Warhammer 40K: Old Edition Skills You Forgot You Had
Each 40K edition brings new skills to the game. Let’s take a moment to remember all those old obsolete skills from the Oldhammer days of yore.
Each 40K edition brings new skills to the game and makes you rethink how to interact with your toy soldiers. What about all those old skills that a suddenly obsolete when a new batch of rules comes with a shiny new edition? These are my top three Oldhammer skills from the old school days of Warhammer 40k.
Guess (Barrage) Weapons and Blast/Template Weapons
Did you know that back in the day you couldn’t premeasure your ranges with some weapons? You also would just “guess” how many inches you need to shoot your long-ranged gun, roll scatter dice, and hope for the best! Do you even remember what Scatter dice are? If you bought a set of Horus Heresy dice a few years back, you would notice one of the dice your rolled had a bunch of arrows and 2 “targets” on them. These would be your scatter dice and once you determined where your template weapon as going you would roll them, subtract your ballistic skill, and determine where that blast would end up.
From there you would take one of your many template and hope it was a bit see-thru to allow you to “shade” an area underneath it so you could determine how many models you hit. If your weapon had multiple blasts, you would then roll the scatter dice looking for arrows or hits to determine where the other blasts would go. Each of those would chain off one of the blasts and you could determine how many dice you would roll to wound. Of course, as GW continued with those editions you would get weapons that would throw out 6+ blast shots into a unit and you would start to see why players would carry 4+ blast markers if they played with those units. And let’s not forget those enormous and super fun Apocalypse templates… such awesomeness!
A fun way to easily determine your range would be to take a weapon that had some kind of large range of shooting – say like the old popular Missile Launcher – and then measure out its full range when you determined a target. You could easily get all the ranges you needed for your other guns and determine what things could shoot where. If you played old Warhammer Fantasy back in the day the guess ranging of weapons was a very distinct skill you needed to play those armies that loved guess weapons.
Wound Allocation / Death Star Units
How many people here remember the old Nob Biker armies of 4th Edition – 6th Edition? Do you remember how you could set up all 10 of your Ork Bikers to have “different” wargear that allowed you to allocate wounds to each one separately via the Mixed Armour and complex units wound allocation rules? Some old editions allows wounds to show up into pools within the units that were determined by their wargear so having bit of that unit be different wound pools you could easily shift wounds to different things. This was especially important with things like a 4+ Feel No Pain and an “invulnerable” save for those models who had their Cybork Bodies.
This was the first iteration of the dreaded Death Star unit that became a problem a few editions form this one. It would allow a unit to function like this giant wound pool and let the player control so much of the interaction into that unit. I remember many games where I would take one unit of Nob Bikerz, hit my opponent’s entire army, and then had the other unit doing donuts in the middle. It was one of the armies that I ran roughshod through the local scene and even did well at one of the Baltimore events ran by GW. Be Happy that in modern 40K you don’t have to worry if you correctly assigned your wound pool as an opponent tried to remove your Deathstar.
Line of Sight Vision Blocking – AKA Fish of Fury & Rhino Walls
This is a wild old rule from back in 4th Edition (maybe the most tricksy 40K edition ever) where you could only put damage onto models that could be seen by the enemy. In most normal games you would just roll up, shoot the opponent, and watch wounds move through the unit from closest model to furthest away from the attacker. In this edition you only got to kill what you could see with Heroes and leaders being a bit protected in their units. What this meant is you could use things like blocking terrain and your other units (like tanks) to “focus” in your line of sight and ensure you killed exactly what you wanted to kill within the unit.
You would see plays like rolling up with a Rhino/Razorback/ Devilfish, creating nice little walls, and then shoot through the “gap” you created to only kill a few important models. You could also have things like Monoliths rolling up and a C’Tan hiding between the two to shoot the gap with its deadly lasers of death. The greatest thing was back when Drop Pods were only from Forgeworld so players would drop “walls” of them and create little death windows to kill your Chaplain from across the field.
You could see this in how you set up your Flamer templates too as you were not allowed to place them over your own models so you could “block” out areas to only throw specific damage on aspects of the enemy. Just this hint of “control” is just insane to think about in today’s age of interaction between units and not really the individual models within the unit. The closest thing we have now is precision and the way it interacts, but it is not nearly as abusable as this old way to determine line of sight.
What crazy skills from past editions of 40K do you most remember?
