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Choppas were lost in favour of Furious Charge, making even the lowly Ork Boy S4 on the charge. Which if memory served worked out about the same against MEQ.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I’m also going to speak in favour of Weapon Traits. At least as a concept.

Take Thallaxi in 2nd Ed Heresy.

Their Lightning Guns are no slouch and are frankly one of the best basic weapons in the game.

But one in three can have a Multi-Melta, Phased Plasma Fusil, or a Photon Thruster.

Multi-Melta is self explanatory. Phased Plasma Fusil was a rare straight AP3 Plasma Weapon, not far off 3rd Ed’s dreaded Star Cannon, but with Gets Hot!. The Photon Thruster is a stripped down Dark Lance. Its stats aren’t great, not hitting as hard as the Plasma but still having Gets Hot!, but does at least offer Blind.

And it’s Blind that tipped me in favour of the Photon Thruster. It has a reasonable shot at outright squashing a Marine (and so most infantry). But it’s the chance to Blind the target unit that is Chef’s Kiss.

So Weapons Traits can be the way to make otherwise niche or middling stat weapons appealing options.

Note the can there. As like so many of life’s good ideas, it’s all in the execution.

For instance of a bad one in 3rd style editions? Pinning.

Now, to shutdown an opposing unit for a turn sounds grand. Except, typically, you didn’t get many Pinning weapons, which didn’t come with many shots, typically lacked reliable AP, and most armies and units either had straight out reliable enough Ld, or a way round it entirely (Synapse, Mob Rule) to prevent a unit failing the resulting test. Oh, and often only appeared in small units.

There, the execution was right off. Pinning could’ve been a powerful tool, but the rules conspired to render it pretty much moot.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There, the execution was right off. Pinning could’ve been a powerful tool, but the rules conspired to render it pretty much moot.

It was more common in earlier editions where you had things like the ranger disruption tables and dark eldar terrorfexes.

Reliable pinning was too punitive to be used en-mass. seems that rather than weaken the effect GW just reduced the causes - in 3e you could pin half the opponents army off the bat with rangers or run drive-bys with terrorfexes... the latter actually had improved pinning rules (-1 Ld if below half strength, another -1 Ld for multi-hits. DE stacked this up with Ld reduction wargear and squad vets were optional).
This meant that playing infantry against DE could lead to multiple LD 4-5 pinning tests from 18" away, every turn, where you were either going to be losing a decent chunk of your units or simply immune with not much inbetween.

Memnoch wrote:
5th Edition brought in armour save modifications for every weapon ironically.

Melee AP was 6th edition, neutering half of the melee named characters as they could no longer harm their counterparts or leading to unaddressed debates over whether Dante was hitting with an axe (init 1, AP2) or axe-shaped sword (init 6, AP3)

I originally played RT back in the day, all the way to the end when the rules (I'm told) had practically morphed into 2nd edition. I didn't play again until 8th edition, and have continued playing until now.

In 9th edition I went to Warhammer World and re-bought the RT core and Realm of Chaos rulebooks, so they sit on my shelf with the 10th edition rulebooks.

I thought 9th edition was better than 8th edition, but got too complex. 10th edition reset that but possibly too far? Having said that, the new TSons codex practically reintroduced the psychic phase which was welcome. Fingers crossed the GK codex does similar.

My favourite thing about 8th edition to 10th edition is that vehicle datasheets are now the same as other units.

 PenitentJake wrote:

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.

While I agree 100% regarding 10th, I don't particularly care for the psychic "system" in 8th/9th.

My issue is that there's no real tactic or strategy - you just throw a couple of dice and hope for the best.

Not that I'd want to go back to 7th, where you basically played Yahtzee for half an hour.

But it would be nice if there was at least a little extra to it. e.g. having Perils (d3 Mortal Wounds to the psyker) on a double-1 or double-6, and letting psykers roll up to 2 additional dice per power. So you can increase your odds of casting but make it riskier for yourself in the process.

Or make it more resource-management, where your dice are pooled (similar to 7th, but without all the random elements) and you can choose how you allocate them.

Just something to add a modicum of depth to using psychic powers.

Which runs into the issue of that over half a dozen factions do not have psychic powers.

 Tyran wrote:
Which runs into the issue of that over half a dozen factions do not have psychic powers.

I always found that the problem lay more with the lack of evenly spread psychic defenses, especially when more psykers was the only proper response to more psykers. Combined with powers being so strong that even getting one off (like invisibility) is a momentum shifting event.

In isolation they can be like the guards orders or the sisters faith where their strength and reliability can be priced in. Some editions though became an arms war where in one game the core of your army might be dead weight and in the next they might summon enough free units to double the points value of your list.

 Tyran wrote:
Which runs into the issue of that over half a dozen factions do not have psychic powers.

That's why I suggested bringing back Deny the Witch and creating units in non-psychic armies. And you don't have to call it deny the Witch- Admech might have a Null Field, the T'au might have Faith in the Greater Good, etc.

@Vipoid- 9th did have perils, but I really liked your suggestion of choosing the number of dice to roll- that would have been a great addition to 9th's support for psychics, and importing the whole thing into 11th would be great. I honestly think there's a good chance of that happening. I think 10th was meant to strip the game down, and now that they've got a skeleton that works, they can add a bit of meat.

Bring back costed equipment, improving terrain rules and psychic powers would be a nice bunch of upgrades for the new edition.

 PenitentJake wrote:

@Vipoid- 9th did have perils, but I really liked your suggestion of choosing the number of dice to roll- that would have been a great addition to 9th's support for psychics, and importing the whole thing into 11th would be great. I honestly think there's a good chance of that happening. I think 10th was meant to strip the game down, and now that they've got a skeleton that works, they can add a bit of meat.

Bring back costed equipment, improving terrain rules and psychic powers would be a nice bunch of upgrades for the new edition.

Amen to that.

As for perils, I couldn't remember if it still existed in 9th or not. Just wanted to clarify the intended risk for using extra dice. Cheers for reminding me that it did still exist last edition.

 Tyran wrote:
Which runs into the issue of that over half a dozen factions do not have psychic powers.

Could you elaborate on what the issue is?

- If it's a lack of psychic defence, I wouldn't have thought this would be any more of an issue with my system than it was in regular 9th. There is, after all, greater risk associated with making powers more likely to succeed.

- If the issue is that other factions don't have much to do, that's fair. Though, again, I don't think it's much worse under my system than it was in 9th (I'm trying to avoid the time-sink that was 7th's psychic phase).

However, I would note that many factions could be given other strings to their bow. For example, Necrons already have C'tan powers, which you could simply make into pseudo-psychic powers. Or you could make their Reanimation Protocols more of a choice (e.g. give them a pool of Reanimation Dice each turn that they can spend to try and revive particular units). With DE, you could do a similar thing and give them a Mandrake Lord with pseudo-psychic powers, or maybe make FNP more involved. SoB already have Miracle Dice.

Basically, you could tweak the unique mechanics of other factions to give them more actual levers to pull (either in the form of powers that aren't technically psychic but which may use similar mechanics), or otherwise by making their faction-specific abilities a little more involved in one way or other.

Just spitballing but IMO 40k is in dire need of more mechanics, rather than fewer.

 vipoid wrote:

Could you elaborate on what the issue is?

- If it's a lack of psychic defence, I wouldn't have thought this would be any more of an issue with my system than it was in regular 9th. There is, after all, greater risk associated with making powers more likely to succeed.

- If the issue is that other factions don't have much to do, that's fair. Though, again, I don't think it's much worse under my system than it was in 9th (I'm trying to avoid the time-sink that was 7th's psychic phase).

Both, with the additional commentary that even 9th's psychic phase could become a time sink for psychic heavy armies.

Just spitballing but IMO 40k is in dire need of more mechanics, rather than fewer.

40k is in need of more universal mechanics, rather than ones in which only some factions can play with.

My requirement for a more complex psychic system is "how are you going to give psychic powers to Tau?" If you can make a system in which even the less psychic faction still feels rewarded then thumbs up, but otherwise it will be inherently flawed.

 Tyran wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

Could you elaborate on what the issue is?

- If it's a lack of psychic defence, I wouldn't have thought this would be any more of an issue with my system than it was in regular 9th. There is, after all, greater risk associated with making powers more likely to succeed.

- If the issue is that other factions don't have much to do, that's fair. Though, again, I don't think it's much worse under my system than it was in 9th (I'm trying to avoid the time-sink that was 7th's psychic phase).

Both, with the additional commentary that even 9th's psychic phase could become a time sink for psychic heavy armies.

Just spitballing but IMO 40k is in dire need of more mechanics, rather than fewer.

40k is in need of more universal mechanics, rather than ones in which only some factions can play with.

My requirement for a more complex psychic system is "how are you going to give psychic powers to Tau?" If you can make a system in which even the less psychic faction still feels rewarded then thumbs up, but otherwise it will be inherently flawed.

I mean, that could be as easy as Psyker client races/mercenaries.

 Tyran wrote:


My requirement for a more complex psychic system is "how are you going to give psychic powers to Tau?" If you can make a system in which even the less psychic faction still feels rewarded then thumbs up, but otherwise it will be inherently flawed.

I heavily disagree with that. Not every faction needs to compete in every mechanic or ability. Keep faction diversity. Tau don't need psychic powers because they have special equipment that gives other unique abilities. Instead of Guide they have Markerlights, for example. Necrons don't need Fortune, they have We'll be Back. (Res Protocols?)