5th edition/AoD hybrid

[Valkyrion]

A friend of mine is returning to the hobby after a 15(?) year hiatus and still has all the 5th edition paraphernalia and a decent sized space marine force. 

He was a keen player back in the day and reckons he will be able to pick it up again without much fuss, but doesn't fancy learning 9th or committing directly to AoD.

Given that AOD is similar to 7th which is a bloated version of 5th I wondered if using the red books would be viable.

I know some units like Flyers and Super Heavy's would be basically outlawed, but that would be fine from our own perspective, but I'm not sure how many other issues there would be trying to use AoD army lists and special rules with 5th edition ruleset - one that immediately jumps to mind is hull points.

 

Would we be creating too much work for ourselves?

[Noserenda]

Some stuff would be missing but Betrayal at least was written with 5th in mind so the early black books at least should work fine, the red books, faqs etc will be a bit off due to working with similar but different systems but should roughly function.

 

Flyers and superheavies both had rules in 5th too so perfectly workable, though they weren't as fun.

[Valkyrion]

I don't have my 5th to hand at the moment, but flicking through AoD suggests a lot more USR's than were in 5th. I don't think there was Shred, or Fleshbane or Armourbane for example. 

 

If we were to use AoD's USR's, but abandon hull points and challenges I think that could work?

Or maybe give (characters) the Independent Character rule with the Retinue caveat. 

[Lucien Eilam]

Even Betrayal was released like 4 months after 40k 6th edition.

 

6th and 7th are very closely related, 5th is a much bigger jump. But at heart, 5th through 7.5th are all very similar games, if you know one of them the rest will be easy to learn.

 

You can probably find a 7th edition mini rulebook on eBay for a quid if you don’t want to buy the AoD rulebook, the changes were fairly minor and it’ll be a lot less painful than trying to make it work with 5th.

[Valkyrion]

Yes, I think it's a step too far.

I don't know/remember much about 40k 7th - I've always kept my nose in and bought the rule book for every edition, so I have it somewhere, but I faded out of the hobby towards the end of 5th myself....did a bit of 6th...I remember thinking 'this is what a codex should look like' about the Daemons codex and, aside from 2nd ed Codex Chaos for nostalgias sake, 6th ed Codex Chaos Daemons remains my favourite codex, but it wasn't enough to keep me hooked.

 

But I digress - can anyone give me a very brief summary of the differences between 7th 40k and current AoD, aside from formations? 

[SkimaskMohawk]

Yea there's a few more special rules from 5th to 7th, in addition to psychic powers changing, wound allocation, and vehicle armour. Not to mention flyers and stuff like that.

 

While I'm personally a big fan of recombining the best of 5th to 7th, I don't think it would be very easy to try and play it only through 5th without any accomodation to the new or changed mechanics.