monkeylite said:

Much appreciated.

monkeylite said:

Then I'll do you the service of taking you at your word, until FFG give us enough information to allow us to make an informed decision on the subject (I still maintain that their official release clashes with your own personal recommendation).

However I reserve the right to dislike the game for the vast array of other reasons I currently have based on the information available.

I'm a bit in doubt...

Sounds a bit like a beefed combo of Advanced HeroQuest, Warhammer Quest with a WFRP sauce poored over it...I need to know more...

DagobahDave said:

No, to me it sounds like Descent. The mere thing about being "a hero party" of three players(WTF) "seeking out adventure and glory" stinks of boardgame. In roleplaying games there are no limits to how many player characters there can be(but there is in Descent).

It sounds not even remotely like a traditional rpg.

its DnD 4 mixed with descent.

Anonymus said:

What would it take to convince you that it's a traditional RPG? Would the game's promo material help? How about the word of a playtester? Because I might be able to dig those up. Give me a minute. In the meantime, feel free to browse.

How about no limitations on the player group first of all?

Anonymus said:

How about no limitations on the player group first of all?

What limitations? You should go back and read that part more carefully.

"Three players form the hero party, seeking out adventure and glory". done

"Adding more players is easy! You can find more careers, party sheets, action cards, and components in the the Adventurer’s Toolkit."

Ooops.

Okay, how about that i did not mean in that direction? anyway using dices for storytelling is just ridiculous.

Anonymus said:

Well, really, if you look at it a certain way, that's all RPGs ever are: using dice to tell stories. That is a definition of an RPG afaict.

Umm not in my groups but ok. Anyway, have fun with "herohammer".

Anonymus said:

You use dice and you tell stories in your game, right?

This is total speculation, but I felt it necessary to posit a view on the other end of the " ZOMG >: ( Board Gamezorz >: ( ZOMG " argument. The announcement is less that 24hours old and I'm already sick to my waste disposal regions of the boardgame-boardgame-boardgame posts. Dave tries to get a discussion going about the game and it devolves into wannybakering and boardgame-boardgame-boardgame posts.

What if all the extra action cards book collections and doodads are just that?...extra...

I never bought the character sheets for any RPG I've played yet they were generally available in neat little $9.99 packages. Heck AD&D 2nd Edition had boat loads of NPC cards, Encounter Decks, Treasures, etc...and I never bought them cause they didn't appeal to me and you know what? The game was fine for years with my little huddled mass of nerd comrades. Same goes for other superfluous game items marketed to all rpg'ers in almost any system with a production budget behind it.

Perhaps the next edition of WFRP will feature a collection of the initial book releases in the same way that other systems have offered collections of the core rule books yet I would imagine you could buy them a la carte as in any game system. Aside from GM's a player would only have to buy the Adventure Guide and lo...I would venture a guess that it would have the various mechanics they would need to play the game each week (or however often you throw dice around). The sorcery and religion books are probably such that players might pick them up, but one copy laying about the table would suffice...again that falls on the GM but that's nothing new to me.

Funky dice? Yeah I get that semi-concious anti-pirating wtf move, but I don't mind new kinds of dice. I have a dice bag with room for some more goofy looking shards of plastic, and if the GM has to supply the dice for stingy, spacey or s-headed players then they've got a brick of 36 dice to toss around the table...again the extra cost falls on a GM...like it always fething does.

Action Cards, Player Cards, etc...falls into the misc doodads that people can buy if they are into that kind of thing. If it brings in a new player and they get a template in their mind that the extra stuff is necessary then they'll buy the future gewgaws supplied by FFG..sounds like a good business move and since I am used to keeping my own records and learning the rules I'll pass. I bet the actions allowed in a round for each career is described in one of the books.

Three characters? Enemy Within came with pregenerated characters that I have never ever used ever. I've run EW a few times and each time we bulit our own group. I'll take the fancy colorful pregens supplied in the core pack and set them in a dark and dry place where they will grow old. Me and mine will generate our own meat for the meatgrinder. We'll write our stats, abilities, etc down on a sheet someplace even if I have to build one and none of my players will have to wait 2 months after release to play a Celestial Wizard when the cards come out.

Look past the initial stabbing reality that the game is changing guys. Let's save all that good venom for when the mechanics are more fully understood. I'm all for evaluating 3rd edition on its own merit and if the core mechanics suck like D&D 4th ed then by all means I'll pick up a torch and join the horde of flagelants.

But we can't review and sign on or off the game just on the initial product release statements. It'd be like talking about our favorite and least favorite scenes in District 9 before it is even out in theaters....

do these special dice affect how the story is told which is how i am reading it, e.g. getting one result on one of the cusomt dice results in a success due to a certain cause or in a certain way? If so that is more of a limitation than an aid to me. I would rather just know if someone has passed or failed and then as a GM I can decide that sort of stuff.

I would rather not use these custom dice at all, I dont like having more than one type of dice in a system and it is one of the reasons I dont like D&D. The dice thing is really my main problem with the mechanics. The thing I like about current WFRP and DH is that the system is easy to understand and can be played with 2d10's. I dont want alot of baggage when I play a game like this, things get lost and broken too easily. If the dice are an optional extra that can be used to enhance gameplay then I am fine with it although I prefer precentile roll's to dice pools usually because it is much easier to make a mistake when calculating a dice pool than reading a precentile dice.

I am assuming that the cards are not necissary and are more referance tools in which case I welcome them as useful, if they are anyway manditory for play they become more of a hinderance than a help, if play relys heavily on them to function they become problematic. These things just get lost too easily or forgotten so while its nice to have them I dont want to have to rely on them.

There is one other problem that may be a concern to me although without seeing inside the books I cant tell. The description that FFG have given seems to imply a less gritty and down to earth style of play, I dont know if that is just poor word choice by them but if it is true then I will be dissapointed. From what I can see they seem to have taken the Warhammer Online approach to the represent the Warhammer world which while fun, to quote Mr McNiell "with the best will in the world, just didn’t." (Note, since the internet is an imprecise tool for communicating, that last statement was intended to be Ironic as I am aware he was talking about WFRP 1&2 when he made that comment, do not point it out.)

If it does take the WAR approach to the background it loses what, for me, the Warhammer setting has always been about, a gritty down to earth realism where fantastic stuff can happen but not for the majority of people, where people don't go looking for the monsters to slay them but try and live in a place immensly hostile to themselves. Those people are at thier heart normal, they cant rely on the healer to come around and resurect them and if he tried they would probably kill them. Bad things happen to good people, the Villian is often the victor who lives his life in comfort at the expense of others.

The "good" races dont always just get together to fight the bad guys, sometimes its just not worth the risk. Elves are mistrusted, Dwarfs are often selfish and dismissive of humans and the Empire is often viewed as a buffer by everyone to buy themselves some time and to protect thier own lives at the expense of humanity. If everyone bands together and just gets along it becomes generic fantasy, it loses the Warhammer feel. The characters need to be normal people for the post part not pigeon holed into game capabilities, if everyone is a noble or a wizard or a cleric, I am not interested. I want to be the grave warden or tax collector or the barber surgeon, the people of the Warhammer universe who live on despite all of the wonders of the world.

Im sorry, this has become more of a stream of thought rathern than a thought out post, its hard for me to put into words why I am worried about this new edition, I am not sure that it will have any of the problems I think it will and anyone that can tell me for definite I am wrong then I will gladly accept it and probably buy this new box set, however much it costs.

However in the words of Han Solo "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Kaihlik

(Regardless of anything else I still dont like dice pools in WFRP.)

monkeylite said:

Cheers for that Runefang, appreciate it!

Kaihlik said:

Runefang, one of the playtesters, has mentioned that there seem to be rules for both "pass or fail" dice rolls and "how do I pass/fail" rolls. So it doesn't really impact you a lot, you get to choose.

MILLANDSON said:

Erm, yeah, don't quote that bit. I was being a bit vague, and that's not exactly what I meant.

monkeylite said:

Fair enough, that's cool. Still, I'm sure people can just ignore the description part. It's not as though you'll get beaten down by the Rules Lawyers (TM - FFG) for house ruling something.

"Runefang, one of the playtesters, has mentioned that there seem to be rules for both "pass or fail" dice rolls and "how do I pass/fail" rolls. So it doesn't really impact you a lot, you get to choose."

I think he was implying that both "pass or fail" and "why did I pass or fail" are both evident in the dice roll results. If all you care about is pass / fail, then you can glean those reasults quickly. If you wanted to know that you succeeded because of a blessing, or because of superior skill, then you could discern that as well.

Probably because special modifiers are handled by adding additional colored dice to the roll. If a blessing die contributed to your success, then you know that the blessing was responsible. If the general skill dice indicate your success, but the blessing die didn't help, then you know that your skills pulled off the event and the blessing wasn't relevant.

I think that people who critisize the game due to the description that says "the dice roll tells a story" are being overly critical. That is just a marketing blurb. I suspect that this is what happened:

Marketing guy goes to interview developer to get info so he can write up the product description.

Marketing guy: So, what can you tell me about the new dice system? What makes it different or special?

Developer guy: Well... It streamlines the modifiers system.

Marketing guy: *gives blank stare and thinks that it doesn't sound "sexy"* So, what else?

Developer guy: Um... You can tell how and why a skill check passed or failed. The modifier dice let you know what caused the pass or fail. You couldn't know that sort of thing in earlier game mechanics.

Marketing guy: So, more than just pass/fail, the player knows why? So it kind of tells the story?

Developer guy: I suppose you could look at it that way...

Marketing guy: Woo Hoo! *runs off and writes a marketing blurb about story-telling dice.*

Roleplayers all over the world roll their eyes.

They see me rollin'

Hopefully it is as you say, im still unhappy about these moneymaking dices though.

So its safe to say that we cant just play the game with d10's then. I dont think that retraction would have been made had this not been the case. Im sorry to say this is one of the major things I do not want in an RPG, dice are annoying, they are constantly lost and finding the one you need in the environments I play in is annoying, I dont want to be passing dice around the group all the time or wondering where they have gone. I want to roll 2d10 and find out all I need to know about the roll, simple effective and leaves the players and GM free to come up with the descriptions and reasons that best fit the situation. I dont want to have to remember what all of the strange symbols mean, and work out alot of information every time I take a skill test, it is all a massive hastle I would rather avoid. Simplicity is a boon in an RPG in my book, at 5am I am not interested in trying to remember what all those symbols mean.

Kaihlik

Kaihlik said:

What he said.

Kaihlik said:

That problem was solved years ago with the burgeoning popularity of dice towers.

Kaihlik said:

If all you care about is pass / fail, then I don't think it will require a rocket surgeon to figure out the result of a dice roll.

Kaihlik said:

You already have to work out a lot of information every time you take a skill test in any RPG. Situational modifiers, race modifiers, spell modifiers, etc... I suspect that the new dice system is an attempt to streamline the whole process. Instead of mentally adding and subtracting modifiers before making a roll, you add or subtract dice from your hand before making a roll.

Kaihlik said:

Same hassle, different day. Whether or not the new system is more streamlined than the old one, less streamlined, or 12 of one and half a dozen of the other, we will never know until we get to kick the tires. To assume it is a hassle, from an informational vacuum, is presumptuous.

Kaihlik said:

I suspect that was FFG's mission statement with the new design. This isn't the first time FFG introduced symbolic dice as a game mechanism. From all their previous symbolic dice systems, it is pretty safe to assume that simplicity is the point. The opposite of what you accuse them of.

I am not persuming anything, these are the fears that I have that I hope will not come to fruition. I know there may be nothing to worry about but until I know one way or another these are my concerns. I apologise for not making that clearer, I do not think WFRP 3 will suck, I do think there are a few things likely to put me and my players off which may result with us not purchasing WFRP 3. I seriously hope it is not the case.

Usually the only thing you need to know when taking a skill test is the situational modifiers as everything else has been worked out before hand and it is simply a case of adding or subtracting a multiple of 10 which is the simplicity of it. Most dice pool systems I have used requires you to add together multiple stats and if you are new to the system remembering everything is often a pain, I have to admit if it works as I think it might it probably isnt that bad as it will be using a limited pool that isnt derived from multiple stats.

I quite often play in less than idea locations where things are often cramped and dice that get knocked on the floor can be hard to find and looking for them, can cause alot of chaos and generally irritate everyone. The great thing about using one kind of dice or even just standard types of dice is that there is always spares that you can just grab and roll, using one type speeds things up. Using special dice with a large group would involve passing them around which considering where I play can be a real pain, as we are often spread across either a fairly large room or a long cramped room. If we lose a few of one type of dice it will quickly become very irritating as every person will likely need the dice passed around for thier go, if we lose all of one type we may not be able to play at all. That is my problem with custom dice something that is not nearly as much of a problem with standard dice that we all own lots of.

I am not accusing anyone of anything I am mearly putting forward concerns due to the lack of information that I have had for a while before this announcement.

It may not be a game breaker but it makes us less likely to pick it when we could just play WFRP 2 or Dark Heresy or any other system that doesnt have this hassle.

Kaihlik

(DagobahDave is right THIS IS NOT A BOARD GAME, will people stop going claiming it is.)