I've been playing this game fro 4 years now and I know there are allot of small flaws the GM are house ruling away. I love this system and the concept despite its many flaws, but there is one flaw that deeply bothers me and I have not found any solution to it.

In WFRP 3ed chance to hit and the amount of damage go hand in hand, in 2st and 2nd edition this was separated, so that you could have creatures that dealt allot of damage if they hit you but they had little chance to hit and vice versa.

Best I idea I have had so far is to give some creatures a trade:

Large creature: -2 to strength when determining hit pool, +2 strength when determining damage, Creatures blows are unstoppable (can not be blocked or parried).

This only solves issues with giant and larger creatures, I suppose creating more trades of different sizes and values could adjust this to suite my idea how the creatures should behave, but I rather figure out some rule book solution that can be allied generally (using size difference etc).

So any idea on how solved this?

High strength should pound through armor and should do more damage IMO. Your best solution is to not use any yellow dice or institute an armor benefit when there is a gross disparity between sizes.

D&D does that (well at least 3.5 did).

jh

^{_{('never really cared for the 2e combat system, but I can see your point)}}

I think it would be fine to rule that Parry and Block are inapplicable against certain creatures based on size/Str.

There's a battle scene in one of the Gotrek & Felix books where the foe is so big Felix realizes parrying is useless and someone who tries would be seen as block simply gets knocked across the chamber for damage. I would be inclined to just rule these case by case and give Player warning. "It's a giant, parrying will be useless!"

Omens of War has "Enhance" Actions. IIRC, there's one that's -1 white, -1 blue, -1 yellow, to get roughly +3 damage. Just slap that on your biggun's, and be skimpy with the A/C/E. So your -2 dice, +2 damage idea would work just fine.

ADDENDUM: Or, for greater variance per roll, increase DR while adding extra black dice to the attack pool (instead of subtracting dice). Your average attack roll will be reduced, but you'll still be capable of the occasional freakishly good roll when all the blacks come up blank.

ADDENDUM #2: It's worth mentioning that fights in this system tend to be a short number of rounds (by the 3rd round the PCs have either won, or are facing down a TPK). As a result, creatures meant to hit hard but miss a lot will usually die before they hit. When they do get lucky, they run a chance of one-shot-ing a PC. IMHO, that doesn't sound ideal.

On Parrying:

I would never remove it as a viable defence simply because parrying is generally not an action to *stop* an attack, it is generally more of a deflection of the power of the incoming blow. I could see Block however being a non viable defence to a large creatures attack.

@ R_B on fight length.

Yup, most fights tend to be done and dusted in 4-6 turns in the games I have played, and our ref very rarely uses minion rank enemies as well.

As to the core issue raised by the OP............

Has anyone considered the ramifications of limiting dice pools to your stance? It's an idea I have been noodling over, but would like to know what other think of.

>>Has anyone considered the ramifications of limiting dice pools to your stance? It's an idea I have been noodling over, but would like to know what other think of.

How do you mean?

jh

Well, lets take combat for example.

a S5 character with 1C/3R enters combat and adjusts their stance to 1R. for their combat pool, instead of it being 1R/4B and say 1G for training it becomes 1R+1G. Players can still spend fatigue to get extra stance as usual. If the player hits however they are still doing STR+WD as normal.

For non stance checks, just use blue as normal.

I am fully aware that it needs work to keep it balanced as it is whack ATM, but as I said, it was a stray thought.

Perhaps instead of just stance you could use 1 stance dice plus one blue if you have it "spare" (IE the STR 5 fighter type could use 1R+1B in round one, 2R+2B in turn 2 but if they have no R3 stance piece they get capped at the 2/2.

I dunno, The main goal was to better use stance points and lower the overall success rate to a degree.

I think we call that the passive-aggressive stance