"Total power! Showing 4th edition Warhammer some love?" Topic

There is a lot of love out there for warhammer 3rd, a fair bit for warhammer 6th but what of the 90's perfection Warhammer 4th. Hero hammer to some it had a lot of things going for it. Brevity of rules, fast play, card driven magic and FUN!
I've decided to devote at least some of my time to improving the image of the much maligned originator of the army books and have started with a wee post on my blog:
ernysplace.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/total-power-showing-4th-edition.html

But here I'm more interested in gathering thoughts, yeah or nay to 4th? Do you have fond memories?

For me it's a toss-up as to whether 4th or 5th was the worst, but they're both in the running. Stupidly overpowered heroes laden with ridiculous magic items and riding nearly invincible large monsters, game-breaking magic, and hardly any point in having regular troops on the table. Herohammer at its worst. It's "much maligned" for good reason IMO.

Still, if there's one thing to be said for WFB, it's that the many editions over the years offer a wide variety of game styles to choose from, and if 4th is your bag, more power to you. Better to play the edition you like than one you don't.

Yeah – 4th and 5th are the Warhammer of my youth and Herohammer at its worst (especially with the oh-so-abused allies rules.) I look fondly back on Nigel Stillman's White Dwarf bits of the time though; he seemed to be the sole voice of reason with his big battalions evangelism back then…. :-)

Hey don't get me wrong I know I love 3rd and even 6th, but 4th is great. If you have, "Stupidly overpowered heroes laden with ridiculous magic items and riding nearly invincible large monsters, game-breaking magic, and hardly any point in having regular troops on the table." Then that is the players fault not the games. An adult can choose how to play his game after all.

Hence my Stillman comments – it could be a good game, but was *very* prone to min-maxing; fair enough if you have a like-minded gentlemanly opponent, but for a bunch of overly-competitive teenagers (as my Warhammer oppos were back then), not so much…. ;-)

4th edition turned me away from WFB for a while.

Interesting, was that immediately or did it coincide with discovering beer, girls and partying, did you drift away or just hate it?

Then that is the players fault not the games. An adult can choose how to play his game after all.

Sure can – but when the rules let a min-maxed "hero" army beat anything else in the game without raising a sweat, you're either going to get tired of losing to them and move on to another game, or you're going to join the crowd and start fielding them yourself.

WFB has always had issues with min-maxing, and each edition has seen different styles of play encouraged by making some things work better than others – the style 4th encourages is not to my taste. I prefer the focus to be on troops and maneuver, not supermen and magic, which makes 6th and 7th better choices for me than 4th or 5th. Not that I really care these days anyway – rather play smaller skirmish games for my fantasy fix.

The thread titles reminds me of something we used to do when playing 4th ed. Someone on rec.games.warhammer suggested that whenever a player used the "Total Power" card, they were required to flex their muscles in front of them, and exclaim "TOTAL POWER!!!" in their best Arnold Schwarzeneggar voice. We picked that up and ran with it.

Irrespective of its merits or lack thereof, the change from 3rd to 4th was the "greatest" in terms of "is this even the same game?"-ism.

They really took a razor to the mechanics and simplified things. Too much for my tastes, but folks are allowed to like what they like, and I tend to play games less involved than 3rd edition these days anyway.

We never ran into the min-max play style in our group during 4th/5th. I think the fact that we still played more D&D at the time meant we were more interested in good story then power gaming. We didn't see any one player dominate. Everyone seemed to have a pretty balanced win-loss ratio.

Now for us, after 6th edition came out there was an explosion of new players in our area. It was this expanding of our gaming circle that brought in the "tournament" type mindset. We liked the more streamlining of the core rules, but the "power creep" of army books really turned us off the game. But we stuck with it.
7th was okay, but just seemed to continue the creep that made people with older collections unable to hold their own against the current "army of the month".
I can not comment much on 8th, I have only played a few times. There are things I like about it (2 ranks fight, step up, archer volley fire) but there are things I dislike about it (random charge, dozens and dozens of special rules).

I game mainly 1st edition these days. But this last Christmas a few of us bought copies of the 5th edition rule boxes and some army books. We haven't played yet, but having the stuff in hand again brought back some good gaming memories. So were going to give it another go.

I have to agree with Chief Lackey Rich… and even if everybody involoved somehow continually avoids the power-gaming temptation (4th edition was not a GM'ed type game…)then the biggest problem still stands with all those decks of cards and items… felt more like 'Magic the Gathering' meets Warhammer than anything else… If a gentleman's game is in order (and I hope it is) than I still say 3rd is the way to go. The ONLY improvement made to the WFB game(s) since 4th edition is the abandonment of all that cardboard… (IMHO, we all play what we want).

Of course, if we hold out for 12th edition, it will be perfect*

*see GW for details.

2nd and 3rd are the only versions I've ever played… and those only in the past couple years. I like them a lot for their flavorful rules and that earlier version of the Warhammer setting they cling to (along with WHFRP, which I still love also).
Despite playing Rogue Trader I had no real awareness of WFB 4 back in the day except for what I saw in White Dwarf at the time. It just looked uglier… brighter colors on everything, big ugly miniatures, more and more of that 'tournament' nonsense.
It was my first sense of GW sliding toward the 'dark side'… so I'd have no interest in it.

While I enjoyed 4th a lot- that was probably my WHFB heyday, though I got loads of mileage out of 3rd- I have difficult now separating it from an ugly period for GW.

Yes, it was a time of horribly garish paint jobs, and EVERYTHING had to have lots of red on it. Ugh.

Sure can – but when the rules let a min-maxed "hero" army beat anything else in the game without raising a sweat, you're either going to get tired of losing to them and move on to another game, or you're going to join the crowd and start fielding them yourself.

But that is probably a moot point because given that it is 4th Ed the OP was talking about he will be playing it with mates – not at a convention or such like where he will face unknown opponents who may well make use of the rule set's particular foibles.

Quite, gaming with my friends means not having to worry about idiots (or maybe we are all idiots with no major idiots…).

As someone on my blog mentioned, sometimes you just feel like hamburger and fries, 4th is no fuss, hits the buttons hamburger and fries.

I remember playing 4th in high school with my older brother. He decided to collect Undead, and I went with Goblins (poor choice). I basically got crushed in every game, I think I only won once out of about fifty games when a wolf rider had some wierd flag that made his Vampire's head explode on contact, causing his whole army to instantly fall apart. That was kinda funny to see his expression, but it was a five minute game and not very fun otherwise. This was the game/edition drove me to give up on GW completely.

Our groups escalation came from ignorance about how crazy the heroes were in that edition. At first it was just a frost blade here and there, and before you know it, we all had a hero with the black amulet, frost blade, etc. by that time we had had enough. Or maybe I moved away. I can't recall.

Great thread!
Erny I have to say that 4th edition will always have a special place in my heart. Just seeing the box art again in your OP does strange things to my nostalgia gland. High Elves versus Orcs & Goblins is still the classic Warhammer match up in my opinion.

Maybe it was 'Hero-hammer' but we didn't really notice any of that because we were kids. Isn't Fantasy supposed to be heroic? Also, there were rules in place to make sure you didn't spend more than 50% of your points total on Hero's (although maybe it should have been 25%, therefore allowing for far more core troops).
In my opinion newer versions of Warhammer don't have the same charm and Codex creep has led to ridiculously over-complicated troop lists where you have to remember about 500 different modifiers just to complete 1 round of combat. And rolling 2D6 for movement, !!!!

On the rare occasions where I get to play Warhammer these days we play it old school but I include some of the better modern rules such as the Horde rule and the one where you have an un-modifiable LD if you have more ranks than your enemy.
This leads to great games that not only have the Heroes but also great big, wonderful looking coherent battle-lines of core units. Fantasy gaming at its best!!!