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Oof, its bad luck like that which would make me take a farseer with guide, at least 1's on that would make the power work... though you'd have perils of the warp hehe

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, fun in 2nd edition very much relied on playing with like-minded people. The Ork Pulsa Rokkit army, the Wolf Guard Terminator army, the Blood Claw all-chainsword/powerfist army, the all-flying-high and pop-up attack Eldar army... they were all problematic if you weren't expecting them.

The groups I played with varied over the years between deliberately avoiding anything too nasty, and deliberately trying to make the worst lists we could. Either way worked, so long as both players were showing up to the table with the same expectations.

I think this it true of all of GW's offerings. Even 5th ed. Fantasy was okay if one took a collaborative approach to the game. If not, it was a nightmare.

The thing about 2nd is that it is very intuitive at its core, and it lends itself to a narrative format of creating linked battles.

Even as a pick-up game, I still found it enjoyable, and with the very common rules mods, it is even better.

As far as weapons/dice, one of the strengths of 2nd was that those high-end damage possibilities did put a limit on tactics and also rewarded shrewd game play.

The best compliment I can give it was that when I finished Conqueror: Fields of Victory - which I felt was what WHFB should have aspired to be - I felt no similar desire to do a Conqueror: 40k because 2nd ed already had that covered. I could think of nothing to add to it.

Yes, it does have imperfections but taken as a whole, it's great and is probably the closest the rules ever aligned with the fluff.

BanjoJohn wrote:
Oof, its bad luck like that which would make me take a farseer with guide, at least 1's on that would make the power work... though you'd have perils of the warp hehe

Yeah, it was a brutal way to lose a game.

Typically I had Farseers in the list, to sit with the Reapers in cover and give them Fortune re-rolls on their saves. I never bought Guide, because what are the chances of what I described happening? As kindly pointed out, 1 in 200 billion.

My opponent, however, had virtually no shooting in his 'Nid list, so the Farseers were out helping other units that game.

I very much enjoyed the simulation and detail of 2nd ed, but there are definitely areas of it I think were too complicated without really gaining anything from it.

IMO, flavour doesn't have to be sacrificed for good rules. Randomness isn't the be all of flavour.

Like, individual scatter for jump packers seems excessive. Unit scatter represents that factor enough, rather than trying to track individual model movements. Similarly setting a model on fire - a fire token on the unit that requires a test to remove gives you that flavour without needing to track individual models.

Necromunda is the scale at which I would expect individual model tracking, rather than a squad based game.

If you absolutely must do it in a squad based game, then resolving it in the same turn reduces to data load, rather than tracking it across multiple turns.

Love seeing all the talk about the fun side of 40K, This is something i can enjoy while i recover, since it will probably be at least another month before i can get back to the game store.

 Hellebore wrote:

Necromunda is the scale at which I would expect individual model tracking, rather than a squad based game.

While I mostly agree with this, I think 2nd ed really falls into a bit of a middle ground - while it's technically a squad based game, the actual number of squads on the board is generally fairly low (unless you're playing Orks) so the rules get away with those individual model interactions for the most part. The two main places (off the top of my head) I would say go too far are the aforementioned individual jump pack scatter, and whole squads throwing grenades... Anything else I've forgotten that involves 10 or more models having to individually resolve scatter for anything would also fit into that basket.

I'd be inclined to do away with individual firing arcs too, although I'm interested in how 2nd ed fans feel about that. Maybe keep them for heavy weapons? (Or certain forms of heavy weapons, like those Eldar platforms or the Guard tripod/cart ones).

Depends if you want to have unit splitting for shooting.

40k seems to have a bad habit of using different 'scale' resolutions for different aspects of the same game. 10th has unit based rules, but then allows every model to shoot at a different target in a unit.

2nd ed allowed only special weapons to fire separately, so you have a situation where the detailed 2nd ed requires 10 bolter marines to target the same unit, but 10th has 10 bolter marines able to target 10 different units....

But then 2nd ed has individual fire tracking and 10th has flamers that are just shotguns...




If you want a squad level game, then I would say that facings can exist based on the sergeant. They direct the unit and thus are the facing model you use.

How do you feel about nixxing arcs and just allowing squads to split fire? I guess that gets goofy if retaining "must shoot at closest" and removing arcs.

"Half of the squad must shoot the closest target. The rest of the squad can shoot closest target within Sergeants arc"? Maybe combine that with an Ld check.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I'd be inclined to do away with individual firing arcs too, although I'm interested in how 2nd ed fans feel about that. Maybe keep them for heavy weapons? (Or certain forms of heavy weapons, like those Eldar platforms or the Guard tripod/cart ones).

I like fire arcs, but 90 degrees is a pain in the butt, and caused no end of arguments. For my house rules, I'm going with 180 degrees instead.

 Hellebore wrote:

2nd ed allowed only special weapons to fire separately, so you have a situation where the detailed 2nd ed requires 10 bolter marines to target the same unit, but 10th has 10 bolter marines able to target 10 different units....

Although you could still shoot your 10 2nd ed marines at different targets by facing them in different directions.

 Kagetora wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
Oof, its bad luck like that which would make me take a farseer with guide, at least 1's on that would make the power work... though you'd have perils of the warp hehe

Yeah, it was a brutal way to lose a game.

Typically I had Farseers in the list, to sit with the Reapers in cover and give them Fortune re-rolls on their saves. I never bought Guide, because what are the chances of what I described happening? As kindly pointed out, 1 in 200 billion.

My opponent, however, had virtually no shooting in his 'Nid list, so the Farseers were out helping other units that game.

Yeah, but you don't need to roll all 1's to miss with the normal reapers, but even paranoid me would want a re-roll to miss when you're hitting on 2's. I could see having a farseer with guide and fortune so you can choose situationally which to use.

But oh well, that is a really fun story of a once in a lifetime thing that could happen in a game.

I’m in favour of the 2nd Ed individual fire arcs - for 2nd Ed.

For the uninitiated, games were on a far smaller scale during that period. Not just smaller squads, but smaller armies. Which meant boards were rarely crowded. But, as shooting was pretty potent, and squads smaller? Being able to sneak up where the foe simply isn’t looking was bloody useful - especially with Overwatch being common.

Much beyond that scale and it doesn’t really make much sense.

 insaniak wrote:
While I mostly agree with this, I think 2nd ed really falls into a bit of a middle ground - while it's technically a squad based game, the actual number of squads on the board is generally fairly low (unless you're playing Orks) so the rules get away with those individual model interactions for the most part. The two main places (off the top of my head) I would say go too far are the aforementioned individual jump pack scatter, and whole squads throwing grenades... Anything else I've forgotten that involves 10 or more models having to individually resolve scatter for anything would also fit into that basket.

If one wants to play 2nd exactly as written, it will be hard to put more than three squads on the tabletop and finish it in a normal session (3-4 hours).

However, it is quite easy to prune away the rules, which speeds up gameplay and allows larger forces to take the field.

The fire arcs are nice because 2nd really depends on shooting lanes and overlapping fire to make its tactics work. That's one of the things I love about it - it takes a solid modern tactical system and adds fantastic and sci-fi elements to it.

It has less abstraction than later editions, which does limit army size, but I feel makes it more intuitive.

When 3rd came out, there was a lot of heavy lifting in terms of making the narratives make sense because of the higher level of abstraction.

I will say that movement stat, different vehicle speeds do allow some wild tactical options. Third ed. simply was not as 'fast' in those regards.

 insaniak wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Necromunda is the scale at which I would expect individual model tracking, rather than a squad based game.

While I mostly agree with this, I think 2nd ed really falls into a bit of a middle ground - while it's technically a squad based game, the actual number of squads on the board is generally fairly low (unless you're playing Orks) so the rules get away with those individual model interactions for the most part. The two main places (off the top of my head) I would say go too far are the aforementioned individual jump pack scatter, and whole squads throwing grenades... Anything else I've forgotten that involves 10 or more models having to individually resolve scatter for anything would also fit into that basket.

That was my experience playing Warmachine, which I would assume was a similar scale.

1st edition Warmachine was definitely in a similar sort of game scale to 2nd ed 40K, although it tended to look smaller due to the focus on 'Jacks over squads. As 40K did, Warmachine grew over editions as squads became more prevalent and points were revised.

I think my 2nd ed games averaged 3000pts, because I had quite a lot in my armies.

My space wolf army was based on the army box
http://www.solegends.com/citcat1996usz40k/c1996usz40kp0020-00.htm

Which was over 2k, and I added a predator annihilator, rhino and wolf guard terminators. Plus jump pack blood claws.

So my games usually had close to 50 marines in them. Which is not as big as today, but they weren't small.

3000 points wasn't the standard size for 2nd ed games, though. Games were more commonly 1500 to 2000 points, because anything bigger took too long.

Having said that, people wanted to play bigger (and those of us with plenty of free time often did) ... and the fact that it was so clunky at larger game sizes was a large part of the reason for 3rd edition being what it was.

 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.

We house ruled out the entire 4th edition vehicle damage rules (entrapment being the biggest offender) in friendly games. Everything just flowed better after that.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

If one wants to play 2nd exactly as written, it will be hard to put more than three squads on the tabletop and finish it in a normal session (3-4 hours).

I certainly remember a lot more than three squads being common though. Even in the WD battle reports. My expensive Marine army featured 4-5 (Assault Squad-often Combat Squadded, Devastators, Scouts and Terminators. But many of my opponents had a whole lot more. Guard, Orks, Tyranids, and Guardian-heavy Eldar, or just Eldar with lots of small Aspect Warrior squads. There were definitely 2000 point games that had 100+ models on the table. Termagants were only 6 points or something. Guard 10 or 11? If any player decided to lean into the swarm the model count got big quick.

 insaniak wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I'd be inclined to do away with individual firing arcs too, although I'm interested in how 2nd ed fans feel about that. Maybe keep them for heavy weapons? (Or certain forms of heavy weapons, like those Eldar platforms or the Guard tripod/cart ones).

I like fire arcs, but 90 degrees is a pain in the butt, and caused no end of arguments. For my house rules, I'm going with 180 degrees instead.

A less specific arc seems like a reasonable compromise, actually. I still worry a bit about arguments but you're probably right in that they'd be less common.

 insaniak wrote:
3000 points wasn't the standard size for 2nd ed games, though. Games were more commonly 1500 to 2000 points, because anything bigger took too long.

Having said that, people wanted to play bigger (and those of us with plenty of free time often did) ... and the fact that it was so clunky at larger game sizes was a large part of the reason for 3rd edition being what it was.

Pickup games at the local store ran 1500 to 2000 points. Psykers were a major time sink and people had army lists with and without them. Most didn't use them. In fact, I only recall two games using the psychic phase, both against Eldar.

That being said, there were bigger games. I recall a 5,000 point A Bridge Too Far scenario with scheduled replacement points. As models got killed we sorted them into new squads which entered from various board edges. We played the long way, and the Space Marines were trying to seize a road and bridge from the Orks. It was a lot of fun.

I still have the bridge.

BanjoJohn wrote:

 Kagetora wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
Oof, its bad luck like that which would make me take a farseer with guide, at least 1's on that would make the power work... though you'd have perils of the warp hehe

Yeah, it was a brutal way to lose a game.

Typically I had Farseers in the list, to sit with the Reapers in cover and give them Fortune re-rolls on their saves. I never bought Guide, because what are the chances of what I described happening? As kindly pointed out, 1 in 200 billion.

My opponent, however, had virtually no shooting in his 'Nid list, so the Farseers were out helping other units that game.

Yeah, but you don't need to roll all 1's to miss with the normal reapers, but even paranoid me would want a re-roll to miss when you're hitting on 2's. I could see having a farseer with guide and fortune so you can choose situationally which to use.

But oh well, that is a really fun story of a once in a lifetime thing that could happen in a game.

A fair point, and part of what made it bizarre, all of those single pips staring up at me accusingly. "You rolled us, loser!"

It was less funny at the time, but 20-years on, it's effin' hilarious.

I wanted to write out some of the insanity I have re-discovered of 3rd edition. Your own custom tyranid hive fleet.
If you kept the number of species in your fleet to a bare minimum, 2 species. 1 of warriors (which can count as HQ, Elites, or Heavy Support), and 1 of gaunts (troops), you could have every warrior in each brood be a mutant, and 1 in every 2 gaunt be a mutant.

Most mutations are not very powerful, hive node just lets that one creature be a synapse creature for the squad, weapon beast lets the creature replace its normal weapon with any bio weapon, acid blood makes enemies take wounds for killing them in combat. But "Exceptional size" mutation grants you +1 Strength and +1 Toughness.

This is where the craziness comes in. You would need to decide, do you want S5/T4 warriors, or S4/T4 warriors to start off with. Because if you make the mutant S6/T5 it will cost +30 points to the base cost, but if you keep it to S5/T5 it will only add +25 points to the base cost.

What does this mean in practice? If you were crazy enough to only include warriors/gaunts in your army. You could have broods of WS5/BS3/S6/T5/W2/ 4+ armor save warriors for 54 points per warrior, plus cost of weapons. Very costly indeed. But your 2 troops choices could be taken up by 2 broods of 8 gaunts costing 5 points per model. (80 points total for filling your 2 troops choices) Giving you your points limit -80 points for the rest to be warriors.

Going up to S6 really makes the barbed strangler option very potent, because it reduces it to S4, much better than S3 it would otherwise be. And S6 gives your venom cannons S8, again allowing for vehicles of AV14 to be chipped down if you so wanted, or other vehicles to get "autocannoned" down.
Even if you choose not to go for those huge weapons, other weapons like the Deathspitter (S7 assault blast weapon) and devourer (S5, assault 4) become even more potent in these warrior's hands. So even when you're saving points by not getting big guns, they become that much more potent. Of course 4+ armor save means you need to make liberal use of cover saves, and maybe you might decide to take more units of gaunts as screening units

EDIT: So why would you even want to do this? This is the only way to get more S6 models than the normal army list. Normally the Hive Tyrant, Lictor, and Carnifex would be the only models that could get S6 or more. 54 points per warrior seems expensive for S6/T5, but hive tyrants are 90 points per model for S6/T6, Lictors are S6/T4 at 80 points per model, and Carnifexes are 90 points per model for S10 T6.

So you're trading some durability for a little more flexibility, and a very specific vision of what you might want your army to be.

BanjoJohn wrote:
This is where the craziness comes in.

Welcome to why big 3e option lists were popular and why they were phased out. They inevitably led to a whole lot of really poor, inefficiently priced choices and a few select wombo-combos that shaped the faction, at least amongst more competitive players.

That said I don't think anyone was too worried about 54pt + gear warriors as that's a lot of points for artillery fodder. Now sneaking a handful of hidden rending mutants into big, fast moving chaff squads on the other hand...

(from what I hear it was also banned at official GW tournaments due to players fudging the rules if a difficult to spot way)

A.T. wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
This is where the craziness comes in.

Welcome to why big 3e option lists were popular and why they were phased out. They inevitably led to a whole lot of really poor, inefficiently priced choices and a few select wombo-combos that shaped the faction, at least amongst more competitive players.

That said I don't think anyone was too worried about 54pt + gear warriors as that's a lot of points for artillery fodder. Now sneaking a handful of hidden rending mutants into big, fast moving chaff squads on the other hand...

I love the crazy options, its making the whole battle bible thing just more fun to do. But speaking of which, after the next update I post, probably on friday/saturday this week, I'll take a bit of a break because its been eating a lot of time that I would have been using for other projects, let things simmer for a bit, and update it more slowly, since I think the next update I have for the battle bible will pretty much get most of the nessisary stuff done and included.

i am loving the older eds of 40k.
i am using my heresy models as space marines.

maybe i should post some of the photes i have taken of our games for yall to see.

here is a game we played

Some classy 40K going on there, what edition?

This isn't related to rules, but I have to say that I have a fair amount of the old boxes kicking around - you know, the 2nd ed jetbikes and various plastic kits.

They are so useful! The perfect size for so many things. You can roll dice in them, flock figures with them. Recently I was doing a bunch of ebay auctions and one of the things I was selling was perfect for one of those boxes but I couldn't part with it. I knew I'd miss it.

The funny thing is that a bunch of them are from kits I never bought, they just sort of washed their way into my collection through fellow gamer, ex-housemates, etc. I'm trying to think of any other 30-year-old packaging that remains so useful.

I still have one of the boxes from the very first Warhammer I got given at Christmas 25 years ago - two Knights of the Realm - which serves as one of my bits boxes. It's quite a sentimental piece, actually.

Yeah I've still got a few of those 2nd ed boxes around, too. Most of them filled with bits/mini collections unrelated to the actual box. I have a 2nd ed Marine Bike squad unbuilt in its box though. That might be the only one holding its actual product.

I have a bunch from 3rd ed era too, as well as the 3rd ed starter box. It's not in very good shape though.