Here is a simple houserule.

When considering a change of career, the player may choose to "stay" in the present career for another Rank by paying the normal career change cost. If he does so, the GM must still provide a new character sheet with a blank career advancement section.

The obligation to change careers to get better was one of the things that bugged me in previous versions. The wonderfully flavourful and diverse basic careers would quickly disappear as the PCs moved into advanced careers. Hunters were necessarily less tough and agile than scouts...

Now, with this houserule, V3 will allow for extremely competent and experienced hunters ! Or anything for that matter. That makes every career an advanced career of sorts.

Jericho said:

Yes and that's one of the reasons I like this new edition. Most careers are basic careers. A few still require a specific basic career, but the GM can easily set up his rules as he likes, because there is no predifined paths you need to take. I do not allow players to start our as Iron Breakers for instance. Players will have to complete a whole combat oriented career first, then aquire the very rare dwarven armor... then they may the career. Becomming an iron breaker has become a while individual campaign for one of my players, while we are playing Thousand Thrones.

I am consider that once you are done with a carrier, you may stay in the career, but all advance are consider of out of carrier advance until the player choose a new carrier.

In this case, it still allow the player to advance, but in a less cost efficient manner.

I also allow my players to "stay" or to choose the career a second or a third time but he has to complete it first.

I agree totally. Let them stay in the same career, do another round of ten advances off the same scheme as they did the first time. So you get three skills and 2 talents and have the same favored abilities. It is a players choice, a choice, in some ways, that penalize them. I would make them pay for each rank of completion (it works out numerically), but why penalize them any further? Their advancing in the same career is no more powerful (and in some ways less) as switching careers, so just let them level normally all over again in the same career. So if someone wants to be the worlds greatest scribe, let them be. There is absolutely no harm in it. Just my two cents

Commoner

commoner said:

I absolutely agree with you.

This is what our Norsca Babarien would have done, if the Wargor wouldn't "picked him up" in the starting adventure...

I agree. I was a bit surprised that the rules said that after 10 advances, the career has nothing more to offer you. It's mechanically not true (the 4 standard advances + the career-specific advances already number more than 10, and there's also 2 characteristics to advance), and it just doesn't make sense that you can't have really experienced, dedicated mercenaries and what not.

Besides, in the previous editions, the forced career switch made very little sense from an in-game perspective. The fun thing about careers is that they're so much more than a generic class. Allowing players to switch freely to any career to get new advances, without any consideration for the in-game reality (become an Assassin without assassinating anyone ever? A Mercenary Captain without a company? Explorer without ever having left the country?), destroys this and turns careers into generic classes. And lame ones at that, because the mechanical differences aren't really all that big. It's the background that makes them cool, so we need to keep that.

And allowing PCs to stay in the same career while still advancing effectively, is exactly what fixes that.

My suggestion for this house rule:

After you've finished the career and paid for the dedication bonus, you can choose to reset your career. It costs nothing (or maybe 1 advance?) , and you get to fill out a fresh set of 10 career advances. Since you already have the dedication bonus, you can't get it a second time (this might be the biggest disadvantage of staying within a career, but it's not a crippling one) , and you keep your dedication bonus if you leave the career before finishing it a second time.

Another option would be to allow them to fill out all career advances (including characteristic increases), and not just 10. That would allow you to stay within the career a bit longer, but eventually you run into limitations and will have to switch. It still offers a lot more flexibility in when a character switches to a new career, and is suitable for people who don't want the PCs to remain boatmen and scribes indefinitely.

Rank 5 commoner anyone?

Our GM (in his great and mighty wisdom) is letting us stay in a career (if we wish) until we have bought all the advances and the stats.

Tho we can still leave and get dedication as soon as we've spend 10 xp as normal.

Seems to me to be a conflict between standalone careers and 'progressive' careers.

It makes perfect sense to career hop into better and better forms of wizard, and this gives the player a tangible advantage and reward for doing so but a ratcatcher suddenly going 'I'm going to be a ninja!' is unrealistic at best and penalises the character unless they stick to a rigid set of careers which allow them to make the most of their acquired skills and abilities.

I'm willing to bet a high ranking wizard is more effective, cohesive and able to bring many more of their skills and abilities to the table than a warrior/ratcatcher/roadwarden/burgher.

I do like some of your ideas though, will post up if i think of any interesting solutions myself.

mcv said:

I'm going to be using one of these approaches in my own game as well. I like the idea of letting a Soldier continue to advance as a Soldier with the understanding that he's giving up variety (by way of different Talent slots, career skills, etc.) in favor of further focus, which makes perfect sense to me.

I disagree with staying in the same career or allowing another run through a completed career. Part of the charm of WFRP is the variety of careers and the forced career transition. When you look at Initiate to Disciple or Apprentice to Acolyte, there's very little difference between their advancement options (one additional action option each is all). Characters in these "vertical" career paths aren't diversifying their abilities, they are gradually becoming specialist, getting better at a few things. Now you can look at that and say, why can't a Soldier do the same thing? Why can't he focus on getting better at what he's good at rather than diversifying? At some point FFG may come out with a Sergeant Advanced Career that will be a "duplicate" of the Soldier career in the same way that Acolyte merely duplicates Apprentice. While it is true that the core set lacks many Advanced Careers, allowing characters to recycle through completed careers defeats the purpose of having Advanced Careers at all and effectively turns every career into a character class. If the Soldier can repeat Soldier, then the Apprentice should be able to recycle through Apprentice as well. Why then does he need to bother becoming an Acolyte? Recycling Apprentice costs fewer advances and other than the availability of one additional action while in that career, there is no other (mechanical) incentive for a wizard to "advance" within his college. You can be 5 time Apprentice and have the same abilities as a Grand Master Wizard, just not the title (or associated responsibilities). Does this make sense?

I had a boss one time tell me that when looking at resumes and evaluating experience, he looked for variety and/or increasing responsibility. If someone claimed 10 years experience, was it really 10 years experience or just 1 year of experience times 10? At some point, doing the same thing over and over again will not allow further growth. You can't just stay a Soldier and continue to get better, it's up or out. If you feel the need to houserule the Sergeant Advanced career using the Acolyte and Disciple as a model, that's one thing, but allowing multiple repeats of any and all careers is too much. The Rank 5 Commoner is this concept taken to the ridiculous extreme, but I'd also say that a Rat Catcher can only get so good in that profession, then he either has to switch careers or his growth stagnates. In other words, there are a lot of basic careers that I would be unwilling to allow houseruled Advanced forms of, Soldier perhaps being one of the exceptions and even then I'd be inclined to limit these "repeat" careers to one pass only.

It makes sense in the sense (rofl) that there currently aren't 'improvements' on most of the careers. There's only a couple which provide a logical path on to the next 'level' of experience/training.

The soldier should move on to becoming a better soldier/specialist type. Right now he can't, so the logic is to let him stay a solidier until something else comes along where he can be 'more soldiery' than becoming an agitator or rat catcher.

Your thinking with why the Acolyte shouldn't re-Acolyting is sound, assuming the other careers have logical progressions as well. Currently, most do not.

Exactly. Forcing characters to switch to a different profession for game mechanical reasons breaks my suspension of disbelief. That is what turns careers into classes, in my opinion. I'd rather have a career change be a meaningful, in-game choice for a character, and that requires giving players more freedom to decide when to switch. In other words, they need to be able to stay in their career longer.

Although to be honest, I'm currently leaning more towards letting them fill out more than 10 advances as career advances, rather then letting them reset their career and start over. That way, they'll eventually reach a point where their career really stops having anything to offer, they become increasingly limited in how they can grow in that career, and they will eventually look for something new. But they have some more time do to that, and in the mean time, their career puts more of a mark on them.

In the mean time, I'm also in favour of veteran warrior/rogue/etc careers that fit well in the wandering adventurer lifestyle.

I think career hopping works mechanically, but it is completely against the spirit of the game - hence the suspension of disbelief issues.

If players are the sort of people who just want to build and ever increasing and powerful block of statistics then the system works perfectly - they might even relish the chance to add a completely new set of skills to their 'characters' - however deviate too much and you wont be able to use half the abilities you have already acquired, which surely means it is more advantageous in one respect to use the vertical careers?

At least that way you know you will be able to further enhance the abilities you have, without sacrificing any of them 'because the rules say you must'. Specialising is not a bad thing necessarily, it has been staple for many years for characters to fill a certain hole in the groups needs, be it rogue, healer, warrior etc.

I still have issues from a roleplaying point of view though. If you can name one reason why a troll slayer would give up the slayer oath and become a ratcatcher or soldier then the system makes sense, otherwise it needs more thought and flavour and not just increasing numbers of mechanical elements.

Personally i would allow the player to continue in the career until they have finished with it, continuing on another sheet if necessary - after that as you say they either turn their hand to something else or stagnate.

Bigest problem is that some basic careers are their own endpoint. You dont start as a Swordmaster or Ironbreaker - you work up to be one. Except for here where you start as one. Why would you leave it? What else is there that is not a 'downgrade' rather than an upgrade.

Even the advanced careers such as witchhunter are the second step on the career ladder. What do you do for step 3?

I think more basic careers are needed to lead into some of these classes, and further advanced and even higher careers made available to allow for progression upwards as well as lateraly.

Stuntie said:

I fully agree. Swordmaster and Ironbreaker shouldn't be basic careers. And I too wouldn't mind an extra step before you become Witchhunter (but I can live with that one). I can understand they wanted to release some cool new careers, but wouldn't it have been even cooler if they'd released them in a way that made sense?

Most of all, though, we need proper "adventuring" careers. This has been a problem in all editions. Most careers are like a steady job with responsibilities and all that. That makes sense for a starting career that you leave behind, and I guess high-level responsibilities might make sense for really advanced, epic characters (they get to be knights, templars, counts, witchhunters, high priests, highly respected scholars, etc), but for a second career, I really just want something that says: "this guy is a wandering loony that has quite a bit more experience than your average Joe". Veteran Warrior, Charlatan, Spy, that kind of thing. People who do their own thing, but are good at it. That's what intermediate careers should be like.