Oldhammer Thread

Any veteran 40K people here?

I was only 10 when I started playing 40K, some of the local geeks at the FLGS adopted me as one of their own and patiently played through games with me (around 1999). I played with them for a few years, right up until the time when 4th was released.

Did the "win at all costs" attitude take over the game in recent years or was it always there but something I was not exposed to because no one was gonna play ruthlessly against a 10 year old?

It seems like the attitude of the players nowadays and the core design of the game is all about doing whatever you have to in order to win (ie - min-maxing the fuck out of your army), even if no fun occurs in between the start and end of the game. Is the golden era of tabletop gaming where people play purely for fun a myth or did it once exist and get replaced with WAAC sometime in the post-2000 era?

i remember my uncle and friends playing around 1995. the orks came as one sold piece. everything was camp as fuck. Eldar had just come out (i think) because the white dwarf at the time had a battle report with fresh looking bieltan doods. also bird face looking helmets.

never got into WH4K but it did spark a life long intrest in modelling so thats GW

>Did the "win at all costs" attitude take over the game in recent years

Sure seems like it to me.

>or was it always there but something I was not exposed to because no one was gonna play ruthlessly against a 10 year old?

The potential was there as far back as Second Edition, but since you had to be on friendly terms to get together for games, people who played like that soon found themselves friendless pretty quickly.

>It seems like the attitude of the players nowadays and the core design of the game is all about doing whatever you have to in order to win (ie - min-maxing the fuck out of your army), even if no fun occurs in between the start and end of the game. Is the golden era of tabletop gaming where people play purely for fun a myth or did it once exist and get replaced with WAAC sometime in the post-2000 era?

It did once exist. I remember it fondly.

I played 40K through the heady days of Rogue Trader on into second and third editions. My interest began to wane with fourth and the change in leadership and attitudes at GW. I had a Squat army, Imp Guard, Marines, Chaos, Eldar and Orks. It was a blast. A bit beer and pretzels and cheesy fun.

We did our fair share of abusing rules but it was all in the name of fun and winning. Sort of. I. But it wasn't the at all costs winning. It was the fun Mole Mortaring robots so they'd fall on their arms and damage weapons systems. Genestealers vs. Bretonian Knights, Single Virus missile sweeping through the entire Eldar army, Rolling grenades down the slope of roofs onto Orks heads, Heroes running around with Powerfield Generators on suspensor sleds kind of fun.

It has changed. And whiel YMMV I find it to have changed for the worse. Make of that what you will. Perhaps it was our enthusiasm not crushed by the world. Maybe the fact that while the rules had gaping holes in them it seemed more a labor of love than an industry churning out ever more rules and models which were the "Next Best Thing. And now with 200% more skulls". Or just me with my nostalgia glasses on. But yes, 40K and the associated community is pretty IMO shite compared to earlier incarnations.

It was there in 2nd ed. I personally played against some of the worst stuff. All skimmer/bike armies that couldn't be assaulted. Space Wolves Ass Can Termie spam. Characters with layers upon layers upon layers of saves. The Original Temple Assassins. God Assassins were so gross some people could only deal with them by bringing squads of Adeptus Arbites with shotguns just so they could shoot the fuckers and knock them on their ass (doing no damage) every turn of the game.

>Is the golden era of tabletop gaming where people play purely for fun a myth

Played 1E/2E and basically quit around the time 3E was rumbling into town; definitely a myth.

Start with 2E: every new Codex release had everybody rushing to buy new crap, not because they wanted the cool new models (though they were objectively better than a lot of the stuff we'd had until then), but because it was an arms race. Nobody played Space Wolves because they were really into like nordic history and shit, they played Space Wolves because they had a hatful of special characters with rule-warping abilities and you could field as many as you wanted provided they weren't more than 25% of your points. So guess what, we played a lot of huge games.

Eldar were the same way, Orks - Ghaz was very popular for a while - Blood Angels with Tycho etc; Dark Angels, Tyranids with the ol' Screamer-Raper. In fact dreadnoughts and vehicles as a whole were a great way to fuck over your group if only because even a few bikes made it a cumbersome game with lots of lookup tables and notes.

That all came off the back of late 1E, which had snowballed - from things like Terminators being introduced - into a mess of a dozen different rulebooks and god knows how many White Dwarfs. Very competitive; Harlequins in particular still piss me off, just because of this one guy that ran a Harlequin/Eldar force. Harlequin dreadnoughts! Shoulder-mounted twin guns, holo-fields, fuck 'em, flanked by jetbikes. Fuck them all.

The holdovers from the old randomly-generated warbands were a nightmare too. I'm sure that's where the certainty units came from - something where you could pay 300 points for a squad of Termies and put it against a big Ork warband with randomly generated weapons, or a Genestealer cult that had been collecting equipment and troops over a campaign.

The worst part? Virus grenades. Some people hated Vortex, but Virus was our bane because we read the rule as "it spreads indefinitely".

>The potential was there as far back as Second Edition, but since you had to be on friendly terms to get together for games, people who played like that soon found themselves friendless pretty quickly.

Nah, we were the only people we knew who played. Other games shops didn't run it (they were just for model enthusiasts, really), and GWs were sparse. You never got time in a store, let alone time to play. Probably different if you lived closer to one of the early stores.

We definitely weren't shits about it, as in, we got to keep our cool and didn't troll, and after you'd got over the initial shock of the month's new deathstar units you could come up with counters, but it wasn't always fun. More like a stealthy way of teaching us maths. If only they'd taught us what humping those rulebooks and lead models around was doing to our backs.

Squats! Fuck 'em. Terminators on bikes in the old vehicle system. They belong dead. When Epic started introducing all those big-gun Squat units I really dreaded seeing them start to filter up into 40k.

Kind of surprising they never did, really. I guess people just think dwarves are shit.

>Virus grenades

Why did you have to trigger my repressed memories user?

Were orks any good back in the old days? They seemed like a clusterfuck of great fun, but I get the feeling everything was like that.

Aaah, virus grenades. Why any one who tells me that they're nostalgic for second edition either never played it, or has forgotten they existed

I'd like to see a lot of the old styles of early-ed 40k come back in revamped forms. The levels of 80s in RT made me want to vomit, but it a kind of funny way. I think it would be neat to see new high-quality Eldar models rocking sleeker versions of the old hair-metal 'doos.

Also a bit of comedy thrown in for a change. I like the grimdark and the gothic and all that, yeah, its iconic, but I get bored of the joke always being "and then it got worse". I'd like a side-bar story that has the main character spike the metaphorical camera or something like "womp womp, looks like I'm gonna be busy all evening".

GW nailed the grimdark stuff. Too much, to the point where we're past gripping grimdark stuff like Gaunt and on into perpetual grimderp. Throw a bit of comedy in.

I started playing just after 3rd was released, and I would say WAAC was present but not endorsed *quite* so heavily in the rules as it is these days. Or at least, there seemed to be a conscientious effort for a few rounds of Codexes to make an army have clear and well defined flaws as well as benefits.

I recall the Dark Eldar and the Imperial Guard lost their first battle reports, for example. While it probably didn't do their sales any favors, I appreciated the honesty of that kind of demo. "Dark Eldar can be really nasty, but if you make a mistake you're paste" was a good thing to know for a player interested in them.

There was also a series of I think, three battle reports for the Brettonian army release around that time that featured the Brettonians winning, losing, and then winning again. Each game neatly illustrated how the Brettonian army worked, what is was weak towards, and how you could expect it to form given certain strategies and scenarios. Wish they did that a little more these days.

They were really, really random.

They were a excellent gunline army.

But we have comedy, we call it 'the entire Ork codex'.

All that aside I'd like to see a bit more dark comedy thrown into the setting as well, less 'no hope' emo anguish more 'my lasgun started talking to me so I took it to the cogboys, they branded me a heretic and now i'm on a ship full of psykers headed for Terra, should I be worried?'

>50 point virus grenade wargear card for space marine captain
>virus spreads indefinitely to affected models in range
>power armour immune to effects
>so long, orks

Like anything, they were good if you knew what you were doing. For a while they were the only faction other than SM that had a transport vehicle, and the rule was that it could transport as many models as you could balance on it, so potentially you could flood the enemy side in a couple of turns.

Gretchin were good too, because they had shit guns but they were cheap, had decent BS and back then power armour was a 50/50 chance of saving against them. So you could wipe out whole squads if you got the initiative, but it was kind of random.

They got a lot of updates and new rules in late 1E because the studio guys (and everybody else) thought they were funny. Shokk Attack Guns came from that; they were OP then with the only limiting factor being that you had to physically have bases of snotlings to fire through them.

Bolters were basically designed to chew through Orks in 1E/2E, but not so easily that it was a foregone conclusion.

The thing with those early designs is that they were made in the 80s. They weren't trying to be iconic, they were just pro-am sculptors putting the things they saw around them - from the media to their friends - into little still life pieces. It's not that that's no longer possible, it's that they'd be producing hipster gretchin or trenchcoat stormboyz or whatever. At a certain point in late 1E they chose to come up with unified design plans for each army, and while the sculpts have changed since that's mostly been refinement of the models to resemble what was on the design sheets.

As far as the grimdark/gothic goes, I guess blame Ian Watson and John Blanche. But there was always humour.

>Did the "win at all costs" attitude take over the game in recent years or was it always there but something I was not exposed to
people gaming the system have been around since forever. It's not a recent trend in wargaming.

The internet just means you get to see more of it, where in the past things were more contained to local groups.

It could be worse, you could've been using the cards from Dark Millennium - oh, virus outbreak? Well, we're either removing most of your orks, or we're just going to punch the person who put that back in the pile of cards and take it out again. From what I recall, a fair number of rules infractions and disputes were settled with punches to the arm when I was thirteen.

I properly got into 40k in second edition, though my introduction to it was by a bunch of guys in their thirties and forties playing Rogue Trader when I was an impressionable youth. My parents signed me up to this "Boys Brigade" thing when I was younger, in the hope presumably that it'd stop me being such a little fucking nerd. Turned out that half of the people running it were massive miniature wargaming grognards, and things like "camping trips" and "brisk outdoor walks" featured less compared to setting up huge games of Rogue Trader in the local community centre.

It did not turn me into any less of a nerd.

Started gaming in 88, 28 year vet here. 1st ed was possible to power game but it was almost like whats the point? It was so fuckrandom you coukd lose or win huge by a single roll on one crazy table.

2nd ed is where the real bullshit started and i was out of it early into 3rd.

The proportion of fuckwits hasnt changed, its the fact that there are more gamers and the internet has allowed easier contact that it SEEMS like there are more of them. Its the usual story that the majority are just keeping their heads down and getting on with the hobby while the minority of autistic shitstains scream louder so that maybe someone will pay attention to them.

fuck em

pic related is the only random unit I miss

>Eldar had just come out (i think)
Eldar, the Imperium (including space marines), orks, and squats were the only armies in the game when it released (along with a shit ton of one-off aliens, which included genestealers and nids).

Eldar have been there since the beginning.

Probably the second-wave releases for Codex: Eldar.

I remember a few all Terminator armies being tried out prior to 2E.

What you're saying about the Internet making idiots more visible is definitely true. My circle of friends doesn't have to hope for games at the FLGS anymore, we just get together every other weekend and play in a basement or on a kitchen table (amusingly that's how we played when we started back in 3e, about 14-15 ago now).

Thankfully this means we completely dodge people who think Riptides, Knights, Baneblades, etc. are appropriate in non-Apocalypse games.

I started playing with rogue trader in 1990 I remember when land raiders and rhinos were the only plastic vehicles. Bikes, buggies and land speeders were all rather crappy metal kits you had to pin the hell out of.

I began in 2001.
I don't feel like a grognard, but I realize that the younger players and I don't have the same references at all.

The idea behind WAAC quickly disappears when faced on equal terms. Thus, two players, enjoying the game by outwitting one another already on the "creation phase" of the game, will have just as much fun, as the two local boys having a go with one starter set each.

Its all down to your local meta, and to fit in if you ask me. If you play friendly, and with friends (as you should), you know whats "acceptable" and what is not.

>Played 1E/2E and basically quit around the time 3E was rumbling into town;
same here.

>definitely a myth.
hold on. 1E played totally differently. 1E was easily abusable, so much less energy had to put into list analysis. also, you had these story/RP elements that enabled playing very differently. finally, a fair number of our games were actually chaos warband based. realm of chaos was based af.

so, yeah, while it wasnt a golden era of gaming, you had way more casual gaming, instead of tourneyfagging

>The worst part? Virus grenades.
nope. psy was the worst offender, redoing turns and changing the allegiances of whole units. taking out vehicles with a simple jinx. shit was ridonkulous.

>realm of chaos was based

Unless you were facing long-legged genestealers with rapid regeneration across the table from you. My mates all played different flavours of chaos at the time and 'witnessed' each other's rolls on the Chaos Attributes table. One of the reasons I packed it in in '95 and only came back to the game near the end of 5th.

>taking out vehicles with a simple jinx

oh god

i've just remembered all those times i got tabled by Harlequins

Hahaha obviously I was wrong about the golden age of TT gaming.... half the posts in this thread are about 1st/2nd edition PTSD.

Well, I will still all the fond memories nonetheless.

Nostalgia is the art of remembering the good regardless of the bad. I feel people can be nostalgic for the good/fun parts, but also remember the flaws.

>But we have comedy, we call it 'the entire Ork codex'.
It's a tragedy.

I'm surprised at how many people in this thread missed late 3rd, early 4th, a time that I'd categorise as the golden era ruleswise (although don't think for a moment that WAAC attitudes and so forth didn't exist then).

Old school Warhammer art, because why not?

Have to say it hits the nostalgia hard.

Anyone else old school art here?

Continuing dump...

Also, stupid timer

I didn't realize I had some many blood angels.

Fuck yeah beakies! I'm actually working on an all beakie Crimson Fists Kill team right now

7/??

The 80s was truly the pinnacle of cheesy schlock, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

Thats awesome, one of my favourite pieces of art is the Last Stand.

Don't care what anyone says, love this piece of sisters art.

Well, before 40k forgot it's roots: goofy satire of ultraviolence.

Thanks! And here's my contribution to the thread

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only really bright colours... Orks in finely crafted power armour?!?

Ah, different times...

Actually random question, I'm thinking of doing a head swap for my chaplain, should i do a beaky headswap and free hand a bird skull or should i just try to find a bird skull bit and paint it up to look like a helmet? More art to stay on topic.

Thanks for having me not be the only one posting art!

I'm a millennial so it might be that, but I think most of the old-hammer 80s artstyle is ugly. Some of the pieces are good, but most just looks so jarring and reeks of 80s that it's kind of cringy.

I also think choir chanting and religious orchestra fits 40k way better than metal. (Unless we're talking about chaos)

And for a little twist of the blade... Sorry about the water marks, I couldn't find it with out.

My Oldhammer folder is a bit lacking but i'll do what i can!

And I know this isn't 40k, but this sums up everything oldschool in one picture.

Thanks! I need a break for a minute.

From a time when Chaos was timeless

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So much older 40k art is so trippy. The ones with titans in particular.

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I started just as soon as the Tau were released. Around 2002 or something. I know I began with Two Towers before Fantasy and finally getting into 40k.

Man, 1e was so much cooler. 40k felt more Star Warsy or Fire Fly than the super heavy religious crazy hellpit that it is today. Like it was just crazy generic sci-fi with fantasy tropes thrown in. I want a Mos Eisley built around a classic looking castle that has some guns on it.

This is one of my favourite pictures of all time due to the fantasy chaos warrior carrying a bolter.

Daaamn, I miss the old mini of two orks carrying a chained Weirdboy and aiming him like a cannon.