I've been skimming back through my 2e rulebook, not for lack of interest in 3e but because there's nothing new to read for 3e at the moment (my delivery window for Winds of Magic from Amazon still hasn't opened yet: 8/4-11/7) and was thinking that if players want the vertical advancement and less table clutter that 2e offered but enjoy some of 3e's components (such as the dice mechanic) shouldn't there be a way to use those components in 2e?

Like a similar mechanic to the one folks are using to convert 3e for Dark Heresy, switch it back the other direction...?

I'm going to mess with it a bit and post what I've come up with over the next few weeks, but anyone interested/having ideas, feel free to post.

The simplest bit would be to use the 'stat bonus' (which is the tens number for the 2e character's stat) as the number of characteristic dice. Expertise dice and fortune dice would scale in depending on what your skill percentage is, and would be bought like a skill bump.

I've had some experience tweaking this system in strange ways, and I've done a lot of mathematical analysis. So the one bit of advice I would give you is that if you're not going to use the action cards, leave out the stance dice entirely. As just dice (i.e.: random probabilities), the red ones are surprisingly much worse than the green, and the way the game balances that is mostly by making the red sides of the cards better. That part of the dice pools is really finely tuned and can quickly fall apart if you remove the action cards.

The other dice (white, black, blue, yellow, and purple) work pretty well as a mechanism for various other systems and settings without the cards, as long as you figure out what you're doing with Comets and Chaos Stars. I've run two very non-Warhammery games using those dice, and had good results.

For one I'm continuing to run, "Everhammer" I ported over those dice, fatigue, critical hits, and variations on party-cards and SBVD cards to fit the framework of the old Everway RPG. Everway was always too light for my tastes, and this did a good job of crunching it up in all the right places. It uses much higher attack difficulties than the default in Warhammer 3rd, and is a lot lighter overall, but has been working really well. We've enjoyed about 16 hours of that so far, and plan to play again soon.

I also did a one-shot that used those dice in a humorous sci-fi setting. For that one I streamlined it too far, and wasn't as happy with the results. It worked okay for a one-shot, but was a little too unpredictable for a longer game where you actually cared about your characters. Mainly, I had no way to distinguish between a Chaos Star and 4 or more Banes. If they're not mechanically separate, things can get pretty slapstick. It was too much GM fiat for my tastes. Only one player complained, and I his point was really more about the pregen he got stuck with, but as GM I wasn't happy with how arbitrary I was having to be.

My point is that, other than the complexities of the stance system, most of the core mechanics can be safely ported over to other settings and systems. How well it will adapt is mostly about how you handle boons, banes, comets and chaos stars without the action cards. Focus there first. Get that stuff working at levels you're happy with, and the rest will follow suit.