Tell me the saga of 3rd/3.5 edition

[Uprising]

I started the hobby when 4th ed was rolling over to 5th edition.  I been hearing alot lately about many hobbyist, including those in my group thinking of moving back to 3rd/3.5 edition.  What is the appeal?  What was the drawback of the edition?  How big where the armies model wise / point wise on average?  I have a few codexes and the rulebook from the era, and it seems simple, yet highly customizable narrative game.  Thoughts?  

[Captain Idaho]

The game felt more customisable yet nothing was so powerful you'd get wiped off the table at a breath like 5th edition + was.

 

3.5 Chaos Codex in particular was the premium, best Codex 40K has ever did see.

 

Plus narrative feel. Everything felt unique to each army, rather than the "Everything hits on a 3+ and these S4, AP-1 weapons are totally different to those S4, AP-1 weapons."

 

Plus plus, the character of the various armies felt more in line with a sandbox we could happily engage with. When GW started updating the narrative every release in recent times, it ceased to be a sandbox and became us playing some games to be told what the narrative was.

 

Codex Necrons had mystery and omnipresent impending danger, rather than the juvenile "human Egyptian empires but really Xenos, honest" mess that they are now.

 

My most enjoyable games were 3.5 days to be honest. I've never had games as fun as back then.

[Karhedron]

3rd edition had some things that didn't appeal to me. Rhino rush in particular was crazy in the way it made transports so much better than jump packs for melee units. The 3.5E Chaos codex was kinda busted. I preferred 4/5th edition. 

[W.A.Rorie]

I played a lot of 3rd edition as a Space Wolf, Black Templar, Dark Angels, Sisters of Battle and Emperor's Children player.  3rd edition has some nostalgia for me. I started at the tail end of 2nd edition so I was able to learn 3rd edition with @The_Oni_of_Hindsight . During this edition my GF/ Fiancé broke up with me so I spent a lot of time at my FLGS Imperial Outpost mending from the break up.  Owner of Imperial Outpost retired this year and closed his store, Last year I married my former Fiancé after we reconnected 20+ years later. 

 

Space Wolves had a unique flair to the army that I loved. 1 hq for every 750 points in your army, The Wolf Scouts coming in the enemy deployement zone and vaporizing tanks. Wolf Guard Terminators in the 1 Land Raider Crusader all non Black Templar Players were allowed, Hatred Dark Angels and Thousand Sons.

 

Sisters of Battle went from having like 10 total units (Rhino, Immolator, Confessor, Priest, Missionary, Canoness, Battle Sister Squad 5-7 models, Seraphim 5 models, Seraphim Command Squad 5 models, and Frateris Militia) to larger squads and more units including Retriburotrs, Celestians, and Redemptionist. 

 

Customization was probably the biggest thing back then.  And some crazy  rules, like Thousand Son Marines could not be hurt by range attacks of that were  Str 4 or less. 

Edited yesterday at 02:51 PM by W.A.Rorie

[Evil Eye]

10 hours ago, Captain Idaho said:

The game felt more customisable yet nothing was so powerful you'd get wiped off the table at a breath like 5th edition + was.

 

3.5 Chaos Codex in particular was the premium, best Codex 40K has ever did see.

 

Plus narrative feel. Everything felt unique to each army, rather than the "Everything hits on a 3+ and these S4, AP-1 weapons are totally different to those S4, AP-1 weapons."

 

Plus plus, the character of the various armies felt more in line with a sandbox we could happily engage with. When GW started updating the narrative every release in recent times, it ceased to be a sandbox and became us playing some games to be told what the narrative was.

 

Codex Necrons had mystery and omnipresent impending danger, rather than the juvenile "human Egyptian empires but really Xenos, honest" mess that they are now.

 

My most enjoyable games were 3.5 days to be honest. I've never had games as fun as back then.

3.5 to mid 4th IMO were the peak of the game. Not only were the 3.5 to early-to-mid 4th Codices really well put together with a huge amount of customization, but the supplements were amazing.

[Tawnis]

3rd was the edition that I got into the game, I was pretty young at the time and only played casually with a couple of friends, so I can't give you a meta analysis or anything, but from a narrative perspective, it felt like the sky was the limit, all the random little customizability's you could do really made the most out of limited model ranges, especially for factions like the Tyranids where the any weapon could be equipped to any model but had a strength modifier for balance. So for example, a barbed strangler was (IIRC) S -2 large blast. So, you could equip a full squad of warriors with them to toss pie plates all over the place, but they'd only be S:3. Or you could put Venom Cannons on Termagaunts, though they'd only be S: 5. It went the opposite way too, Fleshborers were S: +1 (IIRC), so you could have things like Carnifex's run around with them blowing up light tanks. Honestly, it was a great way to customize your army while still keeping it pretty balanced. I'm sure there were meta picks, but I certainly didn't know what they were at the time, I just had fun converting. That's not even counting all the crazy biomorph stuff you could do. 

Now i want want to pull out my old codex when I get home and look over all the crazy things you could make. 

Edited 21 hours ago by Tawnis

[Lexington]

It was, I think, just a much easier game to play. Lots of that has to do with the fact that there’s something like twice as many armies out there now, with several of them having two or three times as many units as your average 3rd/3.5-era armies did. Hell, the 10th Edition Space Marine Codex might actually have more unit entries in it than there were in the entire game of 40K did during some parts of 3rd Ed. There were no Detachment types, no Strategems, and nothing compelling every single unit to have its own bespoke special rule(s). You had army lists with some special weapon choices and character customization options.

 

40K as a game was also just less visibly tied to the particulars of GW as a business.  Not every option needed to have a model made of it, and sometimes whole units were left to convert. There’s good and bad to all of that, but there was a feeling that the game itself was something you had to take some personal ownership of in order to really play. Converting units, creating scenarios, building terrain, etc., it came down to what you were willing to do. It probably narrowed the potential player base down a lot, but the people who played really wanted to be doing it, and GW was, for a while, happy to showcase this kind of initiative. Now everything’s a walled garden of sales and highly engineered play types, and that rankles.

 

…also, we were all 20 - 25 years younger, then. There’s a lot of appeal to that idea once you hit a certain age. 

[Teetengee]

The 3.5 Chaos Codex *to this day* is why I continue to play the game.

[Trokair]

Space Wolves could field 1 Leman Russ Exterminator Tank (the one with the twin autocannon in the turret) per army for no other reason than flavour. It is a tank named after their Primarch, why wouldn’t they have some?

[Scribe]

Beyond the Holy of Holies, the 3.5 CSM Codex, take a look at everything that was released in 3rd. A more civilized age.