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I always liked the Daemon Hunters FAQ which answered the question 'are Nemesis Force Weapons one- or two-handed?'by saying that they're obviously one-handed because look at the models; while those same models have clearly one-handed Storm Bolters which were actually two-handed according to the rules...

 Lord Damocles wrote:
I always liked the Daemon Hunters FAQ which answered the question 'are Nemesis Force Weapons one- or two-handed?'by saying that they're obviously one-handed because look at the models; while those same models have clearly one-handed Storm Bolters which were actually two-handed according to the rules...

The 3e errata had that distinct 'copy and pasted from a white dwarf mailbag article' look to them. i.e. the Blood Angels FAQ has : "A. I'm sure that no reasonable opponent would object to using a house rule that stops dozer blades affecting this test. When not playing against reasonable opponents, you’ll just have to let them have the re-roll and grin and bear it!"

In the 4e FAQ for the same codex it was simply a bullet point that read "Dozer blades do not allow you to re-roll the dice when using over-charged engines", similarly the GK force weapon entry was reduced to "Nemesis force weapons are one-handed weapons"

A.T. wrote:
It's the eldar avatar question all over again - immune to melta and flamer weapons, but what about inferno weapons or incinerators...
Both FAQs gave effectively the same answer, that flamer/melta/plasma weapons under a different name (as per their armoury page description) were still flamer/melta/plasma weapons for rules purposes.

It was the avatar problem but worse. At least with the avatar it was pretty intuitive that "this flamer template weapon with flamer stats and a model that looks like a giant flamer is in fact a flamer", with pulse weapons there's no way you could get the correct answer without reading the right fluff bit. They didn't have stats like any other plasma weapon and didn't have models like plasma weapons, not even the Tau plasma weapons.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
...with pulse weapons there's no way you could get the correct answer without reading the right fluff bit. They didn't have stats like any other plasma weapon and didn't have models like plasma weapons, not even the Tau plasma weapons.

The same is true of the Eldar starcannon.

And while that certainly needed an FAQ for people who didn't read the full armoury entries it was not an errata - Tau pulse weapons have always been plasma weapons, it's just that 'plasma' isn't a rule in of itself.


The Avatar on the other hand was an actual errata as RAW it was only immune to flamers and heavy flamers. Damned if you do and damned if you don't - list the weapons and you miss some (or more get added), don't list the weapons and people disagree on what counts.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'd imagine that if he'd won, 40k's edition changes would be more along the lines of BattleTech's: Small tweaks to the rules and no wholesale non-iterative changes. Certainly no churn.

And yes, I'm sure some smart alec is going to come along and say that new editions are a big money spinner and that if their rules weren't constantly being changed that they would've gone out of business years ago (and I can even guess exactly which person would say that): You can still do new Starter boxes, even if the rules haven't changed much (or at all). You can still refresh codices and miniature lines without taking a scorched Earth approach to previous edition rules and concepts.

Back when sites like Portent were breathlessly reporting inside GW gossip, the battle between the designers and Kirby's management style was a frequent point of discussion.

One of the points I made back then based on GW's own sales figures plus anecdata from ICV2 was that given the massive price rises taking place in the GW product lines, sales had to be in steep decline. There was simply no way to reconcile a cumulative 100% price increase in the space of a few years and double the model count with growth that maybe hit 10%.

GW was selling less and less product to fewer and fewer customers, and for a while the LotR line covered that up, but the thread in the "news" forum that GW got hit by a cash crunch that almost did them in rings true.

And yes, Battle Tech provided a good counterexample of growing through player expansion rather than finding and fleecing whales.

Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

That's like a more respectable version of that horridly bad green stuff scorpion "Land Raider" in Joe Orteza's army that was featured in White Dwarf decades ago. I would have had no problem refusing to play against Orteza's atrocities, but THIS I would gladly play against.

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

I was amazed at the looks until i noticed the name.

I look forward to it, time to break out my warhound.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

I was amazed at the looks until i noticed the name.

The Scorpion? Failing to see any sort of issue.

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

I was amazed at the looks until i noticed the name.

The Scorpion? Failing to see any sort of issue.

It was a joke.
But the correct form would be:

Der Skorpion.

Common mistake on the pronoun side, gender of a word is in german wierd. Then german uses K instead C on scorpion.

Interesting, I appreciate the language lesson!

Hey, I assume this is a place to ask questions regarding older editions of the game?

I'm just getting re-aquainted with 2nd edition, Bought the 2nd edition starter from ebay and have the 2nd ed bible which already is a great resource, but was looking towards being able to include more modern 40K units to the game.

Is there any resource online somewhere with rules for 2nd edition 40K, for stuff such as drop pods, T'au & AdMech? Alternatively, do you suppose it would be trivial to port 3rd edition 40K codexes to work with 2nd edition? 2nd Edition rules with 3rd edition codex support could sound ideal, at least in theory..

Asking for cajual play obvsly, I'm all about that Garagehammer

Thanks!

You would have to really stretch to make it work. 2nd was more like necromunda, much more complex for small skirmish armies ideally with a game master running as a referee. it is much like how 8th ed+ is not really compatible with 3rd-7th asides as "counts as".

 aphyon wrote:
You would have to really stretch to make it work. 2nd was more like necromunda, much more complex for small skirmish armies ideally with a game master running as a referee. it is much like how 8th ed+ is not really compatible with 3rd-7th asides as "counts as".

I know the scale of 2nd edition is different from modern times. I am envisioning games comparable to modern Combat Patrol in terms of model counts/size. I am pretty sure someone has already made some attempts at bringing more modern units to 2nd edition, I just need to find them on the WWWs

I am not expecting to field Knights or superheavies in 2nd edition (unless its a special snowflake mission where one army faces a single "boss"), just need datasheets for basic troops, most common support/auxilaries and transports for all modern factions. This is just so other players in my group could also consider participating with models from their existing collections

Actually, thinking about it, datasheets for current 40K Combat patrols would be precisely what I'm after

EDIT: Found some more datafexes from this resource (Killed by Covid, apparently..?):

http://projectanvil.blogspot.com/search/label/Resources

So now I'm sorted on the remaining Astartes rules (these include Drop Pod and current HH dreads), all that I'm missing are the Admech, T'au & Drukhari.. Admech will be tricky, I'll need to look up 3rd edition dexes for T'au & Drukhari and see if they could be just shoehorned in somehow

 tauist wrote:
Hey, I assume this is a place to ask questions regarding older editions of the game?

I'm just getting re-aquainted with 2nd edition, Bought the 2nd edition starter from ebay and have the 2nd ed bible which already is a great resource, but was looking towards being able to include more modern 40K units to the game.

Is there any resource online somewhere with rules for 2nd edition 40K, for stuff such as drop pods, T'au & AdMech? Alternatively, do you suppose it would be trivial to port 3rd edition 40K codexes to work with 2nd edition? 2nd Edition rules with 3rd edition codex support could sound ideal, at least in theory..

Asking for cajual play obvsly, I'm all about that Garagehammer

Thanks!

As noted before 2ed is a different beast compared to what we have in today's iteration of 40K. There are still plenty of folks who like 2ed and are willing to play it. Take a look at the signature for Commissar von Toussaint just a few posts above on this. Sending him a PM may be a good idea as well.

Yeah, I've checked that site and have read his suggestions for improving the game. But I dont yet have enough knowledge about the ins and outs of the edition so cannot form an informed decision about the suggested changes.

I'm coming to 2nd ed from the POV of a "veteran" Kill Team player, who just wants to expand a bit from squad vs squad level into Combat Patrol size games featuring walkers, beasts and vehicles. I specifically do not want to reproduce modern 40K style larger battles, nor participate in herohammery cheesefests, just a couple squads of troops with a HQ and a couple larger models, and sticking to rather modest wargear choices. No virus bombs, Assassins, named characters nor power swords on every Ork boy, thanks.

I have located all the codexes ever written for 2nd edition, will take some time to plow through it all + Dark Millennium + all the FAQs and GW developer comments from the latest Battle Bible. I think especially the collected FAQs will need thorrough reading, in order to clear up common misconceptions new players might have regarding the rules. Then there is the task of reformatting all the documentation, adding sensible indexing etc.. Fair to say I have my work cut out for me for a while

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

Where the heck is that from/what was converted for that/that is utterly awesome!

AdMech did have some units in the 'Black Codex' army list booklet that came with the 2nd edition box, although the current admech lineup is quite different.

Dark Eldar had (I think) two Citadel Journal lists, but again, quite different to how they were presented when they finally got a proper codex. At least one of the Journal lists had them as Slaanesh cultists.

There are some fan-made codexes floating around online for the various armies that were introduced from 3rd ed onwards (Google turned up a Tau codex on Scribd) but a lot has sadly been lost, like the Pan Fo, to the mists of time and the graveyard of Geocities.

If you want to have a go yourself, you would potentially be better off trying to convert 5th edition and onwards codexes rather than 3rd ed, as power creep and additional options make them a little closer to how they might have looked in 2nd ed. Converting 3rd ed lists would wind up with rather underpowered characters and a severe lack of wargear options.

 tauist wrote:
Yeah, I've checked that site and have read his suggestions for improving the game. But I dont yet have enough knowledge about the ins and outs of the edition so cannot form an informed decision about the suggested changes.

When my gaming group decided to "go retro", we agreed to limit ourselves to the armies of that edition. It was easier and we felt that the armies provided plenty of design space for whatever we wanted to do.

We did, however, allow "modern" (3-4th edition) models to play, but we found they didn't work very well. The Baal Predator got one, maybe two (very big!) shots per game. The rest of the time it cleared jams. All of which is to say that the weapon rules were different, so the vehicles of that edition were optimized for them in a way later editions weren't.

You mention the Tau, and while I'm sympathetic to people who like the aesthetic, their design space belonged to the Eldar. The Eldar "look" is a bit selective, and my Eldar armies use VOID figures, which give them a sleeker, more high-tech and less weird look, while preserving the sense of advanced hover technology.

I'd suggest playing the game "as written" with in-edition armies for a bit, before doing conversions. There are fewer armies, but I feel they have more depth.

 Overread wrote:

Gore Child’s Teeth wrote:
Aphyon… I have a friend who’s just beside himself with angry excitement to meet your army.

Where the heck is that from/what was converted for that/that is utterly awesome!

Sent you a PM

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 tauist wrote:
Yeah, I've checked that site and have read his suggestions for improving the game. But I dont yet have enough knowledge about the ins and outs of the edition so cannot form an informed decision about the suggested changes.

When my gaming group decided to "go retro", we agreed to limit ourselves to the armies of that edition. It was easier and we felt that the armies provided plenty of design space for whatever we wanted to do.

We did, however, allow "modern" (3-4th edition) models to play, but we found they didn't work very well. The Baal Predator got one, maybe two (very big!) shots per game. The rest of the time it cleared jams. All of which is to say that the weapon rules were different, so the vehicles of that edition were optimized for them in a way later editions weren't.

You mention the Tau, and while I'm sympathetic to people who like the aesthetic, their design space belonged to the Eldar. The Eldar "look" is a bit selective, and my Eldar armies use VOID figures, which give them a sleeker, more high-tech and less weird look, while preserving the sense of advanced hover technology.

I'd suggest playing the game "as written" with in-edition armies for a bit, before doing conversions. There are fewer armies, but I feel they have more depth.

There's a Necron player and an Admech player in our group, they dont have any other models. I'll need to come up with something.

And Baal predators? Aint no need to use such a thing, regular predators, land raiders and rhinos will do fine.

I dont need to have datafexes for every exotic unit out there, just need fexes for the classics

PS: Agree to disagree on the T'au. AFAIK, Eldar aint exactly useless in melee.. no drones neither

 tauist wrote:

There's a Necron player and an Admech player in our group, they dont have any other models. I'll need to come up with something.

Codex Army lists, released with the 2E boxed set has ad mech units in the imperial agents section, since they weren't a fully fleshed out faction.

They could take:
Magos
Enginseer
Tech Priest Squads (essentially imperial guard but with lots of special weapons)
Electro priests
Servitors
Support weapons
and any vehicles that space marines and imperial guard could take. bear in mind this is before mass access to unique vehicles so its a limited selection.

Agents were intended to be allies, but you could work it into a full army.

Necrons were originally released in 2E (Forget which White Dwarf the rules were in) and had a very limited unit selection.
Lords
Warriors
Immortals
Destroyers
Scarabs

They were intended more as a neutral faction under control of a third player than as a fully fleshed out faction, but they could work

madtankbloke wrote:
Necrons were originally released in 2E (Forget which White Dwarf the rules were in) and had a very limited unit selection.

WD 217 (warriors and scarabs) and 218 (lords, destroyers, army list IIRC)

If you had the wrong list against them they were unstoppable - the battle report pitting them against 2e sisters of battle was so absurdly one-sided that it led to the Sanctuary 101 background event, even with the sisters catching a big early break in the game when the scarabs blew themselves up (IIRC if they had run into combat with the sisters instead they would have been entirely immune to attack and would have effectively ended most of the sisters shooting as well).

Immortals weren't added until 3rd edition.

Immortals has models in 2nd Ed.

No they didn't. Immortals were added in 'Chapter Approved: Necrons' in White Dwarf 230 (UK), pgs.71-5.

Note that this is also the genesis of the Heavy Destroyer.

Yeah, WD217 had the original article, with Necron Warrios and Scarabs, and WD218 added Lords and Destroyers.

A.T. wrote:
If you had the wrong list against them they were unstoppable - the battle report pitting them against 2e sisters of battle was so absurdly one-sided that it led to the Sanctuary 101 background event, even with the sisters catching a big early break in the game when the scarabs blew themselves up (IIRC if they had run into combat with the sisters instead they would have been entirely immune to attack and would have effectively ended most of the sisters shooting as well).

Supposedly Necrons were developed for 3rd and a crude set of rules was thrown together to bring them into 2nd.

They did not work well. I played against them a couple of times and it was really boring because they were almost impossible to kill.

I'm sure there are modifications for 2nd out there somewhere.

Does anyone know where/when the rules for the 3rd edition Ork warboss on bike appeared? It was for the Speed Freeks army list in Codex: Armageddon, but wasn't included in the original list.

The rules had appeared by February 2004, because the Chapter Approved article on Ork Clanz references them as an option for Evil Sunz armies using the normal Codex: Orks + supplementary clan rules. However, I cannot find them in the three Chapter Approved annual compendiums (2nd, 3rd, and 4th Books of the Astronomicon).