More reports from the ancient and confusing world of 2nd edition
40K!
Since the heady days of page 28 of this thread, my regular opponent and I have somehow managed four (yes four!) more games of 2nd ed. Still keeping it simple, but gradually adding on more bling as we go.
First we played the bonus fourth Armageddon scenario from the Mission book--the one with the flimsy card bunkers. That was good fun. Figuring out the various permutations of attacking bunkers took a little thought but we got there in the end. Favourite moment was assaulting a Marine-filled bunker with 10 Orks and stuffing frag grenades through the vision slits (extra nasty in the confined space). The lone survivor climbed onto the roof and tossed his own frag grenade down onto the tightly packed mass ... Meanwhile the Dreadnought tried to rip the door off but only succeeded in mangling it, sealing it shut. Oh well.
Next up were three 'proper' games using the army lists from the Codexes. Game 1 was 500 points a side, while games 2 and 3 were 750 pts. We allowed any character to count as the commander (it always seemed silly to me that you had to take a high-ranking officer like a Captain even in small games) but otherwise obeyed the usual restrictions, like needing to take a Mek in order to include Ork vehicles.
Neither of us are particularly into power builds or list abuse (too much of that and you go blind) and anyway we don't yet have a good enough sense of what works and what doesn't to come up with any sneaky tricks. My own method for choosing equipment and Wargear cards is a variant on
WYSIWYG that I think of as WYSIWYT: what you see is what you take. My Mek model, converted from a Gorkamorka Spanner Boy many years ago, has a rocket-launcher type thing and is holding some tools while peering through the electronic sights of his bazooka ... so clearly he has a Kustom Blasta, a set of Mekboy's Tools and a Targeter, and that's that.
I could squeeze in quite a few Orks and options in these small games, whereas my opponent took Space Marines (Blood Angels) and had trouble getting much flexibility out of the points allowed. I mostly went with:
- Big mob of Goffs with a Nob leader
- Big mob of Gretchin, sometimes with a Runtherd leader
- Mek
- Bigboss leading a small squad of Bad Moons in a Battlewagon
- Something random (e.g. a Splatta Kannon or a tiny unit of Madboyz) just to try their respective rules
The Marines tended to have a Tactical squad, an Assault battle squad (from the White Dwarf entry), a Scout squad, and a Chaplain for the leader.
We drew random missions from the ones in the starter box. No Dark Millennium stuff, and no psykers (yet) but we did use our Codex books. Annoyingly in two out of three games we both drew 'Engage and Destroy', which I find to be a pretty dull mission. In the other game we both drew 'Take and Hold' and had ourselves a nice proper story-driven fight over a crashed Aquila lander ... that happened to be sitting
exactly at the point where our objectives were, despite having been randomly placed and scattered on the board during terrain setup earlier. Spooky.
My Orks lost two out of three games, but we did salvage da loot from da lander! In that game the Marine player was so intimidated by the oncoming green tide that he didn't even try to contest the objective, just took potshots from the sidelines.
Things we've learned:
- Space Marines using Rapid Fire are a force to be reckoned with. More than once I said to myself, "What could happen? It's just a handful of Marines," only to get pummelled by twice the shots I was expecting.
- My Mek, Bazza, has no idea how to make a functioning gun. In two out of three games he blew himself up with his own kustom blasta, whereas the shots he did get off proved to be mere fizzling fireworks that looked pretty but fail to do more than delight young and old. Meanwhile, my Bigboss's kustom shoota (also made by Bazza) reliably fired at a measly Strength 2 for the entirety of the second game. Presumably it got stuck on the 'nailgun' setting. In the third game the Boss took aim at some Marines, growled "Dat zoggin' Mek better 'ave fixed dis!", pulled the trigger and experienced the supreme dissatisfaction of the shoota blowing up in his face. He was in the middle of bellowing a threat about what he intended to do to Bazza after the battle when a boom from far behind him and a rising mushroom cloud over the Orks' deployment zone informed him that there wouldn't be any need ... yep, Bazza's blasta had misfired in the same shooting phase, this time with a Strength 10 2" blast radius.
- The Ork Battlewagon is surprisingly robust. Must be why the Boss keeps Bazza around. After years of hearing about how 2nd ed transports are deathtraps, we both watched in surprise as it hooned around the battlefield shrugging off krak missiles for three games. The worst that happened was a bent axle, apart from the occasional unlucky passenger who took a krak missile in the chest. My Bigboss and his Bad Moons with special weapons proved pretty effective when fighting from it. Much drive-by flamer toasting ensued. They barbecued a Scout squad in their first game and in the third they managed to set the Chaplain on fire, to general hilarity. The hit location table functioned more or less like a permanent 3+ armour save against incoming fire. The one time they disembarked, they were immediately shot full of holes. (I suspect the real reason the wagon survived so well is that the Marines only had a single heavy weapon and nobody had thought to bring krak grenades.)
I used a modern Trukk model with the tray reversed to represent the old Battlewagon entry. It can fit five minis, more if you stack 'em on top, which seems about the same as the original long-lost kit. But it's a bit rickety-looking considering the high armour value (same as a Rhino), especially since I've put the passenger compartment's shield at the back rather than the front, so I reckon I'll have to bolt some more armour plates onto the model.
- In fact, the vehicle rules are much more fun than I was expecting. I didn't use the Battlewagon to full tactical effect because, like an Ork, I couldn't resist going as fast as possible all over the place. Bodes well for eventually trying Gorkamorka.
- The Splatta Kannon field artillery is entertaining but not particularly long-ranged. And when I explained the bouncing shell mechanics, my opponent immediately groaned, "We'll be here all day!" I had to reassure him that it was only going to bounce an average of six times. In the event it took out two Assault Marines and one startled Gretchin.
- It's very much a shooting game rather than a close combat game. In seven games (the Armageddon scenarios plus these three proper battles) we've had a grand total of two close combats, one featuring a Dreadnought versus a few Marines, and the other involving three Madboyz against four Scouts. The latter did not go well for the Madboyz. I charged just so I could see what the hand-to-hand rules were like. It was ... educational. My opponent had the advantage of having played Necromunda to death as a teenager, so not only did he know who was likely to beat who (hint: not the Madboyz), he could rattle through the melee dice-off at top speed. I had to ask him to slow down so I could learn what the rules were.
- I've been inspired to write on a blank die to keep track of my Madboyz' current madness. (Conveniently there are six.) Plus a second custom die to track which stat they've increased when they roll the 'Crazy' result.
- Although I wouldn't call it a tactical or strategic game on the level of, say, Epic 40,000 or Battlefleet Gothic, it definitely feels like I have more choices and decisions to make in the core system than I would in 3rd edition onward. Do I move and shoot? Move and hide? Run? Charge? Throw grenades? Go on overwatch? Turn some models so they'll be able to fire at different targets come the shooting phase? Quite a bit to think about.
- It's also very much an individual model game rather than a 'blob of wound counters' squad game. An awkward hybrid in some respects. Sometimes things are treated as 'squad vs squad' and other things are 'model versus model' and it takes a bit of careful rulebook reading to sort it out. Likewise, the terrain interactions are fairly concrete (similar to Lord of the Rings / Middle-Earth SBG). I often catch myself moving boyz blithely across obstacles or up building levels in an abstract handwavey 3rd ed sort of way, when I should be checking to see how high things are and so on.
- The 2nd ed rulebooks are hopeless for looking stuff up in the middle of a game. We nearly went crazy trying to find the support weapon and crew rules. Then again, it's hardly unique to 2nd ed
40K.
GW traditionally writes rules as if you're going to read the book from start to finish like a novel.
- Randomising hits between a character and the squad he's a part of caused us some mental difficulty and mild irritation (since the rules basically say "figure it out for yourself").
- Rules question: Where do you place the blast marker for a frag missile and similar weapons? This one doesn't seem to have ever been answered even on the extensive mailing list
FAQs. Do you have to put the hole in the centre over the nearest target model? Or can it go anywhere in the target squad? We compromised by saying you can place it over any
visible model in the target squad, so you can get it fairly deep into the front half of a unit but probably not the back half. Will continue to revise this as we go--it might make targeting characters too easy. It does seem from the
FAQs that when shooting vehicles you can choose the location of the blast marker's centre, but a common house rule is to randomise the location. (And also to halve armour penetration for the locations hit that aren't the centre. That last one is a suggestion from the Tankfest article in the Citadel Journal.)
- The Journal's issue #10 also included an option, by Jervis Johnson and co, to blaze away with sustained fire weapons on 'full auto' (which was later officially used for Gorkamorka): you roll the sustained dice first, then roll to hit with each shot. It's more intuitive but there's more chance of a jam, so the rule lets you choose full auto or the 'short controlled bursts' of the main rules.
- The victory point tables really really annoy me and are currently my number one complaint about the edition. Everything is divided into tiers (e.g. a 0-100 pt squad is worth different points to a 101+ point squad), which makes it tempting to game the system by ensuring your character or squad's points value comes in just below the next threshold. I was alarmed and embarrassed to find that my unit of 20 Gretchin, which happened to be the number of painted models I had, did not yield a victory point for getting it below half strength because it was exactly one point shy of the next tier. On the other hand, my Mek is a few points over 50, so if I shaved off his cheap wargear cards--his targeter and tools--he'd drop down a tier ... but the model clearly has tools and a targeter, dammit! He actually lost me the first game by exploding himself--otherwise it would have been a draw. Later on I found an old Orks tactics article in the Citadel Journal and at least half of it was about making sure your army gave up the fewest possible victory points. I much prefer the scoring system of 3rd ed, even though it meant whipping out the calculator after a game.
All in all (as they used to say at the end of White Dwarf articles) it's been good fun and pretty much the first
40K gaming I've had in, oh, twenty years. The Orks continue to entertain (mostly by blowing themselves up) while the Space Marines are a tough nut to crack, as they should be.
We'll bump the next game up to 1000 points and may be able to fit in a psyker on each side, albeit just using the basic rules in the rulebook rather than the full rules in Dark Millennium.
I need some longer-ranged supporting fire for my Boyz, though. In the Armageddon scenarios my Gretchin were armed with autoguns per the scenario, which gave the Goffs covering fire as they advanced, but I went with the actual weapons on the models for our proper games--they're the more recent sculpts with pistols (and blunderbusses). I suppose I could take the 2nd ed monopose plastic Gretchin but they're in my top ten most despised models of all time, if not my top five ...
And since I have a spare Gorkamorka Spanner Boy, I think I'll make a second Bazza model to represent him without his trademark temperamental blasta on the off-chance he survives the next inevitable misfire. Possibly painted in a scorched, soot-blackened and startled manner, like Wile E Coyote after a mishap with an ACME rocket.
Including those funky kustom combi-weapons that ignore cover.