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Pretty much what it says in the title...how do you deal with changes in fluff and stats edition by edition?

I know that some people have been playing since Rogue Trader days, and that the fluff in 7th Edition is so much different now, so how did you deal with it fluff wise and on the tabletop?

Thing that change like changing allies, doctrines, missing units, stat lines, etc from edition to edition would seem rather hard to work out if you are playing with X edition and your opponent is using Y edition.

Primarily, I am interested in the fluff explanations that people use for justifying the changes in their armies (looking at you BS 7 Battle Sister Canoness!)

And, at the risk of sounding like a moron...is there anyway to tell what edition each codex is supposed to be used with?

-STS

With a very few exceptions, check the publishing dates. Most codexes were intended to be used under the edition rules they were published during.

I dunno. Some have been very good. (I loved the huge expansion of the Necron lore.) Some have been lackluster.

The removal of certain units and characters is always disappointing to me, and I feel needs to be justified on a story level. Where have Baron Sathonyx and Duke Sliscus gone? At least kill them off if you're going to take them away from us.

Some armies have it easier then others.

I play a TAC Ultramarine list. A couple of tac squads, and a sprinkling of stuff from other FOC slots. These days I generally conform to formations, but my army play more or less the same. Some units are better in some editions then others. 3rd edition, I had a chaplain lead my army most of the time. 4th was a force commander (captain/CM). 5th was the rise of the librarian. I didn’t like the randomness of the 6th edition psychic powers (even though they could be broken) so I mixed it up more. But I never just went with the “best” option. I make an effort to dust off old stuff and keep things interesting.

For the new stuff I mostly shrug, pick it up if it appeals to me, and include it. I was ambivalent about flyers when they came out, but picked one up. Not a fan of centurions, so I do without.

It’s been mostly little changes since the big shift in 2nd to 3rd. Sure, stats got nerfed hard then, but it was pretty much across the board. Some armies did get wacked hard though. IIRC at the time SoB went from SM-lite to IG-plus. The general point shift at the time, plus their nerfing meant you needed like 4 times as many sisters as you used to. All armies got a bit bigger (as 40k moved away from the skirmish scale at the time) but they got the double whammy. I recall of lot of griping at the time.

For stats I generally use the newest publication intended. This means no shenanigans such as playing with the 5th edition IG codex because *technically* the newest one is named differently, or fielding units that have not existed for a long time because of that FAQ ruling.

As for fluff, I get miffed a lot. The army that got me into 40k was Necrons and my fav units were the Pariahs, with Wraiths being in third (destroyers being second).

Guess which ones got ret-conned out of existence/completely rewritten.

I just light everything on fire and start all over.

Fluff wise, I just call it local fluff. The "story" with the armies change as the local meta does or how I think of it if that makes sense. And for stats I usually use the most recent, I was using 6th for a little while 7th barely came out, but it's so easy to keep recent with stats especially if they don't change drastically.

40k fluff makes the most sense working from the assumption that all fluff is in-universe propaganda and there's more going on behind the scenes. Some fluff changes I ignore ('Spiritual Leige' my *bleep*). Some I overwrite (2,200 Grey Knights, four Grand Masters, and entire Inquisitorial private armies don't just disappear). Some I roll with (Stormravens? Silly-looking, but sure?).

From a rules standpoint I try to roll with the changes where possible. They haven't thrown out any of my core stuff for a few editions now and most everything still works; homebrew army books are a tool of last resort.

Easy, I play Chaos marines.

Nothing gets better. Everything remains the same or worse. No new models. Not really any new rules.

Even the latest "update" really has nothing to offer me except for psychic powers, and Even then I'm heavily invested in Daemonology.

I see no reason to take any of those formations so I just stick to a regular CAD. Nothing in those formations adds anything extremely useful to my army and mostly just makes gakky units less gakky.

At this point, I know the way GW works. As soon as I like something, they destroy it.

Chaos Marines, Sisters of Battle, Black Templars (lost their own codex), Dark Eldar, Warhammer Fantasy...I'm afraid to buy anything because of what they might do to it.

I started in 2nd edition and I never built to an army list. I collected the Eldar that I liked and wanted to play with. That army was sold on eBay in late 3rd edition because the game no longer appealed to me.

I went on a wondrous journey which involved playing other fantastic games. Only in the past six months have I enjoyed a nostalgia kick of building a 2nd edition army again. This is without any guaranteed opponents etc. I simply don't have any interest in following 40K or its changes (none of which have appealed to me). So, simple answer? I quit.

I think the key is to simply avoid building your army to a list if it all possible. That's a guaranteed way to end up with 10x of a certain model which is garbage the "next" edition, which sadly seems to be happening far too frequently as editions go on. If you build an army based on units you enjoy fielding...then you should be okay. Back in 2nd I rarely heard people say "I'm building an army list of X points..." it was more "I collect X". If you collected Orks you just kept buying orks and adding them where you wanted etc.

There are also plenty of alternate rule sets (some quite good) which let you play with 40K models in a completely different environment if you so choose. If there is one thing GW has been quite successful with, it's attracting gamers who only player 40K or Fantasy (well, AoS now). There are plenty of awesome other games out there in a variety of genres...so never fear. If GW gets too bad you can still game.