I don't mean to be gloomy, but those statistics come from the latest industry report. Look for the topic "the state of our hobby".

You'd have to be blind not to see, smell and taste the LACK of remaining externo-de-basement gamers

jh

Erik Bauer said:

Yeah I agree (midichlorians? WTF?!?!), but did these new iterations ruin the originals for you? Are you throwing away all of your Star Wars Fiction? Are you saying that the sci fi movie genre as a whole is ruined?

Obviously not. 2nd Edition still exists and good old fashioned rpgs are still being produced.

The young ones aren't stealing your hobby away from you.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Though I agree with you Varnias, when I hear folks complain about the new system getting in the way of their roleplaying I always assume that what they're really saying is that it gets in the way of the roleplaying style that they enjoy. We all like some level mechanics in our games. I assume those that are fearful of the new system interfering with their RP just aren't comfortable with their interpretation of what the new mechanics will be doing.

Otherwise, there's much more minimalist systems out there to choose from that the "roleplayers" would be going to. Amber, Prince Valiant, FUDGE, Primetime Adventures, etc.....all are more out of the way systems that would theoretically give you more freedom to roleplay than even earlier editions of WFRP, mechanically speaking, and by a long shot.

So when folks say its all about the roleplaying, I don't usually assume that's entirely true. If it was just about roleplaying they'd all be in community theatre or letting the GM flip a coin for resolution each time.

Varnias Tybalt said:

DREAM-KILLER!

/shakes his tiny fist in impotent rage

//Note: that's all the way to 3 reckless, bub!

I have a great group of players. As a group we have retaken Karak-Eight Peaks, tamed the Boarder Lands, and stopped the ascention of powerful champions that would have otherwise laid waste to the Old World. We have ruled forests and cities, built and fought armies, and explored the highest peaks and deepest sewers. I really don't see a game system getting in the way of all this splendid story telling.

It's up to your GM and players. No dice or chart can stand in the way of a good story. If the system is flawed, fix it. There will be blank card templates, alternate character sheets, and supplemental tables all over the net within days of release. I can't think of a single system that wasn't made better by the players. If there's no room for improvement then why play. The question is, do you love it enough to tweak it? If the system is good, you'll find a way to make it work. If it's bad, collectors will be buying it on eBay and the FF guys will be reprinting Descent and looking for jobs :0

Daemons will still want to eat your face off and heroes will still fight to stop them from doing it. Dark stains of corruption will still seap from the evil cabals seeking to destroy the fabric of society from within and bold adventurers will continue to stumble upon thier machinations and inexplicably find ways to foil their well conceived plots. Nobles will still sell their souls for power and parties will forever uncover them and ruin their lives. In short, the world will continue to turn so long as you stand on it.

Re: the dice issue. I haven't seen anything about detailed charts that completely interpret the dice rolls. My understanding is that they are designed as a tool to help the interpeter tell the story. If there is some all encompassing table, I doubt I'll use it all the time. Alternately, you could just say 'You pass' and be done with it. As far a percentage chances (and the poor finger counting girl), I don't think it will take may rolls before players figure out what kind of 'chance' they have based on the dice they are rolling. Besides, I think 'a pretty good chance' is way better for players than a '46%' chance. Removing the numbers adds to the mystery a bit Finger girl will be happy. She can keep her shoes on now.

I'll buy this system (I'm a neurotic collector and I have disposable income), and I think I'll enjoy it. If I don't, and my players aren't having fun, then I'll shelf it, limber up my pile of 2nd edition material and soldier on. I need 1 book to play WFRP and I have it already. Everything else is just icing.

If I had one wish it would be that we could get some more details on this new system so we could discus things with a bit more knowlege.

I agree with those that say the d100 system is not that great. When it came out, yeah, it was probably a pretty good alternative to AD&D in which every single stat had a different modifier, sometimes you wanted high number, sometimes you wanted low numbers, etc.

The problem with d100 is that mathematically, you're only rolling one die, and the probability curve for that is actually a line. You have a 60% chance of succeeding, but you have the same chance of getting a 1 as a 60 as a 100 - shouldn't you be most likely to succeed, but not spectacularly, while doing super awesome and critically failing happen infrequently? I say yes.

I don't really care if the system is 23 years old or 23 days old, I do not think a flat probability distribution is good for RPG's.

Erik Bauer said:

This is pretty much my opinion, too. It has little to do with 3e, or the d100's flaws/weaknesses vs dice pools, etc.

What I see here is a similar situation I've encountered several times in my career - what FFG has done with WFRP 3e is the equivilent of a new boss/owner coming into a workplace, and changing things for the sake of change or to do things "their way", while completely disregarding just about everything about the way things worked before they got there. The bosses that have done that to me have never gained mine, nor most of my co-worker's respect, and either they wind up leaving, or a majoriy of their staff does, because of the discord in the workplace. It usually has nothing to do with whether the changes are good or bad, but the way they handle making those changes.

In contrast, a boss who comes in, observes, and subtly changes things, encourages his/her employee's input, and gently nudges things towards the changes he/she wants, while incorporating their employee's ideas generally get the changes they want, plus more, AND earn the respect of their employees.

FFG's handling of this has cost them my respect for them. They have become the boss that says "Hey, I'm changing everything about the way we do things, and if you don't like it, tough ****." I don't like working for people who have that attitude, and I'm certainly not going to give my money to a company who treats me that way. I've removed every FFG product from my various wishlists at Amazon and other sites. I spent most of the money I was saving for Runebound and Descent and all their supplements on 2e PDFs, and earmarked the remaining savings for other games from other publishers. I'm not going to go so far as to say I will never again buy another FFG product, but I have ranked them with other game companies whose products I try to avoid.

It didn't have to be this way. FFG could have - no should have - used this game mechanic/system in a game setting that didn't have a 23 year history, then if it was even mildly sucessful, they could have sublty nudged us to the point where we, the consumer, were asking for it to be applied to WFRP. They could have been a boss that earned my undying respect.

kristof65 said:

Well spoken

Varnias Tybalt said:

Game mechanics does matter since they are the backbone of the game. If the backbone is broken then the game is broken.

A quick example: A level 12 D&D Paladin enters a Tavern hunting a badass Chaotic/Evil sorcerer. Casts Identify Evil, discovers the sorcerer, extracts his +4 longsword of Evil Bane and charges the sorcerer without thinking about the fact the sorcerer charmed the whole customers of the tavern: what are a bunch of level 2/3 commoners against a level 12 paladin?

In WFRP the same situation is: a full career Witch hunter enters a tavern, hunting a badass Champion of Tzeentch that has the ability to change his aspect to a commoner. He starts to try scaring the people and try seeing through the illusion of the champion, but he isn't sure of his results. Then he discovers this was a trap! Three thugs with barely 2 advances and 1 crossbow each start shooting at the witch hunter who runs for cover to save his life. Now he has to fight 4 foes! But he was prepared, puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles, the rest of the party kicks in and tries to get rid of the thugs while they are reloading while he charges towards that chanting commoner whose image seems to fade and change.

Necrozius said:

But V3 being so different implies that if I want stick to V2 I must forget fresh usable official handbooks from now on.

donbaloo said:

We are confusing roleplayng with Storytelling and Narrative games here.

Erik Bauer said:

With v3 you will probably be able to convert to v2 without too much trouble, so you'll at least have a chance of getting new official material you can use. That wasn't really going to be possible with v2, because v2 books weren't worth publishing. Without v3 the chances of getting any new material was about zero.

Erik Bauer said:

You are completely right here, but I'm 100% sure they won't introduce "Detect Evil", "Resurrection" or similar nonsense spells in 3rd edition, so I think here you are hitting a straw man.

Even if they did, it's easy to house rule them away (that's what we are doing in the D&D 4th campaign a friend of mine is running).

NezziR, I can help answer some of your questions, at least.

• How do you move the marker up and down the stance bar? Is it triggered by circumstance or does the player decide?

The player decides. Five minutes into part four of FFG's GenCon seminar videos Jay Little said: "The players are able to throttle the risk tolerance of their individual character over the course of the game and adjust it on the fly based on the current situation." There may be circumstances that affect a character's stance, but they've not been mentioned.

• Do the cards contain skills?

No, not exactly. The action cards are basically a return to the original version's "standard tests". Except, rather than being listed on a table and described in a chapter, all of the pertinent information regarding a particular action/test is printed on its card. Otherwise, they are quite similar. Trying to con someone in WFRPv1 would require a Bluff test (roll under your Fellowship characteristic, modified by any appropriate skills, such as Charm). In v3 you'll likely refer to your "Bluff" basic action card (roll your Fellowship characteristic in ability dice, modified by the appropriate skill, such as Charm or Guile, and talent, such as Silver Tongue).

Now, I don't know what the "pull the wool over" action card will actually be called in v3, but it will likely exist and that's fundamentally what it'll do. We've seen the Ranged Shot basic action card and that's the function it fulfils. Note, it's not the "Ballistic Skill action card" (and BS is now a skill, not a characteristic), it's just one of the actions you can perform using your Ballistic Skill.

Ranged Shot basic action = Agility attribute + Ballistic Skill vs. Target Defence

Many of these basic action cards are available to starting characters, with the special actions limited to certain careers (like the Slayer's Troll-Feller Strike). According to "The Role You Play" article, however: "Several of the basic action cards have a minimum characteristic requirement. If a character does not begin play with the required characteristic rating, he does not begin with that basic action card. However, if he later raises his characteristics to meet these requirements, he can choose to acquire these actions later in his career."

• What exactly is in the card decks? I know there are wounds (with crits), conditions (like blind), Insanity, and Attacks (like Accurate Shot). What about cards for social interaction skills (and others like climb, swim, or stealth) or spells?

From the WFRP3 FAQ:
"The large boxed core set includes the following:
4 Rulebooks, 36 custom dice, 154 action cards (which include spells and blessings, as well as special combat and social actions), 70 wound cards, 45 talent cards, 30 condition cards, 30 insanity cards, 30 career ability cards, 19 miscast cards, 12 location cards, 1 item card, 30 career sheets, 5 party sheets, 1 pad of character sheets, 3 character keeper boxes, 48 tracking tokens, 6 stance rings, 6 activation tokens, 2 large standups, 47 medium standups, 12 plastic bases, 39 fatigue & stress tokens, 40 puzzle-fit stance pieces, and 5 puzzle-fit centre pieces"

Additionally, from the WFRP3 description page:
"Mighty warriors perform mighty deeds. You can quickly reference the full-colour action cards to see what your abilities and innate skills can accomplish, allowing players to spend more time focusing on the task at hand. From spells, blessings, and attacks to social gambits, and reactions, and acrobatics you will have the actions you need to tell your character’s tale."

From "The Role You Play" article:
"Certain careers may have access to other basic actions. For example, wizard careers start the game with a number of petty magic spells, which are considered basic spell actions, and Channel Power, which allows them to generate the power needed to fuel their spells. Priest careers start the game with a number of minor blessings, which are considered basic blessing actions, and the Curry Favour action, which allows them to generate the favour needed to activate their blessings."

It's also been mentioned in passing on other forums by a playtester and a developer that the game's well suited to roleplaying-heavy scenarios like Power Behind the Throne and that there are systems in place to cover social interactions. Perhaps social actions may also be impacted by a character's career keywords/tags. So, someone in Menial, Rogue or Rural careers may have a harder time socialising with the Graf than those in Social or "Noble" careers. (Barber Surgeon does have the Social tag, but the "Noble" bit is speculation on my part.)

There'll probably be basic actions covering things like climb, swim and stealth, as Athletics, Coordination and Stealth are basic skills. They may also be covered by other specialisations or advanced skills, too.

• How much detail is there on character sheets and how customizable are they when they level? Are they still going to be interesting with forward goals after a year of campaigning?

If you look three minutes into part 3 of the GenCon seminars online at FFG you get a pretty good view of the front of the character sheet.

There are now only six characteristics (three mental and three physical): Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower, Fellowship.

Jay mentioned a Strength of 5 during an example of the dice mechanics. So, characteristics will likely range from 1 to no more than 8, as there are only eight blue characteristic dice included in the core set.

There are 18 basic skills listed on the sheet (nine mental and nine physical), along with their associated characteristic:

Athletics ST
Ballistic Skill AG
Coordination AG
Intimidate ST
Resilience T
Ride AG
Skullduggery AG
Stealth AG
Weapon Skill ST

Charm FEL
Discipline WP
First Aid INT
Folklore INT
Guile FEL
Intuition INT
Leadership FEL
Nature Lore INT
Observation INT

There is also space to record up to six Advanced Skills. The Coachman career has the Animal Handling skill, which may be an advanced skill.

Both types of skills look like they can be advanced (and marked as "Trained") up to three times. This implies they can also be used untrained. So, potentially, you can use any of the skills listed on your character and career sheets at a base level. So, out of the careers we've seen so far, only the Coachman can use the Animal Handling skill untrained, and he can advance it and any of his other career skills (Ballistic Skill, Coordination, Resilience and Ride) up to three times.

However, there's also a new category on the character sheet: Specialisations. As yet, there's been no indication of just what they are. Perhaps Animal Training is a specialisation of the Ride skill? They seem to have a one-off mechanical effect, rather than a graded scale, though, as there are no checkboxes for them. Perhaps a specialised skill adds one extra yellow skill dice to the pool, as there are four skill dice included in the base set (one for each of three advances and one specialty).

Moving on to the rest of the sheet: Name, Race, Current Career, Current Rank (?), Wound Threshold, Fortune, Special Abilities (these may be racial and/or the ability you get to keep if you complete a career fully, eg. the Ratcatcher's SBVD), Weapons (these have both a Damage and Critical rating) and Armour (which has both a Defence and Soak rating). The back of the sheet has more of what you might expect: Equipment, Encumbrance, Money, Insanities, Critcal Wounds, Adversaries and Stances.

The back of the sheet is also where you track your careers, experience and advances. Indications are that there is at least as much complexity to character advancement in this version as the earlier ones. In addition to spaces for recording any career advances (action cards, talents, skills, specialties, wounds etc) there's also a Career Completion Advances area that has a checkbox for a "Dedication Bonus" (?) and a Non-Career Advances section where you can check off up to ten advances of different types.

There do seem to be quite a few advancement options for characters. Unfortunately, we've only seen the front of the basic career sheets so far, and they don't appear to mention the available talents or special abilities. However, they do show that the basic careers are almost all numerically balanced . The only exception so far, the Troll Slayer, is short one career skill, but this could be for racial balancing purposes (perhaps non-humans remove a career skill, and this is already factored in for the Dwarf-only Slayers) or for balancing out another advantage the Slayer gets, like extra or more powerful talents and special actions.

Each basic career has three additional career tags, two primary characteristics, five career skills, four stance pieces, two talent slots and ten available advances. These basic career advances can be Action, Talent, Skill, Fortune, Conservative, Reckless or Wound and selected from 0-3 times each, depending on the career. There's no indication of how characteristic advances are handled, or how a career's primary characteristics affect them. At the least, I imagine that the primary characteristics might cost fewer creation points at character creation. (From "The Role You Play" article: "Each player has a number of creation points available to invest in the customisation of his character. The number of creation points available is based on the character’s race. Creation points are spent by the player to invest in his PC’s characteristics, as well as starting wealth and other advancements to improve a character’s starting skills and abilities.")

Another area of relative mystery is that of talents. They seem to come in three flavours (Tactic, Reputation and Focus), an individual can only have two active at once and "the character’s career influences his available talents". The only barely legible one I've seen so far is the reputation talent, "Silver Tongue", from the first page of the FAQ. I think the card's text reads, "Fellowship checks add an eagle (boon) to the results pool if three hammers (successes) are generated".

Finally, we're all still waiting to see an advanced career and what differences they bring to the table.

• How are the 4 books bound? Perfect bound? Hardcover? More importantly, what is the page count of each book?

This one I can't help you with, I'm afraid.

NewTroski said:

Another example of d100 vs. dice pools where dice pools show their extra flexibility: gunpowder weapons (this is just me "creating" a possible example, no hard facts yet, of course).

1. With d100. You roll the d100, you check the weapon stats and if you roll high enough the weapon jams, explodes, etc. ... The dice told you what happened, not much to interpret. The linear probability makes it difficult to get much variability in the end results without getting into gigantic timewasting tables (I tried some houserules with this as I like gunpowder weapons more deadly for both the user and the victim... it was too cumbersome using only d100). Also, you always missed the shot when something bad happened to you, which is not realistic at all.

2. With dice pools. You roll X dice for your attack and, depending on how experimental the weapon, a number of difficulty (I think purple dice) and/or chaos (black dice) tokens.

- A gunpowder pistol would roll one purple die. Now, if you are reckless and the purple (difficulty) and red (reckless) die comes with a skull on it, then you were too quick reloading the pistol and it explodes in your hands. If you were cautious and got a skull result in the purple, I could just say that the gun jammed, if on top of that you got an hourglass in your cautious die, I could interpret it as you spending more time than needed reloading the gun, then shooting and the gun getting jammed.... But all the above results are independent of whether you actually hit your victim or not, i.e., the gun could explode/jam before or after shooting the bullet... both user and victim could be killed at the same time, precisely the sort of mayhem I would like to convey to my players so that they know gunpowder weapons are dangerous things.

Now try to get the above using d100 and tables and you'll sweat at the time you'll need to come to similar results.

- A jezzail . This weapon is mean. I would force the user to roll both a purple and a black die. With the purple die you could get similar results as with the gunpowder pistol above, but the black die adds a 3rd dimension to the roll. If you get a skull die on the black die, then some noxious wyrdstone vapours escape and you'll have to check some sort of Toughness test to avoid getting a minor Mutation or some Corruption points (I use them in my game to simulate Mutations the same way as Insanity).

Again, try now to get the above using d100 and tables... I have experience trying and I know it's very very difficult to come with an elegant way of doing it.

So, long live dice pools! (I started discovering their beauty with the Alternity system) I hope this game is a success so that other companies also copy the dice pool mechanics.

Reading various descriptions and things this game starts to wake up both my curiosity and my fears.

Reading the Statistic/Skills subdivision I start smelling D&D inside the pot: Weapon skill purely based on strength and Balistic skill purely based on Dexterity... nothing could be more wrong.

I understand the fact that maybe those skills can be advanced separately from the base stats... but in my world combat is not just about strength.

cogollo said:

Houseruling that on any double on a D100 something bad happens to your gunpowder weapon lets you hit the target even with such a critic result (11 means both hit ad crit). Then you need a 10/20 rows long table to roll a D100 on to get enough variability.

I know well the linearity problem of the D100 system but Dice Pools suffer from Averagity Problem aswell...

Erik Bauer said:

Correct. Combat ability is a combination of physical ability (represented by Str) and skill (represented by WS). Hence S + WS.

So S is a bonus to Weapon Skill, not it's base...

Erik Bauer said:

Yeah, you roll your blue characteristic dice along with your yellow skill dice. However, it appears that the former will range to eight, while the latter to four dice.

Check out my last (marathon) post above for more details.

Interesting... here we can start to have a look at the very mechanic of it.

It is still too tied to Strength for my tastes (8 dies against 4), but maybe the yellow ones will be more important. Moreover a 0-4 variability on skills seems a bit few to me (I'm used to % system) and I guess houseruling that would be striclty tied to the availability of yellow dies inside the box(es).

Wow... THANKS Ravelli! That post deserves its own thread. Excuse me while I digest all that great info you compiled.

Erik Bauer said:

We don't actually know how the attributes scale. Str 8 could be for a dragon or a giant - completely beyond the ability of a PC. Or it could be completely irrelevant - just an arbitrary number of dice.

For comparitive purposes the World of Darkness system uses Strength + Weaponry as their pool for attacking someone with a sword. Str is from 1-5 (1 is weak, 2 average, 3 athletic, 4 very strong, 5 as strong as it is possible for a human to be) + weaponry from 1-5. The type of weapon usually adds extra dice to your pool.

That can be interesting... and If I do not like S I can always houserule to use another stat or a mix of them as a base for Weapon skill...

I read in the long description post that 6 free skill places are there on the character sheet... I suppose this is merely a space limit and not a rule limit. I mean, 6 skills are very few to learn.

Erik Bauer said:

Exactly what I was pointing to in my post: you need at least 2 rolls plus looking at the table to decide what happened. With a pool of dice you need 1 roll plus the GMs imagination and maybe a card in front of you detailing what can go wrong with the weapon.