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From what I've played around in, it's very nice given all the assets you can use along with actual lighting/sound along with automatic calculations for stuff compared to roll20.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:26
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TLDR: The career system isn't as rigid and limited as it appears. Also, I think the bonus XP for randomly generated characters is too low to justify engaging with it if you have a specific character concept in mind, and it should be increased. I think the Career system in 4th edition is really great at handling the concept that's presented very, very poorly. So poorly presented, in fact, that I feel like I need to spend some time explaining how the system actually works in contrast to how it appears to work. I apologize if this seems really obvious, but I didn’t get it until I started making characters. So at first glance, it appears that there are 64 careers roughly grouped into 8 categories called Classes. For example, the Warrior Class includes the Cavalryman, Guard, Knight, Pit Fighter, Protagonist, Slayer, Soldier, and Warrior Priest careers. It appears that Classes are just ways to group and organize Careers based on their ‘role’ in society. It seems like you pick your career and advance up the tiers with minimum 'multiclasssing'. In reality, there are 256 'Careers' - 4 in each Career Path. They're presented as this rigid path you follow, but there isn't any incentive to advance tiers versus changing careers within your class. Let's dissect the Knight Career a little bit  Squire is a Tier 1 Career, with 3 characteristics, 8 skills, and access to the Etiquette, Roughrider, Sturdy, and Warrior Born talents. Once you complete the Squire career, you can exit into Knight (Knight Tier 2) or any of the Tier 1 Warrior careers like Novitiate (Warrior Priest Tier 1). It costs the same amount of XP to complete the Squire career and move into either of these options. So what does Knight offer? 4 characteristics, 14 skills, and access to the Menacing, Seasoned Traveller, Shieldsman, and Strike Mighty Blow talents, at the cost of locking you into that career much longer. It's not an objectively superior option compared to Novitiate, which offers you access to 3 new characteristics, 8 skills, and access to the Bless, Etiquette, Read/Write, and Strong-minded talents. If you wanted to play something similar to a Grail Knight, that's a better way to go. Exiting into the Tier 2 career lets you make a more focused character that is going to advance just 4 characteristics with arguably better talents, and won't be able to complete the career until you've spent a lot more XP. Exiting into the Tier 1 career lets you make a more well-rounded character with access to up to 6 characteristics and more freedom to complete the career and move on. Squire & Novitiate gives you access to the same 6 characteristics as Knight of the Inner Circle, the Tier 4 Knight career, without committing to spending thousands of XP. The important bit that I'm trying to emphasize is that, XP-wise, the system doesn't incentivize one option over the other. As long as you're staying within your class, the XP to exit one career and enter another is the same. The way the career paths are presented also gloss over the very real differences in the different careers on the same career path. Squire, the Tier 1 Career, has access to the sort of skills you'd expect of a mounted fighter and basic (but very useful) talents. First Knight, the Tier 3 Career, has access to those same skills but also has access to Charm, Consume Alcohol, Leadership, and Lore(Warfare) - skills useful for leading and gladhanding. The talents available are focused on being able to ignore Fear and Psychology, and being a leader of other knights. Squire is a career focused around the fundamentals of being a mounted armored fighter, while First Knight is about being an exemplary leader on top of that. What the career 'does' as you advance can change drastically. I never played 2nd Edition, so what I’m saying is based only on second hand knowledge. But I personally think that having limited but uncapped characteristics and skills from your career is a better way of handling things than the caps used in 2e. In 4e, you can spend the minimum amount of time as a Squire before you promote, or you can stay a Squire your whole campaign and become an extremely effective (if narrow) character. Plus, having standardized careers at each tier, and a standardized set of exits from each career, means that all the careers are surprisingly balanced against each other. Once I got it, I really liked the system. But that’s the problem, I didn’t ‘get it’ until I started really working with the system. I’m not sure how else you could present it, but the way they did it doesn’t work for me. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So my second thought is that the XP bonus for randomly generating a character isn't enough to justify working with the system if you have a specific concept in mind or career you want to play. Right now, there's a pretty big divide between the two forms of character generation - either you're creating a specific character, or you're mostly letting the dice decide. That feels like a big missed opportunity to encourage players to create characters that start from unusual beginnings and treat the career as a sort of lifepath system. Overall, I really like the semi-random character generation where you're encouraged, but not forced, to roll the dice and take what you get. The system is fine, if a bit unwieldy to hack if you want to play a game outside of the Empire. But I think they were too light on the XP bonus, and it's not enough to make things tempting. The bonus XP feels like a trifle to encourage creating characters the 'correct' way, but it's not enough to make it the """optimal""" way - HEAVY air quotes around both those words. Let's say I want to play a Wizard. I want to get into the Wizard career as quickly as possible, with as much XP spent on improving my character as possible. If I keep my first career roll, I get +50 XP. If I pick one of my three first careers rolled, I get +25 XP. Otherwise, I just pick the Wizard career. Is there any Career on my first roll that I would choose for +50 XP instead of going straight to Wizard? In my opinion, no. For the sake of argument, we'll say the XP spent on the other career's skills and characteristics are their own reward. That seems fair to me, I take longer to get into Wizard but I get a more well-rounded character for it. Plus it makes everything much more simple. The problem is that it costs 100 XP to switch careers within your class, and 200 XP to switch across classes. The XP is "wasted" in the sense that it doesn't directly improve my character, it just gives me access to the Career I want. But I can just take the career I want from the start. Even if I roll Scholar, a career from the same class with a lot of overlap, I'm going to be -50 XP from just exiting Student into Apprentice Wizard. If I rolled Witch or Hedgewitch, two careers that seem like they'd be great starting careers for someone who wanted to play a Wizard, I'll be -150 XP for switching across classes. In my opinion, it's not really enough to tempt me into picking any career besides the one I want to end up in. The penalty in lost XP from switching careers makes it a bad deal. So here's how I view it. On the first roll I have a 1% chance to roll Wizard (0 XP to switch), a 13% chance to roll an Academics career (100 XP to switch), and an 86% chance to roll everything else (200 XP to switch). So on average, it's going to cost me 185 XP to switch from my first rolled career into Wizard. Treating the second set of three rolls as an independent event so that I don't have to do more work, I have a ~3% chance to roll Wizard, ~40% chance to roll at least one Academics career, and ~57% chance to roll 0 Academics careers at all. So on average, it's going to cost me 155 XP to switch out of one of the three careers I rolled. I know this isn’t the correct math, but it’s close enough to be in the ballpark. Taking that into consideration, I don't think increasing the XP reward for taking a random career from 50 XP to 150 XP, and from 25 XP to 100 XP, is too crazy. At that point, even if I really only want to play a Wizard (or a Road Warden, or a Knight, or...) I'm going to strongly consider taking my random careers if they get me close to where I want to end up. And if none of my random careers get me close, I can just forgo the extra 100 XP and end up where I want to be in the first place. So let's look at it from the other direction. Let's say I roll a perfectly random character, and I get exactly what I wanted anyway. I start with an extra 290 XP over a non-random character. Is that too much, compared to 190 XP instead, or 0 XP? I don't feel like it is. 290 XP is worth about two or three sessions of XP, and I feel like the XP gap between players will be more heavily affected by completing Ambitions or changing careers. Plus, I feel like giving out more XP at the beginning of the game makes things smoother and more fun to start out. But I've been pretty free with the XP rewards in my game, so maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to hear what other people think about the value of XP, especially when starting out.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:11
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WH4E is unlike most RPGs in that there are very few, if any, real power plateaus / breakpoints where a character goes from ok to extremely powerful, at say, "level 4". 5e and SOTDL are great examples of how a system encourages players to play mechanically lovely characters at low level that end up breaking the system at higher levels. WH4E just isn't like that, so the mechanical difference between a character with 300xp and a character with 1000xp can be noticeable, but not excessively so. I run a game where one character has like 2k experience and one of the new guys preferred to start at zero. There isn't a big enough difference in their character "power level" to worry about when planning encounters.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:41
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How much lore knowledge do I need to successfully run games in WH4E? Is there any cursory reading I could do to make sure I'm matching the setting? My first and only TTRPG is 5E so I'm trying to branch out.
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Jun 5, 2020 18:55
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Fresh Shesh Besh posted:How much lore knowledge do I need to successfully run games in WH4E? Is there any cursory reading I could do to make sure I'm matching the setting? My first and only TTRPG is 5E so I'm trying to branch out. The Core Book gives all the info you need.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:18
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Lots of lore knowledge is great for players that are knowledgeable about the setting but if you don't have any WH Old World nerds in your group, the setting can be played very easily without it. The Old World is quite generic on the surface- it's only when you get into the weeds that you uncover the cool little nuggets that make the setting really interesting. So don't feel like you need a great deal of knowledge to begin. As long as you know the basics about the races and religions I'd say you're good to go.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:26
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Of course the main rule is it's your world, it's how you make it. But to offer more concrete advise. The main rulebook has a pretty good section on the empire and general worldbuilding. There's numerous websites dedicated to WFRP lore. But if you want a really good readthrough and analysis of existing lore go read the Fatal and friends readthroughs by Night10194 They're collected on https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/ but I'm not sure if the most recent ones are up there. You might want to check back in the main Trad games thread. He's been tearing through them whilst in C19 lockdown. The only other thing I'd say is. WFRP is not really a medieval world (well except Brettonia!). It's more the early modern period. There's guns and cannons and coaching houses. Printing presses are churning out books and the Agitators seditious material. If they piss off someone powerful there's worse things than sending thugs after them, they might send lawyers bringing lawsuits. It's not just generic medieval stasis universe no.1
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Jun 5, 2020 19:28
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The basic thing with the Old World and Hams in general is that the outlines are all stuff you've seen before, just with a twist. Which I think actually works quite well for getting into it, as you've probably seen most of what's in it before and then it does something extra with it like making the Empire a goddamn mess of an early modern state instead of a general D&D type kingdom. E: My stuff is hardly definitive and is very much an analysis from one specific perspective, mind. If you go read all the F&F stuff or something keep in mind I'm only writing about the RPG book stuff, too.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:28
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The Empire is practically on the cusp of an industrial revolution at this point, it's really rad and you could probably have a campaign just regarding this, either chaos doing it's absolute best to sabotage/outright raze Nuln down so that the Empire doesn't have a way of quickly making more guns/rapidly improving it's productivity to full on rioting from the effects this would cause on classical guild systems to a bucnh of poo poo.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:31
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Awesome I'll pick up the corebook and do some research. Part of this is I want my friends to branch out to other systems and they have to be pulled kicking and screaming to try games outside of 5e. So I want to have everything in my brain to make it as easy as possible for them.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:40
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Some of the older 2e campaign books also have a shitton of information on various regions both in the empire and old world that you can use for ideas for what a party can get up to.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:44
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Probably the two biggest differences between the Old World and generic D&D setting #6000 are the tech level as someone above pointed out, and the rarity and inherent danger of magic. Not every 3rd village idiot has godlike / miraculous powers like in D&D, magic is tightly controlled by the wizard colleges / witch hunters, and magic users almost inevitably end up blowing themselves up or summoning some eldritch horror when trying to do some magic feat. That alone really makes the societies of these settings very different.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:01
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Though it's also a setting where magic often gets used for things like 'fix the fields and prevent famine' or 'manufacture new things'. There's no gap/conflict between magic and technology; one of the magic styles is specifically about machines, technology, math, and metal, after all. Wizards aren't just about blowing poo poo up. They're real good at that, though.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:19
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Sometimes intentionally.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:36
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Incidentally I wasn't joking about the lawsuit. If you want the players to really hold a grudge against your main villian and go full "That bastard is going down." Have them clash with him publicly then a little later have a flunky arrive with a lawsuit for slander and defamation and demanding a public apology and huge damages. Works a treat for motivating your players.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:39
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There is absolutely nothing you can do more to make your players hate a character than to gently caress them over financially, so yeah having a villain outright threaten a lawsuit against them is a fantastic way to get them inolved in whatever plot you have in mind. Just don't actually rob them of everything it'll make them pissed off at you.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:47
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"All liquid funds possessed by defendant(s) in the municipality of Altdorf" is a great sentence to say to get your players A: moving and B: swearing a blood oath of vengeance.
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Jun 5, 2020 23:45
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I've run a couple games where the player characters have been a law firm and the firm's shady muscle, maybe the next one should be them trying to file suit on an adventuring party. I imagine trying to serve papers to a Slayer or something is its own kind of challenge.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:59
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Sanity check me here people. The entangled condition doesn't stack -10 penalties. It's can't move and -10 on 'physical actions', not -10 per stack of entangled, so -40 if you had 4 conditions stacked?
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Jun 9, 2020 23:52
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IIRC one of the developers said the intent was for it to stack. So could continue to wrap someone up until they cant resist. This is A) overpowered as all hell with the Entangle spell B) not really supported by the rules.
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Jun 10, 2020 15:55
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HidaO-Win posted:IIRC one of the developers said the intent was for it to stack. So could continue to wrap someone up until they cant resist. You're not bloody joking. My party fire wizard was just breaking encounters with that spell. Immobilising targets, huge penalties and giving them ablaze conditions on top. Far more effective than Bolt/Blast I had to house rule it as -10% which I'm sure should be the ruling. All the other conditions tend to just be -10% for their appropriate tests. Unless of course they're supposed to stack as well, 3 blinded conditions gives -30?  Edit: In fact I wouldn't mind checking my math and understanding. So the Bright Wizard casts Entangle. He's spent a previous round channeling successfully (just to make the math easier) so it's a straight Language (Magic roll). Let's say his effective skill is 60 and he's now casting what is effectively a 0SL required spell (from the successful channeling) He rolls 20 which is 4 SL. So he inflicts 3 Entangled conditions. 1 base +1 for every 2SL. In addition he's overcast by 4 SL. So he decides to take 2 extra targets (+1 per 2SL). So he's inflicted 3 Entangled conditions on 3 targets. So can't move and -10 (or maybe 30 on rolls) In addition each target has a single ablaze condition from being struck by bright magic . You don't get bonus conditions inflicted for extra SL in this case (which I was doing until I realised my mistake.) Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 19:37
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Conditions aren't, um, the most refined part of the system. Healing a wound if you use Resolve to stand up after getting tackled, for example.
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Jun 10, 2020 20:22
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That and magic in combat is a loving mess since they realized that making all fights a round of rocket tag meant they needed to give wizards some way of firing off huge fuckoff effects in the span of a round or two or they would never get to do anything meaningful
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Jun 11, 2020 09:40
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Update on Death on the Reik. https://www.cubicle7games.com/wfrp-death-on-the-reik-status-update/ Namely it should be here this month, and the Companion next month or august. Also Power Behind the Throne has gotten a good deal on work on it done, and should come quicker then Death on the Reik did.
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Jun 18, 2020 01:50
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Hey everyone, how does Mail Armor, Plate Armor, and the Practical quality interact? Like, let's say I'm wearing Mail Chausses, Mail Coat, and a Mail Coif under my Breastplate, Bracers, and Helm. Do I take a -20% penalty to stealth, or a -60% penalty? It seems to me that you'd only take a -20% penalty - 10% for wearing Mail, 10% for wearing Plate. What about if I'm wearing a Practical Mail Coat. The Practical quality reduces an armor's penalty by 10%, so does the Practical Mail Coat still have a -10% penalty to Stealth? It seems to me that it wouldn't, as the -10% to stealth is part of the armor's penalties. What if I was wearing a Mail Coif in addition to my Practical Mail Coat. If the stealth penalty from wearing multiple pieces of Mail don't stack, do I still take a -10% penalty to stealth from the Mail Coif? (This came up as a question for my group, and initially I ruled that you only take one penalty from wearing Mail, and one from wearing Plate, and that the penalty from wearing multiple pieces doesn't stack. But unless all your Mail or all your Plate is Practical, you still suffer the stealth penalty. I'd appreciate any feedback.)
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Jun 24, 2020 20:18
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My opinion is that the penalties would stack because I believe the penalties don't reflect how "noisy" the armor is, but how difficult the weight makes the act of being agile footed and exact in your movements. Mail coats don't rattle and jingle as one might think, but they are a pain in the rear end because they constrain and weigh you down. Stacking layers, in my opinion, reduces the amount of fine control a person has over their body when performing tasks like "stealth". Imagine wearing several layers of super thick heavy padding them going traipsing through the woods - the padding won't make noise, but you will due to a loss of agility. Just my 2c though. FLIPADELPHIA fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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Jun 24, 2020 20:26
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A document on how to convert stuff from 1e and 2e to 4e. https://www.cubicle7games.com/conversion-tables-for-warhammer-fantasy-roleplay-free-pdf/
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Jun 25, 2020 23:42
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MonsterEnvy posted:Update on Death on the Reik. Welp. That's another deadline blown through.
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Jul 1, 2020 09:24
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Deptfordx posted:Welp. That's another deadline blown through. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/303919/WFRP-Death-on-the-Reik--Enemy-Within-Campaign-Directors-Cut-Volume-2?src=newest_since Perfect timing. It came out today.
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Jul 1, 2020 14:42
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We need to try this again some time.
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Jul 1, 2020 21:23
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I must use this power only for the good of mankind. "Welp. It's July, and I still haven't won the Lottery"
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Jul 1, 2020 22:00
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Been reading through Death on the Reik. I'm definitely feeling like they're underselling WS in those stats. I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of them were unchanged from the earlier edition. So the Goblins are WS25, which would be fine 1st/2nd editon. Roll under their WS get a hit unless you dodge or parry. Not great but they're a threat. But with opposed rolls, fighting against someone with a skill 30 or more points higher? Hopeless. I ran a fight with WS15 zombies the other week and I might as well not have bothered rolling. Significant skill difference just flattens the lesser. And yes, you can mess around with outnumbering them, gaining advange in other ways, but that's very situational. Now maybe it's all a deliberate choice, but I'd wager good money the writers just didn't fully pick up on the implications of the math.
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Jul 7, 2020 23:35
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Has anyone seen (or made themselves) homebrew for dark elf species and sorcerer career track?
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Jul 8, 2020 04:49
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Skellybones posted:Has anyone seen (or made themselves) homebrew for dark elf species and sorcerer career track? I'd think a Dark Elf would just be an Elf with slightly different starting skill options, wouldn't they? Dark Elfs are the same as normal elfs physically. They're all just elfs. It's political.
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Jul 8, 2020 07:16
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Night10194 posted:I'd think a Dark Elf would just be an Elf with slightly different starting skill options, wouldn't they? Dark Elfs are the same as normal elfs physically. They're all just elfs. It's political. Sure. Wood and High get the same attributes, but the skills and talents have a bit of divergence which is what I want to figure out. A dhar-based sorcerer class would be far more complicated to figure out. Here's something that vaguely fits Dark Elves. It does resemble High Elves quite a bit. quote:Dark Elves Skellybones fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 09:44
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Deptfordx posted:Been reading through Death on the Reik. I'm on page 15 of a feedback document I'm going to send in to C7 in relation to DotR. There are a couple of grammatical errors, incorrect rules, a bunch of issues with cash amounts which have been copy and pasted from 1e without conversion to the new 4e paradigm, but the bulk of my feedback is about the NPC stats. There are two problems, firstly some of the stat blocks are copy and pasted from the core book. Unfortunately the bestiary in the core book is meant to represent the base statline of a creature that you then add more stats, skills and talents to. This wasn't communicated terribly well in the corebook, but got clarified later by one of the designers on his personal blog (which is not ideal to say the least). So I've sent in a bunch of suggestions for how to upgun the bad guys so they aren't totally pointless to roll dice around. The second is because of the opposed tests, separate weapon skills, bonus SLs and advantage, combats paradigm is completely different. A 15 WS creature with 5 attacks is dangerous in 1e, unpredictable but dangerous. In 4e its a joke. I did some rough maths and if you have a 20 point difference in skill during an opposed test, the lower skill combatant has a roughly 28% chance to win, 30 points and its 21%, 40 and its 15% and so on. Add to that advantage giving a increasing 10% bonus to the winner and the rich almost always get richer. I'm not sure they get that in C7 and I'm not sure they have a mechanics person around to point that out. So I'm writing a giant crazy person email about it.
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Jul 8, 2020 11:46
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I literally said aloud to my players after a rules discussion last week, "Too many rules, too little playtesting". I only picked up 4E to replay The Enemy Within and I'm pretty sure when we've finished I'm done with this system. Also Lol on the money, I hadn't noticed that on my initial skim. There's some eye-popping amounts of cash being handed out. My players are used to 10GC being a good payday and then there's, here's a chest with 500GC and this apprentice wizard is walking around with 250GC in cash etc. When you've finished I'd be interested in seeing that feedback document myself if you're comfortable sharing. Edit: Oh and it's not just the hit chance of course. Weapon damage is tied into degrees of success, so any hit by a grossly outmatched fighter is likely to be doing minimal damages and blows coming the other way are likely to hit like a truck. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 13:47
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I was given to understand this was a massive labour of love on a well regarded piece of wargaming history, but this seems a little slapdash to me.
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Jul 8, 2020 14:10
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Deptfordx posted:I literally said aloud to my players after a rules discussion last week, "Too many rules, too little playtesting". Yeah its still a work in progress atm but I'll drop in the link when I'm done with my first draft. The killer problem is they tried to fix the whiff factor of 2nd edition and did it four ways. They made tests opposed so someone always wins, they added advantage so winning tests mattered, they added separate Weapon "Skills" to add on to Weapon Skill inflating tested skills and they kept in a pile of combat modifiers and bonus SLs. Its made combat degenerate, everyone needs the gigantic skill totals or they have no chance to compete. There is a lot to like about 4e WFRP, its beautiful, a lot of passion went into it, but some core stuff got mangled when they effectively had the designer and the CEO arguing over what should be in the book.
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Jul 8, 2020 18:11
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Weaponskill just is so much better than strength it's absurd and there not being any real limits to your stats besides career telling you what you can and can't invest in means you can easily be rolling against 80 or 90 in your second career level as a combat class.
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Jul 8, 2020 18:18
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