So, I just got a PM about my house rules. My answer got so long I decided it might as well be a post so others could benefit or participate

Ralzars House Rules

Quote

Hi,

I'm about your list of house rules. The first thing is Target Defence is always 1 purple and 1 black.
I do have a problem in my group. That problem is a Mercenary -> Veteran (18 advances in total). He has Strength of 4, wears greatsword and has actions like Berzerker Rage, Reckless Cleave and Thunderous Blow. Once he is in rage, even his regular melee attack deals minimum of 15 damage. And with actions like Reckless Cleave or Thunderous Blow it easily gets to numbers like 22. So no foe is too tough for him. We have played through Black Fire Pass adventure, and the boss moster Myrdroth was slain in only about two or three rounds.

So I don't think that adding +1 black is enough. So for now I consider houseruling Defence of the monster to add purple dice instead of black ones. Most monsters have Defence of 1, some do have defence of 0 or 2. Monsters with defence of 3 are very rare - they are Vampires, Daemon Princes and things like that. The only exception is the Spite and Clan Eshin Assassin. With this the combats would get much more tough. And yes, monsters may spend their aggression to add black dice to their Defence, the same way PC use their Active Defence.

What makes me still to doubt is that many tasty actions to have increased difficulty, often at least one black or one purple. So players might resort to always use Melee Attack instead of all their interesting actions. And another thing is that there is almost nothing to compensate the defence for PCs. I mean, it is pretty hard to acquire any Improved Defence, and they would work only once in every other round. I've seen ideas to make Active Defences permanent - they always work and need no recharge. But that lets PCs to effectively defend against multiple foes. Perhaps you can advise something about this.

Well, the 1Purple1Black as standard isn't really about attack difficulty. My players are at the moment mostly pretty useless in a fight. Allthough the ST4 Warrior Priest with a 2-handed hammer does pretty well.
The reason for the rule is that in combination with a couple of others, it fixes a serious problem with the combat rules that makes the encounters very same-y.

Perfect example: The party is traveling along a road. They are ambushed by goblins who are hiding in the bushes with bows.
Goblins have short bows, which have a medium range. So the encounter starts with the goblins and the party being at medium range to eachother.
We roll initiative with the party maybe having some negative for being ambushed. One of the Players is an AG-character like an elf waywatcher or whatever. So he rolls a bunch of dice and wins initiative. Combat starts. The burly fighter with ST5, and Reckless Cleave decides to go first. He takes 4 fatigue in extra manouvres to move into melee and starts killing goblins.

So now the interesting goblin archer ambush encounter is reduced to yet another dull melee-encounter. This happened every **** time in my last campaign. No one ever used manouvres for anything other than getting into melee, no matter how many Fatigue it cost.

These rules:
Standard attack difficulty: 1Purple 1Black
Prepare manouvre: -1Black from attacks
Move manouvre: May only spend 1 Fatigue on this
Action: May exchange Action for 1 free manouvre

Combines to force players to consider what they are using their manouvres on. And makes it so running into combat without "preparing" makes it harder to hit. It lets players and monsters decide to just move one step, then use a support action. Or not move at all to wait for the enemy. It lets ranged characters shoot at the charging melee guys. It makes the free manouvre from mounts MUCH more valuable. It has a bunch of effects that changes combat into something much more strategic than just "run up to the enemy and hit him until he dies".

You are running into another problem I am very familiar with, which is the Reckless Cleave warrior. In my campaign I had 1 high-agility archer, a ST6 dual-wielding berzerker and a ST4, TH5, AG4 Sword-n-board fighter with Reckless Cleave.

These guys could just wade through anything in a round or two of combat. Luckily the AG-guy got cornered by a couple of wolves, which turned out to be SUPER deadly since their basic attack very easily causes Criticals. And the berzerker never knew when to stop, so finally ran into a combat while severely injured and rolled a bad roll.

The last guy though, was unstoppable. He had Improved Block, Improved Parry and Reckless Cleave. He usually killed things in the first round of combat and if not, outlasted them until Reckless Cleave recharged since he was allmost impossible to hit. So I am well aware of the frustration with Reckless Cleave fighters. My campaign culminated in him having a duel with a deamon prince of Tzeentch. Which he lost. So it is possible to kill him in a 1-on-1, you just have to go BIG

Anyway, your solution should not be re-writing the rules to nerf this guy. PPartially because he will probably be a bit dissappointed that you did it and because everyone else will also be undeservedly nerfed. And you might wind up with combats that go "you miss - he misses - you miss- he misses" which gets pretty boring. WFRP3 should be fast, intense and deadly.

So he put a bunch of points into being good in melee combat. Great. Just let him be that. I know it's frustrating when your big baddie dies in a round or two, but that's just how it is. (By the way, if you are using the additional rule of adding extra damage for extra successes, just stop using it. It's a big part of the problem. It works fine with weak starter characters but around tier 2 combat characters start causing way too much damage. It also made the Wizards "magic dart" his most effective attack spell. Which was a stupid side-effect.)

What you need to do is be aware of what his combat weaknesses are, and set up some encounters that exploit them. There are two things to keep in mind here:

1: The first being that he can just run in and hit the boss monster with Reckless Cleave in round 1. My hose rules fixes this as long as they are not starting the combat at close range. So he might have to spend a round or two just charging to get to the monster.
In addition, don't have every fight be on a flat unimpeded plain. Write it with obstacles and walls. Or just the enemies as obstacles. If the beastmen fighters are in front and the shaman in the back, you can't just run past the beastmen. You have to spend extra manouvres to run around them. Have them fight in a swamp where you can't do extra move manouvres etc. Make the fights interesting because of the environments as much as the nemies. My partys Sigmar priest allmost got killed by three thugs in an alley because he had AG2 ST4 and the narrow alley gave 2 Misofrtune Dice to physical checks if you had higher ST than AG.

2: A guy with Reckless Cleave is a big baddie slayer. He has a really powerfull alpha-strike, but then he's a bit spent and he has just set one of his defences on recharge. What you do with a guy like this, is that you attack him with a bunch of normal enemies. So he did 22 Wounds to the goblin? That's nice, there's 4 more of them. Also, most players do not think about when they use their Defensive actions. They just throw one in for each attack until they run out. You can exploit this by attacking with weak enemies first and then pull out the big gun.
Take a good look at the action cards available for enemies by the way. I just discovered that the basic Skaven attack causes Fatigue. With a bunch of skaven you can knock a character out by Fatiguing him. Fatigue does not care how armoured you are.

And about Improved Defences: I have mostly made them a bit harder to aquire because they are super effective. 1 Extra Purple on an attack makes a big difference. In addition, I just needed more practical skill specializations, since the list in the rulebook is so weak.

Yes, perhaps you're right.
At least, weakening this Reckless Cleave PC will also weak other PCs that don't deserve it. This would be in addition to my other doubts. It is not that combats would be you miss - he misses - you miss patter: currently PCs almost always hit, and monsters have some 50% chance. But it will surely downgrade PC's actions so that they don't get all those fancy results from multiple successes and boons.

I will surely be using your option of "exchange Action for a free manoeuvrable" and "only 1 additional manoeuvre at the cost of 1 fatigue". And I plan to try with additional success = additional damage, but only for basic Melee Attack and Ranges Attack cards. All other attacks would remain unchanged for now. This should be a benefit for monsters since monsters use basic attacks more than PCs. I shall see how it works.

But I doubt that having prepare manoeuvre at the cost of one black die does solve the problem you mention. What I see is that PC would either use the manoeuvre to get closer to enemies or for prepare - when they don't need to move. And as I understood you, one of your goals is to have PCs to use manoeuvres differently. My PCs do use manoeuvres to reload their pistols and crossbows, to sheathe and unsheathe weapons. But ideally I would want them to see using manoeuvres to aid each other, to interact with the environment and get advantages, and so on. No clear solution from me for this unfortunately. My PCs simply forget that they may use manoeuvres to aid each other and thus grant white dices. Will need to remind them every time.
Anyway, psychologically players would feel more comfortable when their PC would get a white die if they use prepare manoeuvre rather then add black die and force PC to use the prepare manoeuvre to get rid of it. But that is a pretty minor point.

About improved defences. Actually I found a good article Purple Is The Two Black which states that one purple die is mostly equivalent to two black dice. You may use this dice roller to verify that on your own. I've pre-set a typical attack pool of my Reckless Cleave PC. But this proportion works well with pretty any combination. The only exception is higher probability to get chaos star, naturally.
This means that Improved defences are not significantly better than their normal variants when PC has relevant skill training. Normal defence grants two black dice while improved one grants one purple. But you need to waste an advance to get the improved defence. I know there are also Advanced variants of those defences, but I don't have them nearby to reference.

The best thing could be that Rank 1 or 2 PC should not have access to powerful attacks such as Reckless Cleave, perhaps.

About your example with goblin archers I would recommend to have archers placed separately to each other so that engaging one of them doesn't bring all others engaged as well. PC would need to move between them and loose manoeuvres and perhaps fatigue. Then they would have a surprise round before PC even have a chance to react. And at last, goblins might be hidden, even after firing arrows. Successful Observation could reveal a couple of them, but not all at once. The PC would need to use Assess the Situation action (something that my PC never ever did at all, BTW).

Anyway, I agree that I need to spend more time thinking about how to present combat encounters, so that the PC don't just cut through it in a couple of rounds.

Quote

And I plan to try with additional success = additional damage, but only for basic Melee Attack and Ranges Attack cards. All other attacks would remain unchanged for now. This should be a benefit for monsters since monsters use basic attacks more than PCs. I shall see how it works.

Hm, in my games I think it's mostly been the Player Characters that use Basic Melee and Basic Ranged attack. The NPC's mostly have their own actions. Like the basic skaven attack I mentioned. Make sure you use these as much as possible as they are designed to be used against players. The basic attack for wild animals for example, has a high chance of criticals. Also remember that as GM you are free to give NPCs flavour by mixing stuff up. For example, there isn't any actions for thugs and criminals. It's just "Townsfolk" or "Soldiers". So I gave the thugs in my games the skaven basic attack combined with the soldier "Subdue" action and use the "Ruffian" NPC card from Winds Of Change to create a bunch of leg breakers who specialise in beating, but not killing, people.

Quote

Anyway, psychologically players would feel more comfortable when their PC would get a white die if they use prepare manoeuvre rather then add black die and force PC to use the prepare manoeuvre to get rid of it. But that is a pretty minor point.

I considered this, but it skews the odds so the basic melee combat of two guys going toe-to-toe has a default extra white dice. The Black dice symbolises not comitting to the attack. If you unsheathe your weapon and attack without bothering to pay a Fatigue to remove the Black dice, you are paying for having to unseathe your weapon for example. It's a penalty for doing anything else than concentrating on your opponent.
I've only had a couple of fights since I introduced this, but I allready saw a LOT more manouvering and planning than I ever did before. Also, this rule makes all the effects that give an extra free manouvre finally mean something. None of my players have ever used one before. Because they were allready in combat and once you're in combat manouvres were useless.

Edit: to give some examples of how Manouvres became pointless in melee combat:
Character looses weapon while in melee: uses his one manouvre to pick it up. So no effect?
Character gets knocked prone: uses his manouvre to get back up. So no effect?
Character switches weapon: uses his manouvre to switch weapons. So no effect?
My rule gives a penalty of 1 Misofrtune Dice or 1 Fatigue in each of these cases and any other that might come up. Also, effects that makes you not have a free manouvre also suddenly gives 1 Black Dice to all attacks.

Quote

About improved defences. Actually I found a good article Purple Is The Two Black which states that one purple die is mostly equivalent to two black dice. You may use this dice roller to verify that on your own. I've pre-set a typical attack pool of my Reckless Cleave PC. But this proportion works well with pretty any combination. The only exception is higher probability to get chaos star, naturally.
This means that Improved defences are not significantly better than their normal variants when PC has relevant skill training. Normal defence grants two black dice while improved one grants one purple. But you need to waste an advance to get the improved defence. I know there are also Advanced variants of those defences, but I don't have them nearby to reference.

I've had a discussions about that and I don't really agree, since the Purple Dice also gives a chance of Chaos Star. Also, many characters do not fulfill the special requirement, so only add 1 Black dice. I just know that once the Reckless Cleave character had something like 4 Defence and was able to add 1 or 2 Purple Dice to an attack he was pretty much untouchable

Quote

The best thing could be that Rank 1 or 2 PC should not have access to powerful attacks such as Reckless Cleave, perhaps.

To make character genereation go faster I never give my players the whole stack of action and talent cards. I filter out fitting cards and let them choose from those. For example, the noble of my group decided to start with a rapier and pistol. So I gave him some Diestro, Blackpowder and noble social cards to choose from. I made sure to leave Reckless Cleave out this time around

>> Also, many characters do not fulfill the special requirement, so only add 1 Black dice.
If they are not fulfiling the requirement to get the second black die, they would not get the Improved action as well. These cards require a rank in corresponding skill. So once a PC has that rank and gets two black dice, it is mostly a waste to spend an advance for Improved defence. Yes, it does add Chaos Star effect, which is pretty much the only difference. It may impact your game more since you count a Chaos Star as 1 challenge + 1 bane though.

PS. Nice dodge with having players to select from a limited amount! Next time I gather a new group I'll do the same. But for now I have my 15-18 advances PC...
Should consider slaughtering them all in some side quest and have players create new Rank 1 characters for TEW, hohoho...

True, the ones who get the Improved version usually allready have 2 Misfortune effect. I think part of the reason to get it is because they had everything else they wanted and it makes way for getting the Advanced version (can't remember what it did).

I would strongly reccomend new characters for TEW. Using the background cards, extra character creation rules and questions adds a lot of flavour to the adventure. Besides an experienced group will just mow through most encounters in TEW unless you upgrade it. And from what I read, you will still have the Reckless Cleave guy

May I reccomend a Deamon Prince of Tzeentch?

Oh, wow! Indeed a pity that I didn't examine Creature Vault cards before! "Jeer 'n' Jab", "Chompity Chomp Chomp" and "Stick 'em wif da Pointy End" did make my day!
My PCs have been just way too lucky so far. This should end

Some quick input from me.

Reckless Cleave and Thunderous blow are powerful actions but are generally overkill against most monsters. The fact that reckless cleave puts recharge tokens on a defence (and the PC in the group uses a greatsword) would leave that character vunerable to attacks.

During all my campaigns there's always been some character with RC and TB, and I've not felt that it is overpowered in a general sense. A combat character should have oppurtunity to shine in combat, just as investigative or social characters will have their moments.

All in all, most monsters die after 2-3 turns of combat anyways, so why punish a player who has chosen to focus on combat (reward him a mark of Khorne or something instead).

12 hours ago, dertarr said:

Oh, wow! Indeed a pity that I didn't examine Creature Vault cards before! "Jeer 'n' Jab", "Chompity Chomp Chomp" and "Stick 'em wif da Pointy End" did make my day!
My PCs have been just way too lucky so far. This should end

Good to hear It will also make encounters more flavourfull.

I've found that player Actions generally do not work for NPCs and NPC Actions do not work for players. They are just subtly designed differently. So the basic Melee and Ranged attacks is mostly just for players while NPCs have their own Actions. The lethality of encounters often go way up when you use appropriate NPC actions. One thing I've learned to keep an eye out for: If none of the NPC actions can cause Criticals, players can not die during the encounter unless they have lots of criticals allready or they all go down.

11 hours ago, k7e9 said:

Some quick input from me.

Reckless Cleave and Thunderous blow are powerful actions but are generally overkill against most monsters. The fact that reckless cleave puts recharge tokens on a defence (and the PC in the group uses a greatsword) would leave that character vunerable to attacks.

During all my campaigns there's always been some character with RC and TB, and I've not felt that it is overpowered in a general sense. A combat character should have oppurtunity to shine in combat, just as investigative or social characters will have their moments.

All in all, most monsters die after 2-3 turns of combat anyways, so why punish a player who has chosen to focus on combat (reward him a mark of Khorne or something instead).

Yeah, I generally have the same approach. Allthough I often feel the big baddies go down too fast. They never get to use their cool abilities because the players allmost allways win initiative and then just alpha-strike the big baddie. But as mentioned earlier in the thread, this can be fixed with how you design encounters and by limiting movement.

My Reckless Cleave warrior actually used it with an axe and shield. So he allways set Dodge on recharge and used Improved/Advanced Parry and Block. Then he had something like 8 or more Soak. So he was hard to take down.

Now he's playing a ST2 Gambler with a rapier he's not strong enouhg to parry with. And he was pretty useless in his two combats so far

Actually, I've read in Creature Guide that all NPC and monsters do have an access to all basic actions including block/dodge/parry - as long as they meet the requirements. Previousely I didn't use defensive actions for monsters - I was sure that if a monster wants to defend itself, it will use aggression pool. But no, it is not the case: Page 8: "Custom Creature Actions". Perhaps I don't get it right, as many creature actions are tagged with "Basic" keyword.
Then monsters get actions due to their race. And GM has an option to add some more actions from a normal PC pool if the creature card indicates some slots for it.
The problem is that it gets way too difficult to track recharge tokens for all those defense cards along with A/C/E.

Yeah, I know they are available. I just don't use them unless everything else is unavailable. I haven't run intop much of a problem tracking recharge. But then I usually do not run mixed enemy groups. Unless it's monster types that are very different where there is little or no overlap in actions.
I've actually given NPCs Improved or Advanced Defensive Actions as their extra actions. For example a Chaos Warrior with a 2-hander and Improved Parry. Or a Witch Hunter with Advanced Dodge. I usually go for the NPC action cards though. There's so many flavourfull and deadly options

Edit: To easy the recharge tracking. You can just consider giving them a defensive action as increasing their Defense or Soak. Or for Improved/Advanced Actions adding a Purple to all attacks against them.

Yes. In fact I plan to create some application to track WFRP3 combat - both to have something suitable and to practice myself in golang, html and other staff. But I'm at the very beginning and will not have much time. So the product would not be ready any soon. And it will have some legal issues, I suppose... :(

I'm guessing the legal issues are going to get less important since FFG no longer has the lisence.

Anyway, I was re-reading this and just realized something about the 2Black = 1 Purple and how Improved defenses did so little: in my house rules I have a new set of Global Effects (see the last page of the house rules). A Comet may count as a Success AND a Boon. And a Chaos Star may count as a Fail AND a Bane. With this change, adding a Purple instead of 2 Blacks makes a bigger difference.

Another house rule I'm thinking of adding is a Corruption rule. The way Corruption points work at the moment is ok, but it's generally not very flavourfull. What I intend to add is that the GM may spend 1, 2 or 3 of a characters Corruption Points to force him to make a Discipline check to resist giving in to some temptation.

For example, a Character is visiting a rich NPC employer. He sees a piece of jewelry on the table and the GM suddenly asks for 2 of his Corruption points and tells him to make a Normal Difficulty Discipline Check to resist stealing the jewelry.
Or a Discipline Check to not attack an NPC you are arguing with.
Or a Discipline check to not keep ordering more wine at the tavern.
etc

It lets the Corruption points work as deteriorating the characters morals and personality. Showing much clearer how chaos corrupts and changes people exposed to it on a basic level, not just by giving them visible mutations.

An interesting idea with Corruption. You could adjust difficulty of the check to the amount of corruption points in question. And I would suggest to let PC remove the corruption only if the check succeeds.

Hm, maybe. It sounds like a fun rule, but could be a bit harsh. But then Warhammer is a bit harsh.

It strikes me that one thing I should have been using Corruption for but just didn't think about is Insanity rolls. After an encounter when you roll to check if a temporary Insanity becomes permanent or not, adding Purple Dice could be really effective for long term effects on the character.
I guess it could go for the same when healing. Particularly if recieving a healing spell, allthough then the caster would get the purple, not the person being healed?

I think I'll go for just using Corruption Points for whatever I feel like The importat bit is that it feels thematic.

My group had found a corrupted chaos weapon and were in the process of delivering it to a light order wizard for destruction/safekeeping. Then I secretly offered one of the players a deal. Bring the weapon to the mirror (as in the mirror in the Mirror of Desire adventure) and as a reward get rid of 4 corruption. The player did it, and the demon got a powerful weapon.

That felt like a good way to spend corruption.

Haha, nice. A litteral deal with the devil.

Allthough any action like that should really result in more Corruption. You should have given him a Daunting Corruption Check after the deal was done

Oh well, it can still come back to bite him in the bum via a well-armed deamon

Yes, it should probably have resulted in more corruption. But I feel the deal was made semi out of character between the player and me as a GM (as corruption points are a game mechanic). So as a GM I'd be cheating/lying if I removed the corruption and then called for a corruption check. Obviously, in character, the character felt the need to bring the sword before the mirror (without the other PCs knowing). In the game I have no problem with lies, cheating and chaos twisting words thought.

And the deamon did go on a murder spree (for which the character felt super guilty). They have not even captured the demon yet, so it will probably come back to haunt the group even more in the future.