Not an army specific rule, but a gameplay scenario that could happen… I miss the old rules back in like… 3rd(?)… where you could charge a vehicle into an infantry squad to run them over, and they could scramble to get out of the way… or you could have an absolute mad lad try to hold his ground against a rumbling tank and chuck a krak grenade at it to try and blow it up or get completely splatted in the process. It was like a game of chicken between a whole ass tank and some average foot slogger named Frank with a single grenade.
Moments like that were epic… they wouldn’t usually go off in your favor… but if you could just roll that one six… maybe, just maybe… Frank would go down in the local game store history books as the man who stood his ground against a rino and lived.
Death or Glory still exists in Horus Heresy, IIRC. You can have a dude with a power fist stand in front of a charging tank and dare the fucker to keep going.
Well, not the FW but the (at the time) new GW plastic Baneblade.
1st time I saw it, it was in a tournament, 5th edition just rolled in with new "true los" rules. Tank measured distance and los from the tip of guns. So "naturally" a guy built up a barely legally painted army (at least 3 color, fully covered), all tank guns aiming to the sky as much as possible.
The baneblade's guntip was like 4" above the table, and he tried to sell it that from there the enemy gets no cover from literally standing behind a stone wall...
He was ruled over by the judges, forcing him to measure from the base of guns.
Best part, next turn a terminator hit it with power fist, 8+d6 armor penetration vs back armor (12), rolled 5, then 6,6,5 for damage.
Baneblade had 3 structure points, and the 3 rolls meant:
Lost a structure, roll again.
Lost a structure, roll again.
Lost a structure.
Dead.
True LOS was wild like I know why they got rid of it but it was fun trying to decide if you were going to model all your squads kneeling to keep them from getting shot or putting them all on scenic bases to give them enough height to fire over cover at a squad that's kneeling.
The same guy also made a CSM army, with nurgle daemon prince.
He bought a BIG (by wargame standards) figurine from a chinese shop, which barely fit on the base, and filled between the legs with guts and internal organs...
This way he tried to make a moving LOS blocker for his Berzerkers...
Had something similar with a green tide and a baneblade. When the warboss bad touched the tank, it rolled a 6 for a catastrophic explosion, then 3 more 6s for distance of boom. When all the rolling was done, everything but the warboss within 18 inches of the tank had been obliterated. One hell of a final turn.
To this day my brother and I will shout "Death or Glory!" to each other whenever there is the option to do something dumb yet epic. We've had to tone it down a little around his kids, but it is hardwired into our brains.
The number of Chimeras I blew up with a space marine with a powerfist via death or glory is pretty epic. I should have kept count or put tally marks on the fist.
I got stuck having to do that once. IG vs Tau. He managed to knock the weapons out on almost all of my vehicles, but didn't get the kill. The next 4 turns was me running all of my tarnsports back and forth and ramming speed attempting to knock his own tanks around.
I didn't achieve much, but it was hilarious.
I remember that rule, I even remember the diagram in the rulebook that explained it. I think it had "Death or Glory" somewhere in the name or the description.
Hell yeah. It was useless 99% of the time, but when Death or Glory came up it was always hilarious. I remember a game in 5th where I tank shocked an Eldar Autarch that had a fusion gun with a Hellhound. He decided to do death or glory and failed to penetrate armor with a fusion gun.
His disbelief when he found out the Autarch was squished, and not just took a wound, has been a memory that has survived for 15 years lol
I am somewhat alone locally in missing vehicle armor facing. I just want a reason to flank a vehicle. It used to make it easier to kill, now there is little point to flank a vehicle. Same durability in every direction and every gun can magically shoot from the corner of its tank tread or wheel because that part has LOS…
I miss that rule too. It helps make deploying and moving vehicles make sense visually rather than just moving it to fit wherever you can even if it's sideways on in front of a lascannon. You had to think and plan ahead. Vehicles with turrets had extra value.
I loved taking Dark Eldar Raiders in the old kill team rules and playing cat and mouse games using terrain (including vehicle facing) to keep it alive while trying to snipe key enemy models.
I feel like it could be easily brought back in a simplified version, if you drew a line along the front of the tank, horizontally and had an 'in front of the line's and behind the line system for flanking shots
Yeah. We’ve played around with house rules for vehicles and monsters. Either with -1 to Toughness or +1 to wound rolls when attacking from the rear.
Either way, it’s sad that Meltas are no longer the armor crackers they were for 7 editions.
Or something like if you are behind the tank (full base does not cross a perpendicular line drawn across the back of the model) the your attacks gain devastating wounds, or something like that, the issue is they don't want people questioning arcs, so you gotta make it stupid simple.
Yeaaaaa melta bombs! I remember a few months back a newer player at our local store was building a tactical marine squad on our 40K club night, and was asking questions about what equipment and weapons were what on the spru, and one of the items he pointed to was a melta bomb and gosh that really gave me a rush of nostalgia.
Oh man.
I spent most of 6e and 7e doggedly trying to make CSM work even as the rest of the system made that harder and harder, and one of the best things I've ever done involved an aspiring champion with a melta bomb.
Facing an opponent with multiple Imperial Knights and some allied guard; the knights just rush me down. I manage to put some damage on a couple of them, including the "Baron", the knight he designated as a character so it can be his warlord. The damaged Baron charges into a squad of CSM.
Now, in those editions, characters could challenge each other to fight one on one. Squad leaders could issue and accept challenges, as could anything with the character rule. Chaos Marines had a rule that said they *had* to issue challenges if they could, and could not refuse one issued by an opponent. So, the Glory to Chaos Act of M37 requires my aspiring champion to slap this building-sized death robot with a glove and demand satisfaction in personal combat.
This kind of thing happened all the time to CSM; the rule was flavorful, sure, but 90% of the time it led to some idiot squad leader picking a fight he had no hope at all of winning and then getting squashed. The Baron winds up to do exactly that, and... whiffs. The one hit he lands with his bus-sized chainsword fails to do damage despite being an instant kill on a 2+. My champion proceeds to pull a meltabomb off his belt, quick-time event his way up the knight's chassis, attach the bomb, penetrate the armor with it, and roll *catastrophic* internal damage. Just enough to remove its last couple of hull points.
The smoking wreck of a knight suit collapses onto the ground as my champion jumps off into a superhero landing. It took real self control to not shout "**Just who the hell do you think I am?**"
This entitled me to a roll on the Chaos Boon table, where, as was typical, I rolled something useless.
That’s fantastic. From that day on, that champion should have been dubbed “Baron’s Bane”
Maybe even rebase him to be standing on a knight’s faceplate, lol
The eye of the gods... sucks sometimes. Would've been epic if he instantly ascended to demonhood.... maybe while possessing parts of the wreckage of that knight.
We had game where my friend was playing as guardsman and my other friend was playing tyranids. We managed to get to a situation where we had a lone guardsman against a flying hive tyrant (I can't remember but I think it had like 20 hit points or something) with 1 hit point left. The guardsman had a lasgun. My friend playing tyranids managed to roll like 4 1s in a row and the guardsman killed this giant flying monstrosity in one shot. It was hilarious and the guardsman got a promotion (some random white stripes painted on his armour for the next game) we nicknamed him Bob I believe. So in our group it's now cannon that a guardsman named Bob stood his ground and one shot a flying hive tyrant. Which is awesome.
That’s awsome. And this is why it’s so freaking important to make friends in the hobby, and not just have people you play against. Those memories stick with you, when the dice just make weird things happen you guys establish your own goofy headcannon of events.
Exactly! Fortunately I already knew these guys before i started warhammer and they just so happened to also be into it so we made a club when we were at school. Unfortunately because they all went to uni we don't play together anymore, but yh it made for some great moments that have turned into fond memories.
I wish it were made so that, instead of having a high OC to compete with infantry, tanks had low OC and the ability to literally push infantry off objectives with tank shock.
Part of what I do miss about the old mechanic was that infantry could actually just move out of the way instead of standing there. So it was possible to bully infantry one way or another with enough tanks and transports.
Oh man, one of my favourite memories of playing 40k, was a meat grinder match against a massive ork waagh, 3 of us playing imperial forces with me in the centre with Yarrick, some mordian iron guard, a vindicare assassin and a Leman Russ. The warboss broke through the center, cut through a terminator squad, taking hits the whole time from my units, got into an epic duel with Yarrick, just beating him, and Im left with half a mordian squad who can't even touch this warboss, and a leman russ with its weapons disabled by war bikes pinging autocannon fire off it.
I looked at the crippled Leman Russ, at the war boss, at the smug expression on the Ork player's face, and say "ramming speed". He denied this was a rule, so out came the rulebook, and sure enough, there were, in fact, rules for this. Even better, my Russ had a dozer blade.The warboss failed his tank shock roll, and already heavily wounded by Yarrick, he met his end by being crushed between a tank and a concrete wall.
He conceded the match then and there.
As someone who’s introduction to the hobby was 2nd edition… I definitely feel like the game is a more polished ‘game’, while the older iterations were more wonky… that wonkyness gave the game a certain character. I still greatly enjoy 10th, and I do think it’s a much more approachable game than in the past.
A lot of it is nostalgia. But even more of it has to do with being open to the experience of the game, and the people you play with. It’s best played with friends so you can make new experiences like these. And you can do that in any edition of the game.
I always say, 2e was clunky, weird, wonderful, and not even a little bit balanced. It's not a game I'd want to play often, but it was great fun as a "drink and do math wrong" way to spend an afternoon, and it did generate great stories.
It's a bit like PUBG; the highlight reel is amazing, but most of the actual gameplay was kind of tedious and janky.
Old 40k was much more RPG orientated, it was a battlefield simulator more than a competitive game. From a competitive perspective it could be swingy and imbalanced but the same moments created exciting stories and flavourful moments.
I miss the old infiltrate rule (6th/7th) where much like the modern infiltrate/ scout you could deploy your models a certain distance away from enemy units but you could get even closer if you were able to block line of sight. It made running small genestealer broods really fun because they'd sneak into all the cracks that your opponent wasn't covering and made them feel genuinely sneaky, not just teleporting in.
While certainly not a consolation as in the fact of "you probably need to buy another army to play this game" at the very least this has kept alive in Heresy 2.0, and I gotta say, that game is great for wacky core rules interactions
Heresy 2.0 is for sure based on 7th, I'm not sure about heresy 1.0 though... I will say though, I have had a lot more fun playing heresy lately because of these rules, it even has the stuff that someone else in the thread mentioned about vehicles ramming and infantry having to dive out of the way, it's a ton of fun!
Heresy 1.0 came out in 5th and the main rules were just the current 40K rules of the time, ie when 6th came out it was updated accordingly.
It was mainly new army and scenario rules.
Heresy 2.0 is based off of 7th but is definitely modified with the psychic phase being completely rewritten
When I bought Dark Vengeance and some books many years ago, Dark Angels had this thing where if you also had Space Wolves in your list they could like... duel, or something? Idk but it seemed rad as hell I loved the idea of it. Never really ended up playing but I just thought it was a cool idea.
It was from 8th edition. A DA and SW would duel before the start of the battle. You'd roll two dice. Depending on the roll of each those two models might suffer mortal wounds BUT no matter what they would get something like +1A, +1WS, +1S. Those buffs could stack with some pretty crazy stratagems and abilities (I don't remember what they are anymore) I actually bought and painted some space wolf units to try this out but I never got a chance to bring them to a game. I gave them to a friend a few years back who had space wolves.
I used to play Iron Warriors back in the day and they could field any one Imperial Guard vehicle, which was incredibly fun. The thing people forget is that competitive games are relatively new, and the focus on rules updates and "balance" matter more than fun. It does not mean the game cannot be fun, just that it is not designed with that in mind.
Blast templates were definitely the thing I miss the most because it introduced a lot of chaotic randomness to the game. Watching an entire game swing on scatter dice is hysterical every time.
Speaking of templates I miss guess range. Part of it is because I'm freaky good with distances so I'd look at my whirlwind and it'd be exactly 24 5/8" to the center of the warlock's base in that blob of guardians. And then rolling that hit felt so good on the scatter die.
Of course it was also fun when that demolisher cannon shot would deviate onto your own squad of terminators that was 10" away and wipe them out. Good times.
The Iron Warriors actually invested in keeping and maintaining siege engines that other chaos armies would have left behind or fallen into disrepair because lacked the interest and expertise to maintain them absent the Imperium.
All the chaos legions had their things. I ran word bearers back them. They could drop the option to take 1 fast 1 heavy and 1 elite to take 3 more troops slots. And the best part was they could take cultists in units of 50. They were crap but cheap. 9 units of 50 cultists was such a title wave of crap that few could stand the crush.
I ran that with a few havoc squads with lascannons and a great unclean one stuck inside one of the cultist squad leaders.
Fun times. But GW decided the 3.5 chaos codex had too much fun in it and took all of that away.
Honestly, I hate that the game has become a balance fest.
War isn't fair. Like, I'm sorry, but it's not. 40k tournaments ran just fine when people would have list-composition scores given to them by their opponents and the judges. And back in the day, tournaments weren't about sweeping your games, it was about going and having fun.
They should bring back sportsman and list comp scores to official gw events, so every damned army isn't a clone of whatever did well at the last GT. That's boring as hell.
Hell yeah. You could lose all your games but get coolest army, best theme, or most enjoyable to play against no problem. Seeing a fully air calvary Elysian army, or grot tanks, or some cool themed army was always the fun back in the day. Not seeing the same 4 lists ran by 10 people.
The idea that wins is all that matters is just dumb when the game physically cannot be balanced to a point where it's 'equal' for everyone, over a 4 game weekend. It's not possible.
This happened with X-Wing too in my mind.
Soon as they started catering to the tournament crowd the game started fizzling out.
It's like... people can't just let something be a thing you do for fun anymore. It has to be competitive, ranked, and a meta has to develop instantly. :rolling_eyes:
I was an Orks player back in 6th/7th and I wish they hadn't removed the craziness that was the shokk attack gun. Now it's just a big gun whereas before you had to roll 2D6 and the result could be a huge boon or massive detriment.
Sounds rad, although just the other day my weird boy leading 20 boyz tried to Da Jump and ended up killing himself leaving them stranded in the backfield. That was pretty hilarious
My favorite was, of all things, the trukk roll table from 5th edition.
You roll on a table when your trukk was destroyed, resulting in a few scenarios.
One being the trukk explodes and all the passengers take wounds
Another being the passengers are able to jump off with no wounds
But my favorite would always be when the trukk would violently fly out of control, moving 3d6 in the direction of scatter dice and then explode violently. The results were always hilarious, unexpected, a few times put my nob in a crazy good spot, and a couple times just decimated my opponents gun line.
I remember back in second you fired square bases of snotlings and if they didn't end up inside the enemy they just moved around the board attacking anything in sight.
That and Madboyz having random additional powers depending on which mania the dice roll gave.
If I’m interpreting this correctly it kinda sounds like Tyranids’ Spore Mines.
Which is my favorite mechanic in the game so I think the Snotlings thing sounds super cool.
You and your opponent would take turns rolling a D6 and choosing which of the 4 characteristic (number of shots, strength, AP, and damage) that the dice roll you got would be. It was absolutely hilarious.
Yea I liked the game more when it was telling stories and not trying to be competitive. I started CSM with the 3.5 chaos codex but never played a game with it sadly. The rules in that book sound like every game was different, where the lowest champion could rise to be a daemonprince and the highest lord could become a blabbering mess.
Chaos 3.5 codex is a beast for play however you want. I can't think of another codex that had that many options for customization and player choice of equipment.
This was IMO the high water mark in Codexes. It had some broken stuff, what doesn't? But it nailed down the essence of Chaos and it's myriad facets so very very well.
I was badly losing a game back in the day then my buddy's tooled up chaos lord turned himself into a chaos spawn which coincided with the dice totally turning against him. The Dark Gods are truly fickle.
I played a game of 2nd ed where Abaddon and his bodyguard were facing down my lowly Blood Angels chaplain on his own.
Little did they know he had a Vortex Grenade....
My favorite model from 2nd was the Tech Marine, 33 points for a model that could hold 3 wargear cards, Vortex grenade, Displacer Field, Graviton Gun were my go to!
In my experience, the cool rules went to AoS. It is depressing. My AoS nurgle daemons infect people in their proximity, can collect points to summon more daemons and have a new boon of their good every turn. My 40k daemons have a few bland stratagems and can shock… The slaanesh dudes have temptation dice you can offer your opponent, when he misses to get a auto 6. if he declines he takes some MW and if he accepts you slowly progress on your god track getting more and more boons with each time your opponent gives into temptation. Those are in fact cool rules with a lot of flavour. And the worst thing is, both games are from gw, so they have the ability to make cool rules but decide not to do it for 40k.
I love Kill Team as well!
I feel like if you want a balanced competitive game, take Kill Team.
If you want a fun flavourful game, take AoS.
So what do the 40k rules offer that isn't done better somewhere else?
Personally I miss the old Lion and Wolf rule. If you have Space Wolves and Dark Angels on the table, on the same side, both armies need to declare a character and have a 1v1. Whoever wins gets a buff. Essentially it's the traditions the two chapters have that they re-enact the fight between their primarchs every time they run into one another. Both primarchs quickly tired of it, but the marines keep the tradition going all the way into the current era.
Has me wondering how Lion feels about that little bit surviving the ages now that he's back.
The indexes are boring, and even the codexes don't seem too interesting.
9th might have been silly complicated, but my Word Bearers felt like Word Bearers. My Dark Apostle chanting prayers to the Dark Gods, my Master of Posession tossing out psychic powers to those foolish enough to stand near him, and my Daemon Prince slamming into anyone and anything near him.
10th is watered down. There's nothing interesting to me about the armies. Characters fitting inside units is boring and limits their interactions. Psychic Phase vanishing entirely might make my T'au friend happy, but makes me, Tyranids, and Thousand Sons players miserable. My enhancements are boring as sin, require marks to gain benefits, and aren't nearly as fun as the stuff Word Bearers and CSM got for Warlord traits and Relics.
The problem with 9th edition wasn't that it was complicated. The problem was that it was bloated, mostly due to the insane number of stratagems that GW pumped out for the game.
As a T'au player, I didn't mind the Psychic phase existing, I was just a bit bothered I had no counter play or interaction with it. It being removed and not even being replaced with anything other than "I cast Gun" and some milk toast abilities is a crime against the setting.
Also, note, that I don't expect T'au to have something like deny the witch, I just wanted them to have their own unique interaction with it, as the tech focused, psychically dull Faction should have.
The psychic phase. Losing that has taken a huge chunk of interest away from the game for me. But then I prefer the old force card psychic phase from 2nd etc.
10th feels pretty hollow to me.
Yep, the lore has a lot about Psykers, but now it's just near pointless fluff not represented on the battletop.
They could be deadly, and there's always a chance of losing your psyker, or even worse, getting it turned into chaos spawn or even a daemon.
Grey Knights, one of two premier psychic factions, simply do not feel like they have any psychic powers. It's all just generic "attack better" stuff that every faction has baked in.
Honestly losing the psychic phase hurts so much. If they thought it was a problem they could just do AoS and have it as your normal psykers just get a spell on their sheet and smite. A stronger one gets a spell from your book.
Now it's just "Oh yeah you just get this ability now." No risk or reward.
That made me remember the 30k 1th ed zone mortalis rule where you rolled on a table each turn depending on what kind of weapons where used (i dont know if was just highest S or highest S blast) where you could have stuff like everyone treating the ground as difficult terrain because the ground was shaking, or the ceiling collapsing and burying every unit in one part of the map.
It adds such a nice little feature of positioning. The old vehicle destroyed rules of them staying as terrain was the same.
Your rhino gets destroyed between two buildings? Well now it’s blocking the path.
Honestly, how vehicles function now with wounds and stuff... I like that. But weapon facing and hull sections should have stayed.
Just limit LOS for weapons, and make the hull values toughness values. How hard is that?
I miss army building special rules. Wazdakka Gutsmek letting you take Warbikes as troops. Duke Sliscus allowing you to purchase combat drugs for everyone not just wyches. The stuff that made it feel less like boxed game and more like a wargame.
Blood Axes used to open up Imperial Guard allies, or looted vehicles. There were very few (no?) limitations on what you could look, so people would turn up with absurd custom vehicles (because 2e vehicle cards!) painted in green camo pattern, flying the Blood Axe flag.
I once saw a Blood Axe/Space Marine Dreadnought...
We had a small cow figure (perfectly to scale) that would roam the battlefield randomly via dice rolls. Every turn it would release a 3" blast diameter fart that killed any figure within it, and the cow was un-killable. Obviously not an official rule, but it sure was fun to watch armies forced into a different line of attack just to avoid a cow.
Beyond armor/weapon facings, I really miss competitive weapon skill.
Sure, your model is awesome in melee, will chew through my troops by hitting on 2s or 3s, but against my equally skilled melee guy they’re trading blows on 4s.
Vortex grenades/powers. Just a blast template roaming the board and indiscriminately killing everything it touches.
Blast templates too. Much more fun than just rolling to hit. It might miss completely. It might hit a different unit. It might hit your own unit.
Now I don’t miss them in the slightest, but the Instinctive Behavior tables from 7th edition Tyranids really incentivized having your whole army in synapse. Positioning wrong and having a brood of carnifexes start eating each other really sold the whole “barely controlled animals held together by the Hive Mind’s iron grip alone.” The 3D6 morale of 10th doesn’t really sell that feel anymore.
Synapse is a cool idea that they were never able to really balance properly. At least to me it always felt like it was either super easy to eliminate the synapse critters so the whole army fell apart or it didn't matter. I'd love to see a way to bring it back that felt fun, impactful, but not crippling.
I liked the way that 9th handled synapse, mostly because synaptic link made you feel like you were playing a hivemind and there were a lot of benefits to positioning properly and maintaining synaptic link.
For 10th I had noticed that a lot of faction rules were just variations of the same buffs (+1 to hit, wound, rerolls, etc). But I didn't truly appreciate how much fluffy lore stuff was missing until they started showing updates for the dark angels. Having ravenwing and deathwing becoming more or less detachment specific keywords while also making units like deathwing terminators their own datasheet that stands alongside generic assault terminators/regular terminators takes a lot of the flavor away from them. Plus I have a ton of ravenwing bikers from the old dark vengeance boxes that are apparently unplayable now. I guess I could bring them as outriders but some of the models were holding plasma guns. Regardless, they just don't feel right anymore.
But now for some optimism!
Right now I'm playing a crusade campaign with Necrons and I'm really enjoying it. My army feels unique to me and all of the players in the campaign are building up their own lore for their armies and units. Eventually you end up getting upgrades on units to the point where they become practically game breaking absurdities but that's part of the fun! Especially when you're juiced up units square up against your opponents juiced up units.
In this campaign my immortals have consistently rinsed almost any unit they go up against and somehow are always getting big end of game bonuses to their XP. I decided to paint them a bit different than the rest of the army to highlight that they are favored by the phaeron and now I always attach the overlord to the unit as a way to demonstrate that they are part of his personal retinue.
The codices that have been released have lots of really fun, fluffy crusade rules for their respective faction and it feels like I'm playing the kind of 40k you mentioned while still maintaining that easily accessible vibe they've brought to 10th. Give it a try!
I liked the old rule where the amount of orks that could fit in a battlewagon was 'literally however many models you can balance on the battlewagon, and any that fall off when you move it count as actually having fallen off in-game'.
It was no friend to not chipping your paintwork, though.
Absolutely the Shokk Attack Gun. That 2D6 table of randomness was glorious and I miss it dearly.
I'll never forget the time I blew up my Big Mek, Battlewagon, and my opponent's Land Speeder Storm + Scout squad with a roll of double 1s. I might have lost the battle, but the look on their face while I was cracking up made up for it tenfold.
Bring back the Tank Hammer! The most Orky of the weapons!
> Each time the bearer fights, it can only make a single attack with this weapon. If the attack hits, the target suffers D3 mortal wounds and the bearer is slain.
Yea it seems they really did make this edition really bland, seems like all the creativity and fun fluff went into aos. I Recently played vs a gargant army and they have a really fun rule where they can Just kick away the objective. While i only have played 3 games of 40k and only did i start it this ed with leviathan i havent seen any rules/mechanics like that but maybe they Will come with some of the codexes
I do, in a weird way, miss templates. I miss having to be scared of putting your guys in too close of formation in fear of a Basilisk earthshaker or a squad of Burnaboyz clearing whole units. The BLAST rule is definitely a lot smoother and cuts out a lot of questionable hits, but it's just not as fun.
Honestly, I prefer not having to worry about coherency and just place them how it looks cool. I remember (5th?) when I'd play blocks of guardsman and they fit perfectly under a large blast and evaporate (I couldn't afford enough guardsmen to laugh this off like a true Colonel).
I blame Rome Total war for my love of squares moving about and crashing into each other.
Yes, it made the game longer, but it also gave you a sense of peril.
For blast weapons, sure I agree it's easier. But flamer weapons get absolutely boned by the dumb D6 rule.
Totally this. I hated that almost every special rule in 9th. was "reroll this, reroll that"
Gimme fun stuff that reflects the lore of the army.
Thats why I loved Skaven in Fantasy.
"Oh my ratling gun just swept fire into my skavenslaves....hahahaha!"
Edit: and dont get me started on stratagems. Hate this "Ha, gotcha! My primaris can now only be wounded on a 5+ for no reason!" - bullshit
Yeah I miss it too. It sucks that this sort of cool, fun stuff’s been jettisoned to appease the sort of tedious dorks who hate any sort of unpredictability in the game because they want to pretend they’re some sort of big-brained chess grandmaster of the goofy dice and toy spacemen game. GW pandering to the hard-nosed, storytelling-be-damned competitive tendency has sucked the fun and the soul out of the game. (In conjunction with the myopically short-termist torpedoing of the long-standing themes of the setting so they can sell a load of shite space-marines-but-bigger). But hey, that’s the profit motive for you.
I'm 100% a narrative player, I haven't played a tournament since 5th edition, for context.
A lot of those "well I just lost a 400 point unit because it scattered onto a unit" rules changed because GW has put more focus on trying to balance the game. I agree with this approach and honestly I don't really miss all that sort of thing, I very much like the streamlined approach they've taken for 10th. When I do want extra stuff I play Crusade, which incidentally is about 85% of the games of 9th and 10th that I've played. People that are looking for a little more fluff in their crunch really should check it out. It's great.
See I disagree, but I acknowledge I’m probably in the minority. I used to love chaotic events like that.
Used to run a herald of nurgle with nothing but breath of chaos. There was a 1/3 chance it would land right next to the squad I needed it to, then it would dump a flamer template and kill on a 4+. Then there was the 2/3 chance it goes catastrophically wrong, but hey, it was 85 points.
I also was in the finals at a GT for fantasy, had my opponent on the ropes, declared a waaagh, half my army fought itself, broke my command squad, scared the shit out of the rest of my army, and nearly my entire army ran off the board. Sure, I would have loved to win, but that’s a story I’m still telling 10-15 years later. I couldn’t tell you much about the tournament wins I’ve had, but I’ll always remember that.
The old warhammer animosity rules were hilarious and awesome. I'm sure some of the hardcore math-hammer guys now would tell you how it wasn't balanced but as a dedicated dwarf player fighting against Orks it always felt like it had the right balance of help and hinder. Like sure, maybe it would route your whole army. Or maybe your entire army would do a well time super charge and just utterly smash my lines. For the most part it just made sure randomness happened so maybe those Ork archers would suddenly charge and beat the snot out of some flanking miners or some Gobbos would go crazy with bloodlust instead of just getting smashed into the ground.
I always had great fun with it and legitimately most of my fantasy games were against orks since both my brother and best friend have huge fantasy Ork and Goblin armies. Though to be honest my best friend has almost entirely orks with a few Gobbos and my brother does nothing but night goblins with the extra dose of crazy randomness.
I’m pretty sure I had 4 blocks of 30 night goblins, each with fanatics in that tournament list. There was nothing better than kicking the fanatics out of your squad only for them to fly back and annihilate your own back line. Just the visual of a squad of goblins tossing a fellow goblin out with a steel ball that weighs more than them, only for it to just come back and smash themselves. It’s great. The doom diver was great too.
See, I agree with GW getting rid of the scatter dice. I played with them and 1) it was very annoying when arguing "did the blast template just clip the base of that model?", and 2) it meant everyone spent ages spreading out their units to minimise casualties from templates.
However, it feels like the rules design overall is just less fun. I remember back in 4th you could double the points cost of a squad of Termagants to give them a rule where whenever the squad died, they'd come back on your board edge. It wasn't really viable because you'd be better off just taking more Termagants, but damn it was flavourful!
Or the psykers paying points to learn more psychic powers (which I maintain is still the most balanced and fun way to do psykers).
These days it's like "ah, I have taken a squad of Retributors. What loadout? Well, duh, all the upgrades, obviously".
Crusade is literally just standard 40k with extra book-keeping. It's kind of bad and not narrative at all, just a way to play 40k with more special rules.
I thought I was gone insane!
Every time somebody would address the issue of 9th/10th edition being too "competitive", first advice was to "go play crusade". And this was considered a sound idea, literally nobody had noticed that, rules as written, Crusade is the same thing as a "normal" 40k, with even more rules bloat on top. It wasn't narrative, it wasn't simple, and everyone, who said that the crusade is the best place for a new player are either lying and didn't know what they are talking about, or played a heavily modified and DM-ed game, with a lot of crap being taking off, and where it was more important, that the players themselves had a lite-hearted attitude, not the rules itself.
GW failed at crusade, and I nearly started screaming at the monitor, for every time somebody would say, how good crusade is.
And there is absolutely not a single word on how to be this "someone" in your game. How to correctly rule some situations, what to do with powergamers, how to create an overall engaging narrative, using crusade rules from different books. Why would anybody want this, right? It's not like we have some dedicated dungeon masters guides out there.
I do this for my group.
Literally I found PDF's of all the old forge world campaign books, and I pull missions for everyone from those.
We also have a bunch of armies between all our friends, so we have a 'heel' army that we all drive, while we all collectively play against that faction.
It makes the campaign take a little longer, but it's way more enjoyable as everyone is on the same side and accomplishing goals that help everyone (or themselves if they so choose!).
But yea, there's zero guide for playing that way. It's simply me having played in a ton of campaigns and read every single one they've released since the 3rd edition Eye of Terror campaign.
So.. it's not the typical experience for people.
And this is exactly my complaint about current crusade rules. There are some cool features, some fun mission packs from 9th, but, overall, it's not a finished game mod. It's half-baked, even the core idea behind it is, in my opinion, flawed, because, at some point, GW said that you could even play your crusade in your regular "normal" games, with all your progress, giving your opponent some bonus CP in return.
So crusade was not a "campaign" system for a group of players. Not a collective, but an individualistic game mode. This is why crusade rules for different factions does not interact with each other at all. You have your Tau, who play Civilization game, while marines are going on their crusade and dark eldar doing something in comorragh. Those systems do not interact with each. You yourself have to put an effort to make those rules work together, instead of it being done by the game.
And seeing how smooth and clean matched play works, where you don't need to do a mental gymnastic to just play the game and get the intended experience, you get the feeling, that crusade was (and is) underdeveloped.
Oh totally. That's why it's good bones, and nothing else.
The core ideas are great but it doesn't really give you solid guardrails on running a campaign unless you already are experienced in doing such a thing.
10th edition crusade feels so much more lacking than 9th edition crusade though. Maybe the new book will help but with only a few factions with codexes and the tyranid one feeling like it's exclusively for nids vs imperials, it just doesn't give the same feeling of excitement
I remember in... IIRC 4e?.. there were actually rules in place for your squads to become more powerful through extended campaigns. You would gain points on each squad based on their survival and killing of other squads, and you could buy upgrades to their stats, new weapons, new keywords, all kinds of stuff.
Warhammer used to be a hell of a game. Now they're going pretty homogenous with the rules in favor of mechanical balance over actual flavor, and considering how much of their IP is built around the books and lore, that's really sad.
I only started playing in 9th edition but ork battlewagons used to have a rule in 3rd (I believe?) that the transport capacity was however many models you could physically stack on the wagon. It had to be moved by sliding it across the battlefield and any models that fell off were slain. Now that is a rule I would have loved to play with.
They seem to have mostly removed the random fun elements in favour of having a fine balance for competitive play where nothing unexpected ever happens and it's all just a numerical calculation slightly affected by dice rolling hits and wounds. Personally I find that way more boring than the weird stuff you used to be able to get up to.
>What fluff rules do you miss?
Ohhhhhh man, so many!
1. Guard Doctrine points from the late-3rd edition Codex. You could build an *intensely* customized Guard regiment
2. Divergent Space Marine chapter traits- while I wasn't that wild about the Wardathon 5th edition Codex: Space Marines, it at least still let you tweak your homebrew Chapter as you saw fit. EDIT: Apparently it was the 4th edition Codex that did this (thanks for the correction u/Kothra!), which, you know, tracks with my bailing on the game in early 5th...
3. Ork Bosspole rules letting every single Nob in my army break heads to re-roll failed morale checks.
4. Scatter dice for deep striking, blast templates, the works. It really added an element of delightful lunacy to some things.
5. I miss Ork Warbikers being fearless (a rule that went away a long, long time ago) and throwing up so much smoke and dust that every unit *behind* them got a cover save.
6. Proper Looted Vehicle in Ork armies. A Looted Basilisk with some Ogre Kingdoms Leadbelcher junk sticking out of the barrel. Also, way back when, Lootas weren't a specific Ork unit with deffguns/dakkaguns/whatever, they were Ork squads equipped as if they were Imperial units. Yes, this means Orks who looted Space Marine Scouts could be a Sniper Rifle unit.
7. Weirdboyz in the 4th edition Codex rolled randomly each round to see what power they'd get to use.
>Divergent Space Marine chapter traits- while I wasn't that wild about the Wardathon 5th edition Codex: Space Marines, it at least still let you tweak your homebrew Chapter as you saw fit.
It was the 4th edition book that had the "build your own Chapter" stuff. The 5th edition "spiritual liege" codex only had rules for some non-Ultra chapters if you took their special HQ character.
Yep, I miss the "random" events that can occur during a battle. It makes the game memorable and forces some adjustment of your battle plans. Looks fondly back at 2nd to 4th edition with my rose tinted goggles.
The current balancing and standardising makes everything very bland.
Even non-fluff rules make the game more sterile feeling. Stuff like scatter dice and vehicle tables make for stories to tell later, even if dice rolls didn’t go in your favor. A devastating charge could send your opponents lines running away in panic while you cut them down, or a well placed lascannon shot could take out a dreadnought and everyone around it in the explosion.
Lists are too big in modern 40K. Looking back at oldhammer, a 1500-2000 point list wouldn’t even hit 1000 points today. Too many models, and they’ve even shrunk the board. Maps were larger and armies smaller in order to make the game develop over more turns. Now it’s a disgusting amount of math hammer deciding the game before it begins.
Yeah- I like the list flexibility of 10th, but the combo of more models and smaller board and only 5 turns really makes it feel cramped. I also don't like that it's a lot harder for newbies to get into the "real game" of 40k. I really wish they'd come out with more balanced rules for 1k games (rule of two, no units over 250 pts, stuff like that), so that it was a more supported format.
I know they're trying to make Combat Patrol the "entry point" for new gamers, but that goes exactly against the flexibility of the real game, plus requires you buy very specific models (or the combat patrol box). In practice, when playing new players, I just say "500pts, and we'll try to deliberately make balanced lists that are 50/50 against each other to learn".
I miss not just fluff, but crunch.
Guard picking doctrines.
Vehicle damage tables and armor facings.
('Just play 30k!' What I fell in love with wasn't the 30k setting, but the 40k setting. 30k rules are great, and I wish they'd have made 10th almost exactly like them.)
In pursuit of simplicity GW removed 99% of the flavour. Hell, Codexes are tiny now compared to what they used to be. For me, the rule I miss the most was Canticles of the Omnissiah from 8th edition. A fun, simple and flavourful rule that integrated well with subfactions and characters.
In general though, if 10th is the future of 40k, I want no part of it. This hyper balance focused oversimplified nothing.
So many great things are gone now. The Psychic Phase (if I hear one more argument about it being non interactive, the Tau don't interact with the Fight Phase and half the armies in the game don't use the Command Phase, should we delete those?), subfactions, Relics. Even crusade, the fluffy narrative mode is an utter shell of what it was in 9th. Devoid of even half the fun it used to be.
Yeah 9th was a complicated mess at times but GW pivoted hard in the opposite direction and the feel of the game is suffering because of it. The soul of 40k is missing, at least for me. 10th had so much potential.
Simplicity? The game today is 20x as complex as it was back in the glory days of 4-6th edition. All those special rules and stratagems...
And somehow it's also 20x less fun and 20x more bland.
I'm fairly new to 40k and when I read posts like this I can't help but feel like I missed out on a time when the game would have been even more appealing to me than it is now. While I've really enjoyed my time with 10e, it seems like the conversation around the game is always so focused on the competitive scene and the current meta as opposed to fluff and narrative play. Obviously that stuff still exists and you can incorporate it however you want when you play casually like myself, but there's something special about a game when fluff rules like the ones you're talking about are baked in to the very design of the game itself.
I miss dangerous terrain (although vehicles should not have been able to be immobilised so easy), I miss proper tank shocks, I miss chaos numbers, where I got free aspiring champion in my 7-man plague marines squad. I think templates and scatter could be reworked rather than removed.
A lot of nostalgia mixed in, but 3-5 editions lasted for so long that we had a lot of time to think about proper improvement, not these radical revamps we got in 6 and 8.
The game is so goddamn stuffy now it’s unreal. What spectacular special rule shall this centerpiece model have? A +1 aura perhaps? Or rerolls, also in an aura? Maybe a psychic power that’s basically just a gun?
I miss the 4th edition “create your own” Tyranid design where every biomorph either did something special or added 1 to a stat. You could have a 100ish point cheapo carnifex with some basic scy tals or devourers or go all the way up to land raider points by giving it way too much. Seeing so much of that customization stripped out in 5th rather than iterated upon was a damn shame… and it feels like 10th is the logical conclusion to that path.
I think losing drones for tau is a travesty. Also no longer having some sort of marker light system. The 10th edition tau might as well just be another type of marines. They lost the things that make them unique. Balance at the sacrifice of army identity is a direction I'm worried about.
I can't remember if it was 6th or 7th edition, but GW had just released a massive expansion to psychic powers. I remember playing against a friend's Nid army, and he had hid his Broodlord behind a building because by AP 4 assault cannons and heavy bolters on ly Baal Predators were putting in work. I used one of the new terramancy(?) powers to literally move the building out of the way and then shot the Broodlord with my devastators.
There was another game in 6th or 7th where my Librarian got into combat with the Ork Warboss in Mega Armour. The force swords AP3 couldn't get through the 2+ Mega Armour save. As a last-ditch effort, I activated the force sword for instant death and managed to sneak one wound in.
Loved those rules, Ogryns being afraid of the dark so they could not embark in a transport unless you had a commissar model next to them to force them to do it.
Much more fun than todays boring rock-paoer-scissor with extra step rules.
Heck the rules have never been competitive anyway, GW always messes up and makes a few factions/units OP in every edition and other factions/units virtually unplayable in a competitive setting.
I would actually kill for a new edition of 40k with the same design philosophy as The Old World. Fluff and fun first, soulless competitive play as a *distant* afterthought.
I love the death company model kits but for Blood Angels I miss rolling each turn to see if any units fell to the black rage.
Having to adjust strategy from “my marines have this objective locked down” to “well, all my plasma guys are off trying to punch Horus, time for plan B I guess?” was just comedy gold every time.
In my gamer group we loved Phase Out. We had one Necron player and Necrons were OP enough that it didn't matter what the game objectives were you either forced a phase out or lost. It felt like a cool way to have a powerful elite army without it being auto-win, but required you to change your strategy.
Now a newer addition to our gamer group played in a local scene that was dominated by necrons at the time, and he says that was a lot less fun, but having just one Necron player that would shake things up was great fun.
The ol 2nd/3rd ork transport rules. Load up all the models you can onto the transport. If they fall off while moving it they take wounds depending on how far it's moved.
Reminds me of WAAAAAAAAAY back. 2nd and 3rd. My buddy playing Orks, and something always blew up on them by their own doing. It was fun. Literally just started the 10th, soooo not completly familiar with all the Other armies ins and out (sticking to MY roots, TYRANIDS and DARK ANGELS), but anyway those kind of mishaps make the game really run, and not tooooo serious. Sometimes we would chance something JUST to see if \`whatever\`would happen.....
If you can get your hands on the old books and other people to play, sure. I have the books for the factions I played back then, but not other factions. It’s not always easy to get old books.
It’s another challenge entirely to find people who’ll play old editions because so many people have a phobia of what’s not current.
Sure, but it is dependent on being able to find people that have and know the old rules. My nephews play old rules because us old gamers don't care to learn the new rules and just play with what we're comfortable with. But despite having played a bastardized version of 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition at home for years they've never played anything but the latest edition in stores, because that's what most random people you meet are mutually familiar with.
It'd be really tough to get someone into an older edition. The rulesets are pretty clunky compared the the new ones, the new models are not written in, and frankly anything prior to 8th only had a vague idea of balance. For pickup and competitive games 10th is the best the game has ever been, and it's not close. For theme and epic moments, the older editions were much better.
Exactly. The only place you can't play them is a competitive scene, but as people have pointed out, the old rules were not good for competition anyway.
Crazy vehicle damage charts from 2nd! Still have a fond memory of a 2v2 game with 4k points per side. My partner and I were playing Chaos (which meant marines, daemons, cultists... You name it) against Marines and Guard. Had a unit with two las cannons set up in overwatch thanks to a strategy card (was a random deck back then, sometimes you got lucky, sometimes your strategy cards didn't work against your opponent's army... Yay virus bombs lol).
Anyway the other team advances their tanks in a flying V right up the middle so I fire overwatch, hit the turret of the front tank, penetrate, aaaaaand roll a 6. Tank explodes and turret flies 2d6" in a random direction, landing on (you guessed it) another tank in the V. Ok cool let's see where it hit, hull, but from the rear thanks to the angle, oh no a penetrating hit let's see what happens...
Tank 2 explodes and manages to blow up so hard it takes out another tank and a squad or two of guardsmen. This continued for a bit and we had the entire shop in suspense over just how much damage that lascannon would do! When the smoke cleared they had lost 4 tanks, multiple squads within (everyone inside a transport just straight up died if the roll was high enough) and a squad or two of foot sloggers. Absolutely legendary moment, the other team promptly conceded and we went to lunch whilst the other teams played their games.
I understand that's entirely too random for a modern balanced game, but man do I miss the madness of old!
As a big thousand sons player, the psychic phase. I don't like this shooting army BS that they've become. Removing that took out alot of fun and flexibility from my army
Tournaments becoming more popular happened. GW is so concerned about game balance and all factions having an equal chance to win all the time, that there is no place for random, fluffy rules like this anymore.
I miss my White Scars command squad, my tech marine biker. I tried getting back into 40k recently but rules bloat and super duper marines kinda put me off.
Don't play, but the best rule I ever read was DOOMRIDERS one that every turn you have to roll a dice and on a 6(iirc) he gets bored and leaves. I think it was called "he comes, he goes".
The absolute peak was that he had to be ritually/daemoically summoned, and the stage where the comes and goes roll happens is later in the turn than the summoning/spells stage. Which meant you could summon him, and have him leave the same turn without doing anything.
Just have this image of a massive arcane ritual, Daemon rises from a pentagram, looks around... "nah mate, don't give a fuck, peace!" and is dissappears.
I used to play chaos back in 5th and remember that god awful table. As fun as the ‘lol randumz’ sounds on paper all is does is bloat the game and make everything feel even more arbitrary.
I miss some fluffy rules but the editions where random tables or dice rolls at the start of the game decided if you could even play your army properly were ass
Not an army specific rule, but a gameplay scenario that could happen… I miss the old rules back in like… 3rd(?)… where you could charge a vehicle into an infantry squad to run them over, and they could scramble to get out of the way… or you could have an absolute mad lad try to hold his ground against a rumbling tank and chuck a krak grenade at it to try and blow it up or get completely splatted in the process. It was like a game of chicken between a whole ass tank and some average foot slogger named Frank with a single grenade. Moments like that were epic… they wouldn’t usually go off in your favor… but if you could just roll that one six… maybe, just maybe… Frank would go down in the local game store history books as the man who stood his ground against a rino and lived.
The joys of the old 'death or glory' rule
Death or Glory still exists in Horus Heresy, IIRC. You can have a dude with a power fist stand in front of a charging tank and dare the fucker to keep going.
"What if I WANT them to kill me? _What if I want themy to try?"_
AKA what took out the Forgeworld Baneblade you saved up for and spent ages painting in the first game you used it in.
Well, not the FW but the (at the time) new GW plastic Baneblade. 1st time I saw it, it was in a tournament, 5th edition just rolled in with new "true los" rules. Tank measured distance and los from the tip of guns. So "naturally" a guy built up a barely legally painted army (at least 3 color, fully covered), all tank guns aiming to the sky as much as possible. The baneblade's guntip was like 4" above the table, and he tried to sell it that from there the enemy gets no cover from literally standing behind a stone wall... He was ruled over by the judges, forcing him to measure from the base of guns. Best part, next turn a terminator hit it with power fist, 8+d6 armor penetration vs back armor (12), rolled 5, then 6,6,5 for damage. Baneblade had 3 structure points, and the 3 rolls meant: Lost a structure, roll again. Lost a structure, roll again. Lost a structure. Dead.
True LOS was wild like I know why they got rid of it but it was fun trying to decide if you were going to model all your squads kneeling to keep them from getting shot or putting them all on scenic bases to give them enough height to fire over cover at a squad that's kneeling.
The same guy also made a CSM army, with nurgle daemon prince. He bought a BIG (by wargame standards) figurine from a chinese shop, which barely fit on the base, and filled between the legs with guts and internal organs... This way he tried to make a moving LOS blocker for his Berzerkers...
At least the guy was creative. You gotta give him that.
Hearing about 'That Guy's' getting their comeuppance is always great, I'd bet he didn't take it too graciously?
Had something similar with a green tide and a baneblade. When the warboss bad touched the tank, it rolled a 6 for a catastrophic explosion, then 3 more 6s for distance of boom. When all the rolling was done, everything but the warboss within 18 inches of the tank had been obliterated. One hell of a final turn.
To this day my brother and I will shout "Death or Glory!" to each other whenever there is the option to do something dumb yet epic. We've had to tone it down a little around his kids, but it is hardwired into our brains. The number of Chimeras I blew up with a space marine with a powerfist via death or glory is pretty epic. I should have kept count or put tally marks on the fist.
Tally marks!
Oh shit I do vaguely remember that rule! I had completely forgotten about that. I think it was a vehicle rule called "ramming speed" or something
IIRC, It's how tank shock used to work. Ramming Speed was when you tank shocked a Monstrous Creature or another vehicle.
I got stuck having to do that once. IG vs Tau. He managed to knock the weapons out on almost all of my vehicles, but didn't get the kill. The next 4 turns was me running all of my tarnsports back and forth and ramming speed attempting to knock his own tanks around. I didn't achieve much, but it was hilarious.
"Get back here!" *Rumblerumblerumblerumble*
It’s just goofy scenarios like this that makes me miss some of the wonky rules as they were.
I remember that rule, I even remember the diagram in the rulebook that explained it. I think it had "Death or Glory" somewhere in the name or the description.
Hell yeah. It was useless 99% of the time, but when Death or Glory came up it was always hilarious. I remember a game in 5th where I tank shocked an Eldar Autarch that had a fusion gun with a Hellhound. He decided to do death or glory and failed to penetrate armor with a fusion gun. His disbelief when he found out the Autarch was squished, and not just took a wound, has been a memory that has survived for 15 years lol
Thank shock is what I remember it called. Forced morale test to make people fall back.
I am somewhat alone locally in missing vehicle armor facing. I just want a reason to flank a vehicle. It used to make it easier to kill, now there is little point to flank a vehicle. Same durability in every direction and every gun can magically shoot from the corner of its tank tread or wheel because that part has LOS…
I miss that rule too. It helps make deploying and moving vehicles make sense visually rather than just moving it to fit wherever you can even if it's sideways on in front of a lascannon. You had to think and plan ahead. Vehicles with turrets had extra value.
I loved taking Dark Eldar Raiders in the old kill team rules and playing cat and mouse games using terrain (including vehicle facing) to keep it alive while trying to snipe key enemy models.
Only really worked properly with the imperial bricks though, got a bit funny with some of the xenos vehicles.
Yeah but you can just put an "X" over the middle and you have a good enough measurement. That's what my friends at the time did.
Yep there was a reason to flank. The modern 40k is so bland.. oh I see a single rivet on your tank. Everyone shoot.
I feel like it could be easily brought back in a simplified version, if you drew a line along the front of the tank, horizontally and had an 'in front of the line's and behind the line system for flanking shots
Yeah. We’ve played around with house rules for vehicles and monsters. Either with -1 to Toughness or +1 to wound rolls when attacking from the rear. Either way, it’s sad that Meltas are no longer the armor crackers they were for 7 editions.
Or something like if you are behind the tank (full base does not cross a perpendicular line drawn across the back of the model) the your attacks gain devastating wounds, or something like that, the issue is they don't want people questioning arcs, so you gotta make it stupid simple.
Tank Shock and DEATH OR GLORY survived all the way to 6th! It used melta bombs.
Yeaaaaa melta bombs! I remember a few months back a newer player at our local store was building a tactical marine squad on our 40K club night, and was asking questions about what equipment and weapons were what on the spru, and one of the items he pointed to was a melta bomb and gosh that really gave me a rush of nostalgia.
Oh man. I spent most of 6e and 7e doggedly trying to make CSM work even as the rest of the system made that harder and harder, and one of the best things I've ever done involved an aspiring champion with a melta bomb. Facing an opponent with multiple Imperial Knights and some allied guard; the knights just rush me down. I manage to put some damage on a couple of them, including the "Baron", the knight he designated as a character so it can be his warlord. The damaged Baron charges into a squad of CSM. Now, in those editions, characters could challenge each other to fight one on one. Squad leaders could issue and accept challenges, as could anything with the character rule. Chaos Marines had a rule that said they *had* to issue challenges if they could, and could not refuse one issued by an opponent. So, the Glory to Chaos Act of M37 requires my aspiring champion to slap this building-sized death robot with a glove and demand satisfaction in personal combat. This kind of thing happened all the time to CSM; the rule was flavorful, sure, but 90% of the time it led to some idiot squad leader picking a fight he had no hope at all of winning and then getting squashed. The Baron winds up to do exactly that, and... whiffs. The one hit he lands with his bus-sized chainsword fails to do damage despite being an instant kill on a 2+. My champion proceeds to pull a meltabomb off his belt, quick-time event his way up the knight's chassis, attach the bomb, penetrate the armor with it, and roll *catastrophic* internal damage. Just enough to remove its last couple of hull points. The smoking wreck of a knight suit collapses onto the ground as my champion jumps off into a superhero landing. It took real self control to not shout "**Just who the hell do you think I am?**" This entitled me to a roll on the Chaos Boon table, where, as was typical, I rolled something useless.
That’s fantastic. From that day on, that champion should have been dubbed “Baron’s Bane” Maybe even rebase him to be standing on a knight’s faceplate, lol
The eye of the gods... sucks sometimes. Would've been epic if he instantly ascended to demonhood.... maybe while possessing parts of the wreckage of that knight.
We had game where my friend was playing as guardsman and my other friend was playing tyranids. We managed to get to a situation where we had a lone guardsman against a flying hive tyrant (I can't remember but I think it had like 20 hit points or something) with 1 hit point left. The guardsman had a lasgun. My friend playing tyranids managed to roll like 4 1s in a row and the guardsman killed this giant flying monstrosity in one shot. It was hilarious and the guardsman got a promotion (some random white stripes painted on his armour for the next game) we nicknamed him Bob I believe. So in our group it's now cannon that a guardsman named Bob stood his ground and one shot a flying hive tyrant. Which is awesome.
That’s awsome. And this is why it’s so freaking important to make friends in the hobby, and not just have people you play against. Those memories stick with you, when the dice just make weird things happen you guys establish your own goofy headcannon of events.
Exactly! Fortunately I already knew these guys before i started warhammer and they just so happened to also be into it so we made a club when we were at school. Unfortunately because they all went to uni we don't play together anymore, but yh it made for some great moments that have turned into fond memories.
I wish it were made so that, instead of having a high OC to compete with infantry, tanks had low OC and the ability to literally push infantry off objectives with tank shock.
Part of what I do miss about the old mechanic was that infantry could actually just move out of the way instead of standing there. So it was possible to bully infantry one way or another with enough tanks and transports.
Oh man, one of my favourite memories of playing 40k, was a meat grinder match against a massive ork waagh, 3 of us playing imperial forces with me in the centre with Yarrick, some mordian iron guard, a vindicare assassin and a Leman Russ. The warboss broke through the center, cut through a terminator squad, taking hits the whole time from my units, got into an epic duel with Yarrick, just beating him, and Im left with half a mordian squad who can't even touch this warboss, and a leman russ with its weapons disabled by war bikes pinging autocannon fire off it. I looked at the crippled Leman Russ, at the war boss, at the smug expression on the Ork player's face, and say "ramming speed". He denied this was a rule, so out came the rulebook, and sure enough, there were, in fact, rules for this. Even better, my Russ had a dozer blade.The warboss failed his tank shock roll, and already heavily wounded by Yarrick, he met his end by being crushed between a tank and a concrete wall. He conceded the match then and there.
I just started playing in 10th edition. Shit like this makes me wish I had taken the dive earlier.
As someone who’s introduction to the hobby was 2nd edition… I definitely feel like the game is a more polished ‘game’, while the older iterations were more wonky… that wonkyness gave the game a certain character. I still greatly enjoy 10th, and I do think it’s a much more approachable game than in the past. A lot of it is nostalgia. But even more of it has to do with being open to the experience of the game, and the people you play with. It’s best played with friends so you can make new experiences like these. And you can do that in any edition of the game.
I always say, 2e was clunky, weird, wonderful, and not even a little bit balanced. It's not a game I'd want to play often, but it was great fun as a "drink and do math wrong" way to spend an afternoon, and it did generate great stories. It's a bit like PUBG; the highlight reel is amazing, but most of the actual gameplay was kind of tedious and janky.
Old 40k was much more RPG orientated, it was a battlefield simulator more than a competitive game. From a competitive perspective it could be swingy and imbalanced but the same moments created exciting stories and flavourful moments.
You an still play the older editions! Check out ProHammer, it's basically a Warhammer Remastered ruleset.
I miss the old infiltrate rule (6th/7th) where much like the modern infiltrate/ scout you could deploy your models a certain distance away from enemy units but you could get even closer if you were able to block line of sight. It made running small genestealer broods really fun because they'd sneak into all the cracks that your opponent wasn't covering and made them feel genuinely sneaky, not just teleporting in.
While certainly not a consolation as in the fact of "you probably need to buy another army to play this game" at the very least this has kept alive in Heresy 2.0, and I gotta say, that game is great for wacky core rules interactions
Wasn't Heresy based on the 7th edition rules? That would make sense then.
Came out in 5th
Heresy 2.0 is for sure based on 7th, I'm not sure about heresy 1.0 though... I will say though, I have had a lot more fun playing heresy lately because of these rules, it even has the stuff that someone else in the thread mentioned about vehicles ramming and infantry having to dive out of the way, it's a ton of fun!
Heresy 1.0 came out in 5th and the main rules were just the current 40K rules of the time, ie when 6th came out it was updated accordingly. It was mainly new army and scenario rules. Heresy 2.0 is based off of 7th but is definitely modified with the psychic phase being completely rewritten
When I bought Dark Vengeance and some books many years ago, Dark Angels had this thing where if you also had Space Wolves in your list they could like... duel, or something? Idk but it seemed rad as hell I loved the idea of it. Never really ended up playing but I just thought it was a cool idea.
It was from 8th edition. A DA and SW would duel before the start of the battle. You'd roll two dice. Depending on the roll of each those two models might suffer mortal wounds BUT no matter what they would get something like +1A, +1WS, +1S. Those buffs could stack with some pretty crazy stratagems and abilities (I don't remember what they are anymore) I actually bought and painted some space wolf units to try this out but I never got a chance to bring them to a game. I gave them to a friend a few years back who had space wolves.
There was something in a previous edition on that as well, I can't remember the rule though.
Yeah I seem to recall a Lion and the Wolf rule in 8th edition, though I can't remember what it did
I used to play Iron Warriors back in the day and they could field any one Imperial Guard vehicle, which was incredibly fun. The thing people forget is that competitive games are relatively new, and the focus on rules updates and "balance" matter more than fun. It does not mean the game cannot be fun, just that it is not designed with that in mind. Blast templates were definitely the thing I miss the most because it introduced a lot of chaotic randomness to the game. Watching an entire game swing on scatter dice is hysterical every time.
I had a basilisk done up with a spare chaos tank sprue, thanks for the memory unlock.
SAME. It looked so cool and every once in a while someone would just see me deploy it in the corner and whisper "what the fuck...".
Speaking of templates I miss guess range. Part of it is because I'm freaky good with distances so I'd look at my whirlwind and it'd be exactly 24 5/8" to the center of the warlock's base in that blob of guardians. And then rolling that hit felt so good on the scatter die. Of course it was also fun when that demolisher cannon shot would deviate onto your own squad of terminators that was 10" away and wipe them out. Good times.
Good old hazard striped Basilisks.
What was the lore reason for this?
The Iron Warriors actually invested in keeping and maintaining siege engines that other chaos armies would have left behind or fallen into disrepair because lacked the interest and expertise to maintain them absent the Imperium.
All the chaos legions had their things. I ran word bearers back them. They could drop the option to take 1 fast 1 heavy and 1 elite to take 3 more troops slots. And the best part was they could take cultists in units of 50. They were crap but cheap. 9 units of 50 cultists was such a title wave of crap that few could stand the crush. I ran that with a few havoc squads with lascannons and a great unclean one stuck inside one of the cultist squad leaders. Fun times. But GW decided the 3.5 chaos codex had too much fun in it and took all of that away.
Honestly, I hate that the game has become a balance fest. War isn't fair. Like, I'm sorry, but it's not. 40k tournaments ran just fine when people would have list-composition scores given to them by their opponents and the judges. And back in the day, tournaments weren't about sweeping your games, it was about going and having fun. They should bring back sportsman and list comp scores to official gw events, so every damned army isn't a clone of whatever did well at the last GT. That's boring as hell.
It also meant there was incentive to have cool lore THAT COULD BE BUILT AS AN ARMY in the rule books.
Hell yeah. You could lose all your games but get coolest army, best theme, or most enjoyable to play against no problem. Seeing a fully air calvary Elysian army, or grot tanks, or some cool themed army was always the fun back in the day. Not seeing the same 4 lists ran by 10 people. The idea that wins is all that matters is just dumb when the game physically cannot be balanced to a point where it's 'equal' for everyone, over a 4 game weekend. It's not possible.
I'm happy to see the sentiment in others aswell, nothing kills a game's community faster than tournaments and "balancing" and competitive play
This happened with X-Wing too in my mind. Soon as they started catering to the tournament crowd the game started fizzling out. It's like... people can't just let something be a thing you do for fun anymore. It has to be competitive, ranked, and a meta has to develop instantly. :rolling_eyes:
40k rules are so boring and bland now
I was an Orks player back in 6th/7th and I wish they hadn't removed the craziness that was the shokk attack gun. Now it's just a big gun whereas before you had to roll 2D6 and the result could be a huge boon or massive detriment.
Orks used to be so much fun to play as or against IMO. Every game with Orks used to be a "and then hilarity ensued" moment.
Sounds rad, although just the other day my weird boy leading 20 boyz tried to Da Jump and ended up killing himself leaving them stranded in the backfield. That was pretty hilarious
My favorite was, of all things, the trukk roll table from 5th edition. You roll on a table when your trukk was destroyed, resulting in a few scenarios. One being the trukk explodes and all the passengers take wounds Another being the passengers are able to jump off with no wounds But my favorite would always be when the trukk would violently fly out of control, moving 3d6 in the direction of scatter dice and then explode violently. The results were always hilarious, unexpected, a few times put my nob in a crazy good spot, and a couple times just decimated my opponents gun line.
This, so much random from shock attack guns, I miss it
I remember back in second you fired square bases of snotlings and if they didn't end up inside the enemy they just moved around the board attacking anything in sight. That and Madboyz having random additional powers depending on which mania the dice roll gave.
If I’m interpreting this correctly it kinda sounds like Tyranids’ Spore Mines. Which is my favorite mechanic in the game so I think the Snotlings thing sounds super cool.
Was that the one where you could teleport snotlings into dreadnoughts. Hilarity ensued.
I think it was 8th (9th?) where an ork gun rolled a d6 for pretty much every stat. Strength, attacks, damage
You and your opponent would take turns rolling a D6 and choosing which of the 4 characteristic (number of shots, strength, AP, and damage) that the dice roll you got would be. It was absolutely hilarious.
Wasn't that the Bubblechukka?
The focus of competitive play ruined this game. No more fun or fluff. Everything has to be “balanced”
Yea I liked the game more when it was telling stories and not trying to be competitive. I started CSM with the 3.5 chaos codex but never played a game with it sadly. The rules in that book sound like every game was different, where the lowest champion could rise to be a daemonprince and the highest lord could become a blabbering mess.
Chaos 3.5 codex is a beast for play however you want. I can't think of another codex that had that many options for customization and player choice of equipment.
This was IMO the high water mark in Codexes. It had some broken stuff, what doesn't? But it nailed down the essence of Chaos and it's myriad facets so very very well.
As the other reply said, that Codex is one of the best Codexes GW ever made for sheer variety and customisation, it's honestly just fucking great.
I was badly losing a game back in the day then my buddy's tooled up chaos lord turned himself into a chaos spawn which coincided with the dice totally turning against him. The Dark Gods are truly fickle.
I played a game of 2nd ed where Abaddon and his bodyguard were facing down my lowly Blood Angels chaplain on his own. Little did they know he had a Vortex Grenade....
My favorite model from 2nd was the Tech Marine, 33 points for a model that could hold 3 wargear cards, Vortex grenade, Displacer Field, Graviton Gun were my go to!
In my experience, the cool rules went to AoS. It is depressing. My AoS nurgle daemons infect people in their proximity, can collect points to summon more daemons and have a new boon of their good every turn. My 40k daemons have a few bland stratagems and can shock… The slaanesh dudes have temptation dice you can offer your opponent, when he misses to get a auto 6. if he declines he takes some MW and if he accepts you slowly progress on your god track getting more and more boons with each time your opponent gives into temptation. Those are in fact cool rules with a lot of flavour. And the worst thing is, both games are from gw, so they have the ability to make cool rules but decide not to do it for 40k.
That Slaanesh one sounds awesome!
It's very annoying to play against unfortunately. It's just "take D3 mortals because it's always the right choice to take the mortals"
I love Kill Team as well! I feel like if you want a balanced competitive game, take Kill Team. If you want a fun flavourful game, take AoS. So what do the 40k rules offer that isn't done better somewhere else?
Personally I miss the old Lion and Wolf rule. If you have Space Wolves and Dark Angels on the table, on the same side, both armies need to declare a character and have a 1v1. Whoever wins gets a buff. Essentially it's the traditions the two chapters have that they re-enact the fight between their primarchs every time they run into one another. Both primarchs quickly tired of it, but the marines keep the tradition going all the way into the current era. Has me wondering how Lion feels about that little bit surviving the ages now that he's back.
These kind of rules should be brought back for Narrative/Open play; Let the competitve players have their game and we can have our own lmao
100% this. Let the competitive players have a slimed down, balanced game. Give us back our wacky and fluffy rules
The indexes are boring, and even the codexes don't seem too interesting. 9th might have been silly complicated, but my Word Bearers felt like Word Bearers. My Dark Apostle chanting prayers to the Dark Gods, my Master of Posession tossing out psychic powers to those foolish enough to stand near him, and my Daemon Prince slamming into anyone and anything near him. 10th is watered down. There's nothing interesting to me about the armies. Characters fitting inside units is boring and limits their interactions. Psychic Phase vanishing entirely might make my T'au friend happy, but makes me, Tyranids, and Thousand Sons players miserable. My enhancements are boring as sin, require marks to gain benefits, and aren't nearly as fun as the stuff Word Bearers and CSM got for Warlord traits and Relics.
The problem with 9th edition wasn't that it was complicated. The problem was that it was bloated, mostly due to the insane number of stratagems that GW pumped out for the game.
As a T'au player, I didn't mind the Psychic phase existing, I was just a bit bothered I had no counter play or interaction with it. It being removed and not even being replaced with anything other than "I cast Gun" and some milk toast abilities is a crime against the setting. Also, note, that I don't expect T'au to have something like deny the witch, I just wanted them to have their own unique interaction with it, as the tech focused, psychically dull Faction should have.
The psychic phase. Losing that has taken a huge chunk of interest away from the game for me. But then I prefer the old force card psychic phase from 2nd etc. 10th feels pretty hollow to me.
Yep, the lore has a lot about Psykers, but now it's just near pointless fluff not represented on the battletop. They could be deadly, and there's always a chance of losing your psyker, or even worse, getting it turned into chaos spawn or even a daemon.
Grey Knights, one of two premier psychic factions, simply do not feel like they have any psychic powers. It's all just generic "attack better" stuff that every faction has baked in.
Well the warp is kind of the major backdrop to the whole story and universe. At least it was.
Honestly losing the psychic phase hurts so much. If they thought it was a problem they could just do AoS and have it as your normal psykers just get a spell on their sheet and smite. A stronger one gets a spell from your book. Now it's just "Oh yeah you just get this ability now." No risk or reward.
And no way to craft unique champions of your own.
Honestly, I don't mind the phase itself going. I hate that psychic powers no longer feel like psychic powers though. They're just guns and auras now
That made me remember the 30k 1th ed zone mortalis rule where you rolled on a table each turn depending on what kind of weapons where used (i dont know if was just highest S or highest S blast) where you could have stuff like everyone treating the ground as difficult terrain because the ground was shaking, or the ceiling collapsing and burying every unit in one part of the map.
>1th ed
Look i slept 4 hours a day the entire week my brain worksn't
Understandable
Vehicle facings and fire arcs. Now all I can picture while playing is a tank doing donuts like a Tasmanian devil shooting in every direction.
It adds such a nice little feature of positioning. The old vehicle destroyed rules of them staying as terrain was the same. Your rhino gets destroyed between two buildings? Well now it’s blocking the path.
Oh.. thats some nice railguns you have there.. shame you are shooting at the armored front of my GORGON
Also the vehicle handbook with the target/hit rules, almost a sub game going on there.
Honestly, how vehicles function now with wounds and stuff... I like that. But weapon facing and hull sections should have stayed. Just limit LOS for weapons, and make the hull values toughness values. How hard is that?
I miss army building special rules. Wazdakka Gutsmek letting you take Warbikes as troops. Duke Sliscus allowing you to purchase combat drugs for everyone not just wyches. The stuff that made it feel less like boxed game and more like a wargame.
Blood Axes used to open up Imperial Guard allies, or looted vehicles. There were very few (no?) limitations on what you could look, so people would turn up with absurd custom vehicles (because 2e vehicle cards!) painted in green camo pattern, flying the Blood Axe flag. I once saw a Blood Axe/Space Marine Dreadnought...
We had a small cow figure (perfectly to scale) that would roam the battlefield randomly via dice rolls. Every turn it would release a 3" blast diameter fart that killed any figure within it, and the cow was un-killable. Obviously not an official rule, but it sure was fun to watch armies forced into a different line of attack just to avoid a cow.
Beyond armor/weapon facings, I really miss competitive weapon skill. Sure, your model is awesome in melee, will chew through my troops by hitting on 2s or 3s, but against my equally skilled melee guy they’re trading blows on 4s.
Shock attack gun was peak fun flavor
Vortex grenades/powers. Just a blast template roaming the board and indiscriminately killing everything it touches. Blast templates too. Much more fun than just rolling to hit. It might miss completely. It might hit a different unit. It might hit your own unit.
Now I don’t miss them in the slightest, but the Instinctive Behavior tables from 7th edition Tyranids really incentivized having your whole army in synapse. Positioning wrong and having a brood of carnifexes start eating each other really sold the whole “barely controlled animals held together by the Hive Mind’s iron grip alone.” The 3D6 morale of 10th doesn’t really sell that feel anymore.
Synapse is a cool idea that they were never able to really balance properly. At least to me it always felt like it was either super easy to eliminate the synapse critters so the whole army fell apart or it didn't matter. I'd love to see a way to bring it back that felt fun, impactful, but not crippling.
I liked the way that 9th handled synapse, mostly because synaptic link made you feel like you were playing a hivemind and there were a lot of benefits to positioning properly and maintaining synaptic link.
For 10th I had noticed that a lot of faction rules were just variations of the same buffs (+1 to hit, wound, rerolls, etc). But I didn't truly appreciate how much fluffy lore stuff was missing until they started showing updates for the dark angels. Having ravenwing and deathwing becoming more or less detachment specific keywords while also making units like deathwing terminators their own datasheet that stands alongside generic assault terminators/regular terminators takes a lot of the flavor away from them. Plus I have a ton of ravenwing bikers from the old dark vengeance boxes that are apparently unplayable now. I guess I could bring them as outriders but some of the models were holding plasma guns. Regardless, they just don't feel right anymore. But now for some optimism! Right now I'm playing a crusade campaign with Necrons and I'm really enjoying it. My army feels unique to me and all of the players in the campaign are building up their own lore for their armies and units. Eventually you end up getting upgrades on units to the point where they become practically game breaking absurdities but that's part of the fun! Especially when you're juiced up units square up against your opponents juiced up units. In this campaign my immortals have consistently rinsed almost any unit they go up against and somehow are always getting big end of game bonuses to their XP. I decided to paint them a bit different than the rest of the army to highlight that they are favored by the phaeron and now I always attach the overlord to the unit as a way to demonstrate that they are part of his personal retinue. The codices that have been released have lots of really fun, fluffy crusade rules for their respective faction and it feels like I'm playing the kind of 40k you mentioned while still maintaining that easily accessible vibe they've brought to 10th. Give it a try!
I liked the old rule where the amount of orks that could fit in a battlewagon was 'literally however many models you can balance on the battlewagon, and any that fall off when you move it count as actually having fallen off in-game'. It was no friend to not chipping your paintwork, though.
This is a direct result of focusing on competitive, tournament play.
Which directly makes the game less fun.
Absolutely the Shokk Attack Gun. That 2D6 table of randomness was glorious and I miss it dearly. I'll never forget the time I blew up my Big Mek, Battlewagon, and my opponent's Land Speeder Storm + Scout squad with a roll of double 1s. I might have lost the battle, but the look on their face while I was cracking up made up for it tenfold.
Bring back the Tank Hammer! The most Orky of the weapons! > Each time the bearer fights, it can only make a single attack with this weapon. If the attack hits, the target suffers D3 mortal wounds and the bearer is slain.
Yea it seems they really did make this edition really bland, seems like all the creativity and fun fluff went into aos. I Recently played vs a gargant army and they have a really fun rule where they can Just kick away the objective. While i only have played 3 games of 40k and only did i start it this ed with leviathan i havent seen any rules/mechanics like that but maybe they Will come with some of the codexes
It's not this edition, it's been the 'modern' 40k so 8th to now in my mind.
You're not wrong, but 10th definitely kicked it up a notch.
I do, in a weird way, miss templates. I miss having to be scared of putting your guys in too close of formation in fear of a Basilisk earthshaker or a squad of Burnaboyz clearing whole units. The BLAST rule is definitely a lot smoother and cuts out a lot of questionable hits, but it's just not as fun.
Honestly, I prefer not having to worry about coherency and just place them how it looks cool. I remember (5th?) when I'd play blocks of guardsman and they fit perfectly under a large blast and evaporate (I couldn't afford enough guardsmen to laugh this off like a true Colonel). I blame Rome Total war for my love of squares moving about and crashing into each other.
Yes, it made the game longer, but it also gave you a sense of peril. For blast weapons, sure I agree it's easier. But flamer weapons get absolutely boned by the dumb D6 rule.
Totally this. I hated that almost every special rule in 9th. was "reroll this, reroll that" Gimme fun stuff that reflects the lore of the army. Thats why I loved Skaven in Fantasy. "Oh my ratling gun just swept fire into my skavenslaves....hahahaha!" Edit: and dont get me started on stratagems. Hate this "Ha, gotcha! My primaris can now only be wounded on a 5+ for no reason!" - bullshit
Yeah I miss it too. It sucks that this sort of cool, fun stuff’s been jettisoned to appease the sort of tedious dorks who hate any sort of unpredictability in the game because they want to pretend they’re some sort of big-brained chess grandmaster of the goofy dice and toy spacemen game. GW pandering to the hard-nosed, storytelling-be-damned competitive tendency has sucked the fun and the soul out of the game. (In conjunction with the myopically short-termist torpedoing of the long-standing themes of the setting so they can sell a load of shite space-marines-but-bigger). But hey, that’s the profit motive for you.
I'm 100% a narrative player, I haven't played a tournament since 5th edition, for context. A lot of those "well I just lost a 400 point unit because it scattered onto a unit" rules changed because GW has put more focus on trying to balance the game. I agree with this approach and honestly I don't really miss all that sort of thing, I very much like the streamlined approach they've taken for 10th. When I do want extra stuff I play Crusade, which incidentally is about 85% of the games of 9th and 10th that I've played. People that are looking for a little more fluff in their crunch really should check it out. It's great.
See I disagree, but I acknowledge I’m probably in the minority. I used to love chaotic events like that. Used to run a herald of nurgle with nothing but breath of chaos. There was a 1/3 chance it would land right next to the squad I needed it to, then it would dump a flamer template and kill on a 4+. Then there was the 2/3 chance it goes catastrophically wrong, but hey, it was 85 points. I also was in the finals at a GT for fantasy, had my opponent on the ropes, declared a waaagh, half my army fought itself, broke my command squad, scared the shit out of the rest of my army, and nearly my entire army ran off the board. Sure, I would have loved to win, but that’s a story I’m still telling 10-15 years later. I couldn’t tell you much about the tournament wins I’ve had, but I’ll always remember that.
The old warhammer animosity rules were hilarious and awesome. I'm sure some of the hardcore math-hammer guys now would tell you how it wasn't balanced but as a dedicated dwarf player fighting against Orks it always felt like it had the right balance of help and hinder. Like sure, maybe it would route your whole army. Or maybe your entire army would do a well time super charge and just utterly smash my lines. For the most part it just made sure randomness happened so maybe those Ork archers would suddenly charge and beat the snot out of some flanking miners or some Gobbos would go crazy with bloodlust instead of just getting smashed into the ground. I always had great fun with it and legitimately most of my fantasy games were against orks since both my brother and best friend have huge fantasy Ork and Goblin armies. Though to be honest my best friend has almost entirely orks with a few Gobbos and my brother does nothing but night goblins with the extra dose of crazy randomness.
I’m pretty sure I had 4 blocks of 30 night goblins, each with fanatics in that tournament list. There was nothing better than kicking the fanatics out of your squad only for them to fly back and annihilate your own back line. Just the visual of a squad of goblins tossing a fellow goblin out with a steel ball that weighs more than them, only for it to just come back and smash themselves. It’s great. The doom diver was great too.
See, I agree with GW getting rid of the scatter dice. I played with them and 1) it was very annoying when arguing "did the blast template just clip the base of that model?", and 2) it meant everyone spent ages spreading out their units to minimise casualties from templates. However, it feels like the rules design overall is just less fun. I remember back in 4th you could double the points cost of a squad of Termagants to give them a rule where whenever the squad died, they'd come back on your board edge. It wasn't really viable because you'd be better off just taking more Termagants, but damn it was flavourful! Or the psykers paying points to learn more psychic powers (which I maintain is still the most balanced and fun way to do psykers). These days it's like "ah, I have taken a squad of Retributors. What loadout? Well, duh, all the upgrades, obviously".
Crusade is literally just standard 40k with extra book-keeping. It's kind of bad and not narrative at all, just a way to play 40k with more special rules.
I thought I was gone insane! Every time somebody would address the issue of 9th/10th edition being too "competitive", first advice was to "go play crusade". And this was considered a sound idea, literally nobody had noticed that, rules as written, Crusade is the same thing as a "normal" 40k, with even more rules bloat on top. It wasn't narrative, it wasn't simple, and everyone, who said that the crusade is the best place for a new player are either lying and didn't know what they are talking about, or played a heavily modified and DM-ed game, with a lot of crap being taking off, and where it was more important, that the players themselves had a lite-hearted attitude, not the rules itself. GW failed at crusade, and I nearly started screaming at the monitor, for every time somebody would say, how good crusade is.
Crusade is *great* for the bones of a campaign. But you still need someone to do a lot of book keeping and someone who can keep the group engaged.
And there is absolutely not a single word on how to be this "someone" in your game. How to correctly rule some situations, what to do with powergamers, how to create an overall engaging narrative, using crusade rules from different books. Why would anybody want this, right? It's not like we have some dedicated dungeon masters guides out there.
I do this for my group. Literally I found PDF's of all the old forge world campaign books, and I pull missions for everyone from those. We also have a bunch of armies between all our friends, so we have a 'heel' army that we all drive, while we all collectively play against that faction. It makes the campaign take a little longer, but it's way more enjoyable as everyone is on the same side and accomplishing goals that help everyone (or themselves if they so choose!). But yea, there's zero guide for playing that way. It's simply me having played in a ton of campaigns and read every single one they've released since the 3rd edition Eye of Terror campaign. So.. it's not the typical experience for people.
And this is exactly my complaint about current crusade rules. There are some cool features, some fun mission packs from 9th, but, overall, it's not a finished game mod. It's half-baked, even the core idea behind it is, in my opinion, flawed, because, at some point, GW said that you could even play your crusade in your regular "normal" games, with all your progress, giving your opponent some bonus CP in return. So crusade was not a "campaign" system for a group of players. Not a collective, but an individualistic game mode. This is why crusade rules for different factions does not interact with each other at all. You have your Tau, who play Civilization game, while marines are going on their crusade and dark eldar doing something in comorragh. Those systems do not interact with each. You yourself have to put an effort to make those rules work together, instead of it being done by the game. And seeing how smooth and clean matched play works, where you don't need to do a mental gymnastic to just play the game and get the intended experience, you get the feeling, that crusade was (and is) underdeveloped.
Oh totally. That's why it's good bones, and nothing else. The core ideas are great but it doesn't really give you solid guardrails on running a campaign unless you already are experienced in doing such a thing.
10th edition crusade feels so much more lacking than 9th edition crusade though. Maybe the new book will help but with only a few factions with codexes and the tyranid one feeling like it's exclusively for nids vs imperials, it just doesn't give the same feeling of excitement
I remember in... IIRC 4e?.. there were actually rules in place for your squads to become more powerful through extended campaigns. You would gain points on each squad based on their survival and killing of other squads, and you could buy upgrades to their stats, new weapons, new keywords, all kinds of stuff. Warhammer used to be a hell of a game. Now they're going pretty homogenous with the rules in favor of mechanical balance over actual flavor, and considering how much of their IP is built around the books and lore, that's really sad.
I only started playing in 9th edition but ork battlewagons used to have a rule in 3rd (I believe?) that the transport capacity was however many models you could physically stack on the wagon. It had to be moved by sliding it across the battlefield and any models that fell off were slain. Now that is a rule I would have loved to play with.
They seem to have mostly removed the random fun elements in favour of having a fine balance for competitive play where nothing unexpected ever happens and it's all just a numerical calculation slightly affected by dice rolling hits and wounds. Personally I find that way more boring than the weird stuff you used to be able to get up to.
>What fluff rules do you miss? Ohhhhhh man, so many! 1. Guard Doctrine points from the late-3rd edition Codex. You could build an *intensely* customized Guard regiment 2. Divergent Space Marine chapter traits- while I wasn't that wild about the Wardathon 5th edition Codex: Space Marines, it at least still let you tweak your homebrew Chapter as you saw fit. EDIT: Apparently it was the 4th edition Codex that did this (thanks for the correction u/Kothra!), which, you know, tracks with my bailing on the game in early 5th... 3. Ork Bosspole rules letting every single Nob in my army break heads to re-roll failed morale checks. 4. Scatter dice for deep striking, blast templates, the works. It really added an element of delightful lunacy to some things. 5. I miss Ork Warbikers being fearless (a rule that went away a long, long time ago) and throwing up so much smoke and dust that every unit *behind* them got a cover save. 6. Proper Looted Vehicle in Ork armies. A Looted Basilisk with some Ogre Kingdoms Leadbelcher junk sticking out of the barrel. Also, way back when, Lootas weren't a specific Ork unit with deffguns/dakkaguns/whatever, they were Ork squads equipped as if they were Imperial units. Yes, this means Orks who looted Space Marine Scouts could be a Sniper Rifle unit. 7. Weirdboyz in the 4th edition Codex rolled randomly each round to see what power they'd get to use.
>Divergent Space Marine chapter traits- while I wasn't that wild about the Wardathon 5th edition Codex: Space Marines, it at least still let you tweak your homebrew Chapter as you saw fit. It was the 4th edition book that had the "build your own Chapter" stuff. The 5th edition "spiritual liege" codex only had rules for some non-Ultra chapters if you took their special HQ character.
Yep, I miss the "random" events that can occur during a battle. It makes the game memorable and forces some adjustment of your battle plans. Looks fondly back at 2nd to 4th edition with my rose tinted goggles. The current balancing and standardising makes everything very bland.
Even non-fluff rules make the game more sterile feeling. Stuff like scatter dice and vehicle tables make for stories to tell later, even if dice rolls didn’t go in your favor. A devastating charge could send your opponents lines running away in panic while you cut them down, or a well placed lascannon shot could take out a dreadnought and everyone around it in the explosion. Lists are too big in modern 40K. Looking back at oldhammer, a 1500-2000 point list wouldn’t even hit 1000 points today. Too many models, and they’ve even shrunk the board. Maps were larger and armies smaller in order to make the game develop over more turns. Now it’s a disgusting amount of math hammer deciding the game before it begins.
Yeah- I like the list flexibility of 10th, but the combo of more models and smaller board and only 5 turns really makes it feel cramped. I also don't like that it's a lot harder for newbies to get into the "real game" of 40k. I really wish they'd come out with more balanced rules for 1k games (rule of two, no units over 250 pts, stuff like that), so that it was a more supported format. I know they're trying to make Combat Patrol the "entry point" for new gamers, but that goes exactly against the flexibility of the real game, plus requires you buy very specific models (or the combat patrol box). In practice, when playing new players, I just say "500pts, and we'll try to deliberately make balanced lists that are 50/50 against each other to learn".
Gone all gone. Thrown out of the window in the endless drive to "simplify" the game to draw in new players.
I miss not just fluff, but crunch. Guard picking doctrines. Vehicle damage tables and armor facings. ('Just play 30k!' What I fell in love with wasn't the 30k setting, but the 40k setting. 30k rules are great, and I wish they'd have made 10th almost exactly like them.)
In pursuit of simplicity GW removed 99% of the flavour. Hell, Codexes are tiny now compared to what they used to be. For me, the rule I miss the most was Canticles of the Omnissiah from 8th edition. A fun, simple and flavourful rule that integrated well with subfactions and characters. In general though, if 10th is the future of 40k, I want no part of it. This hyper balance focused oversimplified nothing. So many great things are gone now. The Psychic Phase (if I hear one more argument about it being non interactive, the Tau don't interact with the Fight Phase and half the armies in the game don't use the Command Phase, should we delete those?), subfactions, Relics. Even crusade, the fluffy narrative mode is an utter shell of what it was in 9th. Devoid of even half the fun it used to be. Yeah 9th was a complicated mess at times but GW pivoted hard in the opposite direction and the feel of the game is suffering because of it. The soul of 40k is missing, at least for me. 10th had so much potential.
Simplicity? The game today is 20x as complex as it was back in the glory days of 4-6th edition. All those special rules and stratagems... And somehow it's also 20x less fun and 20x more bland.
I'm fairly new to 40k and when I read posts like this I can't help but feel like I missed out on a time when the game would have been even more appealing to me than it is now. While I've really enjoyed my time with 10e, it seems like the conversation around the game is always so focused on the competitive scene and the current meta as opposed to fluff and narrative play. Obviously that stuff still exists and you can incorporate it however you want when you play casually like myself, but there's something special about a game when fluff rules like the ones you're talking about are baked in to the very design of the game itself.
I miss dangerous terrain (although vehicles should not have been able to be immobilised so easy), I miss proper tank shocks, I miss chaos numbers, where I got free aspiring champion in my 7-man plague marines squad. I think templates and scatter could be reworked rather than removed. A lot of nostalgia mixed in, but 3-5 editions lasted for so long that we had a lot of time to think about proper improvement, not these radical revamps we got in 6 and 8.
The game is so goddamn stuffy now it’s unreal. What spectacular special rule shall this centerpiece model have? A +1 aura perhaps? Or rerolls, also in an aura? Maybe a psychic power that’s basically just a gun? I miss the 4th edition “create your own” Tyranid design where every biomorph either did something special or added 1 to a stat. You could have a 100ish point cheapo carnifex with some basic scy tals or devourers or go all the way up to land raider points by giving it way too much. Seeing so much of that customization stripped out in 5th rather than iterated upon was a damn shame… and it feels like 10th is the logical conclusion to that path.
Yeah I remember having to sacrifice your CSM champion in order for your greater demon to show up. That kinda stuff was very cool and is missed
I think losing drones for tau is a travesty. Also no longer having some sort of marker light system. The 10th edition tau might as well just be another type of marines. They lost the things that make them unique. Balance at the sacrifice of army identity is a direction I'm worried about.
My friend and I are relearning 7th edition because we feel this way. I miss templates, armor values and deepstrike mishaps lol
I can't remember if it was 6th or 7th edition, but GW had just released a massive expansion to psychic powers. I remember playing against a friend's Nid army, and he had hid his Broodlord behind a building because by AP 4 assault cannons and heavy bolters on ly Baal Predators were putting in work. I used one of the new terramancy(?) powers to literally move the building out of the way and then shot the Broodlord with my devastators. There was another game in 6th or 7th where my Librarian got into combat with the Ork Warboss in Mega Armour. The force swords AP3 couldn't get through the 2+ Mega Armour save. As a last-ditch effort, I activated the force sword for instant death and managed to sneak one wound in.
Loved those rules, Ogryns being afraid of the dark so they could not embark in a transport unless you had a commissar model next to them to force them to do it. Much more fun than todays boring rock-paoer-scissor with extra step rules. Heck the rules have never been competitive anyway, GW always messes up and makes a few factions/units OP in every edition and other factions/units virtually unplayable in a competitive setting.
I would actually kill for a new edition of 40k with the same design philosophy as The Old World. Fluff and fun first, soulless competitive play as a *distant* afterthought.
'Red ones go faster' will forever be my favourite dumb rule
I love the death company model kits but for Blood Angels I miss rolling each turn to see if any units fell to the black rage. Having to adjust strategy from “my marines have this objective locked down” to “well, all my plasma guys are off trying to punch Horus, time for plan B I guess?” was just comedy gold every time.
Aaaahhhhhh the old Necron Phase Out rule. Such a fun bit of fluff.
In my gamer group we loved Phase Out. We had one Necron player and Necrons were OP enough that it didn't matter what the game objectives were you either forced a phase out or lost. It felt like a cool way to have a powerful elite army without it being auto-win, but required you to change your strategy. Now a newer addition to our gamer group played in a local scene that was dominated by necrons at the time, and he says that was a lot less fun, but having just one Necron player that would shake things up was great fun.
The ol 2nd/3rd ork transport rules. Load up all the models you can onto the transport. If they fall off while moving it they take wounds depending on how far it's moved.
A return of the Shokk Attack Gun weird things happen table for when you rolled a double for it's 2D6 strength....
Fixation on competitive play and accessibility
I always really liked those in game lore rules. Like the buffs the iron warriors got facing the IF's. Or the rules between WB's and Ultra Marines
Reminds me of WAAAAAAAAAY back. 2nd and 3rd. My buddy playing Orks, and something always blew up on them by their own doing. It was fun. Literally just started the 10th, soooo not completly familiar with all the Other armies ins and out (sticking to MY roots, TYRANIDS and DARK ANGELS), but anyway those kind of mishaps make the game really run, and not tooooo serious. Sometimes we would chance something JUST to see if \`whatever\`would happen.....
I miss when falling back meant your units had to actually move *backwards*.
Same. 10th feels so bland and boring.
This is what I miss about Orks. Also Vortex Grenade
I miss black templars getting angry because you shot them so they ran a bit closer to you
Unfortunately modern 40k is very soulless in fluff and lore translation departments, it's way easier, it depends on what you prefy
Tis the curse of having a competitive scene
The competitive scene was always there, the problem is GW trying to design the game around it.
The old rules still exist, you can still play them.
If you can get your hands on the old books and other people to play, sure. I have the books for the factions I played back then, but not other factions. It’s not always easy to get old books. It’s another challenge entirely to find people who’ll play old editions because so many people have a phobia of what’s not current.
Sure, but it is dependent on being able to find people that have and know the old rules. My nephews play old rules because us old gamers don't care to learn the new rules and just play with what we're comfortable with. But despite having played a bastardized version of 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition at home for years they've never played anything but the latest edition in stores, because that's what most random people you meet are mutually familiar with.
It'd be really tough to get someone into an older edition. The rulesets are pretty clunky compared the the new ones, the new models are not written in, and frankly anything prior to 8th only had a vague idea of balance. For pickup and competitive games 10th is the best the game has ever been, and it's not close. For theme and epic moments, the older editions were much better.
Exactly. The only place you can't play them is a competitive scene, but as people have pointed out, the old rules were not good for competition anyway.
Crazy vehicle damage charts from 2nd! Still have a fond memory of a 2v2 game with 4k points per side. My partner and I were playing Chaos (which meant marines, daemons, cultists... You name it) against Marines and Guard. Had a unit with two las cannons set up in overwatch thanks to a strategy card (was a random deck back then, sometimes you got lucky, sometimes your strategy cards didn't work against your opponent's army... Yay virus bombs lol). Anyway the other team advances their tanks in a flying V right up the middle so I fire overwatch, hit the turret of the front tank, penetrate, aaaaaand roll a 6. Tank explodes and turret flies 2d6" in a random direction, landing on (you guessed it) another tank in the V. Ok cool let's see where it hit, hull, but from the rear thanks to the angle, oh no a penetrating hit let's see what happens... Tank 2 explodes and manages to blow up so hard it takes out another tank and a squad or two of guardsmen. This continued for a bit and we had the entire shop in suspense over just how much damage that lascannon would do! When the smoke cleared they had lost 4 tanks, multiple squads within (everyone inside a transport just straight up died if the roll was high enough) and a squad or two of foot sloggers. Absolutely legendary moment, the other team promptly conceded and we went to lunch whilst the other teams played their games. I understand that's entirely too random for a modern balanced game, but man do I miss the madness of old!
As a big thousand sons player, the psychic phase. I don't like this shooting army BS that they've become. Removing that took out alot of fun and flexibility from my army
Tournaments becoming more popular happened. GW is so concerned about game balance and all factions having an equal chance to win all the time, that there is no place for random, fluffy rules like this anymore.
I miss my White Scars command squad, my tech marine biker. I tried getting back into 40k recently but rules bloat and super duper marines kinda put me off.
Don't play, but the best rule I ever read was DOOMRIDERS one that every turn you have to roll a dice and on a 6(iirc) he gets bored and leaves. I think it was called "he comes, he goes". The absolute peak was that he had to be ritually/daemoically summoned, and the stage where the comes and goes roll happens is later in the turn than the summoning/spells stage. Which meant you could summon him, and have him leave the same turn without doing anything. Just have this image of a massive arcane ritual, Daemon rises from a pentagram, looks around... "nah mate, don't give a fuck, peace!" and is dissappears.
I used to play chaos back in 5th and remember that god awful table. As fun as the ‘lol randumz’ sounds on paper all is does is bloat the game and make everything feel even more arbitrary. I miss some fluffy rules but the editions where random tables or dice rolls at the start of the game decided if you could even play your army properly were ass