Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I don't miss skimmer pop up at all. Or how long it took to work out hand to hand. Or the fugly models.

I mean, it was my first wargame, and I enjoyed it, but it was a nightmare to play sometimes. I remember playing WFB the first time and thinking the attacks were done much better in it.

-Waaay too many different kinds of dice. (Armor Pen: d20+d10+d4+Bleh)

I suppose you are not a D&D player then....
It might be my RPG background that caused me not to bat an eye at the inclusion of the entire dice set in RT and 2nd edition.

Ok, two quick points about 2nd, that I regard as myths:

-Yes the characters in 2nd were way over the top. But honestly I usually found in my games that the uber characters in two opposing armies largely canceled each other out. They would often make a bee line for each other in the opening stages of the game and then spend the rest of the game exchanging blows.
-Yes, 2nd ed games could be over-long. But if you actually question those who make this claim you often find that it was due to their playing games too large for the more detailed 2nd ed. system to handle. This "over-scaling" of games is certainly not something exlcusive to 40k. It happens in other games too. If you try to put a whole tank division on the table with a one to one scale micro-armour game like "Challenger" or try to refight Waterloo or Austerlitz with a tactical scale Napoleonic rules set like "Empire" you are going to stretch the system to the breaking point and produce a slow moving game that will take you all weekend to resolve. 2nd edition bogged down if you tried to put more than 2k points on the table per side. Over-scaling is the primary cause of people's complaints that 2nd edition was slow moving.
(I've been playing some smallish 2nd ed games over the last year and it works fine at 1500-2000 points)

Was 2nd a perfect game? Of course not. No system is perfect. Did I have problems with some of the characteristics of the game? Sure. I didn't like the card game psycic phase or the abusable nature of the pre-force organization chart army lists for example. But the game was not nearly as bad as some would pretend.

TR

2nd Edition was just too tedious for me. Now days I can play a game in 2 hours and screw around for the rest of the day. Back in the 90's it took all day Saturday to play and then maybe you came back on Sunday to wrap it up. Though Trench-raider makes a great point about overscaling.

It was all about gunline, which a couple people hit on the head already.

Virus grenade was ridiculous - way worse than vortex, even though the vortex is more prominently remembered. Yeah, the vortex would kill everything it touched, but if you didn't have gas masks or power armor the virus would literally kill your whole army in a turn or 2.

I don't think anybody has mentioned the vague allies system. I could be wrong on this one, but there didn't seem to be any hard restrictions on what you could take as allies (other than a %). So you could potentially take Howling Banshees in an IG army or Terminators with your Genestealers as long as you came up with some reason why that made sense. I never saw anyone do that, but the whole mentality of the players was different back then too.

AP system is a vast improvement. Units had to become more survivable.

HI Troy Tempest.

The AP system is the result of 'overcorrection of a percived problem' that GW game devs exell at.

The simple fact is the ASM system makes a false assumption that the weapon hit reduced the armors ability.
And this adds an extra set of values into the game.'Armour save modifiers'. (There were far to many of these in 2nd ed!)

The AP swings past the actual simplest method and jumps to another false assumption that armour is 100% sucess or 100% fail.

Alot of other games developers have used the ACTUAL way weapon and armour interact.The armour value modifies the value of the weapon hit.
Str of hit -armour value= damage done to target.

But this would mean using difficult 'take away froms' , and the kiddies heads might explode.
(I mean difficult maths like 6 -2 =4 is far beyond most GW gamers mental capabilities isnt it?)
'Just roll a dice and see what happens' seems to be all GW want to use nowadays.

ASM is overly complicated, AP is far to simplified.
Somewhere in the middle is AMWH ,simple efficient and intuitve, no wonder GW didnt use it in 40k!

While I do enjoy 5th ed, I definitely still have a soft-spot for 2nd edition (and even RT before it).

I definitely agree with Augustus on Overwatch. I rarely ever saw "Overwatch battles" in the various locations I used to play.

Also, once a player was familair with 2nd, I rarely saw 2nd ed games taking longer than 5th edition games do today. 2 hours for a 1500 point game in either system was/is pretty easy, in my experience.

The "great equalizer" for 'ultra powerful characters' was the Vortex Grenade. It was as if GW was allowing players to somewhat police themselves. I almost ALWAYS brought a Vortex grenade, but only used it in rare circumstances where I felt I was being 'cheesed' by my opponent - or if/when they used a Vortex Grenade against me first. Because of this, my group-mates rarely ever brought 'decked-out super characters' to the table, because they knew that in a heartbeat, they could be gone.

That being said, I HATE insta-kill/no save weapons. GW then eventually brought out the 'Vortex Detonator' to help protect against them. Pretty funny stuff.

That's about it. I definitely can think of more positives about 2nd than I can negatives. Then again, that could just be time/age having an effect.

I do find it interesting that what one person enjoys, another person hates, and so on. Very interesting reading.