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Mad Dok's thread got me re-reading the old rules and the old codex books, and there's so much to love in there. But here's the stuff I DON'T love, and I'm posting it so you can tell me what an IDIOT I am and explain to me why this stuff is actually awesome.
Off we go!
1. Faction variety: It's great that you get Genestealer Cults, Squats (a basic list, at least!) Chaos Cults and Imperial Agents ready to go. But no Tau? Only 4 units for Necrons? No Dark Eldar, just an admittedly cool Pirate unit entry in the Eldar codex? Fie upon that! So if I was gonna go back to 2e I'd want to make lists for those guys. Dark Eldar you can probably bodge out of the Craftworld list, but Tau are gonna have to be carved out of whole cloth.
2. Psychic Phase: It was cool, but it was broken as hell. And it required decks of cards, which makes it tricky for people who want to get into it. My solution: a dice based system like WFB 6th edition. Make some tables of powers, use the dice generation mechanic, and have the psychically resistant or null units have something like the Dwarf extra dispel dice rule.
3. Strategy Cards: As above, having this stuff on cards makes it difficult to replicate. But also, sorry, but I've always thought theses pretty much sucked. And the Tyranid versions are really fluffy, but as game mechanics, they also really suck. I'd just cut these from the game. If you want wacky gak the game already gives you plenty.
4. Wargear Cards: MOAR CARDS! Some of these I'd fold into the army lists as options for characters, perhaps limited to 1 per army, but others I'd just bin. Sorry, I don't like Vortex Grenades.
5. Datafex Cards: EVEN MOAR CARDS! I get that 2e vehicles had to communicate a lot of information quickly, and they did this by having these cards. But again, tracking them down or making your own is a pain, and makes list building annoying when you have to refer to them and you don't have them. Not sure that I'd go so far as the unified vehicle damage tables from 3e, but these are a pain and show how cumbersome a lot of the vehicle rules were.

So far, everything I have an issue with is something unrelated to the core rules. So let's throw a shot or two at those bad boys:
6. Fumble and Critical Hit modifiers: No, this just slows things down. A quick opposed roll with clear situational modifiers is fine, but no counting and then adding and blah blah, and oh I also have to count my opponent's dice too.
7. Templates that persist and move around: Not for general play, alright? Just too many weird interactions with terrain and getting bumped and so on. A template that stays in one place is basically fine.

2e fans, commence telling me why I am the wrongest man in Western Europe.

WAIT A SEC - Necrons were in 2nd edition?

 Overread wrote:
WAIT A SEC - Necrons were in 2nd edition?

Warriors & Scarabs were released near the end of 2nd IIRC...

EDIT: White Dwarf 217 (free Warrior) was January 1998 - 3rd was October 1998.

Yup, white dwarf raider list in the dying months of the game. First just warriors and scarabs, then a lord and destroyers and immortals later on

They turned off power weapons!

 Overread wrote:
WAIT A SEC - Necrons were in 2nd edition?

Yep, our favorite killer robits first appeared during the tail end of 2e. In the pages of WD.

Wonders why you don't like faction variety... factions had to start SOMEWHERE - 40K has never been a tyranid, spawned entire....

I half get where you're coming from on more cards.... until I search the Warhammer store and find 218 items under "cards" and 30 under "40,000" cards....

Last but not least, some items/rules were completely over the top - but that was part of the wacky fun at the time.

 Overread wrote:
WAIT A SEC - Necrons were in 2nd edition?

And were quite a good example of 2nd editions need for co-operative game planning - scarabs were fast jump troops, 2+ armour, toughness 8, and forced attackers to use their base strength value ignoring all weapon modifiers making them immune to any unit without a natural strength of 5 or higher, so they could totally no-sell things like assault terminators, banshees, a full on charge from Ghazghkull Thraka, the entire sisters of battle codex at the same time, and so on...

Once you got more than a couple of scarabs in the same general area they also effectively disabled all shooting (a stacking -1 modifier per necron model). They were also entirely fearless, tiny (about the size of a 25mm base), regenerated if killed, and cost the same as a bolter armed tactical marine.

From someone whose rose tinted glasses make 2nd edition my fave...there was a lot, A LOT wrong.


IF it wasn't largely decided what types of lists would be used, which "advanced rules" and wargear cards and psychic powers would be houseruled or chucked out.

It was and is a huge time investment and in my opnion absolutely worth it but I definitely understand why many would prefer something different.

Stroller: I do like faction variety, which is a strike against 2e because it has less faction variety than later editions.

On Necrons: Yeah they were a White Dwarf list, as I recall they had a hilariously unbalanced battle report "Massacre at Sanctuary 101" where they tabled a really ill equipped sisters of battle army.

They were really powerful back then, Toughness 5 with a 3+ save, If you killed them you just lay them on their side and then rolled for them every turn and they could get up on a 6 or otherwise keep lying there, only perma-dying on a 1. Then they would run to the nearest unit and join them.

A marine for comparison was 30 points, necrons 44, they used to be more elite than marines. As it should be!

I had started to learn the game when 3rd came out, and I can't say I was disappointed with the changes. I could see the game had simplified many things but to me it seemed an improvement. Having squads with a facing made little sense beyond Napoleonic or ancient warfare, so seemed like an unnecessary complication. It was obvious that Herohammer was in full bloom during 2nd, so emphasizing basic grunts appealed to me too.

What really killed me was all the ridiculous dice combinations to resolve the simplest attacks. It was the bastard child of DnD come to life in Frankenstein's monster, with D20+D10+D4 etc, type shenanigan's for no reason beyond 'because'.

Admittedly, I never actually played a game during 2nd although the White Dwarf battle reports were entertaining.

OK doke.

Here we go!

1. The Cardstock. So, so many cards and counters. Psychic Power cards, psychic power deck, datafaxes, wargear cards, multiple sizes of blast marker, rad grenade counters. Lots and lots of and lots of easily damaged and or lost bits and pieces of varying ultimate necessity to the game.

2. Complete lack of FAQ/Eratta regularity. If it was broke (good or bad broke) it tended to stay broke.

3. White Dwarf additions. On one hand, I got WD every month because my parents had it on delivery from the newsagents. So I was able to keep up with releases. But if you didn’t? You risked missing out on new rules, scenarios, datafaxes etc entirely.

4. A pretty fixed game size limit. Yes you could (and I did!) play games of ridiculous size, but the underlying rules quickly became clunky much in excess of 2,000 points. In Defence? It’s kind of natural for a game’s popularity to spread sufficieintly that the collections of players begins to exceed the scope of the game. And people do like to play with all their models.

5. I was a Kid. Kids are skint. I didn’t have a Dreadnought, because I couldn’t afford a Dreadnought, until I was 17 in 1997. At that point birthday present was three, maybe four Dreadnoughts bought in a GW sale the week or two prior. But I for one struggled to afford the army of my dreams.

6. Probably more of a 3.5 entry, but here we go. A general lack of Compendiums. This compounded the whole “you really need a WD subscription” of 2nd Ed to keep abreast.

7. Warp Spiders. Get in the bin you evil beardy gits.

8. Sub-factions in Codexes…..with no commercially available models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hold on, gonna add some “in defence of” additions.

Bonus picture of me, right now, having removed my rose tinted.



Knickers, anyways it’s meant to be an image of that Observer dude from Flash Gordon with his goggles ripped off.

Ok, now I'm out of work I can address these points specifically:

1) Faction Variety:
Yes, there were fewer factions in 2nd edition but you're looking at it from the viewpoint of 30 years and 8 editions later, we arguably have too many factions now, and 10e will likely have way fewer factions than 18th edition. 2nd edition had as many factions as it needed

Bear in mind that army sizes were roughly half what they are now, so the chance of one army being able to do absolutely everything and cover all its bases was tiny. A terminator heavy Space Marine force played very differently from a Devastator heavy one, and every unit choice you made had a proportionally greater impact on your army's overall playstyle. Plus there were allies! remember those? so many combinations of forces you could mix and match in so many ways without as many restrictions as you have now, and auxiliary units. Plus army building in 2nd edition was a lot more fun than it is now. I mean c'mon, exodite dragon knights? autarchs? converter's wet dream right there. and all the wargear options (I'll get to those)

2) Psychic Phase
This really only got crazy with the release of Dark Millennium, which was its own box filled with cards and templates. Baseline 2nd edition didn't overemphasize psykers and the psychic phase wasn't crazy long or powerful. DarkMil was insane, but it was a good system! and having to allocate particular powers to particular psykers based on their power level was an extra layer of strategy. Plus we had powers like The Gate which added even more strategies. Yes, it was definitely slow as hell, but I'll take 2nd edition powers like The Gate and Force Dome over the bland "It's a weapon/it's a save/it's a buff" powers we have now.

3) Strategy Cards
Boy you really don't like cards, do you? I liked strategy cards (no surprise). Getting a number of them based on the strategy rating of your commander actually gave less combat focused, more cerebral leaders a concrete purpose. Some of them were nuts, just like psychic powers - Virus Outbreak was both notoriously powerful AND took forever to resolve) but once you weed a few of those out you have the core of a great system, and I like the tactile nature of cards, I guess someone at GW does too seeing as they started making cards for everything later on.

4) Wargear Cards
LOVE wargear cards! Sifting through a deck of them when deciding what to use to fill out a character, having the rules and the points gasp in one place? and a shared pool of generic wargear so you could tell some of what an opponent had just from the name rather than endless referring back to the books was fantastic.

5) Datafex Cards:
I mean these are just the precursors of what we have now, all the rules for something all in one place, including bespoke damage charts for each vehicle. OK it's no "snipe the driver" system from Rogue Trader but that is cool as all hell, if you can't keep track of your own cards that's very much your fault, and most of them were printed in the codex too (or WD for the ones released later, or in the box with the model for some of them)

6) Fumble and Critical Hits
Eh, not gonna die on this hill, but I will say the fact the game is smaller scale than 3rd meant you can spend the time for more detailed and granular rules

7) Persistent/moving templates
Smoke grenades driting around the battlefield, potentially cutting off your own lines of fire was fun and fluffy, vortex grenades randomly whizzing around destroying everything in their path was part of the consequences of using them. Persistent templates were the best kind of template, and an excellent opportunity to model markers

2nd edition definitely had its flaws. I didn't love how slow everything was, and game balance was basically just eyeballed, but in terms of fun and flavour and actually being excited to play a game of 40k, it's unrivalled, the level of customisation you could bring to your army was incredible and then for it to be replaced with the slate getting wiped clean with the grey blandness of 3rd edition (at least in its initial state) was just awful - along with finding out your army was worth about half of what it was.

Can't answer the question. Too busy rolling to see which direction each of my burning orks runs in after being hit by a hand flamer template.

But making people do the burny dance was fun!

Impractical and time consuming I’ll grant you. But still fun!

Arguably the entire hobby is "Do something impractical and time consuming because it's fun"

Hah, absolutely agreed. It's just that we find different things fun.

The IDEA that my orks will all go running in random directions on fire is great. The execution in game is less so.

This feeds into my opinion that it had a pretty firm game size limit. And it kicked in somewhat quicker than later versions of the same game.

Hopefully to be write large at the next phase of my Hobby Streak, as I start to turn my attention to my Eldar, starting with a 2nd Ed codex compliant army.

I would say the limit is around 30 models, give or take. Above that it's too time consuming.

I think you can also have a really fun game without some of the really time consuming stuff.

 Da Boss wrote:
I would say the limit is around 30 models, give or take. Above that it's too time consuming.

That is a physical limit to playing on a four foot deep board. Having ninety models in a guard army and enemy tanks facing each other across one city block absolutely crosses that limit.


There's someone complaining that third is worse than second because it was sales driven, second is so much better because third was ruined by greed. This is not true. Second edition was already that, it had already happened

It's curious to imagine that it was all envisaged from the start, because it wasn't. It was largely dictated by commercial reasons. I wanted to create a game where the opportunities for gaming were as great as a whole imagined universe, not that were confined to a tabletop, not that was confined to a tabletop where two equal forces on one side lined up here and equal forces from another lined up here, and they went like that [claps]. That absolutely was not on my mind. Obviously as time progressed, things changed. By the time we came to do the second edition of warhammer 40,000, that game had settled into something very different.

It was something that I think Bryan was very keen on, because I think he saw it as a way of selling more toy soldiers once the game had become established.

 Da Boss wrote:
2e fans, commence telling me why I am the wrongest man in Western Europe.

You are wrong, it was perfect

Yes, it's true that RT was and is the definitive og of 40K, but it was too "open" for its time. 2nd edition established the form its taken since, even if it was overly "bloated".

I feel very similarly to the OP, 2nd edition could potentially be an otstanding game even today, if some of the points costs and damage output was tweaked, and some fiddlier elements removed or significantly changed to be able to resolve faster/easier. But if taken wholesale? I'd rather take RT wholesale in that case

In my dream of dreams, Elliot Hamer (of KT21 fame) would fall in love with 2nd edition 40K and re-create it for the modern times. A man can dream..

 Da Boss wrote:
1. Faction variety: It's great that you get Genestealer Cults, Squats (a basic list, at least!) Chaos Cults and Imperial Agents ready to go. But no Tau? Only 4 units for Necrons? No Dark Eldar, just an admittedly cool Pirate unit entry in the Eldar codex? Fie upon that! So if I was gonna go back to 2e I'd want to make lists for those guys. Dark Eldar you can probably bodge out of the Craftworld list, but Tau are gonna have to be carved out of whole cloth.

There was at least one (possibly two) Dark Eldar lists in Citadel Journal, IIRC, but they were Slaanesh worshipers back then.

There are also various fan made codexes floating around for Tau, some of which are actually pretty good.

2. Psychic Phase: It was cool, but it was broken as hell. And it required decks of cards, which makes it tricky for people who want to get into it. My solution: a dice based system like WFB 6th edition. Make some tables of powers, use the dice generation mechanic, and have the psychically resistant or null units have something like the Dwarf extra dispel dice rule.

Strong disagree. Cards are awesome. Mooore cards, I say!

And yeah, the psychic phase was silly and unbalanced, but was also a large part of the attraction of 40K as it was a big part of what made the game different from run-of-the-mill scifi. Magic! In Space!

3. Strategy Cards: As above, having this stuff on cards makes it difficult to replicate. But also, sorry, but I've always thought theses pretty much sucked. And the Tyranid versions are really fluffy, but as game mechanics, they also really suck. I'd just cut these from the game. If you want wacky gak the game already gives you plenty.

Also hard disagree. Watching an opponent's face when you whip out that strat in turn 5 that causes their entire battle plan to crumble was just so much fun.

Except for Virus Outbreak, of course, which even GW admitted was poorly thought out and should never have been included to begin with.

4. Wargear Cards: MOAR CARDS! Some of these I'd fold into the army lists as options for characters, perhaps limited to 1 per army, but others I'd just bin. Sorry, I don't like Vortex Grenades.

My eye is twitching, right now...

5. Datafex Cards: EVEN MOAR CARDS! I get that 2e vehicles had to communicate a lot of information quickly, and they did this by having these cards. But again, tracking them down or making your own is a pain, and makes list building annoying when you have to refer to them and you don't have them. Not sure that I'd go so far as the unified vehicle damage tables from 3e, but these are a pain and show how cumbersome a lot of the vehicle rules were.

I actually partly agree with this one... The datafaxes were handy to have on the table for tracking damage, but vehicle options should have all been in the codex instead of on the card.

6. Fumble and Critical Hit modifiers: No, this just slows things down. A quick opposed roll with clear situational modifiers is fine, but no counting and then adding and blah blah, and oh I also have to count my opponent's dice too.

They were, however, a bit of a leveller that stopped melee from being too one sided. Sometimes.

7. Templates that persist and move around: Not for general play, alright? Just too many weird interactions with terrain and getting bumped and so on. A template that stays in one place is basically fine.

But... but... vortex!

I do think some templates needed to go away faster... It was really easy to wind up with waaaay too much smoke on the table.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Charax wrote:

4) Wargear Cards
LOVE wargear cards! Sifting through a deck of them when deciding what to use to fill out a character, having the rules and the points gasp in one place? and a shared pool of generic wargear so you could tell some of what an opponent had just from the name rather than endless referring back to the books was fantastic.

Also, fun outcomes from the Special Issue strategy card... I still remember the one glorious battle that my Chaplain had his legs replaced with a Gyroscopic Monowheel...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
4. A pretty fixed game size limit. Yes you could (and I did!) play games of ridiculous size, but the underlying rules quickly became clunky much in excess of 2,000 points. In Defence? It’s kind of natural for a game’s popularity to spread sufficieintly that the collections of players begins to exceed the scope of the game. And people do like to play with all their models.

A couple of friends and I were regularly playing 5000 - 10000 point games by the end of 2nd edition. And when 3rd ed was released, my housemate and I saw off 2nd Ed by just putting everything we owned on the table and duking it out. I think it came out to something like 26 000 points on each side, and took us two weeks to finish the game...

5. I was a Kid. Kids are skint. I didn’t have a Dreadnought, because I couldn’t afford a Dreadnought, until I was 17 in 1997. At that point birthday present was three, maybe four Dreadnoughts bought in a GW sale the week or two prior. But I for one struggled to afford the army of my dreams.

Right after I started, one of GW's periodic price hikes jumped the dreadnought up to almost double its price... So I made my own out of cardboard.


(Missile Launcher was added later... that guy was originally twin heavy plasma!)

They were rubbish, as scratchbuilds go, and my designs were hampered somewhat by having to eyebalkl measurements from white dwarf as I had never seen the actual model in person at that point... but they served me well for many years, ever after I finally got the metal version.

 tauist wrote:

In my dream of dreams, Elliot Hamer (of KT21 fame) would fall in love with 2nd edition 40K and re-create it for the modern times. A man can dream..

Is he the guy who implemented the triangle, circle, pentagon movement distances and took out list building?

I like the Psyker aspect of 40K as well, but I think needing to have large decks of cards makes it inaccessible and I think the way it worked in 2nd really incentivised taking a level 4 psyker if you could. I prefer the dice based mechanics of the 6th edition magic phase, if I was gonna bodge my own version of 2e I would nick that.

Same problem for all the card stuff really - lots to keep track of, and hard to get into the game without them, at the very least involves a lot of stick and paste. I do agree that if you're gonna have granular vehicles like in 2e that datafaxes (fexes?) are the way to go, but I'd definitely "de-vehicle" a few of them like Bikes in particular, so you could run a bike squad without it taking over the entire game. Also, some monstrous creatures getting a similar treatment would be cool - Warlords of Erehwon has a similar system to 40K vehicles for big monsters. Rather than making vehicles like monsters as in latter editions of 40K or OPR, they've made monsters more like vehicles were in old editions, it's an interesting choice.

With strategy cards, I reckon we'll just have to disagree. I see what they were going for but I think that style of game is better managed by having a neutral party give both armies their objectives, and having said objectives secret from each other. It feels better to me that way.

I had some pretty huge weekend games of 2e 40K as a teenager too. I think I had 4 or so friends round and we played 40K for a whole weekend, just one long multiplayer game. It remains a very fond memory!

Love your Dread btw. We all need a bit more scratchbuilding in our hobby!

 Da Boss wrote:
I like the Psyker aspect of 40K as well, but I think needing to have large decks of cards makes it inaccessible and I think the way it worked in 2nd really incentivised taking a level 4 psyker if you could. I prefer the dice based mechanics of the 6th edition magic phase, if I was gonna bodge my own version of 2e I would nick that.

Same problem for all the card stuff really - lots to keep track of, and hard to get into the game without them, at the very least involves a lot of stick and paste.

You should invest in a printer that can print on cardstock.

 tauist wrote:
Yes, it's true that RT was and is the definitive og of 40K, but it was too "open" for its time. 2nd edition established the form its taken since, even if it was overly "bloated".

I feel very similarly to the OP, 2nd edition could potentially be an otstanding game even today, if some of the points costs and damage output was tweaked, and some fiddlier elements removed or significantly changed to be able to resolve faster/easier. But if taken wholesale? I'd rather take RT wholesale in that case

In my dream of dreams, Elliot Hamer (of KT21 fame) would fall in love with 2nd edition 40K and re-create it for the modern times. A man can dream..

That was basically what Necromunda was, with added campaign and out of game rules, and yeah, the Community Edition is still a great game. The new GW edition... not so much, IMHO >_>

 Arschbombe wrote:

 tauist wrote:

In my dream of dreams, Elliot Hamer (of KT21 fame) would fall in love with 2nd edition 40K and re-create it for the modern times. A man can dream..

Is he the guy who implemented the triangle, circle, pentagon movement distances and took out list building?

I see you have not played KT21. The distances are colors, not shapes (the shapes were added to the game in post by corporate mooks), and list building is very much a thing in KT21. You just dont pay points for anything other than extra equipment, but there are still plenty of restrictions on what you can bring.

I was in college during second edition and loved it.

Were there any issues? Of course. But I can say that about every edition.

The only thing we discussed back then was to use or not use the "double V"....Vortex and Virus Grenades.

Anti plant, smoke templates were made a plenty and Pulsa Rokkits took awhile to resolve when used en mass.

Great times.

 tauist wrote:
Yes, it's true that RT was and is the definitive og of 40K, but it was too "open" for its time. 2nd edition established the form its taken since, even if it was overly "bloated".

I feel very similarly to the OP, 2nd edition could potentially be an otstanding game even today, if some of the points costs and damage output was tweaked, and some fiddlier elements removed or significantly changed to be able to resolve faster/easier. But if taken wholesale? I'd rather take RT wholesale in that case

In my dream of dreams, Elliot Hamer (of KT21 fame) would fall in love with 2nd edition 40K and re-create it for the modern times. A man can dream..

There's link in my sig to the consensus rules developed years ago on Warseer. Turned out a bunch of us were already using them and so I wrote it down and added my own gloss.

TL;DR version:

Use basic psyker rules, not DM.
Persistent templates last one game turn.
No scatter for jump packs, models don't catch fire.
CC is resolved with single modified opposed die roll.
No virus grenade, vortex by mutual agreement 1 per side
Minor list mods for greater flexibility

So yeah, some funny stuff goes away, but you can get in bigger games in less time, which we like. The one die roll for CC really speeds things up. It's crazy how much time is spend rolling dice, sorting dice, re-rolling and resorting.

2nd had flaws, but the core was solid and the fixes were pretty easy and obvious IMO.

 tauist wrote:

I see you have not played KT21. The distances are colors, not shapes (the shapes were added to the game in post by corporate mooks), and list building is very much a thing in KT21. You just dont pay points for anything other than extra equipment, but there are still plenty of restrictions on what you can bring.

You're right. The kindergarten colors/shapes thing and the fixed teams were complete turnoffs. When the Eldar could choose to take two fire teams of Guardians, Storm Guardians, Rangers or Dire Avengers instead of a proper kill team like in KT18 I noped on out. So I don't find your suggestion that 2nd Edition get reworked by the guy responsible for those changes to be an inspired recommendation.