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 think its inevitable that GW will one day realize they are better off offering their publications from any previous edition to their customers. It could be a strictly MTO affair, if nothing else. Obviously GW would still encourage the latest and greatest edition for their customers, but would still drop these MTO runs every now and then, to keep hardcore fans happy.

Maybe one day you can go "Play 40K?" and people will be like: "sure, which edition?" and even pickup games can be found for a specific edition of the game in an active player area..

The way I see it, there are a few groups of people to consider.
#1 people who won't be interested in playing 40k no matter what.
#2 people who don't currently play 40k but who might enjoy either older editions, or newer editions, or any edition
#3 people who used to play 40k during the older editions but aren't interested in newer editions
#4 people who play newer editions but aren't interested in older editions
#5 people who play newer editions but who would enjoy newer editions.

Scanning and making older editions available for print on demand or digital downloads can appeal to different groups of people.
#1 people who on a lark might get something just to see if its interesting or not.
#2 people who want to complete their collection of older edition books, or replace damaged books.
#3 people who hear about the game from friends and who want to get in on it too
#4 people who play 40k but who are interested in trying something new(or old so to speak)

If I were GW I would see doing something like this as a one time investment to get all the old editions digitized, and then it would be available as a basically free to maintain long term revenue stream. Making the hobbyists who are are interested in the older editions happy will help them to keep their groups going, and keeping groups who are interested in 40k going helps to broaden up the hobby as a whole, which can both indirectly or directly increase sales of newer models as more people get interested in the hobby as a whole.

And I don't really buy the downside of the "people will realize how good it used to be" to turn off the newer players. I think people who are likely to not like current GW will already have that opinion, and people who are likely to form that opinion are going to do so anyways, while people who are not likely to develop that opinion will not develop it from this stuff. If anything, it may just make more people more interested in the game as a whole.
They could foster even more growth by having some "oldhammer" tournaments, or painting competitions. I haven't checked so I don't really know if golden daemon is still a thing, but if it is, they could have oldhammer categories.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I don't think that statement rings true at all. In 3rd lots of armies got new, cheaper plastic troops kits, and codex price dropped as well. The focus was definitely on expanding, not gouging. That was also the era of calling up the company and ordering specific bits by part number. Customer service was amazing.

The feeling of gouging for me started when they moved to hardcover codecies. That was 6th ed. iirc. Imo rules started to feel more "churney" during 5th, but that's probably more subjective.

The focus was absolutely on expanding the number of models sold, and that increased the size of the games.

But the concept of refining the system to create a "definitive" rule set was gone. Maybe I was more sensitive to it, but the way WD FAQs outlined how you could have an ork vehicle move without actually counting as moving, was the kind of Jesuitical rules analysis that the old GW would have openly mocked.

It wasn't all at once and everywhere. The 6th ed. of WHFB was a vast improvement over Herohammer, and caused me to make deep investments into the game. But even there, it didn't last. Had to make front ranks wider because more models have to be sold.

As to customer service, that is in no way relevant to my remark. I did interact with them in those days, especially the Rulz Boyz and I was a regular patron of Trollboss Bob's Bargain Basement.

The culture didn't change all at once, and different people can pick different moments when it struck them, and that was mine.

 tauist wrote:
Maybe one day you can go "Play 40K?" and people will be like: "sure, which edition?" and even pickup games can be found for a specific edition of the game in an active player area..

I think that gets less likely the longer they continue this 3 year edition cycle, honestly. There are just too many different editions, which in many cases now drastically change the game.

I do think at some point the 3 year edition is going to break. Either GW puts so many games on it that GW itself breaks and has to slow down or gamers start to edition drift and not keep up or slow down buying or start investing into other games.

Which could well mean something like One Page Rules or another proxy rules system rises up and GW keeps selling models but people play other games with them.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

The focus was absolutely on expanding the number of models sold, and that increased the size of the games.

But the concept of refining the system to create a "definitive" rule set was gone. Maybe I was more sensitive to it, but the way WD FAQs outlined how you could have an ork vehicle move without actually counting as moving, was the kind of Jesuitical rules analysis that the old GW would have openly mocked.

It wasn't all at once and everywhere. The 6th ed. of WHFB was a vast improvement over Herohammer, and caused me to make deep investments into the game. But even there, it didn't last. Had to make front ranks wider because more models have to be sold.

As to customer service, that is in no way relevant to my remark. I did interact with them in those days, especially the Rulz Boyz and I was a regular patron of Trollboss Bob's Bargain Basement.

The culture didn't change all at once, and different people can pick different moments when it struck them, and that was mine.

Yeah, 6th/7th edition WHFB was pretty much the peak of that game. Then the pendulum swung back to Hero/Magehammer with 8th, and now we have 40k with Fantasy models.

My Lizardmen and Wood Elves miss the olden days.

 Kagetora wrote:
And yet, I can find the entirety of Mordheim (all books, Town Cryers, and every half-assed experimental rule in existence) scanned in, in printable form, for free, on the internet. Because someone cared enough to do it. Same with Epic Armageddon. And likely other GW products I haven't looked for.

Yeah, I have an original physical copy of Rogue Trader and then every single codex from 2nd to 9th edition, Mordeim, Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Inquisitor and Battle Fleet Gothic rulebook s on my phone. (I also have a physical BFG rulebook too... with the "Dakka Dakka Store Copy" sticker on it. I think it ended up in my collection after the roof collapsed at Battlefield: Manchester [Dakkas 3rd version/location]).

 Da Boss wrote:
I've said it before on here but 4e was the last edition with a proper "hobby section" in the rulebook. 5e switched to being all about the kits GW released and didn't really have the same amount about kitbashing, or painting your army to a hobbyists standard, or making terrain. That was a great part of the philosophy back then, which was really shown best in the various LOTR books where they wanted to make wargaming accessible.

On the playing with new models thing, the main issue for me is the egregious scale creep. Not interested in playing with the upscaled models generally.

I have to agree on both points here. Never played the 4th for 40K but I could tell a difference when I got a copy of the BRB. It made me start to collect the edition myself, even though I am not sure that I ever will play that edition, still one can hope.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kagetora wrote:

Yeah, 6th/7th edition WHFB was pretty much the peak of that game. Then the pendulum swung back to Hero/Magehammer with 8th, and now we have 40k with Fantasy models.

My Lizardmen and Wood Elves miss the olden days.

Yep, that is about right on AOS in my view. 40K with fantasy models.

 Da Boss wrote:
5e switched to being all about the kits GW released and didn't really have the same amount about kitbashing, or painting your army to a hobbyists standard, or making terrain.

They hadn't gotten to the 'no model no rules' of later editions in 5th though, and to be fair to them most of what they were doing was filling in the gaps in the model range rather than pulling stuff out*

5e was also the golden age of ebay and bitz sites when things cost less than retail. GW may not have encouraged it but it was a hell of a lot more affordable.


*With the exception of the jump pack canoness (retroactively shakes fist at Cruddace and his half-assed phoned in excuse for a product) :p

I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

On the churn thing, I think we'll end up a bit like RPGs where people just pick the ruleset they like but the most recent one is the biggest most of the time.

I personally use OPR but that has fairly fast churn of it's own, it's just that the rules are free so it doesn't bother people as much.

OPR tends to be more iterations as well rather than a wholesale "change ALL The Rules just cause".

IT's honestly also a system that's been around for a while but has grown significantly over the last few years. I'd expect a newer rules set to evolve more rapidly as it finds its feet ,but also as its userbase and collection size grows etc...

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

I think 5th was definitely a shift. Stuff like Doctrines/Chapter traits was out, and named characters became a more prominent feature for army/ability unlocks, iirc. Gameplay customization started taking a hit, in general, I think.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

I think 5th was definitely a shift. Stuff like Doctrines/Chapter traits was out, and named characters became a more prominent feature for army/ability unlocks, iirc. Gameplay customization started taking a hit, in general, I think.

Plus the garbage wound allocation rules

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

I think 5th was definitely a shift. Stuff like Doctrines/Chapter traits was out, and named characters became a more prominent feature for army/ability unlocks, iirc. Gameplay customization started taking a hit, in general, I think.

Plus the garbage wound allocation rules

Oohh, yeah. I wasn't going to go into specific mechanics, but yeah 5th brought some other obnoxious things with it. That was the first edition that felt like a downgrade to me.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

I think 5th was definitely a shift. Stuff like Doctrines/Chapter traits was out, and named characters became a more prominent feature for army/ability unlocks, iirc. Gameplay customization started taking a hit, in general, I think.

Plus the garbage wound allocation rules

Oohh, yeah. I wasn't going to go into specific mechanics, but yeah 5th brought some other obnoxious things with it. That was the first edition that felt like a downgrade to me.

As a play through i saw the general progression from edition to edition it was an overall improvment from 3rd to 4th to 5th and i felt it was overall better but yeah the wound allocation thing, i understand the reason, but i think the design team underestimated the player base abusing the system. it is why we use the 4th ed wound allocation system in our 5th ed games to avoid said abuses It leads to a situation where game mechanics are generally the best in 5th ed, but the best codexes are generally better from 3rd and 4th save the blood angels, space wolves, necrons and dark eldar from 5th which were better codexes over the predecessors.

It was a downgrade across the board, from gameplay to background. This was the edition that began transitioning to comic book style superheroics and 1v1 knock down battles with the space marine codex and Marneus' infamous avatar punch up. That started the ball rolling that led to sanguinor v thirsters and draigo...

I was less aware of the rules degradation because the quality of background writing had nosedived so much.

It also gave us the current better than everyone super beatdown necrons and sidelined the originally lovecraftian cosmic horror ctan.

I disagree on the rules... Wound allocation and vehicle damage were not perfect in 5th, but it was a far better ruleset overall than 4th, IMO. 4th ed was not fun, particularly for transport vehicle-heavy armies.

On the other hand, 5th ed was not fun for footslogging infantry focused armies (unless they happened to be a heavy infantry/bikes death star abusing wound allocation).

5th had me stop caring about owning every supplement to an edition. I would have quit outright back then but I was assured 6th would fix everything.


I have since gone back to playing 3rd and I couldn't be happier.

 insaniak wrote:
I disagree on the rules... Wound allocation and vehicle damage were not perfect in 5th, but it was a far better ruleset overall than 4th, IMO. 4th ed was not fun, particularly for transport vehicle-heavy armies.

Transports suffered in 4th, but that went a long way in keeping 40k a game mostly focussed around infantry. In 5th, deployment on our local tables usually looked like a parking lot. The increase to vehicle toughness, the return to TLOS, price reduction on transports combined with an increase in ranged lethality incentivised armies to load up on METAL BAWKSES. Terrain variety suffered and armies looked uglier, imo.

It would have been understandable to soften the blow to infantry in transports when the transport dies, but the correctional swing was (as typical) way too severe.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Just Tony wrote:
5th had me stop caring about owning every supplement to an edition. I would have quit outright back then but I was assured 6th would fix everything.

Same here. I had (have) just about every book up until 5th. 5th was when I started buying just the minimum to play.

 Insectum7 wrote:
In 5th, deployment on our local tables usually looked like a parking lot. The increase to vehicle toughness, the return to TLOS, price reduction on transports combined with an increase in ranged lethality incentivised armies to load up on METAL BAWKSES. Terrain variety suffered and armies looked uglier, imo.

The answer to this was the same as it has been in pretty much every edition of the game (at least up to 6th) - use more terrain.

40K has always been at its best when you cram as much terrain as possible onto the table.

4th ed's abstract LoS was the best system they ever used.

It still pisses me off that people call modern LoS 'true'. Because it's only 'true' in ironically the most abstract sense.

It's true to a model on a table standing in its artsy pose raised off the ground by a base and tactical rock.

It's not 'true' to the behaviour the soldier that model represents would have.

Abstract LoS is far more true to the soldier, in that it assumes agency and behaviour.

Edit: OH! I think 5th is the edition that GW really started leaning into giving things-other-factions-had to Marines, and make them better of course. Like Celestine was the Imperial "Daemon" entity, but then BA got The Sanguinor. And I think Orks lost Boarboyz, but then Space Wolves got their Wolf Cavalry. Chaos had Obliterators as a unique Heavy unit, then Marines got Centurions. A bunch of that started happening around then too, iirc.

My memory is fuzzy around the details, but I seem to remember having a more extensive list from the time.

Yeah it seemed like they were looking at the xenos armies and thinking, we could sell a marine version of that army instead.

 insaniak wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
In 5th, deployment on our local tables usually looked like a parking lot. The increase to vehicle toughness, the return to TLOS, price reduction on transports combined with an increase in ranged lethality incentivised armies to load up on METAL BAWKSES. Terrain variety suffered and armies looked uglier, imo.

The answer to this was the same as it has been in pretty much every edition of the game (at least up to 6th) - use more terrain.

40K has always been at its best when you cram as much terrain as possible onto the table.

Normally I'm right there with you, but it's not that simple in this case. The transition to 5th changed the nature of a lot of terrain. It's not so much "use more terrain". It's more "the terrain that you use which would formally block LOS and give cover, well you can see right through that now. FU"


So yes, you *could* change your terrain around, but there are undesireable side effects. For one, tables looked uglier. If you need solid walls to block LOS, forests start to dissapear and you get big block terrain like bunkers or that tower thing they put out around that time. You also remove a whole class of terrain which was terrain-that-blocks-LOS-but-not-movement, which is what forest/area terrain could be earlier.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
4th ed's abstract LoS was the best system they ever used.

It still pisses me off that people call modern LoS 'true'. Because it's only 'true' in ironically the most abstract sense.

It's true to a model on a table standing in its artsy pose raised off the ground by a base and tactical rock.

It's not 'true' to the behaviour the soldier that model represents would have.

Abstract LoS is far more true to the soldier, in that it assumes agency and behaviour.

^Yah 100%. With emphasis on the assumption of agency.

 Insectum7 wrote:
You also remove a whole class of terrain which was terrain-that-blocks-LOS-but-not-movement, which is what forest/area terrain could be earlier.

What it turned it into, though, was terrain that could block LOS but not movement. You could still block LOS with forests, you just needed more than a single MDF base with a tree stuck at each end of it. Larger areas of forest blocked LOS better than a small stand of trees... and that works just fine in my book, and makes area terrain functionally completely different to solid terrain like buildings.

 Hellebore wrote:
4th ed's abstract LoS was the best system they ever used.

It still pisses me off that people call modern LoS 'true'. Because it's only 'true' in ironically the most abstract sense.

It's true to a model on a table standing in its artsy pose raised off the ground by a base and tactical rock.

It's not 'true' to the behaviour the soldier that model represents would have.

Abstract LoS is far more true to the soldier, in that it assumes agency and behaviour.

From a purely mechanical point of view, abstract LoS gives a more 'realistic' result, certainly. From a gameplay PoV, GW's stance has largely always been that it is more immersive for players to get down and look at what their models can 'see'. That's why 4th ed's system didn't adopt the abstract entirely - it only applied to area terrain and close combats. The rest of the time, it was the same 'bend down and have a look' system of LoS that the game has used in every other edition.

It's immersive in name only because at no point is your model actually going to be in the position its modelled in to see its target.

Simply telling people it's immersive does a lot of the thematic heavy lifting...

It was as close as we got to a proper LoS system, they just couldn't commit all the way through to a full terrain ruleset. And you'd still need to have a look from down below to see if the LoS could go past pieces of terrain, it's just that it would be from the base rather than the 'eyes' of your cirque du soleil Mime reject.

Immersion is in the eye of the beholder and there's nothing stopping beholders from looking at their models at table level at any time. That the mechanics don't rely on subjective viewpoints shouldn't have any impact on that.

There just isn't a way to have a forest or patch of rubble block TLoS while still allowing you to place models inside it. The base will be floating on top of the underbrush or boulders.

TLoS only works on the table if you're using thin walls or impassible obstructions, which (unsurprisingly) seems to be what all terrain in 40k has become.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked 5e don't get me wrong, but looking at the two rule books the change is stark to me and bodes ill for what came later.

I think 5th was definitely a shift. Stuff like Doctrines/Chapter traits was out, and named characters became a more prominent feature for army/ability unlocks, iirc. Gameplay customization started taking a hit, in general, I think.

Plus the garbage wound allocation rules

I missed 5th edition (was playing WFB and Epic instead). Can someone explain the wound-allocation shenanigans that went on?

Because there were plenty of them previously too. In 3rd, before the revision to 3.5, Monstrous Creatures counted as "units," and Characters could join them. I remember abusing that in a couple of games by having the Avatar (MC and Character) and a Farseer (Character) join a Wraithlord (MC) and form a "unit" (yes, I use that term lightly). It was legal by the rules, but it let me literally ignore the most common shooting on the board, i.e. the 5-man Tac Squad with Plasma Rifle and Missile Launcher (or Lascannon).

Anything with S6 or less went to the WL, the Plasma hits went to the Farseer (T4 back then, so no auto-kill), and Heavy Weapon hits got shouldered by the Avatar. The Farseer, of course, had Fortune, so re-rolls on Armor, Cover, and Inv. Saves for the "unit."

Opponents had to dedicate so much firepower to delete that unit while it stomped across the board 6" a turn (doing literally nothing most of the time, or even all game) that they'd ignore the rest of the army tearing them to shreds. I never took it to a tournament or anything, but it was literally stupid.

"So, you got a Krak Missile hit, 3 Bolter hits, and the Plasma Gun. Ok, I'll allocate them. Plasma on the Seer. wounds on a 2+, but he has a 4+ with a reroll (75% save rate) and it only does one of his three wounds. Bolter on the WL. You need S5 to wound T8, so it does nothing. Krak on the Avatar. Again, won't kill him, and he has a 5+ re-rolled. Another bolter on the WL, same result. Last bolter on the Avatar, needs a 6 to wound."

Went away when they FAQ'd the rules to say MC's couldn't be joined by Characters.

So...was 5th edition actually worse than that?

There are so many simple ways of simplifying and de gamifying wound allocation. GW just loves to throw whole systems out rather than improve them.

And a lot of players assume the core mechanics are faulty because the implementation was bad. Rather than understanding that you can implement it differently and get a better result.