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 What is this thread? This is a thread about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition (which I will be abbreviating to WFRP3rd because drat that's a lot of words). It will also include discussion of previous issues but I'll be concentrating on 3rd. What is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition? Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition is the latest edition of the Games Workshop Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay RPG. It is published by Fantasy Flight Games and looks like this:  How on earth is that huge collection of cool stuff a roleplaying game? Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition provides you with all your character abilities, status effects, etcetera printed out on individual cards, visible on the lower-left/middle of the picture. Not only is this convenient for reference purposes, it also allows for a whole bunch of neat card based mechanics that I'll get into later. On the top right are the Core Rulebook, the GM guide, and the Magic and Religion rulebooks. On the bottom right are some of the character standups you get with the game, some tokens for keeping track of things, and some Creature and NPC standups. Last but not least, the awesome, awesome custom dice are in the centre. Everything in this picture comes with the Core Set and is all you need to play the game. I'm already sick of this Q&A format so I'm just going to start talking about the resolution mechanics. WFRP3rd uses custom dice with various symbols on them for task resolution (Picture stolen from this blog)  The seven types of of dice are: Conservative(green), Reckless(red), Skill(yellow), Characteristic(blue), Fortune(white), Misfortune(black) and Challenge(purple). The good dice (the first 5) have good symbols on them, the bad dice have bad ones. They all have at least one blank side. Successes (hammers) are countered by Failures (crossed swords). The less common Boons (eagles) and Banes (skulls) counter each other, as do the rare Sigmar's Comets (comets) and Chaos Stars (starbursts). Characteristic Dice These are the meat and potatoes of task resolution. You roll a number of these equal to whatever Characteristic (Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower or Fellowship) you are using. They only have Successes and Boons on them, and represent raw natural talent. The minimum amount a PC can have in a Characteristic is 2, and the maximum is 6. Challenge Dice These are the other side of basic challenge resolution. Usually you'll be rolling just one of these. They're covered in Failures and Banes and are the only way to generate Chaos Stars. They represent the base difficulty of the task. Stance Dice In combat (physical or social) your character has a Stance Meter, which you can move up or down for free one step each round. You swap out one Characteristic die for one Reckless or Conservative die for every step you are into the Reckless or Conservative stances. Reckless Dice are high risk high reward dice loaded with Successes, double Successes and Boons, but also Banes and Stress/Fatigue symbols. Conservative Dice have more reliable, but less dramatic results, but also have Delay symbols on them, which the GM can use to bump you down the initiative tracker/add recharge symbols to a power etc. Despite these downsides Stance dice are generally better than Characteristic dice. Stances have one more effect: Most Action cards have two sides, a Conservative and a Reckless side, determined by what Stance you are in. These follow the same basic pattern as the dice; Reckless Actions tend to have better Success/Boon/Comet sections but more serious Bane/Star sections. Skill dice If you have a skill trained you get to add one or more Skill dice. You can have a maximum of one skill die trained per skill per tier (Simplified explanation: 1 tier = 10XP spent). Skill dice are very good, they can explode and are also the only way to get Sigmar's Comets. They represent practice and training. Fortune and Misfortune dice Where Challenge Dice represent the basic difficulty of a task (distracting a guard would be one Challenge die, buying his pants would be two), Fortune and Misfortune dice represent situational modifiers, and are not mutually exclusive. This leads to my favourite aspect of WFRP3rd: When in doubt, throw more dice at it. Guard not paying attention? Player gets a Fortune die. Guard got no spare pants? Misfortune die. Character offers replacement pants? Add more Fortune dice. Each die has three blank sides, two Successes/Failures and one Bane/Boon, meaning that you can be fairly liberal with them without them dominating the results. I cannot express how much I love this modifier system. Actions  The basic action cards can be downloaded from the FFG website here. Once you've rolled your dice and totaled up your symbols you compare them to the relevant Action card to see what happens. If you have the minimum number of required Successes listed on the Action (usually one) then you succeed, or if you have enough Successes to meet the requirements you can get the second, superior success condition. If you have any leftover Boons or Comets you get to choose Boon or Comet effects, and if you have leftover Banes or Chaos Stars then bad things happen to you. As you've probably already worked out, you can have up to three resolutions occurring nearly independently of each other. Sometimes you'll just succeed (one success) and sometimes you'll just fail (nothing). Sometimes you will succeed with consequences (multiple Successes, one or more Banes and/or Chaos Stars) and sometimes you will fail at what you were trying to do, but succeed at something else (No Successes, one or more Boons and/or Sigmar's Comets). When you have multiple Boon or Sigmar's Comet effects available to you you can choose which to trigger, and if you have enough Boons or Comets you can purchase multiple effects in one action though each effect can only be triggered once. The different dice make it easy to tell where each component of your success or failure came from. Got double hammers on a Reckless dice? Your berserker rage helped you to succeed where a more cautious approach would have failed. Rolled nothing on your skill die? Picked the wrong day to play hookey from Wizard School. Being able to interpret the dice like this makes reading each result a genuinely engaging experience, and being able to see where everything came from makes the results feel like the actions of your character rather than an arbitrary dice result. There's a bunch of other mechanics stuff worth putting in the OP but if I try to include everything worth talking about I'll never get this posted, so I'm going to sign off with the Stress/Fatigue and Wounds. Wounds (I'll edit an image in here at some point) Wounds in WFRP3rd are handled by Wound Cards. When you take damage you take an equivalent number of face-down Wound cards. The average character can withstand about 12 wounds before falling unconscious, or about three hefty whacks with a standard a hand weapon against an unarmoured target. When you take a Critical Wound you flip one of the received Wound cards face up. This will act as a negative status effect until healed, usually adding one or more misfortune die to specific dice rolls. This causes long-term injuries to have very real and tangible effect on a character without rendering them useless; A single Misfortune die to intelligence checks from the Concussion card is not the end of the world, but whenever it does come up you'll know exactly what to blame for your Priest suddenly forgetting what the deacon's name is. One of the Always Available Sigmar's Comet purchases is to upgrade one inflicted Wound to a Critical Wound. Depending on your weapon you can also spend between 2 and 4 Boons to upgrade to a Critical Wound. Like most fiddly rules in WFRP3 Critical Wounds work differently on unimportant Creatures/NPCs, they just do extra damage. You still get to flip the card over though, so you'll know exactly what body part you just sent flying into the wild blue yonder. Stress and Fatigue Stress and Fatigue are yet another way for characters to get messed up without actually dying. There are various ways for characters to gain or lose Stress and Fatigue, including good/bad rolls, Reckless dice, and Creature/NPC abilities. They have various effects, ranging from minor penalties to actions to passing out mid-combat to going temporarily or permanently insane. Stress and Fatigue are Bad. One of the Always Available Bane/Boon purchases is taking/losing Fatigue or Stress, and two of the results on Reckless dice are a Success and a Stress/Fatigue icon. Again, unimportant Creatures/NPCs just take extra damage instead of Stress/Fatigue, which has the nice side effect that sometimes the GM can tell you how you just scared a Goblin literally to death. Madness cards are like Critical Wound cards in that they are status effects that impose minor penalties in specific situations until you get better from them. They have an impact without crippling you, and once again the WFRP3rd resolution mechanic shines through in determining whether your Dwarf failed his First Aid check because the rats, the rats, the rats are eating him or because he's just not very good at First Aid. Cool Things Not Described In This Post Party Sheets and the Party Tension Meter, Magic and Miscasts, Religion, How Initiative Works, How Combat Works, How Creatures/NPCs Work, Progress Trackers and Orkz. Also Careers and Talents, which in retrospect are really important. If anyone else wants to tackle these go ahead! (links to other mechanics posts by me and other people will go here) OK I'm sold! What do I need to buy? The core set is all you need to get started. It has enough for the GM and three players, more if you don't mind sharing cards, printing out the basic cards from the link there, or a quick visit to Mr Photocopier. Or you can write them down like some kind of filthy player of other, inferior RPGs. Expansions Other pro buys in order of pro-ness are: *Extra Dice: Makes it easier to throw more dice at things. *The Adventurer's Toolkit: Contains a set of Basic Action cards, duplicates of some of the more popular non-basic and Talent cards, new Action and Talent cards, some new Career cards (including Ratcatcher with Dog), Party Sheets, some spare character sheets and a really nice box. *The Creature Vault: Makes running creatures easier and contains some neat Creature/NPC powers, also contains Villain Sheets which are fantastic. *The GM Toolkit(Not the Vault!): GM screen, extra cards, more tokens, all good stuff. Also some good advice on running the game and some encounter templates. *Hero's Call: Not out yet but will have Halflings and Ogres in it. *Everything Else: Is also good, except the GM Vault. Everything in the GM Vault is in the Core set, it's only there so you can graduate from the filthy book version without buying the Core. That's a lot of things! The base set is $80 on its own! My precious monies! The base set really does contain everything you need to play, but the expansions can be best described by saying that anything you don't get isn't needed, and anything you do get is immediately indispensable. The way Careers and character construction work, and the fact that everything's on cards, means WFRP3rd does modularity really, really well, and the new mechanics are all either expanded versions of basic mechanics or for things you don't technically need mechanics for but are so well done that you're going to use them in pretty much everything. The base set is well worth the price, and no more than you'd spend on a standard PHB/GM/MM combo with no need for your players to buy anything, meaning they can take the money they'd have spent on their own PHBs and spend it on buying you precious, precious expansions. I don't know, the whole card thing is scary and new. Did you say something about there being a normal book version released for cowardly crybabies like me who are scared of change and hate having nice things? I would prefer not dignify this with a response, but yes, this thing does exist. Now get out. ------------------------ There! I've made your drat thread. The OP is finished (mostly). Now everyone make me feel validated by coming here and talking about how awesome Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition is, and about other WFRP related things, and, because it's a FFG game, asking rules questions because drat are they bad at writing rule books. All images or files containing game rules are from the FFG website. Splicer fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Apr 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 10:45
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FLUFF Thanks to Tendales and dishwasherlove for drawing attention to this fine fluff resource. RESOURCES Universal Head WFRP3 Rules Summary Seriously, download this. Gitzman's Gallery Alternate character sheets, rules summaries, general good stuff. Splicer fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Aug 30, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 10:45
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Awesome! This is my favourite role-playing system of all time. It has a great setting, and is appropriately grim-dark. Also, it is wonderful for story-telling and of course dropping fistfuls of dice is fun! The only real drawback is the entry price (which isn't so bad anymore) and of course needing lots of table space and a pretty in-depth organization system. Really looking forward to watching this thread grow~~
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Mar 25, 2012 11:34
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Can I play as an Ork? All I know about warhammer involves space marines and massive tanks.
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Mar 25, 2012 11:35
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Cassa posted:Can I play as an Ork? All I know about warhammer involves space marines and massive tanks.
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Mar 25, 2012 11:56
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My only experience with non-standard dice symbols was the D&D board game (no, the real one, this is not a 4E bash), but from what I remember it had just a single kind. I would really like to see how all these weird dice mechanics work in action. Also, someone please tell us about the "party tension" mechanic, seems like an interesting concept.
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Mar 25, 2012 12:16
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This is pretty interesting but I wish they'd gone with a 4e-style encounter/save system for timers. When my group played this we spent a lot of time faffing with tokens for power cooldowns, and I guess that gets easier when you play more but it's a pretty big inconvenience for beginners when the system already has quite a lot of bookkeeping.
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Mar 25, 2012 12:33
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One day.. somehow.. I will convince my group of friends to try this with me again. they just looked at the card character creation, and practically walked out of the room at the amount of options they had. I would do ANYTHING to play this properly.
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Mar 25, 2012 13:09
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Talkie Toaster posted:This is pretty interesting but I wish they'd gone with a 4e-style encounter/save system for timers. When my group played this we spent a lot of time faffing with tokens for power cooldowns, and I guess that gets easier when you play more but it's a pretty big inconvenience for beginners when the system already has quite a lot of bookkeeping.  Buy one of these. Every time someone uses a recharge power they stick a die on it at the appropriate number and rotate it every round. The solution is always More Dice  Druggeddwarf posted:One day.. somehow.. I will convince my group of friends to try this with me again. Ignore the stance meters for the first few games except for a single red or green die depending on stance until someone asks how they can get more red/green dice. Edited for nonsensical sentence. Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Mar 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 13:12
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Talkie Toaster posted:This is pretty interesting but I wish they'd gone with a 4e-style encounter/save system for timers. When my group played this we spent a lot of time faffing with tokens for power cooldowns, and I guess that gets easier when you play more but it's a pretty big inconvenience for beginners when the system already has quite a lot of bookkeeping. I think the only inconvenience is being familiar with one system and not being familiar with the other. I would argue that looking at a stack of recharge tokens is easier for beginners than flipping to the spot on your character sheet, looking it up in the book, or squinting at the text on your power card every time you can't remember when something ends or recharges. Also everyone else at the table can more easily see when your zone of ice or whatever ends -- they too can glance at your stack of recharge tokens. quote:Also, someone please tell us about the "party tension" mechanic, seems like an interesting concept. Also, initiative is really great -- party members get their individual rolls based on their Agility (for stabbing encounters) or Fellowship (for social encounters), but the players decide who goes on which initiative count each round (though each PC only goes once per round). This means that if on this round it's more advantageous for the Barber-Surgeon to run over and heal the Agitator at the top of the round, that's what happens, even though the Barber-Surgeon had the lowest initiative roll . . . somebody else will take that last slot this round. The GM can do likewise with his monsters and NPCs. I'm considering trying this in 4e. For those who like that sort of thing, there are MapTool resources. We fooled around with these last night and the main things missing are the actions and talents, understandably; you'd want to make macros for those if people don't have the cards in front of them. The files are huge (50MB RAR); he has insanities and wounds and miscasts scanned in as tables, I think.
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Mar 25, 2012 14:12
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How the game handles players doing Cool Things is also good. Every time someone does a Cool Thing the GM puts one or more tokens on the party sheet. When the total number of Cool Thing tokens equals or exceeds the number of people playing, you take off that many tokens and everyone gets a Fortune die each to use whenever they want.
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Mar 25, 2012 14:23
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This is one the top 5 Objectively Great rpgs on the market. You know I'm right because of how much stupid people hate it. I have a number of the expansions so I'll try to write about those at some point. My regular gaming group's also been talking about recording a session of play but I don't know if that will ever happen. If you don't want to fiddle with the real dice (you monster) you can buy an app. So I'll write up A Thing about Careers, party sheets and Talents. Someone will have to expand on this I'm sure but it's a start. Careers Careers serve as the classes of WFRP 3e, but are broader and not quite so defining. They're more along the line of, well, careers than adventuring capabilities. They're also not very heroic - you might be a Scribe or a Thug or an Agitator instead of a Paladin. Careers give you bonuses to Characteristics and determine what Skills you can buy. You also get a unique ability for each Career - for example, a Rat Catcher gets a Small but Vicious Dog, or the Gambler gets some rerolls. They're all useful, flavorful mechanical effects. As you gain experience, you can increase your Characteristics, learn new skills and gain new Talents based on your Career. You can also change Careers if you want to try something new. If you stick with your Career all the way through the end, you get to keep the Career's unique thing - otherwise, it's gone. Talents Each Career has two (or three) slots on the card for Talents. They're kinda like Feats, and separated into categories. Focus, Tactic, Reputation. (There are some special Talents, like Tricks and the magic ones, but someone else can talk about magic.) A Tactic like Relentless Approach lets you reroll all white and black dice in a Strength, Toughness or Agility check. Connected is a Reputation talent that adds two white dice to a social action. They're cool ways to define your character's abilities outside of high scores, and like everything else in WFRP 3e they make it more fun to read the results of the dice. A combat-oriented character might have two Tactic slots on the card, while a social Career instead has two Reputation slots. (Many have a variety, of course.) You can buy any number of Talents, but you can only ever have as many active as the slots on your Career. So you might own three different Reputation cards, but only have one Reputation slot - but you can swap out the active Talent. That way you can be the Voice of Reason when necessary, have More Money Than Sense if a bribe's what you need and be Resourceful if things go wrong. You can also slot Talents on your party sheet, as seen below. Party Sheets Every party has a separate Party Sheet. You might be Oathbound, a Diplomatic Entourage or Defiant Scoundrels. Each party sheet has its own tension meter, as Splicer explained, and what effects tension can have. A Diplomatic Entourage suffers stress and increased recharge times at 5 tension, and it increases if it hits 11. Defiant Scoundrels instead suffer fatigue and adjust their stance meter closer to neutral. Each sheet also has a unique ability. An Oathbound group adds one Skill die (yellow) to each member's Toughness or Willpower check once per session. Party sheets store Fortune Points, which are a reward for being awesome and doing cool things. I don't know if anyone explained those yet. (Splicer did while I was writing this) The coolest thing about party sheets? They have their own Talent slots. Oathbound parties have two Focus slots, Brash Young Fools have a slot for one Focus and Reputation Talent each. When you slot a Talent to your party sheet, the Talent affects everyone in the party. You might be Skeptical and receive a bonus to detecting the lies of others, but if it's really important you can grant that bonus to the whole party. Party Talents are a great indicator of what you expect to encounter or how you plan to handle situations; if everyone's slotting up combat bonuses, the GM might want to take note. In general, party sheets are incredibly versatile and one of the best parts of WFRP 3e. If only the other not-RPG boardgame out there had them...
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Mar 25, 2012 14:47
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This really looks like a lot of fun to play and would be right up the alley of me and my warhammer loving best friend. Also I can never get enough of big boxes full of nifty stuff  I am curious though, is there a 40k equivilant out or in the works? Because that'd just make things even better.
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Mar 25, 2012 15:33
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My Sunday group is going to be giving this a try, just as soon as we dig ourselves from the pile of excellent FFG 40K games they have buried us with. However, I have heard anecdotally that the rules as written in the box set, require forum searches and Rosetta stone translations to be made sense of. Is there any truth to that, and can you recommend some sites that have managed to clarify what the rules are actually trying to say.
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Mar 25, 2012 17:06
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ocrumsprug posted:However, I have heard anecdotally that the rules as written in the box set, require forum searches and Rosetta stone translations to be made sense of. Is there any truth to that, and can you recommend some sites that have managed to clarify what the rules are actually trying to say. One thing that helped me is the FAQ/Errata.
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Mar 25, 2012 18:08
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I had issues figuring out where rules were and getting everything right for our first few games, but it didn't take long to sort out. It is true that the core books aren't laid out very well and information is just kinda spread throughout.
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Mar 25, 2012 18:47
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Since there is now a thread with people who have played for real in it, I have a question about range. It's supposed to take three maneuvers (or Manoeuoevers) to go from Extreme to Long, two maneuvers from Long to Medium, and one from Medium to Close. A maneuver is free, extra maneuvers are fatigue . . . but monsters can't spend fatigue, and actions that cause fatigue cause wounds on monsters. Are there rules I missed for monsters closing distances aside from "people can still decide to do whatever's narratively appropriate"?
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Mar 25, 2012 19:21
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Bottom left/top right of page 5 in the FAQFAQ posted:The higher manouevre costs to move between the farthest range 
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Mar 25, 2012 19:31
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Yeah, I saw that about characters. I was wondering whether there was a "if they're just closing distance, monsters and NPCs can use two movement maneuvers" or something.
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Mar 25, 2012 19:42
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Are there any pre-gen adventures in the Core set? If not, which of FFG's adventures is the best?
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Mar 25, 2012 20:40
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1Q84 posted:Are there any pre-gen adventures in the Core set? If not, which of FFG's adventures is the best? There's a full adventure included in the set. I haven't read through it, so I can't say anything about its quality. I got this a couple of weeks ago after so many of you guys talked it up in the 5E thread, and I'm pretty impressed by it overall. I don't like the chits, but I'll just follow Splicer's advice. I do like the dice and cards. The dice remind me of HQ, and their results are fun to narrate. Action cards are just the best way to track what your character can do, but I wish the set came with a deck of monster cards for the GM.
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Mar 25, 2012 22:06
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Is the game tailored to a party of 3, then? Or do they expect you to go out and buy an additional standalone book and some extra dice/cards?
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Mar 25, 2012 22:21
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If you're talking mechanicswise, it's not geared towards any specific number of players. Resources-wise the base set is designed for GM + 3, but you can stretch it if you don't mind sharing cards or printing off a copy of the basics from the link above. The Adventurer's Toolkit is an expansion that adds another copy of the basic cards and the more generically useful non-basics as well as a bunch of new careers and actions and things. The dice pool is a shared pool so you don't need an extra set for extra people, but an extra set is a good idea in general.homullus posted:Yeah, I saw that about characters. I was wondering whether there was a "if they're just closing distance, monsters and NPCs can use two movement maneuvers" or something. Secondly, I'm not aware/cannot find anything specific except that NPCs and Monsters can take wounds voluntarily to perform exertion-causing maneuvers. However the wound/fatigue/stress/critical hit unification is there purely to reduce bookkeeping, so if you don't feel charging is worth the wound, don't give it to them, or take it from some other resource (lose a die from their dice pool, up the difficulty of their charge attack or whatever) Also groups of henchmen are treated as one unit for stress/fatigue so a whole mob of Goblins would only take one wound anyway. e: I made a mistake here. Only henchmen take wounds instead of stress RAW. Big enemies take stress, so your Orc can push himself into range without taking wounds but taking stress, while a mob of henchmen Orcs will take one wound. Splicer fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Apr 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 23:19
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I am a gently caress awful player that wanders in and out of consciousness when I'm not providing input at the table. This is a major problem with the traditional initiative based RPG combats, where there is pretty much no input at all unless it's your turn, and then you sit and wait 5 minutes for your turn to come up again, and if you're lucky you might get hit by an enemy during that time and have to reference some numbers on your sheet and perhaps even write down a new number or something. Do the dice mechanics of WHFRPG3E keep the players more involved throughout the game, perhaps as they collectively narrate their meaning? Are there other mechanics that keep players involved throughout the game?
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Mar 26, 2012 00:48
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Well some of this is kind of theoretical since I'm one of those annoying "Hit that dude! Or that dude! Yeah hit that dude so I can hit this dude! Aww yeah right in the nadgers good job team!" players, and most of the people I game with regularly are similarly invested in other people's turns (though not to quite to the same degree). But mechanics that I think would help someone with your problem are: Yes, looking at all the dice and working out what just happened is enourmous fun, and way more engaging for onlookers than just "Did you beat the number? Yes you did well done." e: Also see my second-to-last point. Since initiative order is a group decision you're not just waiting for your turn, you're watching to see when it would be good to take your turn. You never really have that feeling that whatever's happening now is going to be irrelevant by the time it gets back to you. Getting hit is: Ok, here's a quick combat/damage summary: Characters and NPCs and such don't have an AC type stat. They have Soak (which reduces damage (a successful hit cannot be reduced below one)) and various ways of adding misfortune dice to other people's rolls. If the GM announces a guy is going to hit you then the first step is to decide if you're going to use any of your hard mechanics for adding fortune dice (dodge, parry and shield are free if you meet some requirements, you can buy others). Then you (and the other players) can try to think up soft reasons why they'd roll more misfortune ("I'm in a tree! He's on fire! There a Small but Vicious Dog attacking his leg!"). Then all the dice get rolled. Then you and the GM work out what just happened. If you get hit for normal damage you don't just write down "+1 number", you get cards! (mechanically identical but being physically handed your injuries is pretty engaging). If a bunch of banes came up on the bad guy then sometimes you get a free maneuver or something, which is always nice. Often the bad guy will do more than just damage; you might get stress or fatigue which could lead to madness cards, or you might get a critical injury of some variety. These all make being hit way more engaging than just "You got hit, your numbers go down" since you tend to be actually interested in the results beyond "Did he hit or miss?" While the above sounds mad complicated and fiddly, after you get the hang of it things start to flow pretty quickly. It's hard to explain why without you seeing actual play, but once you've seen it in action a few times you'll see how it all flows surprisingly naturally. Again, a big part of this is how straightforward the Misfortune/Fortune dice mechanic is for handling modifiers, and that reading the dice boils down to colour/shape matching and then reading a pattern in it, which is pretty much what humans are built for. The game leverages Apophenia for fun and profit, and does a good job of it. Finally, one of the orc abilities from the creature vault is hitting you with a nearby goblin. This kills the goblin. This isn't hugely relevant to your question but y'know. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 01:40
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Thank you for making this thread. I'm never going to be able to get my group to play this, so I will be glad to sperg vicariously through you guys. Regarding just buying the books: if I do this (just for my own reading pleasure), am I going to have to buy fancy dice and poo poo if I ever try to run it? I'm assuming yes, in which case I should just shut the gently caress up and spring for the box?
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Mar 26, 2012 05:17
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I'm a pretty big fan of WFRP3, although I think it's taken Fantasy Flight a while to get into the groove of things. The boxed set, for example, has all the monsters in a book. As soon as possible, you should throw that book away and replace it with cards. Lately, I've been musing over the idea of a classic style dungeon crawl, of the inexplicable monster rooms, lethal traps, and mandatory 10' pole, one of the players hunched over the graph paper hoping the map he's drawing is accurate variety. D&D4's focus has moved away from that kind of game in favor of broad setpieces, but with a little tweaking WFRP3 would be perfect for this. It's already got the assumption that the players are broke-as-poo poo dudes getting into danger way above their heads in hopes of a payout. It'd be super easy to do. Sketch out a nice big dungeon, or steal any old module. Replace all the monsters with warhammer themed stuff. Giant rats, goblins, and zombies can go anywhere for any loving reason with no justification needed. Replace all the treasure with baubles of dubious resale value, except for one good magic item at the end of the dungeon.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:53
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nauggins posted:Thank you for making this thread. I'm never going to be able to get my group to play this, so I will be glad to sperg vicariously through you guys. While Drive Thru RPG does have the core in a single PDF for ~25$ iirc, and you can grab an app for the dice rolls on your iphone or tablet, you're definitely much much much better off grabbing the box set if you actually want to run it. edit: yeah this V V V Blank Construct fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 06:11
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Splicer, those are both great ideas (one damage for the whole initiative count, or fortune dice on attacks against them/misfortune dice on their own attacks) and I am going to try those out.nauggins posted:Thank you for making this thread. I'm never going to be able to get my group to play this, so I will be glad to sperg vicariously through you guys. I think you're getting a better deal by getting the box. The fancy dice are pretty key to the interesting choices players make in character creation/advancement and round by round, and you get all the other bits too. Probably also easier to resell if you never do play it -- you're selling a complete game. quote:Lately, I've been musing over the idea of a classic style dungeon crawl, of the inexplicable monster rooms, lethal traps, and mandatory 10' pole, one of the players hunched over the graph paper hoping the map he's drawing is accurate variety. D&D4's focus has moved away from that kind of game in favor of broad setpieces, but with a little tweaking WFRP3 would be perfect for this. It's already got the assumption that the players are broke-as-poo poo dudes getting into danger way above their heads in hopes of a payout. I was thinking about adapting it for Eberron, with the Chaos Gods reskinned as The Dreaming Dark, Xoriat, The Lords of Dust, and maybe the Blood of Vol. Eberron is best at a low to mid power level, so Lady Vol gets a bit of a boost to be on par with the others.
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Mar 26, 2012 06:24
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homullus posted:Splicer, those are both great ideas (one damage for the whole initiative count, or fortune dice on attacks against them/misfortune dice on their own attacks) and I am going to try those out.  homullus posted:I would probably not want to mess with the OSR inventory game and just make one of those track things for their "equipment" -- they can, say, pull a 10' pole, or door spikes, or a rope, or whatever out of their collective gear for one step on the track. When they're at the end of the track, they have to use what they have from then on. Also stealing it for the next survival horror type game I run. Splicer fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 09:25
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Nobody's really explained the progress tracker and how useful/versatile it is, have they I mean I'm not going to but somebody should
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Mar 26, 2012 13:36
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Reading this thread has filled me with a lust that cannot be contained in words.
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Mar 26, 2012 15:11
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Mojo Jojo posted:Reading this thread has filled me with a lust that cannot be contained in words. Isn't that what you get for following a certain chaos god?
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Mar 26, 2012 15:13
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Also if (like me, Mikan) you think the Warhammer setting is boring and you don't care about it WFRP 3e is still a great system and I've used it for original stuff and Dark Sun and all kinds of other things.
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Mar 26, 2012 15:17
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Mikan posted:Also if (like me, Mikan) you think the Warhammer setting is boring and you don't care about it WFRP 3e is still a great system and I've used it for original stuff and Dark Sun and all kinds of other things. The only things really Warhammery are the cults, the orc card flavour text, and the way your party wizard occasionally finds himself floating immobile three feet off the ground, temporarily made of ice and/or suffering from a non-fatal case explosions (rolling a chaos star makes you suffer a temporary magical blowback effect, drawn from a deck of interesting things. This does not preclude you still otherwise succeeding obviously). The cults can be fixed by changing the flavour text, and if you play your orcs as anything but angry green football hooligans there's something wrong with you so that's not a problem either. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 15:46
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It's not hard to get rid of the magic miscast effects but still require like channeling and favor; if a Bad Thing happens, use something more suited to the setting and treat it the same as rolling Bad Things for more mundane activities. I would totally use WFRP3e for a cool urban magic type setting.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:05
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Back when a few friends and I played this a few times right after the initial release we had some problems with it. It felt like magic on the whole was severely underpowered when compared to say just shooting an arrow. You had to build up power, brave the possibility of miscast and sometimes have weird set ups like comboing creating a area of shadows where no one could see including your party and then making the shadows strike with the result being less damage than the regular mundane ranged attack. Likewise a lot of the rules were poorly written and incredibly vague in terms of how many of which dice were rolled; some incredibly important things were casually mentioned in side bars and such then never brought up again. The cool down system was also weird since you could just alternate between two different attacks which had nearly identical dice pools. I think a lot of the problems we had were related to the terrible rulebook with no index. The fundamental game was pretty fun and we went through the intro quest which was really good so if those kind of wonky problems have been addressed (for one the main book needed to be totally rewritten) I could give it another go.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:31
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Mikan posted:It's not hard to get rid of the magic miscast effects but still require like channeling and favor; if a Bad Thing happens, use something more suited to the setting and treat it the same as rolling Bad Things for more mundane activities. Basically I just wanted to ramble about the magic miscast deck for a bit. Magic will probably be my next writeup.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:40
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Even if you take out the miscast deck you can still have wonky magic thanks to Banes and Chaos Stars; it's just a matter of degree. It's what I would do for any non-Warhammer, non-crazy magic setting. The miscast deck is a lot of fun though.Radish posted:I think a lot of the problems we had were related to the terrible rulebook with no index. Yep, no argument here. One dude had a great summary document that FFG made him take down (stupid) and it made running/understanding the game so much easier. I'd link it but I don't have it on hand and my own copy isn't on this computer.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:54
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 02:15 |
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How easy is it to reskin careers or make your own? Is there an intuitive math to making a career that doesn't suck or turn out to be a newbie trap? I like the presentation of careers because you seem less likely to be rigidly locked into being a bad character, but I haven't really looked at all the career options yet to see (my wife frowns at the price point and I haven't broken her down just yet).
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Mar 26, 2012 18:19
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