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I dunno, dodging stuff you have no control over while trying to kill your enemy presented a unique challenge. I like to be challenged by external factors; night fighting, acid rain, meteor showers.

I'm ok not playing it, just wish more people were open to the possibility of stuff randomly happening.

Open war deck has enuff random gak going on for me nowadays, which the same people that say no to RT/2ND have no problem with(which is weird).

The thing about 2nd is the number of actions/options available to you felt greater. So even if random stuff was thrown at you, there seemed to be more solutions available to address it.

I'll probably not go back to another edition, but rather just go play Epic 40k as that's where I started and have the fondest memories.

Otherwise I have been exceedingly lucky and have a good group of people I can play with who are not stinkin' grots about the game and are willing to play for fun. So even if the next SM codex is the end-all book some want to predict I will still be able to play against people who are doing it for fun and not min-maxing the hell out of the book.

5th edition for me was the most fun as I was a new player and very green as someone who'd never played a wargame before. When I take off my rose tinted goggles, I can see what the issues were like wound allocation for multi-wound units, tanks rules needing to be fixed, and power creep from certain armies like Space Wolves (long fang spam) and Grey Knights. If I went back now and sat down with my opponent to make fair games, sure that would work, but getting the game is the issue for me.

I played through 6th, which overall left a bad taste in my mouth dealing with a 4th edition Eldar codex where I couldn't win and moving to a broken 6th edition codex where people wouldn't play me even though they'd not even seen my list. I didn't get far into 7th and decided to leave the game for a few years because it was just more of the stuff I didn't like.

8th for the most part was an edition I enjoyed, with ITC fixing a lot of the issues the core game had and making me a more competitive player. Marines eventually ruined my fun in the game, and nerfs didn't really fix a lot of the issues in the game. Also, legends and removing a lot of the datasheets without models really killed some of the enjoyment too.

I've had a few games of 9th, and while it's a cool and interesting new edition, I can't give an opinion on whether I enjoy it yet. I find myself more and more tempted by Horus Heresy for what seems to be a fairly balanced ruleset by getting rid of the shenanigans of 7th which I hated. Again though, will I get a game where I live? Probably not, and mini-marines won't be around for much longer so I'd say support will disappear.

At least you went through all the rule changes and had a vague understanding of what was happening. Try stopping just around 4th edition coming out and then just dropping back in now without a clue! I think to continue your Theseus' ship analogy, I can very clearly see the ship isn't the same. Because my two interactions are so far apart the game changes that everyone focuses on make no odds to me. Particularly as I've not had a chance to really sit down and read the rules.

I took the dive into 9th because the crusade narrative play sounded genuinely interesting. Damned if I know if it'll be good.

EDIT: when I dropped back into the hobby in general the first thing I did was play some 6th edition WHFB because that to me was the best edition. You don't have to play the newer rules when you have other stuff available!

If I could rewind all the local players who bailed out through 6th and onwards yes...

5e was the most popular but there is no getting away from the massive codex creep it suffered.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
Also worth pointing out that for those who don't find the current 40K rules to their taste, there are a lot of other rulesets out there these days, for which models can be converted. I worked up a bare-bones Space Marine army list for Maelstrom's Edge (for which you can download the core rules for free) a few years back, and I'm currently revising that to add in a bunch of extra stuff. But there are also various 'use whatever miniatures you have' rulesets out there now, many of them free.

While it's often the road of least resistance, you don't actually have to stick with a game if you don't enjoy it anymore.

But Can You Get A Game?

That's usually the crux of it. Like, I can play 2nd ed with one person I know. When the shops were open I could usually stroll in on 40K night and get a pick up game with a stranger. That's a biiig, friggin, deal.

Pretty much this and it's a vicious cycle when it comes to both games from other companies and even within editions.

People stick to the Party Line because they know it's being supported and what most people will do. 9/10 times the people saying "just play the edition/ruleset/game you want bro, none is stopping you!" aren't the ones actually doing that. People don't pick up new games or try old editions because the odds of them finding likeminded sods local to them is slim to nil.

Been playing 6th edition WFB for a couple of years, some games of 3rd 3dition 40k, and we're now moving onto 2nd edition. It looks a lot of silly fun, a bit random in places. Vortex and virus weapons are out.

We may even do it in 15mm - there's quite a scene out there, using Vanguard minis (anything will do for Guard!) and 3D printing.

We tend to make lists that look like actual armies - the bulk of the force is troops, with appropriate support. Even that makes a difference to how the game plays.

Don't like a rule? Discuss it, try alternatives, make a decision. That was the ethos of Oldhammer in the beginning - take responsibility for your fun, don't leave it up to a company then complain about it.

I'm lucky that I have gaming friends who have a similar outlook.

The older books are cheaper than new ones too - the complete 40k 3rd edition book set cost £50 in total, and only took a month to hunt down. 2nd edition is looking a bit more expensive - again, it seems to be becoming more popular.

There have always been whispers of people playing prior editions. The switch from 2nd to 3rd was profound enough that some never left 2nd, and then every edition probably drove another clutch of guys in a basement or garage to keep playing their favorite edition. The real uptick began with 6th and 7th editions, which were bloated and frankly NOT FUN. Playing 7th edition against a good army was like doing your taxes.

I think its a great idea to explore playing older editions. Personally, having played every edition since 3rd, I think 8th, and now 9th, have the best "core" rules. You can quibble about the missions, but the biggest flaws I see in 9th are the codex ecosystem. Unfortuantely, that's the hardest part to rebuild.

Still, my dream for a hybrid homebrew uses modern 40k rules, which are clean and streamlined, with home made army lists closer to what 3rd edition offered.

+100% OP!

I'm getting back into the game, after starting out in earnest with 2nd and playing up through the early stages of 5th edition. I briefly came back in 8th edition and decided I just didn't like the ethos of how the rules work. It's not the same feeling game at all.

In asking around and digging through forms similar as this, it seems like a large number of people call out 5th edition as a high watermark in the game. It felt like a proper skirmish game focused on units and position and maneuver. While list building was always a core part of the gameplay, after 5th edition things seemed to get crazier and crazier. Less emphasis on a traditional Force Organization Chart and more about combining multiple wacky detachments, using formations (7th edition) and gaming detachments / stratagems in 9th + 9th. All of these shifts seemed to just be de-emphasizing the basic troop unit - which is the cornerstone of game's lore and character IMHO.

All this said, I implore the OP (and everyone else) that is looking back to older editions to check out ProHammer.

* ProHammer is built on 5th edition
* Refines a few of 5th edition's weaker aspects (vehicle damage tables, wound allocation shenanigans, etc.)
* Pulls in a few old-time rules from 2nd edition (proper overwatrch, declared firing, etc)
* Incorporates some "best of rules" from 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th where they make sense (split fire, go to ground, etc.)
* Adds some compatibility options for using 6th + 7th edition codex (if players agree)

Through all of this, I'm trying to retain the classic character and feel of what I loved about 40K while making the game tactically diverse and as interesting as possible (while still keeping the basic game structure in place). I also want to cut down on illogical or "gamey" feeling rules and make the game as intuitive to play as it can be. Of course, I don't want it to spiral into too much complexity either. It's a balancing act.

Ultimately, I want ProHammer to feel like the version of Warhammer that many of us were always waiting for. I'm totally open to discussing the rules and making adjustments to get it working smoothly and reliability.

If you're interested, check it out!

I'm starting to get some games organized over Table Top Simulator for it

Started at the beging of 8th. Every month was worse expiriance, to a point where end of 2019 I didn't even want to play that much. 9th is awesome comparing to that. Better rules, the units I own and like, are actualy okey. I don't even mind GW puting rules that directly work against my army, because it is still nothing comparing to the stuff they did in 8th. If it stays that way for another 6 months, it it is going to make buying in to w40k actualy worth it.

Ship of Theseus.

And no. 9th edition's core is the best version of 40k I've played. The point changes were wackadoodled and it's far from perfect and there's huge potential to muck it up in the near future but right now, I'm having a lot of fun with it. Way more than I did in 6, 7th, and the middle part of 8th where I quit to play sigmar for about a year.

 insaniak wrote:

 Gnarlly wrote:

I agree about each edition having at least one critical flaw. Fortunately, many of those flaws can be fixed with a few simple house rules, including replacing the offending flaw with the rule(s) from an earlier or later edition (ex. I happen to much prefer 4th edition's wound allocation rules, but prefer 5th edition's rending rules).

Yup, the ability to patch rules flaws yourself without having to worry about how that patch may interact with future releases is one of the big bonuses of playing a previous edition.

And I would agree that inserting 4th edition's wound allocation into 5th edition is the way to go.

This is, I think, the reason we never managed to get to play an old edition.

Everybody can generally agree, even it's proponents, that something needs to be fixed, but we can't ever nail down how. And sometimes, there's pretty serious debates about "what" as well.

I started in 2nd edition as well and while I have a strong sense of nostalgia for 2nd edition and even 5th edition, the game has in deed changed a lot from its former self.

The evolution of the game has largely been good. A lot has improved and been made better. The thing is, GW is willing to completely toss out mechanics and try new things This is good in its own way, but can make the game act and feel entirely different. Each edition has had things that were liked and disliked and this is likely to always be the case.

Personally, I think it's good for the overall health of the game to change things up and that this is why 40K holds onto a lot of its fans for years, decades even, and continues to grow; Warhammer doesn't get stale.

Tangent... 9th edition is the exception. It's already stale because the mission design is complete garbage. A new mission pack is already needed. Thankfully, this is really easy to do.

Perhaps its just the current state of 9th edition and its gak mission design, but going back to a previous edition provides that much needed mix to keep things from getting stale.

So is it the same boat? No. I think a better question to ask is; Should it be the same boat? I believe the answer is also a resounding 'No'.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The difficulty with trying to rewind is that you still need people to play with. I suspect that most of the people complaining endlessly on Dakka are people who dislike 9e but whose playgroup is happy with it and can't convince anyone to play anything else. The fixation on "GW needs to fix the current official rules" probably springs from dealing mostly with people who insist on playing only the current official rules.

It's like sex. You don't need a thousand notches on your bed post. One like minded partner and you are set. You can only play one person at a time after all. Bigger groups have advantages, do do smaller groups.

Thing with the argument about folks' playgroups is playgroups are generally 'active' players and typically tuned into the current 'game'. Thing is, they don't represent the hobby as a whole. There's plenty folks that are 'not active' or 'taking a break' and plenty 'former players' too. And they're, in my experience at least, more willing to do older editions. You are likely not the only horse in town that wants to do what you want to do. Find other people, put less EXP into list building and more into social networking. It won't be immediate but you will find them.

insaniak

To your original post, there apparently are loads of people who want 40K to be something other than where GW is taking the game. it seems to be broken down between the skirmish 2nd ed players, and the army battle game at it's general best with 5th edition players. i am in the second group

Mezmorki's prohammer has a few homebrew rules in it, our group just used the rules that already existed in the game in 3rd -7th editions and just put all the best stuff into 5th edition(and converting new units from 6th/7th into 5th is very easy to do)

I have a thread on this very topic that i regularly update

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/789567.page

The funny thing is that while GW purposely never makes a perfect edition, the players all seem to reach a very similar rules set with all the best parts to make the game the best it can be.

I'm more an RPG guy and I feel you, after years of sulking DnD, I'm just getting back to 3.5 in Epic6.

But regarding 40k, you don't even have to be an old'timer to try and go back. I am familliar with GW universes for a very long time, but I really started playing 40k for real in 8th so I don't think you could talk about rose tinted glasses about me. I finally realized the game did not provide what I was looking for.

Lucky for my, my bud is some kind of an "archivist" and posess pretty much every edition.

So we played 2nd and it was really fun, more than most my 8th games, but it really felt a bit clunky and antiquated to me. I'm hoping to try out 3rd and/or 5th soon.

But right now, we are full in WFB 6th, replaying the Dark Shadows campaign and having a litteral blast !

No need to rewind for me as I've been playing 3rd Ed. 40K and 6th Ed. WFB since abount 2013-2014, I think.

Seeing all the people here who would play 6th makes me wish you all lived close enough to facilitate a few games...

I got here when 6th edition started. Sell me on why 2nd edition was better please? (Genuine interest)

Well, define better?

2nd edition was a skirmish game. A 1000-point Marine force might be a couple of squads, a vehicle and a couple of characters.

The rules are still recognisably a skirmish game. Rules like overwatch, rules for broken squads, or target selection, actually work well. Most weapons fire a single shot.

More detail. Auto-weapons can sustain fire and risk jamming. You can fire all your Cyclone missiles in one salvo: you'll either wreck the enemy unit, or vanish in an explosion yourself. Vehicles have individual damage charts. Penetrate armour and maybe the vehicle crashes, maybe it flips and lands on the shooter, maybe it explodes. Different power weapons have different effects.

Wargear cards allow you to customise characters and vehicles. There's a table for medpack use, another for engineers repairing vehicle damage. More detail was built up in the codices.

Conversely, less detail. There's a page of ranged weapons and a page of melee weapons. Orks use the same bolter as Marines. It's a much smaller game than later editions. Fan codexes often make the mistake of adding tons of new weapons.

There's a flexibility about army slots. You have HQ, troops and support (vehicles, field guns). A certain percentage of points MUST be spent on troops; HQ and support have limits (usually 1/4 of your army for each type). The Chaos codex still has beastmen, minotaurs and Chaos Warriors.

The game is random, swingy and lethal. The Dark Millennium supplement and its endless psychic phase makes it even worse. In the expansion, not taking a psyker or two when the enemy has them is a bad idea. The game is not polished, not really balanced, and you should probably cut up any cards with the words "virus" or "vortex" on them.

It's FUN and MEMORABLE - and that's the point. Coming back to it over 20 years later, you will need to discuss psykers with your opponent, you will need to talk about the stupid, overpowered stuff. But for that cost, you have a game to tinker with and dead power creep. The statline is still recognisably 40k if you want Necrons, Tau or Admech.

+1 to Momotaro's response

I sat down to write something and Momotaro's post was better than what I was going to say. I'll just add a few things:

As a smaller scale game, the rules were more "detailed" ... although much of the rules were also pretty intuitive and logical. So it played smoothly and there weren't many overly "gamey" things that broke your sense of immersion.

The entire game was more chaotic and volatile though. Lots of units had unique "catastrophic failure/success" charts that you rolled on (Ork Shock Attack Guns anyone?) that often meant your own stuff was as likely to backfire and blow you up as it was to blow up your enemy. At the same time, the game didn't take itself too seriously as a deeply competitive game. So players were willing to just go with it and let the wacky narrative and twists of faith take them on wild ride.

2nd isn't "better" per se - it's just different and depends on what you want to get our of your game.

I have already brought this up but I am not sure my playgroup wants to regress. Finding players is a challenge.

That said, I'd happily go back to 4th or 5th!!!!

A couple of friends and I are going back to 5th ed.
That's where they came into the game, and it's where I last had fun with it, and I ran a few tourneys in my area in 5th edition, too.

I played eldar in 2nd ed. Nobody liked eldar in 2nd ed.

I don't think I could go back to 2nd edition any more than I could start playing 9th, having quit playing in the summer of 2019. I mean, I have the models, but I held off playing for most of 2nd because of how janky it was, and I think I'm all Warhammered out. Plus spending the time exploring board games, making my own game, and assembling/painting my backlog is much more personally satisfying.

With you on that, Mezmorki!

Unit, "regress"? There's a ton of old games that work just fine.

Nurglitch, janky? Sure is! You do your thing and enjoy it.

I read a lot of posts about how "fun" 2nd edition can be, but maybe my glasses are not as rosy. I started 40k early in 2nd edition (just before the first codexes and Dark Millenium were released), and at that time I thought it was reasonably manageable. But once you got all of the characters, additional wargear cards, vehicle datafaxes, and psyker phase cards from Dark Millenium and the codexes, it really got a bit out of hand. The psychic phase could really bog the game down, let alone the close combat phase which also could eat up a lot of time. A 2000 point game could take an entire afternoon. This was definitely a "hero hammer" type of game, and really needed some friendly house rules to prevent competitive types from ruining it.

If I wanted to go back to 2nd edition, I'd stick with just the "Codex Army Lists" black book that came with the original box game and the basic psychic rules in the main rulebook. Otherwise, 4th/5th edition for me please with a few tweaks to the rules. 4th edition with a few minor revisions to its rules is the peak of 40k in my opinion.

 Gnarlly wrote:
4th edition with a few minor revisions to its rules is the peak of 40k in my opinion.

Completely agreed. 4th edition 40k had some major flaws that need revisions (the Terrain needs more options for levels than just 3, consolidating from combat-to-combat needs to be reigned in somehow, skimmer-auto-glance combined with Holofields, stuff like that).

I have similar feelings, the game isn't exactly what I remember getting hyped about back in the day. Also have fonrd memories of 2nd edition..

My solution is preferring Kill Team. It retains the skirmish feel, but is still current so finding a game isnt such a needle in the haystack.

I more or less play 9th just to have an excuse for collecting an army

Unit1126PLL wrote:I have already brought this up but I am not sure my playgroup wants to regress. Finding players is a challenge.

That said, I'd happily go back to 4th or 5th!!!!

Like anything else you have to make the effort to build the community.

Granted given the covid lockdowns the player base is weak right now, however i am fortunate enough to have a core player group that has been in the game since 3rd that all agree 5th edition was the best the game has ever been-even with its flaws. also i have been able to interest newer players who had never known anything prior to 8th ed. they look at the rules from those prior editions and go-"this was great why did they take it away?" or "this makes more sense" or more importantly they enjoy the thematic lore based rules like blood frenzy for khorne berserkers(we allow all codexes that are compatible IE 3rd-7th edition. the core rules/USRs of 5th over-ride any old or new rules from those other edition aside from the better rules we house ruled in like allowing snap fire from 7th into 5th).

In a sense we tried to make 5th the "perfect edition" much like The previously mentioned PROHAMMER project.

chromedog wrote:A couple of friends and I are going back to 5th ed.
That's where they came into the game, and it's where I last had fun with it, and I ran a few tourneys in my area in 5th edition, too.

I played eldar in 2nd ed. Nobody liked eldar in 2nd ed.

Lets be honest NOBODY liked eldar, except the eldar players in 3rd-5th.
A buddy of mine had an eldar corsair army in 5th, one of the toughest armies i ever had to fight...still managed to beat it from time to time

Insectum7 wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
Also worth pointing out that for those who don't find the current 40K rules to their taste, there are a lot of other rulesets out there these days, for which models can be converted. I worked up a bare-bones Space Marine army list for Maelstrom's Edge (for which you can download the core rules for free) a few years back, and I'm currently revising that to add in a bunch of extra stuff. But there are also various 'use whatever miniatures you have' rulesets out there now, many of them free.

While it's often the road of least resistance, you don't actually have to stick with a game if you don't enjoy it anymore.

But Can You Get A Game?

That's usually the crux of it. Like, I can play 2nd ed with one person I know. When the shops were open I could usually stroll in on 40K night and get a pick up game with a stranger. That's a biiig, friggin, deal.

And it's not like I won't enjoy the game either. I just don't like what GW is doing to the universe/lore/design-ecosystem.

AnomanderRake wrote:The difficulty with trying to rewind is that you still need people to play with. I suspect that most of the people complaining endlessly on Dakka are people who dislike 9e but whose playgroup is happy with it and can't convince anyone to play anything else. The fixation on "GW needs to fix the current official rules" probably springs from dealing mostly with people who insist on playing only the current official rules.

You might get lucky with a gaming group and find a decent number of people are interested in joining you in revisting older editions, but there are also the options of reaching out online or convincing a friend.

It's interesting to think about DnD when talking about this, a lot of people play older editions of DnD quite happily or take things they like from older editions and put them into the current one, obviously there are differences between DnD and 40k but one thing that DnD players seem to grasp is that new editions don't make the old editions disappear, they're as valid as they ever were. People are generally up for trying something new (or rather, old, but fresh to them) and you may have better luck convincing a group to try out some select elements from older editions for a session rather than convincing them to dump the current edition entirely.