Old Hammer 40K: Old-School Rules I Miss the Most
Goatboy here to go through some of the classic old school 40K rules I miss the most from the old editions.
Mostly everything is better in the new Edition 40K games we have – but there are still some fun things I wish would come back. I think some of them might make things a bit more complex but the randomness of some of the rules made for some great fun interactions. Let’s dive back into the old rules to see what might actually be good if GW brought them back.
Random Draw Psychic Spells Per Game – 5th Edition – 7th Edition
The random nature of the old Psychic editions from 5th and 6th edition of Warhammer was a pretty interesting time. Your Psyker would pick a discipline and you would roll to see what you could get. It was also the time period of summoning Daemons too but the random roll was something interesting to think about. You would have games where your power would just be the default one as you can shift to it or you would have super powered magical sci-fi jerks running the table top. I always liked how the game could shift between rounds and wonder if some of that could come back to 40K. It feels like the current game gets “solved” pretty quickly for armies and you just play what is the best choice all the time. A little on-the-fly psychic variety might mix things up.
Old Rending Rule – aka Ignoring Armor Save but not Invulnerable save – 3rd Edition – 7th Edition
I wonder if this is something that could come back into the game. I don’t think we need more mortal wound stuff but instead another category of damage that would ignore Armor saves but leave any Invulnerable save etc. This could just be a simple stack on the wound roll so it would give another interesting option beyond just lethal, sustain, mortal, and now rending as a new keyword.
Old Torrent Weapons – aka Hitting Multiple Units – 3rd Edition – 7th Edition
I know template are not coming back but I miss the old methods you could have of doing damage to multiple units with Torrent and blast weapons. I wonder if there could be a thing that the damage would somehow jump to an adjacent unit or something along the lines of cause area damage. It could be something as simple as an arching keyword for the weapons that anything within engagement range would get a chance to take some hits from the weapon.
Placing Your Home Objective – 6th Edition – 8th Edition
I wonder if this could be an interesting thing in the game where you have a choice of where your “home” objective could be. I know we are going to be locked with terrain points to contest but what if you could pick your home. You might have armies that make it closer to the enemy due to their nature of being aggressive or just create some unique ways to play the scoring game. I know a lot of the time the game became a pre game when placing objectives and terrain at that time but it could be cool to have it work that way.
What Do You Old-timers Miss?
What other old rules do you miss? I think these ones could come back as some kind of method to add some more interaction in the game. I really think having a different form of ignoring armor without just going straight to Mortal wounds would be a neat thing.
Personally, I’m still partial to classic Guess Weapons!
