I saw the same review pathfinder right.

I would also to keep the deabte fair say this i fully use 3.5 d@d and all the rules its a different game.

I have a soft spot for it but i have to admit its just to dam rules heavy.

I have fallen in love with system please dont tell the wife lol

Yeah Pathfinder.

I play it myself with another group where I am lucky to have a really good GM. We have all played together for some time now and agree pretty much to go light on the rules and heavy on the story. we only use the very basics of the system, since only one of the players can remember half of the rules.

But as a wizard I really look forward to the day I get to play with 3rd WFRPG. I like to be a powerful mage with lots of diverse spells to cast but lets face it I never get to use half the spells available to me and end up mostly using a few of the same combat spells in the end because you know you'll get to use them! Its very hard to predict what kind of spells you will need to prepare for each day before you even know what kind of trouble you'll end up in this time. I know I could just play a sorcerer, that way I wouldn't need to think about it that much, but it still bothers me that if I want to have an effect on a combat encounter I will run out of spells in no time and will have to wait untill next day to cast again (at least at low levels). And then of course its risk free and not tiring at all... tsk tsk.

No. WFRPG 3rd is the system I have unknowingly been waiting for for a long time.

Thank you FFG. Now do your best to support it and let the community expand upon it.

CHeers

I'll chime in, too. I thought I was done with RPGs, but this one's just so elegant that I found myself wanting to run it within about ten minutes of sitting down with the rulebook. The system just clears itself out of the way so that you can get straight to the storytelling, and when you do use the rules, they're more fun than restrictive.

I have a really tough time playing 3x/pathfinder anymore. I find the combat "roll to hit, roll to damage" then look up the rules for starvation to be boring. After a few years of playing it combat is stale and not very dynamic and you spend an amazing amount of time either looking up rules, or tweaking your character, and amazingly little time in character.

I personally dont find the combat stale however the characters spell lists at mid level and above takes ages.

I can always keep things moving at pace but one or two encounters is all we will get done at those levels per night and that is telling.

When people say the prep time for a dm takes ages no way. Its how bogged down the characters get with everything they have to remember.

Another thing is that the system scales strangely because at mid levels enemies can kill so easily.

So in balance this system seems so far very fair and scales superbly well.

I have read the rules book and am totally stoked to start running around in this game. I have been playing RPG's for 18+ years and this game really feels like something awesome. Between the dice and the cards there is little to no rules look up. The Party Character concept and stress level is awesome. If the players bicker you can shut them up quickly by sliding the meter over one.

Dice... Superb!! I love dice pools and this brings that up to a whole new level. the pool is storytelling not just a way to generate numbers.

Cards AWESOME!! Unline D&D4th where the cards weigh you down these ones are where the rules are located. If you preform an action you use a card. If you use the card the rules are right there for reference.

Table Top standies and location cards distance meters..... So great I want to sob. You game stops being the miniature battle BS that 4th has become to a good use of just enough info to remind players about what they are doing and where they are going.

Speaking of reminders.... The Event tracker and initiative rules... Great Great great. I love that you don't single out a sh*tty roll as the bottom of the initiative ladder. It really means you as players can plan what they want to do and what order to do it in regardless of any individual die roll.

I can't say enough good stuff about the game.

Without playing it yet I already bought the Players expansion and look forward to buying all the supplements.

OH Yeah one more thing that is brilliant. By FF putting new cards and characters in every supplement they garuntee that every piece that gets published gets purchased so your game group will have all the available goodies to play with. I never ever ever buy campaign packs or world books for games. I prefer to make it all up myself. But this system requires the purchase so you can get the new critical hit cards and new action cards. BRILLIANT!!

My only gripe and its minor... Warhammer has always been a NICHE world. I really hope they push this to the way side a bit for some extra exposure. I hope they spend some advertising dollars and get some cross marketing going. Warhammer computer games are doing well they really should advertise this game in some of that stuff as well. If it becomes more profitable then they will surely support the game for a longer run.

CHEERS ALL

Your grim world of perilous adventure awaits!!

Tim Burton should make a Warhammer Fantasy movie. how cool would that be? Maybe that should be a TOPIC?

chuckroc73 said:

I'm sorry - your argument for this being the best system ever is that it's incomplete? Now, I can see arguing that you have an ease of integration with expansions, as you just add the relevant action card/career to the deck - that's a nice part of the system. But I'm a little incredulous that you are so ecstatic at being required to shell out more money...

phobiandarkmoon said:

To be fair, there's a large portion of the population that enjoys consuming as an end in itself, only they'd never admit it. Chuckroc is at least being honest.

just wanted to thank you all for your thoughts so far

very much appreciated

I don't think I could make the assertion that this is the best gaming system ever. I'm not even sure how one would judge that. The best edition of Warhammer?

From what I've read, people have needed to make some fundamental changes about the how the game is played to make it enjoyable. When I ran it, the counters and bits were a huge distraction for myself and the players.

The removal of the counters in favor of old fashioned pencil and paper and eraser seems to be a common solution. The development of stat cards to help track the various pools for monsters and ignoring the game's recommendation of using cards and/or counters to track wounds says to me that while the game is a good game system, capable of providing a good gaming experience, it suffers from some issues.

The biggest issue is the design and layout of the rulebooks. I know I agree with the common opinion that these books are just a nightmare to navigate and pull rules out of of. A good rulebook is the core requirements of a good game, and WFRP3 fails miserably in that.

The core system has merits, but this game needs a lot of work before I'd ever call it the best ever. I'm not sure how, in the short term, FFG is going to get around the rulebook issue, unless perhaps they released a new hardback with all the books combined, which is organized and written in a more efficient manner. But then, I just dropped quite a bit of money on the game... and that doesn't seem quite fair either.

Layout is disappointing no doubt about it.

However with the living index its not a problem also i used sticky notes before the index to mark pages easy after that.

Check out this review

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOutsiders68

Shadowspawn said:

Not that I'm ready to call this the best RPG ever either, but I'm sure there are lots and lots of more people who haven't felt the need to tweak anything and are having a great time. I know we are at least. You're not forced to use the counters in any way, not using them (but rather pen and paper) is certainly not a fundamental change.

That there is a group of people at the forums who think that the system is unbalanced doesn't mean it is, it's just their opinion.

I don't know, the game seems to think all the counters make things easier to track and it was advertised as part of making the game easier to run. We found it to be the complete opposite and many other people, not just on these forums have found that to be a very huge issue. Leaving those things behind, to me, is a fundamental change in the way that FFG intended for us to play the game.

One GM plus five players means a LOT of counters on the table, and every group I'e talked to that tried or did in fact adopt the system ditched the counters for a more conventional and less space consuming way of recording data. Hardly empirical, but it does seem very prevalent.

boogle, I watched that review, but it sounded more like cheerleading the game rather than giving any real feedback on its merits and flaws. He just seemed to really like the game and wanted to talk about. Not a bad thing, but it wasn't really a review.

The Index is still very incomplete, I can't recall what I was looking up the other day, but the index was missing a link to some crucial data that was buried somewhere in character creation sections. Not to mention the ambiguity of the combat and spell rules and challenges.

The errata and FAQ have gone some ways towards helping this however.

Not the greatest game ever. I've stated my thoughts on other threads.

The game has it's merits, but it is OVER the TOP with the knick knacks and Doo Dads included.

Shadowspawn has also made a lot of statements I agree with so I won't repeat it here.

Shadowspawn said:

We use all of the counters and doodads, and in fact, I use more than FFG provided, as I also use Campaign Coins and am going to start using item cards from Paizo next game. Not saying that it's not a lot to keep up with for some groups, but not everyone has tried to reduce the amount of stuff. Some of us like the shiny bits.

Llanwyre said:

I just find all of those things to be distractions that get in the between the player, the GM and the story. Things that keep the player's minds focused on moving around bits and doodads rather than wrapping their minds around the scene I'm describing or NPC that I'm playing. Just my personal take on it though, I guess others aren't as distractable as our group is.

I would rather have seen more substance and less "tools".

Now having the tools in a separate toolkit that I had the "option" of buying separate from the rules would have been great.

When some of the races and classes are missing from the core box, do we really need the counters? I'd rather have had a complete core system first and then add in all of the tools to make my game easier.

I"m too tired to right a full response to "best system ever" so I'll resond in short:

Pretty much.

Shadowspawn said:

Yeah, I would have thought the things might have been more of a distraction than they actually are. Instead, I'm finding that they really increase our group's ability to work together to visualize a scene and tell the story together. As a player, I have always found that tangible items (cards, pretty clanking coins, props) tend to feel like more of a reward for a finished quest than just a few pencil scratches on a sheet.

In this case, it doesn't hurt that every single person in my group also has a heavy background in board gaming, so they are used to managing bits with almost professional efficiency and turning their attention back and forth between bits and gameplay.

Shadowspawn said:

I don't get how you can consider the way to track things a fundamental part of the system? That's like saying that the layout of the character sheet is what defines a RPG. All in all, I'm also a bit skeptical about using the counters for everything, but when I feel that it becomes a problem I will just switch to pen and paper.

I can see how 5 players (which the game doesnt really support at the moment) would cause "fiddly bit overflow", we're only 3 players at the moment so it's certainly less of an issue. The use of the counters have not really been problematic for us, I think keeping track of things on paper would be worse when it comes to distraction.

With four sessions under our belts, this is the best system I have played in the fantasy genre. System tools that really work include: abstract movement, condition cards, chaos spell effect cards, critical wound cards, banes and boons on successes and failures, acttion cards, everything about the dice system (fortune and misfortune dice really expand the scene's circumstance modifiers), fatigue system (things we had historically taken for granted in other systems became important- baths, sleep, food, clean skivies), insantiy cards( it was fun to roleplay "the shakes").

That said, there are system tools that dont work so well including; normal wound cards(kind of clunky), career sheets (why so big? There's very little in game info on them and yet the impression is that you lay them out on the tableau and reference them), rules examples could have been better in the books(it took a few read-thrus to get our brains around combat difficulty dice), counters are a bit small and fiddly (our group uses them but i can understand that some people would rather use pen annd paper, the nice thing about the counters ,though, is its easier for everyone to see how faitgued, stressed, what-not you are).

My biggest criticism of the product is the world itself. I am new to the Warhammer universe and at this point I find it pretty vanilla. The winds of magic, wizards colleges and orders, religion and gods just have not drawn me in. The fluff in the core product is very middle of the road. I like how they handle the dwarves and there are other things that are OK, but mostly our group is content to come up with our own stuff and mostly ignore the setting. I run rogue trader (played 5 times) and feel the base rulebook did a better job of making the setting pop. I think the charater creation pathway and setting specific character classes go a long way in this regard for the rogue trader setting. I wonder if warhammer fantasy were to use more setting specific careers (i.e. slayers) I would feel differently.

Overall, our Gm has an easy time setting up and running adventures. We play the system as- is, no house rules, and avoid combat at all costs. The system is deadly so we tend to look for other ways to complete our objectives besides wading into battle guns blazing. Of course we still end up in combat its just not something you take lighlty. On most occasions, during combat, the players feel a good deal of tension at the table which in my book is a good thing.

For this style of game "Best ever" is our concensus. I would not make a blanket statement of "best ever" for every genre. Diceless systems, LARP's, what-not fit other play styles better im sure. But compared to other similar RPG experiences (D&D) I would say yes.

You definitely shouldn't judge the Old World by what you find in the WFRP3 boxed set. It is actually a very rich world full of interesting conflict, races and cultures. It does follow many of the tried and true fantasy themes, but I think it does so with a sense of style.

There are a lot of older Warhammer references that can help with learning the world, in addition to excellent series of books by Black Library that help illustrate the Old World.

Some of the really good ones...

Gotrek and Felix

The Witch Hunter Omnibus

The Brunner Omnibus (due out in May)

Tales of the Old World (contains quite a few stories by various authors)

gruntl said:

Well, the game introduces many new mechanics and the text of the book explicitly references using these counters to track those new systems. The rulebook is full of references to use them. That is explicitly how the game is intended to be played by the producer, I'm not sure how you could say it isn't.

One box might not support five players, but two boxes ( a friend sold me his set after finding he didn't like it) and the Toolkit is more than enough dice and counters. Its not really that I don't have the support for the players, its that with five players it takes a lot of table space and a lot of counters present on the table.

So, yes I think the game has a lot of merit, but I think they overdid it by using various tokens or cards to represent every aspect of number tracking. If you take that away and use conventional methods, then I think it becomes more manageable and the system itself can shine.

I use standard D6 of different colours instead of tokens. Very easy to see and track by turning the dice and yoiu only have one per card to keep track off.