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.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 waefre_1 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Bosskelot wrote:
The old AP system really was awful. Just totally binary and nonsensical.

Imo it had it's place and worked pretty well before the game inflated beyond it. One of the things it did really well was reinforce the "bring the right tools for the job" design paradigm. It also provided for a stronger differentiation between 'levels' of weapon and armor.

Kind of? You're not wrong, but what stands out the most to me when I remember it was how a Battle Cannon treated Space Marine power armor the same as an Ork t-shirt save, but a Terminator squad would see the Battle Cannon the same as they saw a lasgun. Bringing in some modifiers probably would have fixed that, but it didn't prevent the sudden cutoff from feeling strange.

I'd like to see a hybrid system.

Something like AP X/-Y.

X is the armor it punches through, no save allowed.
-Y is how much it modifies the actual save by, if X isn't good enough to ignore it entirely.

So Bolters could be AP 5/-0. Ignores Guard saves and worse, but doesn't affect heavier armor at all.
Heavy Bolters could be AP 4/-1. Ignores Carapce armor, and dings Power or Terminator armor.

We really don't need to go back to the days where the most common weapon in the game could completely ignore the saves of half of the basic infantry units in the game while also being higher strength than their toughness (barring Orks). That was probably the nicest thing that 8th brought about - 5 and 6+ saves actually meant something for the first time in god knows how long.

Mind you, combat doctrines have already reduced this with Marine bolters getting -1ap and marine melee getting -1ap...



On topic of hated old rules, I didn't overly like the Instant Death rule. Mind you I think part of it was I learned about it in a gotcha moment when I first started playing, but it just kind of is a feels bad moment when you get hit by a weapon and then whoops, that model is dead regardless of how many wounds it has. This salt with that rule might also be in part because most armies I'm drawn to have T3 as a baseline so anything s6 and up could just destroy something - often without a save.

I "got" the old AP system as it seemed logical that a weapon either had sufficient penetrative power to go through armour or it didn't. I didn't like the way it played in game terms though.

A blast from the past.... but I'd like to nominate the virus outbreak strategy card from 2nd edition. A randomly acquired card that could be completely useless or destroy entire armies and the only rule I know of that lead to a formal apology from the designer (I seem to remember he told people to tear it up).

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
I can understand you not liking LoWs and flyers in the game, but this particular complaint is confusing. Are you saying that unit movement stats should be higher generally, or that a slow moving unit (I'm guessing something like a terminator with M5) should be able to run around something like a Baneblade in less than 2 turns? How does that break immersion for you?

Think about scales in the game. Your average infantry model can run 6" which is about 3x their own height without the base, I'm out of shape and I can do that in a couple of seconds at most. Now at the same time, we have certain 'ranged' weapons that have a maximum range of 6-12". So how do you square that circle?

If you didn't have tanks or terrain you could imagine space marines being so fast that they can cover the hundreds of meters of distance their rounds can travel in seconds. Once you add in landmarks like vehicles and buildings it starts to look silly that a rocket-powered space gun can't fire further than 3 or 4 tanks parked tip to tail and that it takes a marine a couple of turns of 'advancing' to clear those same dozens of meters. Adding in larger vehicles that can't even move their own length in a turn armed with guns that can only fire twice as far as they themselves are long just further highlights the absurdity.

For our table sizes space marines should be half their current scale or less to fit better with the sizes of battles our current forces allow us to have.

I just remembered one that confused the hell out of me when I first started - the way Ballistic Skill used to scale. I think it was in part the way I was originally described it to, but BS3 hit 1/2 the time, BS 2 1/3 the time, and BS4 hit 2/3 of the time. I think it was because I was used to "roll under" rpg systems since I've done role playing games far longer than 40k, but on hearing it is determined by D6 rolls, the natural conclusion was "BS 3 means I hit on a 3 and under, BS 4 a 4 and under, BS 5 a 5 and under, and BS 2 a 2 and under. Instead, for some random reason, BS 3 means I need 4 or better, while BS 4 means I need a 3 or better to hit, BS 2 means you are fishing for 5s and 6s...etc.

I vastly prefer the current "hit on an X+" to that. It is intuitive and makes far more sense than the old version.

The piecemeal introduction of rules through 6th and 7th.

Flyers countered flyers. Psykers countered psykers. Formation bonus countered formation bonuses.

But whether GW gave your faction any of that was pot luck.

 Unknown_Lifeform wrote:
I "got" the old AP system as it seemed logical that a weapon either had sufficient penetrative power to go through armour or it didn't. I didn't like the way it played in game terms though.

I think it was intentional weapon abstraction - like in some computer games when you have anti-tank guns that take longer to kill infantry than handguns.
It starts to come apart as you add more and more categories of unit and weapon to the mix.

 kurhanik wrote:
I just remembered one that confused the hell out of me when I first started - the way Ballistic Skill used to scale. I think it was in part the way I was originally described it to, but BS3 hit 1/2 the time, BS 2 1/3 the time, and BS4 hit 2/3 of the time. I think it was because I was used to "roll under" rpg systems since I've done role playing games far longer than 40k, but on hearing it is determined by D6 rolls, the natural conclusion was "BS 3 means I hit on a 3 and under, BS 4 a 4 and under, BS 5 a 5 and under, and BS 2 a 2 and under. Instead, for some random reason, BS 3 means I need 4 or better, while BS 4 means I need a 3 or better to hit, BS 2 means you are fishing for 5s and 6s...etc.

I vastly prefer the current "hit on an X+" to that. It is intuitive and makes far more sense than the old version.

The real problem is that there was a bunch of rules to make your weapons twin linked, so a higher BS value was often pointless.

Not so much a specific rule, but a design paradigm that GW went through a while back. It was the "Let's put in a wargear section!" phase.

My homeboy Jervis explained this at the time, his son couldn't figure out what was what, so the introduction of the Wargear section was done to keep all the weapons in a central location for easy reference.

Of course this is GW, and GW's ideas often don't meet up with the execution of said ideas. So we ended up with units that had rules spread across 3-4 different pages, be it from unique special rules, weapons, specialist equipment and USRs.

And it reached it's absolute nadir in the 5th Edition Imperial Guard Codex, specifically the vehicle wargear section, which has 31 different entries, of which 23 told you to check other pages in the book (actually, one of them directed you to the main 40k rulebook!).

What was the point in this central wargear page if all the rules were spread out across the entire book? It was nuts.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
I can understand you not liking LoWs and flyers in the game, but this particular complaint is confusing. Are you saying that unit movement stats should be higher generally, or that a slow moving unit (I'm guessing something like a terminator with M5) should be able to run around something like a Baneblade in less than 2 turns? How does that break immersion for you?

Think about scales in the game. Your average infantry model can run 6" which is about 3x their own height without the base, I'm out of shape and I can do that in a couple of seconds at most. Now at the same time, we have certain 'ranged' weapons that have a maximum range of 6-12". So how do you square that circle?

You don't. It was explicit in Rogue Trader that model scale and table scale aren't related in any way at all, and weapon ranges were decided based on their gameplay merits, not 'realisms.'

And that's before you try to apply real time units like 'seconds' to game turns, which also aren't even vaguely related.

*Rule of 3 in 8th ed. And my distaste for this rule has only grown with 9th.
*the 8th ed+ deep-strike (and similar) rules.
*Strategems
*anything can wound anything on a 6.
*Vehicles not having facings/fire arcs.
*The requirement that x % of stuff has to start on the board.
*Not being allowed to fire into melee from units not involved. WTF? Lore wise, unless you're an Eldar (maybe) life is even cheaper here in the 41stM than it ever was in WHFB/Sigmar....
*The wound allocation system in most editions.
*The moral system in most editions.
*very often the psychic phase

Crispy78 wrote:Hammer Of Wrath is specifically meant to be the impact of the bike / jetpack guy / whatever slamming into the other unit, hence happening before any of the other actions of the combat take place. Whether that's worth picking out as being different enough to warrant a different rule to 'this unit fights better when charging' is another matter, but the distinction was always there.

This is exactly why I like USRs as a concept and strongly dislike the 6th-7th Ed implementation of them.

What on earth is a 'hammer of wrath'? That name tells me nothing, except that the writer isn't allowed to name the band. Call it 'impact hits' and then it's reasonably intuitive, and I can more easily remember why it's different from Furious Charge. What's the difference between Bulky and Very Bulky again? Couldn't it just be, like, Bulky(2) or Bulky(4) and that tells me how many spots they occupy in a transport, if that's the relevant factor? I can guess that It Will Not Die has something to do with durability. Oh, right, it's regeneration. Why can't it just be called Regeneration? Go for gold and call it Regeneration(5+) even, so I don't need to remember what the value I need to roll is. And how many unrelated USRs are there that are all some variation of anger but had totally different effects? I remember Rage, Furious Charge, and Hatred; got any others?

Unintuitive wording adds an unnecessary cognitive burden to an already complex game. If you want to use thematic language to convey a theme, best practice is to separate it from crunch- 'It Will Not Die: This unit has the Regeneration USR.' Special rules that have their definitions right there are fine, but universal special rules ought to be as straightforward and easy to remember as any other part of the core rulebook.

At least the basic mechanics stayed free of the purple prose. Imagine if GW decided that 'Movement Phase' or 'Strength' were too straightforward and gave them 'fluffy' names instead.

Lots of hate for my boy Instant Death... so conversly.

Eternal Warrior: No just because you're grrrr real good at taking damage and powering through it doesn't prevent you from turning into a fine mist when the Medusa siege gun fires at you.

Anything involving having to roll leadership to shoot at anything but the nearest target, or worse, not giving the option at all.

Sweeping advance into combat

Invisibility

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Instead of. NOT in addition to.

But it is unmodifiable? Just looking for clarity.

Seems reasonable overall.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Just Tony wrote:
Every mutable genus/trait/doctrine/veteran skill system

You didn't like those?

It started the trend of not knowing what the feth you were facing. Prioritizing fire was a nightmare as you usually wind up focusing on a unit that was innocuous while a particularly vicious build that had NO WYSIWYG WHATSOEVER was ignored. It also gave Chaos YET AGAIN the ability to have their cake and eat every other army's bakery as well.

So I started in 8th, but I love me some 30k, and also reading about earlier editions. It completely blows my mind that there was a time when you couldn’t measure distances until you were committed to an action. In fact I think in necromunda you still can’t. That just seems like the cruelest design choice.

Crackedgear wrote:
So I started in 8th, but I love me some 30k, and also reading about earlier editions. It completely blows my mind that there was a time when you couldn’t measure distances until you were committed to an action. In fact I think in necromunda you still can’t. That just seems like the cruelest design choice.

In practice it meant you had situations where you had to use an element of risk management. You might really want to shoot a specific target but you're not sure of the range so you need to decide whether to risk it or take a safer choice to target a less important unit you know is in range. Pre-measuring does have the major advantage of avoiding the really heated arguments about what's in range for charges but the older rules had their merits too.

For me Challenges, Flyers and Superheavies are probably the three things I hated the most. Challenges just didn't work. I still remember a game where my Death Company surrounded a Chaos Sorcerer and ended up having to be cheerleaders because he challenged my Chaplain and neither of us were equipped to kill the opponent (AP4 FTW!) Flyers and SH just completely skew the scale of the game and their introduction showed that just with the sheer number of rules they broke/ignored in order to function.

Was nice to have a much wider array of psychic powers but some were just obnoxious, such as Invisibility and the one that let you move an entire terrain feature (regardless of size) and anything on it.

7th Ed casting was also just awful; add up the total warp charges and that's your pool, every dice from the pool that rolls a 4+ is one charge, meaning you'd need 3 charges to comfortably get a WC1 power off. Even worse for denying, since you'd only deny those charges on 6's.

The codex bloat as mentioned previously. Your rules were scattered over several sections. Want a Leman Russ? Ok the stats are here. Oh you need to know the Battle Cannon stats? In another bit...You need the points cost now? Keep checking around, you'll find it.

I do wish we kept USRs in 8th-9th but there were so many in previous editions it was hard to keep track. IIRC, you had Hatred, Preferred Enemy, Crusader and Zealot which all did very similar things but were all distinct.

Challenges. Longer that stays dead, the better.

Unbound armies. Didn't mind the Allies Matrix, as that can do some nice fluffy combos (IG force with a squad of Deathwatch hunting down a xenos relic for example), but when you can "literally take anything you want from any book" and the only downside was, IIRC, you can't reroll your warlord trait, utterly ridiculous.

Having to roll for warlord traits and psychic powers in general.

Slipspace wrote:

Crackedgear wrote:
So I started in 8th, but I love me some 30k, and also reading about earlier editions. It completely blows my mind that there was a time when you couldn’t measure distances until you were committed to an action. In fact I think in necromunda you still can’t. That just seems like the cruelest design choice.

In practice it meant you had situations where you had to use an element of risk management. You might really want to shoot a specific target but you're not sure of the range so you need to decide whether to risk it or take a safer choice to target a less important unit you know is in range. Pre-measuring does have the major advantage of avoiding the really heated arguments about what's in range for charges but the older rules had their merits too.

Haha, no-pre-measuring before declaring targets?! Some of us remember when indirect barrages required you to literally GUESS the range between the firing model and the target, and that's where your shot hit/scattered from. I loved that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Just Tony wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
Every mutable genus/trait/doctrine/veteran skill system

You didn't like those?

It started the trend of not knowing what the feth you were facing. Prioritizing fire was a nightmare as you usually wind up focusing on a unit that was innocuous while a particularly vicious build that had NO WYSIWYG WHATSOEVER was ignored. It also gave Chaos YET AGAIN the ability to have their cake and eat every other army's bakery as well.

Different strokes for different folks I guess. Imo all those potential army mods made list building way more fun, and opened up unique opportunities for more units to shine.

I really dislike flyers in this game, especially their current implementation. They just feel like tanks which are very fast, often they have the same toughness/save/wounds as actual tanks!
I like to imagine flyers as "hitting them is hard, destroying them is easy", but that's not what we've got or have ever really had.

I like USRs, there's no reason not to have them. They were badly implemented before, but IMO current special rules have exactly the same problem of bloat but now they're not even universal!
Even when rules are universal, like deepstrike, they pretend it isn't and give each one a unique name. Which just gets confusing when they try and tie effects into deepstrike as they need long-winded explanations instead of just saying "deepstrike".

I didn't like the old cover, armour, and AP system either.
A Space Marine gets zero benefit from hiding behind a building, unless he gets hit by a battlecannon in which suddenly the building stops 50% of incoming fire. To name just one example.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Haha, no-pre-measuring before declaring targets?! Some of us remember when indirect barrages required you to literally GUESS the range between the firing model and the target, and that's where your shot hit/scattered from. I loved that.

.

Wouldn't you just know the table after 4-5 games and to the math for the triangulation in your head by memory? Plus pre game you could just check what the lenght of terrain is, and with that and Pitagoras you more or less could hit anything with an error of around half an inch, maybe less if you were really good at decimals.

Karol wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

Haha, no-pre-measuring before declaring targets?! Some of us remember when indirect barrages required you to literally GUESS the range between the firing model and the target, and that's where your shot hit/scattered from. I loved that.

.

Wouldn't you just know the table after 4-5 games and to the math for the triangulation in your head by memory? Plus pre game you could just check what the lenght of terrain is, and with that and Pitagoras you more or less could hit anything with an error of around half an inch, maybe less if you were really good at decimals.

No. You weren't allowed to measure anything other than ranges back then and anyone trying to do shady stuff like measure terrain pre-game wouldn't get very far in either a gaming group or tournament. There were some stories (possibly apocryphal) of IG players gluing protractors to their Basilisks to allow them to work out exact ranges. the thing is, this was all unnecessary, as it took about 3 or 4 games for most competent players to be able to guess ranges within a reasonable margin of error. I haven't had to do it in well over a decade but reckon I'd still get within a few inches of targets in the 24"-36" range. Even then, you still had to roll for scatter so it wasn't like it was a guaranteed path to victory.

But you could check the lenght of store terrain after the game? If you know where your opponent and your deployment ends, you can easily check the ranges knowing the table size.

If you know that that building is 6" wide and 8" long. It would be really hard to mind scrub someone from such knowladge,specially after a few games.

What was a scatter, I don't know the term?

Back in the before-premeasure days, you could only measure once you declared an attack, so if you were out of range, sucks.

HOWEVER, it allowed for some awesome differentiation - there was a wargear called 'Targeters' that allowed units to premeasure for their shooting before they declared targets. IG stormtroopers had them.

This also allowed for some interesting tactics, where you could move a unit with targeters to a specific distance between say, a guess range weapon and it's target, allowing them to measure the distance from themselves to the target without firing at it. This effectively "spotted" for the artillery/guess weapon by getting a precise known range.

Stuff like that was cool and made units useful in roles besides "kill the enemy" or "die slowly"

The first rule that sticks out to me as the one I disliked the most was from 5th edition.

From memory it went something like.
A fearless unit that lots a close combat takes a number of saves based on how badly they lots, something like that. I recall it was devastating to my foot Orks at the time and all the online and other player were all like Orks are amazing because or Nob Bikers. Which just compounded the issue in my head as I didn't play that new hotness and Orks were in fact not good. One good build doesn't make a good codex. I'll add to my complaint a dislike of pulling casualties from the front and later in 7th being forced into challenges. Which lead to another weird change to my army, no more equipment spent on Nobs. There was no point to throwing those points away.
Other than that I can't think of many rules that gave me such an emotional reaction.
And maybe on there own those rules aren't so bad but stacked with a gakk codex it was a lot of compound interest.
The only weird positive that came from some of that was moving towards a shoota boys based list mid to late 7th which seemed to work quite well.

Oh, last one. Close combat in 2nd edition. That's the one thing about that edition I never liked. The rules were just a slog as I remember it. 90% of the time an unkillable character moved across the table to engage one of my characters or a squad and it never went well for me. maybe it was the dice. Who knows at this point. I just recall really not enjoying that whole phase.

 Kroem wrote:
The pinning rule and having to take leadership tests to shoot at not the closet target have been consigned to the dustbin of history with no tears being shed

Count me as one who "shed a (figurative) tear" and misses taking leadership tests to shoot at a target other than the closest unit. It is a rule that makes logical sense in the chaos of battle, directly impacts model placement and targeting strategies, and further distinguishes more elite armies from less disciplined armies. Yes, it was more time consuming, but it added more realism to a game that was trying to become a tabletop wargame (versus the more mathhammer "gotcha" card game with models we have now). For older editions, I also like to houserule that an infantry unit (ex. tactical squad) may split fire with heavy/special weapons by taking another leadership test beforehand instead of all models having to fire at the same target (i.e. all of the models with bolters having to fire at a tank when really only the one model with a missile launcher really wants to).

As to what I did not care for: TLOS versus more abstract terrain rules may be easier for beginners to learn but it has had more of a negative impact on the game in my opinion. I also disliked 5th edition's wound allocation rules and the Eternal Warrior USR; basically a form of "plot armour" for big/named characters.

ugh, yes, "Fearless' units actually getting extremely bad penalties from losing melee was a very obnoxious feature. Oh my orks are "Fearless" So they just...take 15 extra casualties from that melee, whoops theyre all dead now instead of just possibly being dead and possibly running away.

oh, for fun I'll also throw out:

If a necron player ever got below 1/4 of the number of necron models (stuff like wraiths/scarabs/vehicles didnt count) they had at the start, they instantly lose the game because all the necrons disappear.

Brilliant, wonderful rules writing, very fluff, very narrative, very fun and satisfying for everyone.

 warhead01 wrote:
A fearless unit that lots a close combat takes a number of saves based on how badly they lots, something like that.

One wound per point by which they had lost combat, saves allowed.

Previously the morale rules were based on how outnumbered you were and how many remaining wounds the two sides had, not how badly you were getting beaten.

Gotta add that I hated guess range weapons and was very happy with GW changing it to scatter instead. I'm not an artillerist, the game should be testing my generalship rather than my ability to guess ranges, and when you spend your weekends cutting metal and wood to precise lengths you get pretty good at estimating distances.

To a lesser extent, the lack of premeasuring in general. I like the idea but so many cheesy interactions came out of it, like guys casually laying their forearms on the table or measuring their movement with a yardstick that just so happens to extend over the enemy army. Oh, the battlefield is composed of 12" tiles, isn't that something.

I very much like the idea of friction and uncertainty, not knowing whether you'll be able to shoot, not able to hover 6.1" out of range and know with complete confidence that you are immune to shooting. But I'd rather see that friction come from things like randomized movement or activation orders. That's how hex-and-paper wargames handle it and it works well.

Free detachment bonuses. The 4e Apocalypse formations required specific models but then made you pay extra points to actually get the special formation bonuses, 7e's free special detachments screwed the game badly.

Slipspace wrote:
...There were some stories (possibly apocryphal) of IG players gluing protractors to their Basilisks to allow them to work out exact ranges...

Maybe this is me being an IG fanboy, but if I played a dude who had literal protractors on his artillery to work out firing solutions, I think I'd let him.

Also, from what I recall, a lot of the badfeels from Guess ranges was that one guy in the group who worked in carpentry or construction/was preternaturally good about eyeballing ranges/had a forearm exactly 12" long who basically didn't have to play by the rule where everyone else did. I can dig the idea of having to guess artillery, but at the same time the actual artillerymen are probably doing a bit more than blind reckoning in the game word (I have to imagine they'd at least have a map and a set of binocs, never mind all the high-tech rangefinders that would be available), so that's a bit of abstraction that I'm happy to do to keep everyone on a reasonably level field there.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Back in the before-premeasure days, you could only measure once you declared an attack, so if you were out of range, sucks.

HOWEVER, it allowed for some awesome differentiation - there was a wargear called 'Targeters' that allowed units to premeasure for their shooting before they declared targets. IG stormtroopers had them.

In an edition where you couldn't pre-measure, Targeters were probably the best wargear in the game. They were only 1 point. A single point for your unit to pre-measure. IIRC, only Daemonhunters also had access to them, but seeing as you could take an allied Inquisitor very easily, nothing stopped you from attacking with him first, then using that as a baseline for the guys around you.

Not really a rule but keywords for keywords.

In 7th monster had like smash, ignores heavy, all these keywords that I could never remember that were jammed into one word.

I hated it