Hi!

I'm new to the game, we played only twice till now, but we played many rpg games before for many years, most of the time D&D.

Here are a few things that looks strange for me, if somebody can tell me official or house rule solutions, that would be greatly appriciated:

1. It is very easy to hit someone with beginer characters and it looks like to me, this will be event worst, because the skills will be increased, but the defenses not.

2. The number of manoeuvers you are able to make in a round, so the speed of your character, it depends on how many fatigue you can take, which means a dwarf with high tougness in a heavy armour is faster then a naked agile elf.

3. I didn't found any penalty for armour(except for wizards), I think skills should get some penalty if you wear heavy armor. And high agility should increase defense which isn't stack with the defense from armour.

4. It is strange that you can disengage with one manoeuver(with a free one) and you are free to do anything in the same round. This makes ranged weapons(and spells) much stronger than melee, because it has no disadvantage in close combat(you just disengage and shoot) but you can use it when your opponents are futher away.

Thanks

Hi!

I'm new to the game, we played only twice till now, but we played many rpg games before for many years, most of the time D&D.

Here are a few things that looks strange for me, if somebody can tell me official or house rule solutions, that would be greatly appriciated:

1. It is very easy to hit someone with beginer characters and it looks like to me, this will be event worst, because the skills will be increased, but the defenses not.

2. The number of manoeuvers you are able to make in a round, so the speed of your character, it depends on how many fatigue you can take, which means a dwarf with high tougness in a heavy armour is faster then a naked agile elf.

3. I didn't found any penalty for armour(except for wizards), I think skills should get some penalty if you wear heavy armor. And high agility should increase defense which isn't stack with the defense from armour.

4. It is strange that you can disengage with one manoeuver(with a free one) and you are free to do anything in the same round. This makes ranged weapons(and spells) much stronger than melee, because it has no disadvantage in close combat(you just disengage and shoot) but you can use it when your opponents are futher away.

Thanks

well, it is not official but it can be a houserule. That depending on the armor you are wearing you can get an amount black dice depending on your actions. You should look at white/black dice as you did in d&d with +1 or -1. So this might solve some issues.

The hitting thing: for me it makes this game more realistic then d&d because there it was just mis mis mis mis mis and then if you hit, it was usually one shot one kill. Here you have to focus on soak/thoughness. You might always hit the enemy but there is a good chance you just do like 1 - 2 wounds. ( Unless it is against a henchmen )

Well this is my point of view. I never was a fan of d&d just seemed pointless. level 1 requires a 15 to hit, but hey, at level 20 too!

#1, hitting is supposed to happen often (as is getting hit), it's the damage and other effects that increase. A powerful foe is one with great soak etc. more than modifiers to be hit. As noted, this prevents the whiff-whiff effect of some systems.

#2-3, feel free to use houserules for people in armour such as the soak or def dice are penalties at times (I do that - wearing armour often penalizes social encounters for example), and similarly use them as guidelines for how much extra fatigue can be spent etc. Though in practice I don't find people blowing through Fatigue to run fast as they don't want to have high Fatigue in a fight (penalties on things etc). In the real world there's a motto among prison guards "Don't run towards a riot" (because you don't want to arrive out of breath).

#4, it's important to visualize the environment and placement of foes etc. On an endless open, flat plain yes characters can back up and shoot etc. Note the penalty for bad roll on ranged attack deals a bit with that situation. However it's fair in my view to describe situations of fights in situations where there is no backing up (or not more than once or twice), where enough foes have surrounded you (1 single archer and a mob of henchmen engaged, the archer/spellcaster is actually going to have to make a check to tumble or something out of there as he's surrounded - again unless he has back to wall). Borrow a bit from the latest middle earth RPG and require 2 "engaged PC's for every PC "staying back" and don't allow any staying back if outnumbered 3:1 plus.

If you don't have foes come from all directions at times, terrain and tactics effects in play, yes ranged characters can be combat monsters as can some spellcasters.

- the fight is in a narrow corridor, they are behind and infront,

2. The number of manoeuvers you are able to make in a round, so the speed of your character, it depends on how many fatigue you can take, which means a dwarf with high tougness in a heavy armour is faster then a naked agile elf.

You'll notice that elves don't really get near the amount of love dwarfs do in Warhammer. The races are quite a bit different from their equivalents in D&D, and dwarfs in WFRP are insanely powerful. That's not to say that playing an Elf is bad, it's just nowhere near as easy as a dwarf.

Dwarfs are leagues better at tanking, they're around the same at dealing damage (while being much better at surviving, even naked), and they're much better in social encounters (excluding Slayers, if your GM has knowledge of the lore).

#1: The to-hit rate always remains high, and PCs are always vulnerable. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It keeps the game exciting because any PC can go down shockingly fast. Even a high-Toughness Ironbreaker in his Gromril can fall in one round to a group of Skaven Henchman using their Fatigue-inducing basic attack... that's a good thing.

If you're concerned that there's no room for "leveling up" because success rate is so high even at Rank 1, I'd recommend the Omens of War and Hero's Call supplements. Both of them have solid late-campaign action cards. There are some very potent Advanced Defenses, and also things called Enhance cards where you trade in redundant dice for bonus effects before you roll.

#2 & #4: In my experience, Ranged and Melee are actually better-balanced in the game than they appear at first glance. Melee characters take a lot of Fatigue in the first round getting in to position, but Archers and Wizards take similar amounts of Fatigue, just spread out over several rounds as they fall back and maneuver. Reload, Quick Casting, and various ranged actions with penalties for being Engaged actually mostly evens it all out in practice. My current campaign has a Slayer, a Pistolier-Marksman, and a Bright Wizard, and they're all pretty evenly matched at late Rank 3. The only case where I think it might start to break down is when you have someone with a high Toughness wearing decent armour and using a longbow (no reload, great range, not terribly expensive)... but they won't be able to Block or Parry so there's a couple black dice in trade-off at least.

One of the great things about the abstract movement system is that there's no "Attacks of Opportunity" or movement blocked by someone standing in the square you want to move through. So if 1 PC starts to outshine the others over the course of a few fights, it's easy for the GM to compensate by having the badguys preferentially swarm that particular PC and not the others.

#3: In the real world, armour doesn't so much slow you down as tire you out. I wouldn't object to the heavy armours giving the wearer "Bane: Suffer 1 Fatigue".

http://www.benjaminrose.com/post/mobility-in-medieval-plate-armor/

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#weight_b

#2 & #4: In my experience, Ranged and Melee are actually better-balanced in the game than they appear at first glance. Melee characters take a lot of Fatigue in the first round getting in to position, but Archers and Wizards take similar amounts of Fatigue, just spread out over several rounds as they fall back and maneuver. Reload, Quick Casting, and various ranged actions with penalties for being Engaged actually mostly evens it all out in practice. My current campaign has a Slayer, a Pistolier-Marksman, and a Bright Wizard, and they're all pretty evenly matched at late Rank 3. The only case where I think it might start to break down is when you have someone with a high Toughness wearing decent armour and using a longbow (no reload, great range, not terribly expensive)... but they won't be able to Block or Parry so there's a couple black dice in trade-off at least.

In my experience, Melee is the biggest star of the WFRP world, with Ironbreakers being insane. So far in our games, there's no comparison with wizards.

A wizard is:

1. a ton more squishy than a melee character, since there's no focus on toughness, and none on armor, not to mention no extra wounds other than the one everyone gets.

2. less likely to actually do something to an enemy. Some of the spells do in fact have zero opposed checks, but you will almost always require power to cast them, which means at least 1 purple in addition to any other dice the spell requires (usually purples or black die)

3. limited by the amount of power they generate. A melee character requires a single roll to determine if he hits something, whereas a wizard will require a channeling roll to see how much power he has, and then another roll to determine if his spell works. Whiffs do happen, and you do find yourself without the power to do what you wanted to do.

4. At worst, a melee character's chaos stars on attacks means that they'll drop their weapon or something, whereas a wizard rolling chaos stars means miscasts, with potential corruption, or other nasty effects

Sure, a bright wizard would look on paper like he can deal out tons of damage, but if you take the time to play one, you'll notice that he'll often run out of power, miscast, gain corruption, miss his attacks, and be liable to die waaaaay more often than any melee character. Even wearing an armor + shielding winds of aqshy, a bright wizard is still squishy, and even with magic dart, a melee character has the possibility of inflicting just as much damage with less chance of failure, and less chance of being knocked out.

I haven't personally played a Bright Wizard, but one of the PCs in the campaign I'm running is Bright Wizard / Mystic / Seer. He and the TrollSlayer were very competitive on the topic of damage output and total performance for a long time, each convinced the other was outperforming them. It was weird. That lasted right up until the wizard got a Miscast that made him the target of his own spell, then he stepped back and stopped casting for a while.

So I'll agree with you about Miscasts, in that they are much worse than the usual Chaos Star. In his case, 1 chaos star combined with exactly the worst miscast card did like 16 damage and a permanent wound. (Though I suppose the same miscast card on a buff or healing spell would actually have been quite advantageous.)

And obviously I'll agree that Ironbreakers are Ironbroken... but again, they go down fast to the Skaven's basic attack. For 2 successes the target suffers one Fatigue per Skaven in the engagement. I one-shot KO'd our Troll Slayer the first time I ever used it. Then a few months later, I did roughly same thing with Ruffian NPCs using the Subdue action. Fatigue is a killer, especially for a character that has to race into range in the first round. Sheer numbers can wear down anyone.

The remainder of your points, I'm not so convinced about. Sure, the melee guy only cares about 2 stats (STR + TOU), but honestly the Wizard only cares about 1. INT can do everything. 5 Basic Skills, and practically all of the Advanced ones, plus with the right talents it steals Intimidate and Charm. It's amazing how much mileage a Wizard can get out of something as lowly as single Fortune advance. As you say, Whiffs do happen, but even a 1st Rank wizard has at least a 50-50 shot at scoring +6 Power from the red side of Channel, and there's a Talent that restores 2 Power per turn.

But, I digress... the original poster was concerned that Wizards and Ranged were "much stronger than melee" (his words). My point was NOT "Melee and Wizards are _exactly_ equal", just that they're a lot closer to equal than they appear at first glance.

Fine-tuning that balance is entirely in the hands of the GM, the person who decides what range the encounter starts at, where the NPCs go and who they attack, how much A/C/E to spend, exactly which Action cards they have available, and whether or not there's Rally steps and reinforcements. The GM has a lot of dials and sliders to fiddle with, and fight is exactly as challenging (for each individual character in the party) as they choose to make it.