Yeah, nothing says "game" like a boxed set. People see a 400-page book, they know they're not going to be playing anytime soon, and there's going to be more cost involved, particularly dice. With a boxed set, people expect to be able to open it up and start playing within an hour or three. The resurgence in board game popularity really makes the boxed set a good way to publish these days I think. Plus, it might get you into stores that don't carry RPG books.

Hey all new poster first time

I havent had the chance to get the box set yet, Pre ordered on amazon only to find out its delayed at suppilers... twice so sadly ive had to settle for the pdfs from drive thru, which i found to be a great price, gave me a chance to read all the rules before i finally get my order.

reading through the books navigating the minefield of typos, i found the system to be rather good, having played D&D for years it seemed a nice refresh from the dungeon bash. ive also played whfrp v1 loved the realism of it all. Over all i do rather like the mesh of narritive and mechcanics they over lap nicely though i havent had a chance to play with all the cards and counters i dont know how they function on the table

from what i read a few things came nipping at my ankles.

It seems from the mechanics it is quite easy for a character to pass out from stress or fatigue you only get one manouver before you start taking stress or fatigue from actions it seems to build very quickly, can someone tell me how frequent this has occured in your gaming sessions, having players pass out mid fight is a sure way of getting your party dead :s

Talents, in the description on page 19, it describes them as part of the charatcers training, social ability and knowledge, but in the rules it says you cant use a talent if the career doesnt have a corresponding socket. i find this a bit odd i thought talents were a characters natural ability not career training. so for example a high elf gets a free focus talent, great but if he/she starts in a career without focus it becomes redundant, again bare in mind i dont own the box set so dont know how often this problem crops up, if someone has had any problems with this happening can u tell me how often it does. last thing i want to see is characters with unusable talents, what becuse they change career they forget how to do these things bit of a head scratcher, im sure most of the problems are tackled in the compatibility career rules.

thanks for letting me rant

Trustn1 said:

In our second session the GM got a bit over-zealous with the party tension meter and fear rolls, so we should have had two out of three characters pass out on a tension meter increment except we misread the rules, so yeah, it's total party kill territory.

Most of the time fatigue and stress are self-inflicted though, so once you have too much you can back off on the manoeuvres, aggression dice and talent abuse. There is also a basic action you can use to recover stress and fatigue during combat.

On the talent problem, you can often socket your unusable talents in the party sheet, but it is a bit odd.

jaj22 said:

Yeah, this is important. Our Bright Wizard turned into a gibbering useless wreck in his first combat. But that was mainly coz he didn't know what he was doing, and after that he realised what he was able to get away with and what would be pushing it. So, he controlled himself with that in mind. So when he did get into a similar state later, that was because he knew he had to push himself because the encounter was difficult and the party was in grave danger. He knew what he was getting into, and he decided it was worth the risk.

Players shouldn't expect to be able to pull three manoeuvres and go full reckless every round. But this is an option for the desperate.

monkeylite said:

Hi. Which effect card was this? I coudn't find one with this effect.

I just meant it vaguely as a description, not as a proper card or effect. He was just frightened and strained.

Hmm, another claim of the book(s) being a minefield of typos. Surely if there are that many it can't be too hard to find a few examples? Please post some since I seem to be oblivious to them.

Add in the fact that there are numerous other things that are not of the player's choice that can increase Stress or Fatigue and yes it is easy, especially for starting characters, to pass out from Fatigue or Stress. The system relies on the GM understanding and making use of the three Act episode format with a Rally Step between Acts. Without Rally Steps to allow characters to recover from Stress and Fatigue, you severely limit their options to perform maneuvers and put them at greater risk of passing out. It is a bit of a mindshift from other games where you may be used to thinking of an encounter as the smallest unit of an adventure.

The rules tell us that Skills are the more generic abilities that can be improved and used irrespective of current career, while Talents are the extra specialized type of training that one gets from actively performing one's career. If one moves to a career that doesn't have say, a Tactics slot, then it's kind of like you aren't using that type of ability enough in that career to be able to benefit from Tactics learned in other careers. You're probably familiar with the cliche, use it or lose it. However, that's a pretty thin explanation for the Talent socket mechanic. Even if I accept the loss of the slot, it doesn't help explain why it costs a maneuver to swap out an active talent during an encounter and that you can only swap out a talent if the currently slotted talent isn't recharging. It's like saying that even if I'm in a career where these talents could be used, I need a moment to sift through my brain to access a particular one and if I've recently used another, that activity becomes somehow more difficult. And let's not get started on how I can socket one of my Talents that I can't socket in my current career in the Party sheet where not only I can now use it anyway, but so can my companions who may have never been in an appropriate career. It's like they learned it from me and now even though I'm no longer in a career where I would expect to make use of it, I can because my companions using it somehow reinforces my knowledge of it where my career doesn't. In the end it's just a mechanic the designers thought would be neat. When placed alongside actions, It forces you to take talents into consideration when planning career advancement since whether or not you can use previously taken talents will inform your career selection and perhaps help curtail career hoping to cherry pick other advancements. It does seem to make talents one of the less desireable advancements since their use is so much more restrictive than an advance spent on skill training or even an action.