What limits exist for character advances - i.e. caps on characteristic increases, wounds etc. I remember in older versions of wfrp if a career allowed an 10% increase/advance then only a career which offered a 20% increase would give a character the opportunity to increase a particular characteristic etc again.

There isn't a hard cap outlined at the moment. Though it does get prohibitively more expensive.

Max characteristic value is 10. Max training of any skill is 3, and only once per rank. There's no max number of Talents or Action cards you can take, but you are limited to how many Talents you can have "active" at one time.There's no limit on wound threshold, but each advance only raises your wound threshold by 1. There's no limit on how many stance pieces you can buy, but your Characteristics wll limit how many you would reasonably need. There's no limit to Fortune dice on Characteristics.

...and the allowed number of each type of advance is shown on the front of each Career card. Advances of the first four lines on the back of the character sheet do not count against those advance options - for example, if you have wounds 0 (zero) on your advance option chart on a career card, you can still advance wounds by 1.

Yep, this is an "interesting" shift from previous version.

In V1 and V2, in the majority of cases the higher stat advances (+30/+40 etc) were only available in the more advanced careers.

As people have mentioned, this now is no longer the case, which is one of the reasons why FFG have comfortably got away with only releasing a small number of advanced careers; a PC can happily move through the multitude of basic careers and still advance their character comfortably. The diffculty of increasing a stat becomes how much it costs to increase it in "a" career, rather than the amount of xp it costs to get to a suitable career that has the +40 advance you want/need.

This is one of the reasons why i think as we see more advanced careers they will have more sockets and such to offer the PC. Unless you have a specific career path you want to follow (wizard/priest for instance) then moving into an advanced career doesn't really offer the average PC anything more than moving into another basic career.

mac40k said:

"Max training of any skill is 3" is derived from the character sheet?

I can't find it anywhere in the rules...

Yes. Just like you can't buy more than 1 fortune die for a characteristic, and the 10 advance slots are technically "maximums" for a career (thus, making a maximum of 10 for characteristics, etc). There are only 3 training boxes on the character sheet, and thus the maximum for training a skill is 3.

LukeZZ said:

Yes, it is never explicitly stated that you can only train a skill a max of 3 times. The rules only say "When a skill is trained, a check mark is made next to the skill on the character sheet. For each training box checked off, the character adds one {expertise die} to characteristic checks when that skill is relevant. A character can train a skill once per character rank. When a character goes up in rank, he can spend advances to gain further training in a skill."

Since there are only 3 training boxes on the character sheet for each skill (both Basic and Advanced), that makes it impossible to train a skill a fourth time, since there are no more boxes to be checked off after the third. Again, I'm sure the designers thought that this was self evident and that people were bright enough to figure this out without explicitly stating it in the rules.

mac40k said:

Still I think that this kind of rules should be written on the rulebook and not extrapolated by a character sheet.

Since on the sheet there are 3 slots for the weapons does it means that a character can carry only 3 weapons? Or that the maximum number of advanced skills is 6?

When a rule is written, it's better... I think! :-)

dvang said:

Uhm... you can buy more than 1 fortune die for each characteristic...

LukeZZ said:

Common sense has to prevail. A character can't be a walking arsenal due to the encumbrance rules, so three weapon slots is plenty.

There are only 9 advanced skills in total. I challenge you to come up with a character that would need more than 6 slots.

Why does the rule for 3 levels of training per skill needed in the rules when it is blatantly obvious from looking at the character sheet that that's all you can train?

However, there is nothing stopping you from not treating the checkboxes as limitations if you want to for your game. Since it doesn't say that you can only train a skill three times in the rules, you can even do so without claiming it is a house rule. Of course, you'll have to come up with a modified character sheet to track that, but why let that fact get in the way of your interpretation?

mac40k said:

Just want to commit that the character sheet is not "blantantly obvious" as a set of three. It depends on how a person perceives it. As you stated you "check" the box off and can only do it three times. Someone else might "slash" the boxes and then "backslash" so they can get a total of six trainings. Hence why people would ask for clarification on how the mechanics work.

To this, I would point folks to you second point, alter the ruleset to make the game fun for you and your group. People keep forgetting the fundamental rule of gaming. You are allowed to tweak, alter rules for any game you play to make it fun for you and your group.

nub5 said:

Except now you are making an assumption that it is okay to check a single box twice. Nothing in the rules implies that you can check a box next to a skill more than once. You're really stretching to try to make a point. The rules say that the first step of chargen is to race, write that race down on your character sheet along with any special traits or abilities afforded by that race. It doesn't say you can only do this once or that you can't do it more than once. Why can't I write Human/Elf for race and have the abilities of both? By your logic, that should have been spelled out in the rules as well, else it "depends on how a person perceives it."

mac40k said:

You can "challenge" me to make a character with more that 6 advanced skills... but I think that a character with say 5 careers can (without any trouble) have more than this number.

Beside, in the manual it is written that characters have 3 Fortune Points. Have they made 3 boxes to check in the sheet? No, there is only one blank space to fill. In many RPG the character sheet is not always "the best sheet", and falls short somewhere. I never used it as a source of information, this is why I would have preferred a reference in the book.

I don't think those 3 boxes on the character sheet are a skill upgrade limit, neither those 4 yellow expertise dice are a limit.

(p.35) Skill Training or Specialisation: This advance allows a character to train in one of the skills listed on his career card. A single skill can only be trained once per character rank. If one of those skills is already trained, the character can choose to instead spend the advance to acquire a specialisation for the appropriate skill.

it's said you can upgrade 1 skill per rank ; You gain 1 rank per 10 XP without limit. So you may upgrade more than 3 times a skill...What do you guys think about it ?

willmanx said:

I think it is waaaaay overpowered to train any skill more than 3 times.

Yellow dice are quite powerfull, and I will not allow any of my players to do such a thing (same is with raising any attribute above staring for chosen race+3).

I hate "heroic", so no "dwarfs stronger than giants", no "I always hit" and no "I kill everything with 1 blow" in my group. Ever (even if official rules allow it).

Sunatet said:

Yes, beside the fact i tried to resume the rules, i do agree with you. This expertise dice is powerful.

As a GM here's what I do : after 3 advances in the same skill (once per square on the sheet), the only way to progress more is getting different specializations in that skill.

willmanx said:

Yes, expertise dice are very "powerful"... too many of them almost all the rolls would become trivial.

LukeZZ said:

Have you even looked at the Advanced Careers? A wizard may have Channeling, Education, Magic Sight, and Spellcraft. What kind of convoluted career progression has him aquiring and training Animal Handling, Medicine, and Tradecraft, let alone Invocation or Piety. I'm sure that mechanically you can find a way to need more than 6 advanced career slots just to prove a point, but you'd have a real hard time justifying any such career progression in my game, so it wouldn't be "without any trouble."

As to Fortune Points, you start with 3, you always start with 3. You track them with tokens. You don't start with less and gain them with advancements, so no checkboxes needed.

But as to the root question of training a skill more than three times, if you need that spelled out in the rules because it isn't obvious from the character sheet, how do you ever expect to play, let alone run this game since the results of die rolls made in story mode aren't spelled out? What does 3 successes on a Observation roll made to spot someone in a market square mean? What if I roll two boons? The rulebook doesn't cover this either. As I said in an earlier post, the rulebook doesn't say I can race only once or say that I can't it multiple times. Why can't I choose Human/Elf and have the racial abilities of both? Everything can't be and doesn't need to be spelled out in minute detail. Use your brain.

The character sheet included is the only character sheet the rules are intended to reference. Again, as I've already said, you can allow people to train more than 3 times in a skill in your game if you want. Just don't come back to the forums complaining about how powerful your characters are since they are rolling 5 or 6 Expertise dice which after Righteous Successes results in 11 successes, 6 boons and 3 Sigmar's Comets. Me I think I'll stick to common sense and halt it at the 3 boxes that are provided on the official character sheets.

For some reason the word s-e-l-e-c-t keeps getting deleted from my posts. Sorry if that caused any confusion.

mac40k said:

I was only thinking that rules should be put in the rulebook...

first off, let me say this. each game is owned by the people playing it, the GM and the players, let them decide how to work it for their game. "hous rulz iz gud" as the orc would say.

if we are talking about specific rules pertaining to this situation, the only time a limitation on the number of dice you can get is "one per rank" there is no argument saying you cant have more because there is not room for it on the character sheet. there is also only one box for training fortune dice in a characteristic but on page 37 that "fortune dice are cumulative. if a character already has a fortune die in a characteristic from a previous advance, selecting this advance again provides a second die to the characteristic pool."

i do think that too many die in a skill is a bit over powered and a limit is probably a good thing, but in the end characters are going to be overpowered anyway. remember that the cap for characteristics is 10, a character swinging a sword with 10 strength doesnt even really need 1 trained die in his or her skill to be overpowered.

In general, most of my WFRP characters (in past versions) didn't survive their first career. Leveling far enough to be truly powerful was usually an irrelvant issue. You just kind of got stoic when you took a crit in your arm from a firearm that bursts a major blood vessel or glances off the shoulder-blade down into your heart; death was always just around the corner. I still kind of feel that if you crit a goblin's head with a blunt weapon you should still get out 2d6 to see how far away it lands in a random direction. Crits may have changed a little but I am not sure we really need leveling caps. Just play viciously...like its Warhammer and not D&D or something.

evilben said:

there is also only one box for training fortune dice in a characteristic but on page 37 that "fortune dice are cumulative. if a character already has a fortune die in a characteristic from a previous advance, selecting this advance again provides a second die to the characteristic pool."

Correct. The rules do not say to check that box. What the rules do say implies that you have to write a numeral in that box. The rules don't explicitly say this either, but again, I'm sure the designers thought we were smart enough to figure this out.

So by the way, do you have any idea whether should there be also a rank limit for the fortune dice advancement?