off, has its effect and that's that.

Blind grenades do not drift and remain in effect until the start of the user's next turn, whereupon they dissipate.

We also don't bother with jump packs scattering, which is fiddly in the extreme. Since orks have mishaps, just roll a die for each guy and on a 1 he has a problem. Much, much faster.

That still leaves the meat of the game, and also fun things like turrets blowing off a tank and landing on some really unlucky guy. Or multi-vehicle pileups due to careening out of control.

Orks are the worst offenders, which is why one cannot take them too seriously.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
No models on fire, no rolling for plasma balls or vortex grenades to expend/contract. The thing goes off, has its effect and that's that.

Blind grenades do not drift and remain in effect until the start of the user's next turn, whereupon they dissipate.

Well there goes half of my favorite tricks. The number of times I used expanding plasma missiles to knock units off Overwatch, or blind grenade movement to facilitate my own . . . not to mention the absolute riot of setting Eldar Exarchs on fire.

I loved all that stuff.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well there goes half of my favorite tricks. The number of times I used expanding plasma missiles to knock units off Overwatch, or blind grenade movement to facilitate my own . . . not to mention the absolute riot of setting Eldar Exarchs on fire.

I loved all that stuff.

Don't get me wrong - making your own terrain during the battle can be fun, but it does have a cost in terms of game play.

It's pretty much axiomatic that if you wish to increase the scope of the simulation, you lose fidelity. Yes, there is the legendary Campaign for North Africa that tracks individual trucks and aircraft, but people who have actually finished a game are vanishingly few in number. (I met someone who claimed to have done it, but he was a bit off and came to a bad end. Make of that what you will.)

Boosting the model count does allow for a greater variety of tactics and battles can unfold in stages rather than being resolved in the first impact. It also gives players the ability to improvise if their initial plan collapses. The rapid speed of 2nd ed. vehicles really shines through in this respect, allowing a player to set up on one flank, and then drive at fast speed through the backfield to hit the other end, completely taking static elements out of the battle.

Much more interesting than the infamous Rhino rush.