The total Soak Value of a creature in the beastiary is Are both numbers under the "To" added together, right? The boar for example (page 48) has 6(2), so its total soak value is 8.

A really strong fighter with a Strength of 5 and Handweapon equipped does normal damage of 10 (5 Strength + 5 weapon damage).

Can it be right, that even if this strong fighter hits the boar, it usually only takes 2 wounds (of 15), because 8 of the 10 wounds are soaked? That seems pretty **** tough to me, considering the boar is only rated 3 Difficulty-Skulls. Is a boar really that hard to kill for starting characters, or am I just doing something wrong.

Another question: The Sniper Shot-Action Card says, it does critical damage with one success. What does that mean? Normal damage + 1 critical, or are all wounds taken criticals?

Thanks a lot!

Uebelator said:

Boars have a lot of soak. 8 total, as you correctly surmised. Yes, that means that most attacks from a Str 5 character with a Hand Weapon, with a single success, will only generate 2 damage after soak. Boars are really hard to kill.

From my (limited) experiences (my wife and I have run several playtest battles, but I haven't run a real session yet), a relatively combat-oriented starting PC seems to be about a 2.5 threat rating - they'll almost always clobber a goblin or ungor, but have to get lucky or smart to beat a crypt ghoul, orc, or, as you point out, a boar. The threat rating system is pretty light and sketchy, it's not terribly precise, but anything with a threat rating 3 or more has the potential for a TPK unless the PCs outnumber it.

Possible mitigating factors to keep in mind:

• The PC will lose the fight in a straight-up slugging match with the boar, but should be able to engineer the fight in a way that lets them win. PCs probably have ranged weapons, and/or the cleverness to climb a tree, use the terrain, etc. At the very least they should be able to generate some bonus Fortune dice, and depending on how you describe the terrain, they may figure out a way to prevent the boar from ever getting to attack. The 3-act structure in this game is meant to make the fights dynamic, and not just a point-blank slugging match, anyway, so use it.
• A combat-oriented PC should have at least one Action card that's better than basic melee attack, and will probably have at least one combat-relevant Talent or Career Ability. With the right cards, rolling three successes or a comet can be devastating. The boar's only equivalent to this is headlong charge, which it should only be able to do once per battle.
• For monsters and NPCs, fatigue is treated as unsoakable wounds. The PCs can either outrun the boar, or force it to pay wounds to keep up with them. The boar's two reckless dice will slowly whittle it away as well. And if the PCs have one of the actions that inflicts fatigue on the target, these can really shine against such high-soak enemies.

Even with those factors, though, a boar is more than a match for most starting PCs.

Uebelator said:

One success on Sniper Shot does the normal amount of damage, but one card at random is turned face up to be a critical wound.

Here's the relevant text from the FAQ:

When an effect lists a result such as critical damage or +1 critical
damage, that does not modify the attack’s damage potential –
rather, it influences how many of the final wounds inflicted become
critical wounds.

...

An effect that states “inflicts critical damage” is mechanically iden-
tical to an effect that stats “+1 critical damage.”

The GM toolkit gives a great optional rule that fixes this problem. I don't know if it's legal to post it here. Anyone's thoughts?

Use better attacks? Our groups Troll Slayer does 14-16 damage no problem with each attack and hits almost 95% of the time.

Some enemies are just pretty tough and harder to take down than others, the beasts specifically are pretty buff in the book compared to lot of the other enemies/creatures.

I would be very wary of using the more damaging combat rules in the GM kit any time soon as really lot of characters will be doing hefty damage with ease, while it is true certain characters don't put out that much damage and have more utility uses, but if you make combat too deadly then you just give a big advantage to those characters that are optimized for combat.

Also keep in mind that the threat value for monsters is comparing monsters to monsters, not to the PCs. A single 3-skull monster is generally tougher/more dangerous than a single 2-skull monster but less than a 4-skull monster. That's about all that the rating says. It has absolutely nothing to do with the
PCs directly.

There are many action cards that increase damage beyond the base (St + DR), too, which many combat oriented PCs will have acquired.

My group and I don't exactly support the fixed damage system.

It's somehow bland. Like you said, each time you hit that boar you deal 2 damage. So you hit it again for 2 more, and then another 2 and so on...

Yes, there are a few ways to increase the damage done but most of the time you're going to do 2 damage to it. There are no suprises there, no criticals, no one shot one kill effects. I hope those optional rules are going to remedy this.

commoner said:

Of course it's legal to discuss rules from ALL expansions here.

Gallows said:

Commoner was being careful with good reason, because Games Workshop is notorious for cracking down hard on any site that explicitly quotes game stats or rules relating to their games. From what I've seen, Fantasy Flight Games has a much more enlightened and player-friendly policy. I'm not contradicting you, Gallows, just clarifying for those who might not know why Commoner was concerned in the first place. The community should be aware of this in case, say, a thread ever come up discussing Fantasy Battles rules vs Fantasy Roleplay rules or the like.

Chaos85 said:

I don't know what you have been playing, but all the players in my current group can do more damage than basic set damage. And almost all attack cards have variable damage depending on what you roll.

One of the benefits is that damage is fairly easy to calculate and manage. Players can quickly determine the amount of damage they are dealing, since the base is always the same, and the only variable is the action and what they roll.

If you think about it, it is essentially the same process everyone uses. Think of DR as an augmentation to Strength. There is still (usually) an element of chance/randomness/die roll that adds to the damage. WFRP3 just has smaller variable damage additions than most other games, put these in with the attack action rather than the weapon, and has put more value into the static value (ie, DR).

So, rather than a Hand Weapon doing 1d10+St it does 5+St, then adds damage based upon the action as well as the roll.

Haggard said:

Yes I know you're right. I wasn't saying that GW won't complain. But I believe that if we can't discuss rules for all expansions, then the site is worthless. It's not like he would be copying the entire book. It's just a matter of pointing out solutions. In fact if the book had a solution, then it might inspire people to get the kit. But perhaps there's a pdf version that people can buy cheaper if they just want the rules.

I would also appreciate knowing these optional rules for damage.