Hello All,

I am fairly new to rpg's in general, and picked up WHFRP as it looked to be a little more streamlined and easier to pick up for newbies like myself (I do have the Pathfinder beginner's box and rulebook, but being the person blazing the trail for rpg's in my group of friends, I found it very difficult to master all on my own).
I do have some questions I was hoping you could answer for me. I've read through some of these posts and this seems like a great community.

1. In my aforementioned dealings with Pathfinder, I know that in that game the GM can do secret roles, concealing from the PC's if they are right or wrong on certain checks. Is there a way to do this in WHFRP?

2. If a PC is just making a basic attack, without using an action card, how does the GM interpret the banes, boons, Sigmar's comets, and Chaos Stars without reference material?

3. I swear I read somewhere about damaged items (possibly because of poor craftsmanship). How does an item become broken? How is it repaired?

4. My wife's character is a Trollslayer. The career card says that Trollslayers typically don't wear armor. Does this mean they can't wear armor? What if she wants to buy armor?

5. If a character is 2 deep on his/her stance meter, but one space is red, and the other is green, are they rolling one red and one green die?

6. How do you typically handle the purchase of equipment/special items? The rulebook is very vague about this. It's almost as if the character describes what they want to buy and you work out the details with them. Am I misunderstanding this? I would like to give my players the feel of a store with specific inventory.

7. Any recommendations for magic classes? In general? We're holding off on wizards and initiates for now until we get the grasp of the game.

8. Any overall tips you have for a new GM that you think would make our sessions successful? I've sat for hours trying to play through Pathfinder, and another hour or so trying to build a character in Mutants and Masterminds. I have picked up on this game more easily, by far. But still want to make sure we actually have a good time when we sit down to play.

Thank you in advance

1. There's a GM screen in the Game Master's Toolkit here . You can roll secretly any time you wish, however the system is so simple, and the values so low, that it's hard to lie to players. Players will always know if they succeed or fail (due to the nature of the dice. If they score more successes than failures, they succeed), but the actual outcome of the action is still up to you to interpret according to their results.

2. Every basic attack has an action card. Melee Attacks have "Melee Strike", Ranged Attacks have "Ranged Shot". All Wizards have access to "Magic Dart", and all Priests to....**** I forgot that one All characters have access to those 2 (melee and ranged) cards, along with Assess the situation, Block, Dodge, Parry, Guarded Position, Perform a Stunt and Parry.

For any strange attacks or special tricks, the player can use the Perform a Stunt action card, and you can determine the difficulty of the action, and then decide on the outcome.

3. Yes, but I'm not exactly sure how it works. Some people use the 3 quality levels as 3 HP so to speak with the piece of equipment essentially being poor/average/superior, and certain specific attacks weakening that value by 1, and when it goes down below poor it is destroyed. I think there's an actual mechanic but I don't know it for sure, I know breaking attempts can be made, since the Gold Order spell "Fault of Form" actually gives you 2 white dice when attempting to break an item, or directly breaks it on a comet on the reckless side. No rust monsters though

4. The career card for Troll Slayer notes that "While in a Slayer career, you cannot wear armour, but have a natural Defence of 1 and a natural soak value equal to 1+ the number of Slayer careers you have completed".

So that's a no on the armor. Even if it didn't say anything there you should never allow a slayer to wear armor. That is completely against the spirit of the class, and the established lore.

5. What? I don't get this question. You assemble the stance meter with the neutral stance always between conservative and reckless, it could be GGNRR or GNRRR or GGGNR or anything like that, but you could never be both R and G at the same time, either one or the other, or neutral.

6. Check the Player's Guide around page 95 I think. It details most equipment your players would ever be looking for, and how easy it is to find (rarity being: Abundant, Plentiful, Common, Rare, Exotic). You can then look at the town they're in, and figure out how well stocked that place would be. Ubersreik for instance is big enough to find even Exotic things in. Usually the capital cities such as Middenheim, Altdorf, Nuln, etc. should have the best stocked stores, while the smaller the town is, the rarer the goods are. Each rarity comes with a number of difficulty dice to see if the character can find the piece of equipment they want. In that order 0D, 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D. This can either be a Folklore check, or maybe a Charm/Guile check, depending on how they ask for information around town.

7. Wizards are awesome, but magic sight and cantrips can ruin your game . However, wizards are weaker in terms of dmg output + survivability than most other classes, so there's at least that. It's harder for wizards to put out sustained damage, and stay alive at the same time than it is for most other classes.

8, Too tired for advice, get the necessary stuff for a test run, maybe if you want, try to find a game online 1st with you as a player so you can get the feel of it before you GM a game.

1. In my aforementioned dealings with Pathfinder, I know that in that game the GM can do secret roles[rolls], concealing from the PC's if they are right or wrong on certain checks. Is there a way to do this in WHFRP?

A: Correct. This is true in any RPG. You are not required to show your players your rolls. Sometimes you should though so they cannot argue with you. The main rolls to keep secret are:

* Observation checks to see if they notice something

* Intuition to see if they "feel something"

* Opposed Stealth checks by an NPC or monster

1. In my aforementioned dealings with Pathfinder, I know that in that game the GM can do secret roles[rolls], concealing from the PC's if they are right or wrong on certain checks. Is there a way to do this in WHFRP?

A: Correct. This is true in any RPG. You are not required to show your players your rolls. Sometimes you should though so they cannot argue with you. The main rolls to keep secret are:

* Observation checks to see if they notice something

* Intuition to see if they "feel something"

* Opposed Stealth checks by an NPC or monster

I heavily disagree on those checks. Observation and Intuition checks made by the players are just that. Made by the players. I disagree with rolling secretly instead of the player. I see no point in it being a secret roll made by the GM.

1. In my aforementioned dealings with Pathfinder, I know that in that game the GM can do secret roles[rolls], concealing from the PC's if they are right or wrong on certain checks. Is there a way to do this in WHFRP?

A: Correct. This is true in any RPG. You are not required to show your players your rolls. Sometimes you should though so they cannot argue with you. The main rolls to keep secret are:

* Observation checks to see if they notice something

* Intuition to see if they "feel something"

* Opposed Stealth checks by an NPC or monster

I heavily disagree on those checks. Observation and Intuition checks made by the players are just that. Made by the players. I disagree with rolling secretly instead of the player. I see no point in it being a secret roll made by the GM.

I can see it from both sides. It really depends on the players and the type of game. I never conceal any rolls because I trust my players to roleplay and not do that kind of meta-gaming where hidden rolls would be required. If the characters rolls intuition to see if someone is trustworthy, if they fail and I say "he seems very trustworthy" my players will usually play along and have their characters treat him as trustworthy until the game exposes him to be something different.

The times this becomes a problem, and hidden rolls might be a good idea, is when the game becomes a challenge for the players instead of the characters. The best example of this is mystery-solving adventures. The players easily switch mental gears from "playing my character" to "solving the mystery". The character easily just becomes a tool for solving the problem the GM has presented, because the players are focusing so much of their mental powers on just finding a way to make the game progress that they easily forget to roleplay.

I have generally moved away from these kind of adventures for this very reason. The games are best when the story just flows naturally from what the characters do, and are usually the most frustrating when the players are trying to basically solve a puzzle.

I figure I'll take a crack at some of these questions as well:

4. My wife's character is a Trollslayer. The career card says that Trollslayers typically don't wear armor. Does this mean they can't wear armor? What if she wants to buy armor?

She shouldn't want to buy armor. If she does, she shouldn't be playing a trollslayer, as she is not roleplaying a trollslayer. If she just wanted to play a fighting dwarf, she should have gone with another career, like Ironbreaker.

5. If a character is 2 deep on his/her stance meter, but one space is red, and the other is green, are they rolling one red and one green die?

Like others have said, this question makes no sense. You need to re-read the rules for this. The stance meter works like a thermometer; it's like asking what the thermometer will show if it's both hot and cold at the same time.

6. How do you typically handle the purchase of equipment/special items? The rulebook is very vague about this. It's almost as if the character describes what they want to buy and you work out the details with them. Am I misunderstanding this? I would like to give my players the feel of a store with specific inventory.

My players are usually not in a position where they can pick and choose what to buy from a list. The only time I have used a kind of shop inventory was before a longer journey where they had to make some hard choices about food, pack animals and other equipment. For more general shopping the players will usually ask me if a shop has something they want and I'll consider it based on how likely it is.

7. Any recommendations for magic classes? In general? We're holding off on wizards and initiates for now until we get the grasp of the game.

I did the same. The casting rules are a hassle unless you have a proper rules-nerd to play the career who can keep track of everything himself. But from a story and "feel" perspective I would still generally discourage playing casters unless the adventure is somewhat intended for those careers. Wizards and Priests often feel weird and a bit out of place in many character partys and adventures.

8. Any overall tips you have for a new GM that you think would make our sessions successful? I've sat for hours trying to play through Pathfinder, and another hour or so trying to build a character in Mutants and Masterminds. I have picked up on this game more easily, by far. But still want to make sure we actually have a good time when we sit down to play.

Some advise I think will help based on the feel I got from the questions you asked: Stop trying to make the game have rules for everything you want to do. WFRP3e often have vague rules precisely because it should be a bit up to the GM and players how it is played. The story should take a front seat, while the rules just help things along. WFRP3e lends itself very well to a more improvised way of playing where you just make up what you are going to do, roll a fistful of dice and then try to interpret an amusing outcome based on the result of the roll.

Whenever a player attempts something and you are not quite sure what rules to apply, just decide on a Skill he will have to use, then decide how difficult it would be for an average person to do what he is attempting. Then add Challenge Dice to the roll based on difficulty:

Simple - 0 Dice

Easy - 1 Dice

Normal - 2 Dice

Hard - 3 Dice

Very Hard - 4 Dice

You should probably not be attempting this - 5 Dice

This will resolve just about anything the players can come up with and most rules in the game boils down to one of those rolls anyway.

You mention having to use a lot of time on creating characters: I have been playing for quite a while, so this was naturally easier for me to do, but something I did to not have to spend the first session teaching the players the rules for character creation (which they will only use once anyway), is to just make a couple of versions of their characters for them and have them choose. Once the creation points are allocated to the different categories (Stats, Skills, Actions etc) it is pretty easy to juggle around what the points are spent on within each category.

For example:

You choose the race and career the player wants.

Then you decide how to split the points between Stats, Skills, Actions, Talents and Wealth.

You make two or three different stat-lines with the points you allocated to stats.

You make a small deck of action cards and a small deck of talent cards that you think would fit the character (about 10 each should be about right).

When the player is creating his character, just give him the choice of the stat lines you made and tell him how many action cards and talents he can take from the decks you have prepared. Then finally let him more or less choose gear based on his wealth.

This is more hassle for you, but it is still much more efficient than having each player create his character. It's not like the players have any experience with the system, so they will not be making informed choices anyway. And you will learn the system much better by having to make a set of characters in it. Once you've done it a couple of times you can just grind out new characters without much effort.

One of the biggest time sinks in the character creation process is for each player to look through all the big card stacks to evaluate each card when there is probably around 1 in 10 cards that the player would actually even seriously consider.

#1:
Secret rolls are, IMHO, a bad match for this system. PCs have tons of things they can add to rolls (Fortune Points, human racial ability, assist manoeuvers, various reroll career abilities and reaction actions). You can’t make an informed decision about when to spend those abilities if sometimes you don’t know the difficulty or even that the roll is happening. If you take those tools away from them, success rates will drop. The GM probably knows the PC’s Intelligence + Observation ratings, but that’s only two of the half-dozen factors that will go into determining their final dice pool.

Think about Fortune Points in particular, they don’t represent something special the CHARACTER is doing, there is no in-character explanation for them at all (unless you’re playing a Mystic/Seer careers). Fortune Points represent the PLAYERS ability to affect fate / the narrative and succeed when it matters the most (to the Player).

In the Lure of Power supplement, there’s a passage (the “Influence Defined” sidebar) where the authors encourage GMs to spell out, _before_the_roll_, what the effects will be of a successful “You Influence the target” result (such as from a Charm check). Such a revelation will often involve spoilers of some sort, but the GM is still encouraged to spell it out, so the player can decide whether or not it’s worth spending various resources on the roll, or if they’d rather just forget about it and take some other action.

So my standard advice is to just trust your players. If they start acting differently because of something they (as a player, not as a character) figured out because you asked them to roll the dice, you should politely but firmly remind them that their characters don’t know that they just failed an Observation check vs 3 Purple Dice. With newer players, it can take some time to adjust to the concept of “my character doesn’t know that, so I can’t use it” but in time they’ll get it, and your game will be better because of them “playing fair”. Discussing it openly when it happens is a much more mature response then starting from the assumption they’ll “cheat” about what they know, and rolling secretly to prevent them from doing the thing you’re afraid they’ll do.


#2:
As others have pointed out, normal attacks use the Melee Attack or Ranged Shot basic action cards, which have some lines for boons and banes.

Also, not listed on those cards directly are the universal effects.
2 Boons: Recover from a Fatigue
2 Banes: Gain a Fatigue
1 Comet: +1 Crit

In addition, the Player’s Guide has a section on “Freestyle Boons and Banes” that can be helpful if you’d like to make the results a little more interesting.


#3:
The place where you read about damaged items was probably in the Equipment chapter, in the list of weapon special rules. Items with “Unreliable” ratings have a chance of gaining the “Damaged” condition card when used. Beyond that, there are no official/general rules for damaged items, but you could use the unreliable ratings as a starting point for exceptional die rolls or unusual situations that might be damaging to a piece of equipment.

It’s worth noting though that most players won’t find having to repair their sword _again_ to be much fun. Unless the situation is really special, it’s usually better to just not worry about the durability of items.


#4:
The Troll-Slayer career ability says they can’t wear armour. The point of the career is that they’re a disgraced warrior seeking their glorious death in battle. Plus, if you stack the bonus soak from their Slayer careers on top of armour, it may be a little broken. So really, they shouldn’t be wearing armour.

Plus, it’s your wife. As a new GM, you may find it difficult to establish your authority at the table. Ultimately, you’re in control of the majority of the setting and game-world, and what you say goes, but if the other players get the mistaken impression that you’re "playing favorites", it may have a negative impact on their enjoyment of the game. Tread carefully there.


#5:
As others have said, there shouldn’t be a situation where a PC can be both a green and a red into their stance meter. The starting space should be neutral, and it’s in the middle of the meter. If that’s not how you’ve got your stances set up, you may want to reread that part of the rulebook.

#6:
Yes, the rulebook makes equipment purchases unnecessarily complicated. They were trying to be more open-ended and flexible than most RPGs, and avoid having some incredibly lengthy inventory list. For the most part, they failed. A big, detailed equipment list would actually have been more useful. Rarity and haggle checks are mostly annoying, and if your adventure is set in a large city where Rarity shouldn't really be an issue you could safely ignore it.

If you google around a bit, you’ll see several people have made such expanded equipment lists for their own use. If you do decide to use one of those, take a few minutes to examine it thoroughly and compare it to the rulebook. Some of the alternate equipment lists out there use different currencies/exchange rates than the core book does (usually such changes are based on the monetary system in previous editions of the game). If you know that in advance, it’s no problem, but it could mean having to convert costs on the fly if you aren’t prepared.

#7:
Wizards are a little weird in this system (as are Priests, but to a lesser extent). They require more die-rolls than other careers, are subject to some nasty consequences for rolling chaos stars, and require a greater amount of rules knowledge. They also don’t start very powerful. Early in the campaign, they’re actually weaker than melee fighters, and only really start to come into their own late in the campaign when they can more readily access the most powerful spells.

I think your instincts are right: avoid magical careers until you and your players have a little more experience with the system (and/or RPGs in general).

#8:
Let the players win most of the time. Though the game refers to 2 Purple as being “Average Difficulty” in a few places, that is actually a more difficult roll than what they assume or want you to be rolling most of the time. Cards that say “vs Target Defence” mean 1 Purple + a number of Black dice. Cards that don’t list a difficulty (and just say something like “Intuition (Int)” assume the only bad dice rolled are the ones in the upper left corner of the card. Add extra dice to that when it seems appropriate (for terrain, bad weather, distractions, etc), but don’t go overboard. In general, you want the players to succeed. Especially with new players, who are just learning the joys of RPGs. Yes, you want to challenge them, and you want to require them to be brave or clever to defeat the villains and save the day. But ultimately, you want them to succeed more often than fail, and to have some fun kicking badguy butt along the way. It’s possible as a starting GM to end up in situations where the players are stuck without a lead or clue on where the plot is going. Be mindful of those sorts of problems, and never let the entire game crash to a halt because of a single failed roll. Give them some early easy victories (and one good scare in an early session to keep them on their toes) to get them invested and excited, before you build up to whatever the big crescendo is. Once you've got them hooked, you can start making things more difficult -- not the die-rolls, specifically, I'm referring more to plot complications and being outnumbered by the villains -- but it's very common for new RPG players to want to engage in power fantasies and butt-kicking. They probably want to feel their characters are more heroic, powerful, competent, and important than they themselves are in the real world. This is a good game for that sort of thing (due to high success rates and rules that emulate cinematic action nicely), and the setting is also deep enough to allow for heavy character development and mystery-solving as and when your players refine their tastes in that direction.

EDIT: Note that my "go easy on 'em and let 'em win a few times" advice is pretty much heresy in most Warhammer circles. The setting has a rep for being unforgiving, and treats characters more harshly than most RPGs.... but dragging dismembered PCs through the mud isn't really the best way to introduce a new PLAYER to the role-playing hobby. If your players had some other RPGs under the belts first, my advice would be very different from what I wrote above.

Thank you so much for the help all. I learned a lot.

Yes, I was mistaken in thinking the neutral position was always in the middle of a stance meter, no matter how many red vs green there were. So it makes sense to me now.

I appreciate it! And will probably have a few more questions later!