Part of the joy of the experience of playing earlier editions of Warhammer 40,000 is using era specific models. I enjoy using my Eldar and Rogue Trader era Marines in games of 1st edition and my second edition models in 2nd ed games as well.
Lately, though, I've been toying with breaking that unofficial rule in order to break up the monotony of playing the same three armies (Space Marines, Eldar, and Orks). I have a nice and I feel pretty balanced Iron Warriors army that I built for 8th edition and it would work well with the Chaos Codex of 2nd edition with very few instances of "counts as".
Sometimes I agonize over breaking unwritten rules, probably due to my adherence to playing with only painted models (the one rule I absolutely will not break -ever-).
I'm also a little unhappy with the reluctance to adopt house rules for our early edition games. Essentially you have to have house rules to even play Rogue Trader, but my opponent seems to really not want to adopt any real changes to the 2nd edition rules at all.
The only real rule I'm not happy with in 2nd edition is the Sustained Fire rules. The Sustained Fire dice were apparently not a big hit given that they did not survive integration into third edition.
For the uninitiated, the Sustained Fire Die is essentially a D3. The results on the die are:
Malfunction
1
1
2
2
3
The malfunction or "Jam" symbol triggers effects on some weapons such as Chaos Plasma weapons and Assault Cannons. Each malfunction also creates a jam which must be cleared before the weapon can fire again. In order to clear you must skip the shooting phase once for each jam you roll. Some weapons fire multiple sustained fire dice, such as the Assault Cannon while other weapons are twin linked and can fire up to four dice, such as the Twin Heavy Bolter.
This can lead to a weapon being unable to fire for the entire game.
Sustained Fire Dice came about as the streamlining of the "Following Fire" rules that several weapons had in 1st edition. Those weapons could, under the right circumstances, create situations where one model could effectively kill one unit per turn (or even more if you weren't spread out enough). At the advent of 2nd edition I feel like the Sustained Fire die was a good solution but now with the decades of gaming since then I feel more and more like it was overcompensation, something that creeps into iterative editions of any game.
The risk/reward for sustained fire dice just isn't worth it in most cases. For something like a Plasma gun, which has to recharge every other turn, there's zero risk since you can only roll one jam and you aren't shooting it next turn anyway.
But for the vast majority of weapons it's really bad and can lead to holding your fire until the last turn of the game (something that seems wrong within the larger context of the game setting).
A solution that I feel retains the spirit of the rule without creating really bad play experiences would be to simply count any jam as a zero when determining the total number of hits. You still reference the weapon to see if any malfunctions trigger other effects, such as an Assault Cannon exploding.
This feels like a more balanced approach, doesn't lock up a weapon for multiple turns, and lets weapons like Stormbolters function as better versions of Combi-Bolters. I bring up Combi-Bolters because they're by far a superior weapon to the the Stormbolter (the weapon that according to the historical context of the game is far superior). A Combi-Bolter is simply a twin linked bolt gun so you roll one to hit roll and if you hit, you roll two rolls to wound.
It's effectively like having a sustained fire die that always rolls a '2'. When you add in the Space Marine Rapid Fire rule, Chaos Terminators become terrifying.
If I were to codify a set of 2nd ed house rules I'd start with how Sustained Fire Dice work and I'd lobby to adopt the change I just outlined.
Other rules in the game I'm more or less fine with. I'm unhappy that the Orks arbitrarily can't have certain missions, something that inhibits choice for the player (which I'm usually not a fan of) and also creates situations where Ork armies become more focused on a smaller spread of missions when players draw randomly. It also creates headaches when trying to draw up a mission flowchart or a campaign of any kind. There's also a big issue with the nature of that rule which seems to indicate that Orks are too stupid to want to kill the enemy leader but somehow can recognize the strategic importance of a particular territory (Take & Hold) or particular buildings/areas (High Ground).
At the end of the day this edition of the game is dead as old Marley. Playing it "correctly" isn't as interesting to me as playing it for fun and for trying to represent a 40k skirmish game.
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