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Spent a few hours going over my 40k rulebooks by edition and it is strange to see how long some things lasted while other things just went away rather quickly.

My basic focus was on the structure of the turn and hit, wound, save procedures.

The BS from RT remained almost unchanged until 8E, which was pretty nice, although the high level 6+ BS mechanic changed in 3E.
WS changed in 3E to make melee a bit more effective, marking a shift away from niche melee to having it be a whole type of army in 3E and later. The attacker and defender's skill were taken into account so that was a nice mechanic IMO to keep skill levels in mind when attacking in melee.

The 8E simplification of the to-hit roll was a thing. It made it more simple, but after 30 years I guess they needed something to modernize it. I don't think it was necessary, but it did make it easier and at least now it didn't need two separate charts. It felt like it was buff for melee attackers as the defenders skill no longer really mattered anymore so it went from skill based, to just roll a die. The rerolling of "1's" seemed to really ramp up here as well.

The wound roll was kept the same for 30 years, and then in 8th it changed, and it made it so that anything can wound anything as AV went away, any Strength can damage any level of Toughness. It felt like a definite bonus for all attackers as the more you shoot, the more chances you have to do damage, no matter slight. It seemed to make vehicles and armor (in terms of high Toughness) in general less useful as you could no longer just shut down some attacks completely. It did make more of the higher strength, mid toughness attacks harder though (more 3+ showing up).

Armor saves were sort of all over the place when taken with the cover modifiers. Sometimes it favored armor and cover, other times it made cover pretty useless, coupled with the slight AP changes in weapons over the decades, you can see the attempts to get shooty armies vs defense "just right".

Strangely, the increases to Damage and the introduction of Mortal Wounds at the same time as anything can damage anything feels like it was known that Wound bloat would occur, so they increased damage and Mortal Wounds to compensate. If you already knew it would be a problem, why change it instead of incorporate a fix... then incorporate Feel No Pain to make sure that the "heroes" are not killed off too fast.

It was like making changes, then fixes when I'm not sure there was a large desire for a change at all. It felt like a way to make a rules fix to accomodate Primaris, which it probably was.

Leadership tests followed the same format all the way until 8E, which seemed like an attempt to slowly attrite high wound squads in a new way since the battles would last too long otherwise?

Next comes Psychic tests and wow... in RT it was some book keeping. In 2E it got a bit better, but in 3E, they seemed to just go minimalist with the rules and that seemed to be a good enough solution, although psyker powers got more dangerous as editions came out. In 6th, the whole Warp Charge mechanic showed up and wow, it seemed like a solution in search of a problem, harkening back to Rogue Trader book keeping. Then 7E psykers got a huge boost in lethality and options... and book keeping and dice rolling. It was hardly elegant. Granted, the desire to make psykers potent is certainly there, but that system was not fun. 8th Edition and later seems to have gotten the psyker right. It isn't as simple as 3, 4 or 5, but keeps the flexibility of RT, 2E and 7E while making the whole thing much easier. Giving every psyker an offensive power was genius, and it is offset by suitably bad effects on a Perils of the Warp roll... D3 Mortal Wounds and possibly more to allies in 6". Nasty.

So, looking at all of this, I think that the best all around set of rules is probably 3E, 4E or 5E using just those mechanics as criteria. RT and 2E were still too experimental (?) to be good as a rule system, 6E and 7E started to get complicated for the sake of being different... and 8E really launched a whole new set of rules and editions that have kept the core mechanic pretty stable so far. It feels like they wanted 8E to be faster playing, but sort of ended up slowing games down with Wound bloat, more rerolls of 1's, Warlord traits, FNP, Strategem spam and keywords to tell you that there is no special rule (HunTR)... like it seems so strange.

Overall, I think GW could have spend their time making new models than new editions of the game. I mean I still buy 40k stuff, but I stopped "playing" when 6E came out. I still buy models to grow my pile of shame and get the random codex when it looks interesting, but the push of new editions sort of pushed me out of the game aspect of the hobby.

Anyway, I had some time today to waste, what are your opinions?

-STS

I think HH 2.0 and 8th edition showed two solutions to the aweful WS charts of 3-7th edition that boiled down to "90% of times you roll a 3 or a 4". 8th had a greater spread in WS rolls to hit, while HH improved the chart to a similar effect.

I agree that 8th/ 9th had the best psychic mechanic, they should have kept it and just added the more interesting powers of other editions instead of "everything is mortal wounds and the default power usually is the best one".
8th/9th edition did a similar arms race 5th to 7th did, though it's significant that it happened in 6years vs 10 or so years. 5th introduced a lot of AP2, 6th introduced fixed toughness and FNP that wasn't shutdown by instant death, 7th spread D weapons like candy that in turn needed Necron decurion to shut down everything on a 4+ FNP and even Dweapons on a 5+. And 2+ invulnerable saves. Meanwhile vehicles got beaten to death by Space Marine fists (not power fists, just fists...) because of the introduction of hull points.
9th spiraled down very fast from a promising start, in the end you had stuff like the Daemon save to ignore weapons that ignore invulns...
10th so far seems to have found a nice middle ground, let's hope 11th isn't like 9th.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
5th introduced a lot of AP2

Plasma cannons definitely got a lot cheaper as 5th went on, along with most heavy weapons and all the extra firepower guard brought.

In terms of new stuff though it was all AP3 - flamestorm cannons, vengeance rounds, hotshot lasguns, gauss cannons, the change to cyclone and typhoon missile launchers.

You need a Damage characteristic to make the larger Monstrous Creatures work, as seen in HH 2.0 in which you need Brutal to take on Dreadnoughts.

Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

Also old school poisoned rules kinda sucked as they didn't scale with toughness (but at the same time hardcountered the entire Tyranid army).

I guess it goes without saying but as a Tyranid player with lots of large monstrous creatures, I don't have a lot of interest in going back to older editions.

slade the sniper wrote:
6E and 7E started to get complicated for the sake of being different...

Quite a few edition differences felt like either a shake-up to justify the new rulebook or an attempt to implement a change that didn't quite go as planned.

The 5e wound allocation stuff for example kind of mashed together some of the extended wound allocation rules from 4e into a single system... and made a hash of it, but you can see what they were trying to do.

 Tyran wrote:
Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

IMO it was saves and toughness more than wounds. T6 3+, no fnp/inv was a terrible place to be as a large target in 5th.

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

IMO it was saves and toughness more than wounds. T6 3+, no fnp/inv was a terrible place to be as a large target in 5th.

This. It wasn't the wound pool that made the Riptide a pain. It was a combination of wounds, T6, a 2+ armour save, a 5++ invulnerable save that could be boosted to 3++, mobility that could also be boosted, and strong offensive potential with the ap2 large blast.

If you try to blast it down from long range it just sits back with a 2+/3++ (and possibly FNP on top, if I remember right) and drops blasts on your elite units. If you try and get close, it can just nova boost away so you can't even lock it down.

Basically, no unit should score highly on toughness, mobility, range, and damage. There should be some give and take, pros and cons. The Riptide was all pros.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

IMO it was saves and toughness more than wounds. T6 3+, no fnp/inv was a terrible place to be as a large target in 5th.

This. It wasn't the wound pool that made the Riptide a pain. It was a combination of wounds, T6, a 2+ armour save, a 5++ invulnerable save that could be boosted to 3++, mobility that could also be boosted, and strong offensive potential with the ap2 large blast.

If you try to blast it down from long range it just sits back with a 2+/3++ (and possibly FNP on top, if I remember right) and drops blasts on your elite units. If you try and get close, it can just nova boost away so you can't even lock it down.

Basically, no unit should score highly on toughness, mobility, range, and damage. There should be some give and take, pros and cons. The Riptide was all pros.

As a monster in 7th it even got an automatic Ap2 in melee (and stomp IIRC) just because. So even in CC it wasn't that bad.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

IMO it was saves and toughness more than wounds. T6 3+, no fnp/inv was a terrible place to be as a large target in 5th.

This. It wasn't the wound pool that made the Riptide a pain. It was a combination of wounds, T6, a 2+ armour save, a 5++ invulnerable save that could be boosted to 3++, mobility that could also be boosted, and strong offensive potential with the ap2 large blast.

The issue is that took one of these away and the Riptide goes from all pros to crap. Take away the invul and it dies to ap2 spam, take away the armour and it dies to chip damage, take away the ap2 large blast and it is unlikely to ever make its points back. It is very easy to go from a strong model to a crap one because it is a system of binaries without a lot of middle points.

 Tyran wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Otherwise it is kinda impossible to balance a unit with a large wound pool. Carnifex and Wraithlord sized (T6 W4 or T8 W3) was the limit of E3-7 rules, anything bigger either just broke the system (Dreadnights, Wraithknights and Riptides) or just didn't work (Tyranid MCs).

IMO it was saves and toughness more than wounds. T6 3+, no fnp/inv was a terrible place to be as a large target in 5th.

This. It wasn't the wound pool that made the Riptide a pain. It was a combination of wounds, T6, a 2+ armour save, a 5++ invulnerable save that could be boosted to 3++, mobility that could also be boosted, and strong offensive potential with the ap2 large blast.

The issue is that took one of these away and the Riptide goes from all pros to crap. Take away the invul and it dies to ap2 spam, take away the armour and it dies to chip damage, take away the ap2 large blast and it is unlikely to ever make its points back. It is very easy to go from a strong model to a crap one because it is a system of binaries without a lot of middle points.

This is true. The current Riptide is nowhere close to the power house it used it be. It's still not bad at all, but its not the auto include it used to be.

slade the sniper wrote:

8th Edition and later seems to have gotten the psyker right. It isn't as simple as 3, 4 or 5, but keeps the flexibility of RT, 2E and 7E while making the whole thing much easier.

I's say 8th and 9th got it right.

10th gutted what 8th and 9th got right, to the point where the only thing in the game that feels remotely psychic is Ksons.

In 10th, psychic powers are just a special class of guns that have certain characteristics in common. It's boring and stupid, but they kept Crusade, and made it easy enough to play for free for long enough that they were able to keep my interest. I'm hoping 11th restores at least some of the variety we used to have with psychics. I don't need a dedicated phase, but I need to be able to make choices with psykers so that they aren't all the same.