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 don’t really miss charts or goofy rules. I get the appeal, but I find them generally inelegant or frustrating.

I did like a few concepts from the past which opened up either options for the player, such as going to ground, or that allowed players to set up clever outcomes, such as some of the morale rules or melta bombs or what not.

The good news is that many of those old rules were kind of haphazardly implemented, and many are coming back via stratagem, although again, implementation is spotty.

Speaking of charts. The make your own chaos champion and warband for either warhammer fantasy 3rd edition or Rogue Trader from the Realm of Chaos books was something else. many D100 and D1000 charts

Roll dice - You have a level 10 Human Champion of Slaanesh
roll more dice, he has a chaos weapon which can be thrown at the enemy and a horse.
roll many more dice - he has a 6 skaven, 3 goblins with cloven feet and 1 dwarf wizard following him
roll a lot more dice - Slaanesh has declared he may have some chaos armor and a steed of slaanesh
roll a load of dice - Slaanesh has blessed the champion with a scorpions tail, put his head where his chest should be, made his skin blue, atrophied one leg and given him eye stalks.

Play one game, you win.

Roll some dice - your champion has become a chaos spawn
Roll a lot more dice - Your champion has the head of a manticore, no legs, three eyes, can teleport, suffers from stupidity, has acid blood, his skin is now made of rocks, has become deaf and is also a were creature that turns into a giant leech which has robot parts and feathers.
Your warband is now led by the dwarf wizard, cue more table rolling ah fun times

- Units physically running away from failed morale. The rules were terrible and unintuitive all around, but I feel like you could make them work with standard of rules writing GW has reached now.
- Pinning/going to ground. Badly implemented in the past as well, but being able to suppress enemy infantry without killing it is mostly missing from the game, and being able to react to enemy shooting outside of stratagems would be nice as well.
- Wrecks and craters. I miss having the battlefield littered with destroyed tanks and hiding in craters from my own transports/destroyed enemies.
- Assault vehicles. Be it orks, dark eldar or landraiders. Just allow units to disembark from them after moving, but disallow the disembarked unit to move any further in the movement phase. I doubt this change would break anything and would help a great number of weak units.
- I really liked the SAG mishap table, though back then is never was powerful enough to warrant the risk. Maybe a combination of the SSAG relic and the old oddball mishaps would result in the perfect version of the SAG: Powerful, but it can hilariously go wrong. I miss those 60" charges.
- A really recent one, the bubblechukka mini-game where you took turns with your opponent to decide its stats. For some reason that stroke of genius was removed with the codex.

In 4th edition, Codex Orks had a rule that an Ork character was not allowed to take both a Warbike and Mega-Armour, because he would probably fall off a lot.

Guess what Wazdakka had in 2nd edition? Mega-Armour on a Warbike. Not just any old Warbike though; the Bike of The Aporkalypse had a Battle Cannon on it.

Of course, putting a Leman Russ-sized weapon on such a small chassis was not without consequences, and so the bike was 'pushed' back D6" each time it fired, due to the massive recoil.

All the 1st edition ORK rules, warbikes having a 2” wide 72” long fire corridor that would randomly veer off 45 degrees. Schorchas having a 4d6” long 4” wide flame. Not knowing how many Waaagh points would blow up the head of your weirdboy, the 9 tables of mad boy behaviour. Most things in your army being as happily to kill your own troops as anyone else’s. I had a kustom nob bike, with a speed freak driver that had a top speed of 60”. Every game I would set it up just for it to accelerate off the table on turn one. Still brought it every game though.

All these people wanting to win at all costs should try that army out.

Shock attack guns drowning terminators in snotling pee.

Shokk attack guns accidentally teleporting the Mek into combat with the target.

Andykp wrote:All the 1st edition ORK rules, warbikes having a 2” wide 72” long fire corridor that would randomly veer off 45 degrees. Schorchas having a 4d6” long 4” wide flame. Not knowing how many Waaagh points would blow up the head of your weirdboy, the 9 tables of mad boy behaviour. Most things in your army being as happily to kill your own troops as anyone else’s. I had a kustom nob bike, with a speed freak driver that had a top speed of 60”. Every game I would set it up just for it to accelerate off the table on turn one. Still brought it every game though.

All these people wanting to win at all costs should try that army out.

Flinty wrote:Shock attack guns drowning terminators in snotling pee.

AnomanderRake wrote:Shokk attack guns accidentally teleporting the Mek into combat with the target.

These are all reasons RT is the best version of 40k...don't agree....fight me for it!

7th Edition 30k rules had the Ordinatus Ulator, which had one of the most insane weapons in either 30k or 40k.

It used a 7" Blast, but instead of simply placing the blast and scattering as normal, you simply placed it at the tip of the weapon and moved it forward, either to 72" or the table edge. Anything underneath the template takes a hit, strength depending on the type of unit; Infantry for example take a S5 Ap-2 hit, while Superheavies take a Destroyer blow.

It's the only weapon in the game can never miss anything it shoots at. At all. As long as the first unit hit is an enemy unit, your Invisibility, Aircraft, or any other Snap Shot rule cannot stop it.

Racerguy180 wrote:
...These are all reasons RT is the best version of 40k...don't agree....fight me for it!

SAG teleporting the Mek was around in 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th as well, mind.

Not sure I have enough data to say "best", having never played RT, but I've been reading the rulebooks a lot as source material for a retro-Inquisimunda project, and it's definitely packed full of entertaining stuff.

I think it has no place in the game today, but the Harlequin's kiss used to one-shot *anything* that failed its save against it (excepting vehicles). However, the Harlequin had to make a roll to safely extract the weapon from the victim, or be stuck.

Very silly.

I did love old Vortex Grenades, though, that just sent everything in the radius to hell. I remember back when Armor Cast was US-based, and the developer was testing out some ridiculous Tyranid creature. His opponent threw a Vortex grenade at it, and he made up rules on the spot about why it was too big to die to that XD.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Valkyrie wrote:
It's the only weapon in the game can never miss anything it shoots at. At all. As long as the first unit hit is an enemy unit, your Invisibility, Aircraft, or any other Snap Shot rule cannot stop it.

Old Zzap guns never missed either.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Racerguy180 wrote:
...These are all reasons RT is the best version of 40k...don't agree....fight me for it!

SAG teleporting the Mek was around in 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th as well, mind.

Not sure I have enough data to say "best", having never played RT, but I've been reading the rulebooks a lot as source material for a retro-Inquisimunda project, and it's definitely packed full of entertaining stuff.

RT was insanity made manifest on a tabletop. The random stuff that happened always made for an interesting game.

 Valkyrie wrote:
7th Edition 30k rules had the Ordinatus Ulator, which had one of the most insane weapons in either 30k or 40k.

It used a 7" Blast, but instead of simply placing the blast and scattering as normal, you simply placed it at the tip of the weapon and moved it forward, either to 72" or the table edge. Anything underneath the template takes a hit, strength depending on the type of unit; Infantry for example take a S5 Ap-2 hit, while Superheavies take a Destroyer blow.

It's the only weapon in the game can never miss anything it shoots at. At all. As long as the first unit hit is an enemy unit, your Invisibility, Aircraft, or any other Snap Shot rule cannot stop it.

Rules like this are so much fun. I wonder if we'll ever see a return to rules based on fluff and flavor instead of accessibility and balance.

Speaking of rules I kinda miss...Challenges. "One per combat" no, but there was something neat about getting characters into duels with one another.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Speaking of rules I kinda miss...Challenges. "One per combat" no, but there was something neat about getting characters into duels with one another.

The IDEA was cool.

In practice, didn't work so hot.

But that honestly describes a LOT of GW stuff. Cool, but poorly implemented.

Challenges work great in 30k where the relationships between Ap/Sv, WS, and I are more tightly controlled. The problem in 6e/7e 40k is that the way they chose to write stats any character from Codex A would always kill any character from Codex B in a round or two, so unless you had a mirror match the challenge was pretty much always a foregone conclusion.

Build a Dreadnought rules from the Rogue Trader era.

I’ve had the book they’re in for the best part of a years (collected a complete set last year, and regret it not one iota), and still can’t properly figure them out.

And of course programming rules for Imperial Robots. They’re more than enough to make you go cross eyed and have a nosebleed.

2nd Ed? Skimmers having pop-up attacks, allowing them to hide behind terrain and still blat stuff.

Pop up was fun

 Valkyrie wrote:
7th Edition 30k rules had the Ordinatus Ulator, which had one of the most insane weapons in either 30k or 40k.

It used a 7" Blast, but instead of simply placing the blast and scattering as normal, you simply placed it at the tip of the weapon and moved it forward, either to 72" or the table edge. Anything underneath the template takes a hit, strength depending on the type of unit; Infantry for example take a S5 Ap-2 hit, while Superheavies take a Destroyer blow.

It's the only weapon in the game can never miss anything it shoots at. At all. As long as the first unit hit is an enemy unit, your Invisibility, Aircraft, or any other Snap Shot rule cannot stop it.

2nd Ed Hellhound had similar, as did Epic Wave Serpents (and I’m sure a few others?)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
...2nd Ed Hellhound had similar, as did Epic Wave Serpents (and I’m sure a few others?)

Beam psychic powers in 7th, The Furnace's Heart (Vulkan's unique 30k doom laser pistol), and the Legion Glaive. None of them could hit aircraft, though.

Oh, back in Epic and 2nd ed WD, there were *three* Chimera Variants. The Chimerro had a rack of 6 Hunter-Killer Missiles, the Chimerax had a TL-Autocannon, and the Chimedon had a Battle Cannon.

Yup.

I know I already posted about necrons phase out rule, but I thought of another mechanic that I really enjoyed.

Templates. God I miss templates. There is something awesome in having this big green plastic wafer and seeing the horror in your opponents eyes when they realize that the small blast template covers their whole squad because the forgot about spacing XD

Especially flamer templates. I HATE the new rules for flamers, X+Y damage is SO BORING! I want to be able to try and shenanigan as many models as I can under that sexy green cone again.

God help you if you were playing OG Apoc and someone brought out the apocalyptic blast template. Plopping pie plates (or pizza boxes... whatever) down on the table is just so... satisfying lol

There was an obscure rule in 3rd edition where if you immobilized a vehicle twice, all turret and sponson weapons froze in place in the direction they last shot.

I had players that were veteran players that thought that wasn't a rule.


And who could forget models that had mind control powers. I used that a couple times to make a Vindicare Assassin jump from the top of a tower to his injury/death.

crazysaneman wrote:
I know I already posted about necrons phase out rule, but I thought of another mechanic that I really enjoyed.

Templates. God I miss templates. There is something awesome in having this big green plastic wafer and seeing the horror in your opponents eyes when they realize that the small blast template covers their whole squad because the forgot about spacing XD

Especially flamer templates. I HATE the new rules for flamers, X+Y damage is SO BORING! I want to be able to try and shenanigan as many models as I can under that sexy green cone again.

God help you if you were playing OG Apoc and someone brought out the apocalyptic blast template. Plopping pie plates (or pizza boxes... whatever) down on the table is just so... satisfying lol

I have a guy at my National Guard unit that started 3rd with me despite having started back in 7th, and he prefers templates.

I loved the Acts of Faith mechanic from the Ordo Xenos Codex. Sororitas troops were very mediocre at the time, but the army generated Faith Points, based on its composition and these could be used for pretty powerful Acts of Faith effects. In a way it was similar to current stratagems. It was purely based on player agency and choice and was very flavourful.

Unfortunately, later GW managed to dumb it down, GW-way, tying Faith Point generation to a dice roll (because there's never too much random chance, we all know 40K players apparently prefer rolling dice to making decisions) and the menu of options has been eliminated by giving a specific AoF option to each Sororitas unit (because it seems giving players choices and options is bad, decisions make brains boil and that's to be avoided in a 40k game).

I think you mean the Witch Hunters (Heriticus) Codex, Cyel - Alien Hunters (which is what Ordo Xenos are) never got released in 3rd.

Which was a shame.

That's right, Hereticus - Witch Hunters, obviously!

Lash of Submission.

Psychic Power allowing you to move your opponent's units.

Not the most exotic and actually fairly basic ("Double Lash" was a popular meta-list for a while). But concept of moving an opponent's model in any way, shape or form appears to have disappeared completely.

artific3r wrote:

 Valkyrie wrote:
7th Edition 30k rules had the Ordinatus Ulator, which had one of the most insane weapons in either 30k or 40k.

It used a 7" Blast, but instead of simply placing the blast and scattering as normal, you simply placed it at the tip of the weapon and moved it forward, either to 72" or the table edge. Anything underneath the template takes a hit, strength depending on the type of unit; Infantry for example take a S5 Ap-2 hit, while Superheavies take a Destroyer blow.

It's the only weapon in the game can never miss anything it shoots at. At all. As long as the first unit hit is an enemy unit, your Invisibility, Aircraft, or any other Snap Shot rule cannot stop it.

Rules like this are so much fun. I wonder if we'll ever see a return to rules based on fluff and flavor instead of accessibility and balance.

Same here, I miss when units had unique mechanics instead of just "causes Mortal Wounds".

GSC didn't use blips. Instead you had a table you would roll on for units that determined where they could deploy. If you were really lucky you would get a unit that could deploy and then immediately could shoot before the game even started. Sometimes this could be within the enemy backline.

In the 5th ed Necron book Entropic Strike could permanently reduce Armor Value on vehicles or had a chance to remove a models armor save (which basically never happened). This made scarab units terrifying if they actually made it into melee.

Tyrannids Sporocyst had to shoot its weapons like a vehicle even though it was a monster. So you had to figure out which weapon could see what unit in its firing arc before shooting its 5 weapons. Problem is that the Sporocyst is immobile so it couldn't even rotate for better firing lines.