Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Rules of Yesteryear: 40k Vehicle Damage

Inspired by my post yesterday, I thought I'd pull out a few old rules that have long since been discarded. Today, we're going to take a quick, and very visual, tour of the old vehicle damage charts from 1992's "Vehicle Manual". The first picture is of the front cover of the manual.


These rules were released in White Dwarf prior to this publication, but feedback from the public and play testers modified it. Yes: seriously. People wrote letters using pen and paper and sent them to Games Workshop HQ. You don't have to believe me, the authors wrote exactly that in the introduction to this tome!


This next image explains what the system was ultimately all about. The overhead sheet! Basically, you put the crosshairs on where you are targeting on the vehicle (see the next image that shows a Rhino in the cross hairs). 


Here, I'm aiming for the fuel tank. We then proceed to hit (etc.) and you can read what happens next in the summary on the targeting grid.


If you got a palpable hit, then the charts on the reverse of the rhino's sheet would be consulted. The above is an example of what might happen if the fuel tank got hit. I like the 4-6 result of the tank essentially turning in to a heavy flamer! 

Equally, I can totally see why this entire system was got rid of. Its slow, unwieldy, too detailed, too labour intensive (imagine having a sheet for every tank, dreadnought, Tyranid big bug, and variant thereof) and frankly the current more abstract system just flows a whole lot better. 

I regard this as one of the prime examples of the rules changing over the years for the better. But I fear we have reached the stage where cutting back of 40k rules will happen once more as the rule book has become too bloated and the armies too complex. Just an opinion. Regardless, I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane and found these images educational (they're reproduced here for just that purpose - please don't sue me GW!). And for those of you who've never seen this stuff before, I trust its been an eye-opener!!


1 comment:

George Q said...

I played a game of Rogue Trader a couple of weeks ago and my opponent asked to use these rules. I was a bit skeptical - it wasn't too bad in our game as we had all of one vehicle on the table in our skirmish but I can see it very quickly bogging down in larger games.

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