I'm a long time wfrp player and gm. I've played extensively all three incarnations. I was bored with 2nd ed. mainly because I felt that rules as written required lots of tweaking. I have been worried that it is the same old story with 3rd ed. I was looking at the action cards and at the first glance some of them are unbalanced. I've also read about too high success rate and weak monsters. WTF I thought, how can this be happening again. Well, after some study I learned that my panic has been unjustified and house rule frenzy of the community is to some extent unnecessary. Let me explain my views using some examples.

In wfrp3 you can make cheesy combat machine from the start that has 5S, defense 2 (from armour), some pretty impressive action cards like:
Set1: Double Strike, Disorienting Blow, Improved Parry, and Improved Dodge or
Set2: Reckless Cleave, Improved Parry, Improved Dodge, and Improved Block
There you have too high success rate, unbalanced cards (Double Strike vs. Disorienting Blow), and monster killing capacity that greatly surpasses previous edition characters. Or is it so? Lets do some very rough considerations:

Equivalent 2nd ed combat character with few advances, say WS50, 2A. This is possible at close to the beginning with some luck. Two of these type warriors face eachother in duel. The succees rate of both attacks is roughly 25% so after two attacks about 0.5 hits go through.

At the same time 3rd edition combat machines of set1 and set2 face each others in parallel warhammer universe. Warrior 1 has dice pool 3 blue, 2 red, 1 yellow, 2 white, 3 purple, 4 black. Suprisingly, success rate is only 51%. Moreover, there are likely more banes than boons. His double strike is not so hot afterall. It becomes also quite fatiguing which is bad in prolonged combat which seems now happening. What is more interesting is that Disorienting Blow now becomes better than anticipated. Staggered condition is really good and Blinded and Exposed are useful against those defences.

What is now very different compared to the old version is that goblins and skeletons and other weaklings don't possess any threat against these 3rd ed. warriors. In 2nd ed. era they did which was cool and all. But Fate points are not needed anymore and weak vs. weak combats are more interesting. Its up to gms (as always has been) to provide enough challenge to those good combat characters in 3rd. To me atleast, it seems that tools are in correct order in the basic box. I'm looking forward to new bestiary that surely will contain many more toys to play with.

After killing off two characters last night and throwing their useless carcasses into Nurgling-vomitous-laden mud, I've found that as a GM, I prefer to just use up ALL of the ACE dice on the first attack and get it overwith.

My players figured out the Rapid Fire and Improved Defenses already, so I just escalate as a GM on that first round..then for the rest of the game I regularly challenge their shortcomings..not to be un-fun, but to demonstrate that a well-rounded character is more useful.

The advantage of dumping all the ACE dice at once is that it shows that they probably wasted what could have been an interesting character build on min-maxing..min-maxing that the GM is just going to hop over the fence for.

jh

Thug said:

Okay, how did you figure that out? Each die has it's own success rate or ability to flub the success of another die.

Can you share your wisdom on how to determine relative percentage of success?

I've been trying to get people to share this with me since I first started posting in these threads. And I don't want to have to feed all of the dice into a PC program to figure it out every time.

Thug said:

4 black... why? Best defence you can have is 2.

3 purple? If they are using all their improved defences on that attack they will be defenceless next round.

You are right that 51% isn't too bad, but in reality his chance to hit would be 87% and 55% for three successes. Defence cards can modify that, but that would be his base chance to hit for a newly created character.

Besides Player vs. Players is irrelevant.

Find success rates here: http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceroller_compact.html

But these are quite fresh (few advances earned) characters. Of cource they take Improved defences early because they are fighters. Guy 1 uses DS (one black) and other reacts using 2 (out of 3) of his improved defences. I assumed that one of the relevant skill is trained so 1 more black. That is 4 blacks with 2 blacks from armour/shield. Next round he can again use the same method by spending 1 fortune point. He can hold his defences up quite long so that the other guy starts to get fatigued (because he is vulnerable to it after spending his creation points to S). This is example that shows that 3rd ed. does not necessarily have hugely different success rates compared to earlier versions.

This can be player vs. player or not, it does not matter. GM can use any tools he wants. And these tools are within the system without modifications. This also works if you give your npc orc just few cards. I would certainly give for example Chaos Warrior all possible defences, otherwise he would have not survived countless battles in the chaos wastes.

The success rates go crazy when player characters or npc:s are ignorantly unbalanced. Those kind of characters deserve to die.

Emirikol said:

100% agree on this.

I had a Gutter Runner almost take out the noble Swordmaster by spending ALL of his A/C/E on rolling initiative, parrying, dodging and attacking. It was pretty awesome. Then, I had him flee as far away as possible (taking several wounds instead of fatigue). The Swordmaster caught up with him, taking a ton of fatigue on the way, and killed him, but was in a pretty bad state once a SECOND Gutter Runner appeared. The look of dread on my player's face was priceless.

GMs just have to be a bit more clever in this system. Battle is no longer Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Way to go. I may do that

jh

Heh, the simple solution is to exploit these "combat machines" weakness. There has to be some area they are deficient in. Take note of where they short suited them selves, and hammer them with it.

You are unlikely to get a first career character in 2nd ed with a WS of 50, unless they are a dwarf. It's only a 1% chance of rolling a 20 for WS, otherwise you need a career with +15% advance to weapon skill and the only career that has that and +2 attack advance is the Estalian Diestro.

Either way the character would still need to have spent 200 xp, effectivly 2 advances in 3rd ed.

Necrozius said:

Great article

I agree that the tools in place are fine and as we see the next set of monsters the threats will surely be there.

So far my players are loving this edition combat is always deadly.

I make each encounter memorable and that adds to the challenge.

Regards

Thug said:

I think you may have missed my point... your calculations are way off because you only use 1d and not 3d for combat and you don't add 4 black to a simple standard attack.

On the weak monsters subject, I use a bit different approach to A/C/E and monster capabilities.

Instead tracking A/C/E I spend them on few chosen monster skills (usually 1-st level of training cost 1 point, 2-nd 2 points, 3-rd 3 points) when I prepare the adventure.

So Aggression goes into physical skills, Cunning into mental skills, and Expertise into specialisations.

It requires a little bit more time when preparing, but saves me the tracking, hollywood movie effect (when a hero gets beaten for few rounds, and then shrugs off and wins on suddenly weakened opponent), and ensures that mobs will be capable all the time in a field I want them to be (in case they escape, and engage players a bit later with backups).

Spending all A/C/E on first few rounds is ok too (especially if you're short on prep time, or in case of random encounters).

Sunatet said:

After having so many of my carefully crafted villains and thugs taken out in round 1, I tend to take the "all at once" approach. Taking the PCs by surprise tends to get the best results. If I'm lucky, a single PC might get a single critical!

If they get more than that, they complain that the fight is too hard. ARGH.

Necrozius said:

I know the pain...

Some of my mobs didn't even had the chance to act at all (they were taken by surpraise by my players ).

But I like to create villains by myself (waiting for this GM toolkit Jay!), and for random encounters I plan to make some skill templates for all A/C/E values (you know, warrior types, rogue types, marksman types, shaman types etc) for quick and easy use. Kind of expanded monster charts.

Emirikol said:

This has been my strategy of late as well. The combats already were going pretty sweeping to the PCs. Once I started using my monsters dice pools up in big ALPHA strikes, the combat has put some of the PCs back into respecting the monsters a little.

My most recent battle had two PCs go down to an assassin monsters. The rest of the party flipped out.

Disengaging with my monsters and spending fatigue/wounds to move to other areas and engage the party also has flumoxed my PCs.

It breaks down to three simple GM actions.

A) Swamp them.
Throw a load of goblins at them for instance.
They may be able to do max dmg and insta kill one per go, but numbers will overwhelm them.

B) Hand out the steroids
Beastmen dying too easy? Up their wounds so they don't.
Make them frenzied, mad or just plain hard nuts to crack.

C) Fight a boxer, box fighter.
Got a 100 ft sniper god?
Mug him in an alley where he must fight in melee.
Got a 2h Sword tank. Stick arrows in him from 100 ft away, then run off as he gets close.
Stick em in a net and beat the snot out them whilst helpless.

The players are at your mercy even if they try to Min max.
So be a conniving vindictive git, and give em a kicking they will remeber.

Show no mercy.

Also remember that you have a deck of different conditions that you can toss at the players. Traps, poison, environmental hazards all contribute to the difficulty of an encounter.

Even D&D, with it's extensive system of encounter ratings, has rules on using these things (traps have challenge ratings too).

ie- night goblins sure are lame on their own, but if the fight is on their OWN turf (in huge numbers, in the pitch dark and being extremely familiar with the terrain and hazards) they could be very dangerous.

Also it helps if half the PCs are still a bit drugged from the poison gas trap a few rooms ago.

Stuntie said:

To be honest that just doesn't click with me. If I wanted I could just let nurgle meet them in the open and eat them in one go, burp and fart out their remains.

What I would like to see is exciting combat, that isn't too predictable or too random. Give my players a genuine challenge, but also let them be superious in some situations or under dogs in others where fleeing is the best option.

In my games with the house rules we use the monsters from the core game are perfectly balanced.

Challenge is great, but if you always create situations where players are victims of the situation or at the mercy of a specific GM setup, then I think things will go sour. The players should be the proactive force in the game. If I set up a challenge and the players for some reason outsmarts the situation, find an easy way out etc. then I stick with my plan and reward them for it.

I don't believe that using rapid fire to kill a player will fix the issues with rapid fire to use that as an example.

Gallows said:

I don't think anyone here advocates killing off the party mercilessly in one shot. The problem is that in some player groups, the BAD GUYS are killed off in one round or two.

On one hand, it is GOOD that the players are having fun and killing off bad guys like protagonists do in movies.

On the OTHER hand, when your main villain or boss dies a really anti-climactic death, then it ruins some of the fun for the DM. How can a storyteller create feasible tension when all the antagonists die like punks without any challenge?

That's one of the major flaws with The Phantom Menace: the droids were useless against the Jedi, creating NO tension at all. Crappy storytelling.

As a DM, I like to run a combat once in a while that makes the PCs appreciate life a little more. I don't want to outright KILL them, just give them a memorable conflict.