Hello all,

As the title says I'm new to practicly everything in this game, I have bought all the resources for it and have 4 players that want to play with me being the GM. This is a bit daunting for me as it is my first time doing it so I figured I would post here with my concerns to hopefully get some of my questions answered and fears alleviated.

After reading the core rule book and the GM guide book I have a bunch of questions about it.

1. When determining an attack lets say using melee strike, and the character is an Initiate who has trained in weaponskill and specalized in great weapons and has a STR of 4 lets say and is fully reckless at 3. So this character would have 1 blue, 3 red, 1 white, 1 yellow die for his melee strike action. Now how do I as the GM figure out exactly how my monsters will defend that? I know about the A/C/E and the stats, but I still don't know where I can throw in purple die and black die. Any awesome example of this would be very appreciated.

2. When reading the core book I came across the example with the wood elf shooting the beastman in the woods, it says she had to prepare for the shot? I have read the accurate shot card many times trying to find where it states on the card that you need to use a manuver to prepare the shot, can't find it. I also don't understand in that example where they said the sigmar's comet would result in a critical hit? I have read the book under those areas where expertise dice are referenced and I can't find anything that says a sigmars comet can be used as a critical strike.

3. What do the white boxes next to the attributes on the charcter sheets mean? What do those white boxes mean on the monster sheets?

4. I want to make this a challenging game for my players but I don't really know how to yet, I can't find any good case where I can use a monster to beat up one of my players effectively, he is playing an Ironbreaker with a Toughness 6 and Gromil armour and a shield, he is at a defense of like 3 or 4 and a soak + toughness to equal 12, The way I understand soak is you add your toughness to the soak, so I started thinking about it and alot of my monsters even in the eye for an eye mission in the back of the GM guide can't really touch him. even if they do this really hard they are only going to be doing 1 wound to him it seems. Any idea how to play with this?

Thats all I can think of for now, but I know there are other questions, thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy post and I appreciate any insight into this,

Thank you very much, Tim

1 - Combat is always one Challenge dice base difficulty. Then you may have to add more dice depending on the action beeing used (upper left corner of the card dice are extra dice). To that base Challenge you add the Defense rating plus any condition or Active Defense needed/beeing used : your Wargor has a Defense of 2 [the (2) next to Agility on the stat line], he uses Parry, the fight occurs at night with low light (you decide it's worth 1 black dice) and the Wargor is being engaged by 3 players (extra white dice for the attacker outnumbering the defender). The Wargor uses 1 Aggression to defend himself, he feels the pressure of 3 dudes on his ass.

With the Basic action Melee Strike (no modifier), you get : 1 blue + 3 red (Str 4 with Reckless stance 3), 2 whites (Spec & outnumbering), 1 yellow (WS trained), 1 purple (base difficulty), 5 black dice (2 def, 1 low light, 1 Parry, 1 Aggression)

2 - Get the FAQ/Errata, they corrected it (also use the 3 errata cards). Lots of clarifications too in there, a must read. Several actions have the Prepare manoeuvre as a requirement. Sigmar's Comet can always be used at the player choice as : a Sigmar's Comet or a Success or a Boon or a Critical hit (if combat related), don't remember were exactly it's from.

On a side note, get the Rules summary (Headless Hollow) and the Reference Guide (Court Dimon) from Gitzman Gallery (you can also get the Basic Actions image to reduce the number of cards on the table), very useful.

3 - The white boxes on the right side of characteristics on the character sheet are where you write the number of Fortunes you have bought for those Attributes. You don't have any at character creation. A Fortune on an Attribute is a white dice you have each time you use the characteristic to make a dice pool. Per RAW, you can buy a Fortune only on the 2 Career Attributes of your current Career. The number of (attribute) Fortunes you can buy is limited by your current Career (most have 1, a few 2, and only a couple have 3)

Monster stats line is a bit different : a white square is an actual Fortune dice for that attribute, some have more than one (you'll see 2 white squares). The Wargor has Str of 6, one Fortune on Str and a base (unarmed) damage of 5 (11 really with Str added). If you equip him with a Great Weapon, his Damage becomes 6+7=13. He is supposed to be equiped with some pieces of scraps as armor giving him 3 armor soak [the (3) on the Tou side]. If you want, give a better soak armor (like a chain mail, you can up his soak to 4 or 5, whatever you want).

4 - That exemple is a case of min-maxing with an un-balanced Career ability (there is a thread about the Ironbreaker). You may want to self correct that, several ideas (stack them) :
_ do not allow your players to have Attributes above 5 at character creation (no room for improvement),
_ Make the Ironbreaker an Advanced Career (my player wants to be one, he started as a Soldier),
_ Replace the Ironbreaker's Career card so that he does not get the Gromril armor (make it an epic quest reward sort of item). I personally made the Career card as "Treat Toughness as 1 point higher to determine Soak" (no impact on skill checks related to Toughness).

That type of character (very high Soak) will allow you to have nasty beasties like Wargor with 2 hander. The problem is when those nasties hit the other guys in the group

Also remember there are Fatigue, Stress, Critical Wounds, Insanities, Corruption and Diseases to overcome players. Needless to say, the Ironbreaker is still the strongest Career against all those anyway (high Tou & WP, access to Resilience & Discipline).

Enforce yourself the balance you want to have (needs some experience, after 2 or 3 games you'll see things differently), find new ways to challenge that bunker (surround him with lots of small beasties/henchmen to alternate with those big heavy hitter nasties, especially if they have attacks provoking Fatigue, that minimum 1 Wound hit + Fatigue will wear him down fast enough )

Cheers!

Toughness 6?! His other stats must be rubbish. Just put him in an investigative campaign, and watch him fail all those Fellowship/Intelligence tests.

Minion said:

Hey. Cwell I thought covered most of your points very well (but always feel free to asks if things are still unclear). However I wanted to throw my 2 brass into this last equation since we see it crop up too often.

First off: Core Book Page 28. "During Character Creation no single characteristic can begin higher than 5." This is not optional, this is not a house rule. This is RAW.

Second. Use non-combat based threats. Namely if he's soaking hits like a champ (and he will), what's his will? How's them Terror/Fear checks eh? There's a high chance he'll pass out from stress (2x Will) or pick up insanities and become a blubbering mess fairly quickly. Also there are a number of attacks that either bypass soak altogether (and do wounds) or deliver taint/corruption on a per-hit basis. If you can't threaten his physical form, there are plenty of options for alternate means of challenge in this system.

BUT. If you do have a big combat heavy game. Remember the rule of min damage. Everybody when they hit do a minimum of one health level of damage (p.59 core rules again - Minimum Wound Result). What this means is that if he uses a Saga and 'taunts' everything, and he's holding a dozen Ungor, he might very well zero out the damage conceptually, but they're bound to do half a dozen wounds (normal or crit) on him every round. He won't crit out and die unless the attackers are lucky, but then again it might cause him to pause before attempting to tank an army and follow the old tried and true WFRP technique of running away and fighting another day.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the replies, I really appreciate the time ya took to respond to me! I only have a few more questions about the game,

1. how does dual wield work, my nephew wants to play a wardancer and dual wield 2 weapons, i don't know the rules for this or how it works with abilities etc.

2. when an initiate or wizard channel power or curry favor and get their result, when do they have to suffer the stress for being over their equilibrium? when do they take the test for being more than 2x their will power?

3. I have read the FAQ / Errata and from that I still gained some confusion, does it take a manuver to use an action? from my understanding so far is a character starts at neutral stance when combat starts, they can adjust that one time for free, then move it more and suffer (stress)? after that they pick ONE action to use (unless they are doing a channel power / curry favor and opt to use a spell after for a penalty during the channel or during the invocation). after that they get one manuver and can take more manuvers by suffering fatiuge or stress depending on what abilities they want to do, is that correct?

I am also worried about the campaign and how to get my characters to know each other in the game as we haven't played as a group before, even though we all know each over very well with 7+ years of knowing one another, I think that should help the play experience. Are there any tips on just running the game in general? not sure if that question is too broad, but I'm not sure how else to ask it with my limited knowledge.

Thanks again guys!

Ok, lets try this one at a time.

Minion said:

Two weapons doesn't confer bonus attacks or extra damage. There are some dual-wielding cards (namely Double Strike, and DO MAKE SURE to use the errata'd copy before you gain a splitting headache from the unbalance) which are quite nice even errata'd but other than stating 'I fight with 2 weapons' that's it. That said there are some weapons (like a main-gauche) that have the defensive property and can help you parry when offhanded. Aside from the dual-wielding cards this is for flavor, fighting style, and special effects. If you want to be a dual wielding badass, but there are no preset system rules for it aside from being described as 'a dual wielding badass'.

Minion said:

P4 of the FAQ under the equilibrium heading: The answer is during End of Turn Phase.

Minion said:

This is kind of a jumble of questions, I'll try to tackle them in order.

No it does not take a maneuver to use an action. You get 1 action, and 1 FREE maneuver on your turn. There is an optional (I stress optional because I know some people prefer to play just vanilla) rule in the GMs toolkit that states that you can gain a 2nd free maneuvre by giving up your action (think of it as a double-move or a move/ready etc).

P.57 Beginning of turn phase. At 'beginning of turn' you can adjust your stance meter 1 in any direction for free every turn. THEN you may choose to take 1 stress per and shift it aditional spaces. For example if I am 1 in reckless, and I really want to go for a big hit to finish a fight, I can shift to 2 reckless for free and move it to 3 by taking 1 stress.

You have one maneuver for free that you can use before or after your action, like charging in and then attacking, or attacking and then hopping back. And similar to said additional maneuvres you can purchase for fatigue. You always have to pay fatigue up front (so you can't do 10 maneuvres and THEN pass out). You can use it at any point its story-appropriate. You can draw your weapons (maneuvre), rush in from close to engaged (maneuvre), use you action card to attack, and then dance away (maneuvre) for the cost of 2 fatigue (paid before you begin the action sequence) as this is 3 maneuvres and you have to pay for 2 + your free. Note: You always take fatigue for extra maneuvers, not stress (unless the GM house rules for a specific situation). What you are remembering is the universal banes effect for actions.

You can use your ONE action during the round at any point it's appropriate. And yes you can channel->cast, or cast->curry (the distinction is very important as it makes priests and mages play wildly differently) with the extra purple die on the second action.

Minion said:

Character creation and the formation of a cohesive story is something that you should work with your players on honestly. If they want to make wildly different characters (Dwarf Trollslayer, Dwarf hating Elf Woodsman, I want to be a priests of Myrmidia!) you can put a bit of a burden on them. Ask each of them to try and come up with one tie-in with another character. Do they frequent the same tavern? Did they recuperate together in the same Shallayan Hospice after suffering some critical wounds? Did they grow up in the same village? We usually hold a character creation night and work our back-stories in together which adds a bit of flavor, banter and gives us something to rely on aside from the usual DnD staples: you are hired/ordered to do this job or (the always popular) you meet in a tavern.

As to the hugely broad question? Look at the GM forum and this forum for ideas. I know there was a post of 'general good advice for novice GMs' not too long ago (first couple pages). Keep asking questions as they come up. Good luck!

Edit : hehe i was playing SC II while typing in between matches. As above then

1 - no special rules per say (you don't hit with the 2 weapons as a basic attack or Actions that does not specificaly use 2 weapons), but there is a nice melee Action Card named Double Strike (errata version, it's just under the FAQ on the support page). If you use a weapon with Defensive quality like the Main Gauche as one of the 2 weapons, you get extra Defense when you Parry. If you use 2 weapons with the Fast quality, that Dual Strike becomes quite good (Recharge of 2 becomes 1 with Fast weapons). I don't know about the Wardancer cards, it's a complicated system from what i've seen and did not bother with it yet

2 - during the "end of turn" phase, you regain/loose 1 Power/Favor depending on your Equilibrium. If you don't want to loose 1 for being above your WP, you can spend 1 Manoeuvre to not loose Power/Favor this time (no stress here). If you have more than 2 x WP, suffer 1 Stress with the Manoeuvre to keep it. Be carefull with having more than twice your WP, venting is quite dangerous (for Wizards mainly, Priests can't really get unless special conditions)

3 - no, only Cards with a pre-requisite of "Prepare manoeuvre" style.

At the begining of turn phase (before Action / Manoeuvre), you can adjust your Stance once for free, then have extra adjustment costing 1 Stress each.

The turn is indeed 1 Action (special rules for Quickcasting / In Time of Need for Wizard & Priest) and x Manoeuvres (1st is free unless restricted by conditions etc.). No special order between Action and Manoeuvre(s) unless the action itself require something

Equip yourself with main gauche and rapier (and a pair of pistols for added effect).

Get double strike and riposte, and your char will have tons of fun

Spivo said:

i was thinking about that too

Double Strike, Improved Parry, Riposte (Duelist Strike also) are neat. Need to train Weapon Skill, specialize in Fencing Weapons + Parry with Fencing Weapons.

cool guys thanks a bunch again, you're all awesome!

my last set of questions is about the combat in the game with the ranges to each other, I am more accustomed to grids etc and the book makes specific reference to why they don't want to use grids (takes too long or too much time from the DM is used). I would love to find out how others have used their abstract combat system and made it work, the markers between a PC and say a location card or a monster or group of monsters seems insane to me, you would have tokens on all sides of every PC, you would have markers between PC 1, PC 2, PC 3 and PC 4, and between all those PC's there would be markers to individual monsters or maybe groups, and vise versa with the monsters, it just seems to me like there will be 50+ tokens on the field in any given combat. Any really good example of a few scenarios might clear this up for me, thanks!

The other point I wanted to make was the ranges related and in different areas, if the PC's are in a dungeon how do you represent distance in a dungeon? How do you do a corridor?

I'm probably not hitting all the different examples in this post but if anyone can answer these + any other examples from games that have come up it would rock.

Thanks again for taking the time to help me out here as my session is Thursday and I just wanna be prepared as much as possible mechanicly so I can focus on the story.

Just assume your players are all engaged, unless one of them says that he is moving away from the PC group.

Do the same for creatures. If you have a load of them, maybe make 2 or 3 groups. Split them if they pursue specific targets, etc.

I printed and use the tokens from last page of Headless Hollow summary

Engaged = 0 (figurines touching if you have some), Close = 1, Medium = 2 (Close +1), Long = 4 (Medium +2) and Extreme = 7 (Long +3)
The number itself represents the total number of manoeuvres needed to reach it from Engaged.
Imagine that an engagement zone could be about 3m, a Close range can reach up to 10m from you, Medium more like 20m, Long 40, Extreme 70+, along those lines. Do not fixate yourself on pure distances though, you won't need it. If all your players are at Close range from each other, they are very much spread out (4 players, one at each corner of a 10m by 10m square, or close to that)

They start each other at a certain distance you or the scenario chooses. Don't put tokens all around, just where it feels relevant and improvise a little if needed (some guy wants to break from the group and tries to go around).

With the Engaged notion (short range allowing melee combat) and no "flanking" or tactical positioning necessary, it becomes easier to track down packs, just have figurines touching / in a pack, and put distance tokens between them and other groups or important landmarks.

We still draw on a battle mat, but don't really use the squares now. It's rough drawing of decor(s) and putting approximate distances with tokens.

Minion said:

Let the dwarf dominate fights. There's few "aggro managing" abilities. So allthough he's pretty much invulnerable to physical damage, he can't protect the whole party. The player has put all his points towards being as tough as possible, and I think that's completely ok. WFRP isn't a game where the only risk characters are exposed to is combat wounds. To have 6 in thoughness and still be able to fight, I'm betting his Will Power, Intelligence and Fellowship are dumpstats. Chances are, he might end up an invulnerable gibbering loon after a while if you expose the group to some fear and terror inducing encounters.

If you use the whole spectrum of Warhammer, from basic melee combat to investigations to risk of disease to call of cuthuluesque horror, min-maxed characters run a high risk of dying or becoming unplayable after a while.

If you have 4+ players and 5-6 groups of enemies, the range token system becomes quite messy. You do need quite a lot of space to make it work. But it is very nice and simple to use otherwise.

One idea to reduce the clutter is to use d8/d10s to mark distances with the number that corresponds to the number of maneouvres required to reach engaged facing up. You'd still have to put one dice down per distance you want to track, but you get rid of the many many cardboard tokens that would have been on the table. And you get a an instant reminder that "long" distance is not three maneouvres, but rather four, we made that mistake in our last session despite playing for a year (had a bit of a break before this session).

Actually when it comes to dual wield, the Double strike card is the dual wield rules. That the rules are on an action card doesn't mean that the system is unsupportive of dual wielding or anything like that. There's a couple of more actions that deal with dual wielding as well (e.g., Twin shot).

If you're all new to the rules it may be a little bit unwise for your nephew to play as a wardancer, that career is likely the one of most complicated to play. But if he likes the challenge why not. I'd suggest that he splurges creation points on the abilities though, having 4's in ST, AG and T will make it a lot easier. And make sure that he tries to use manoeuvres to get out of close combat after striking. He will not be able to survive a lot of hits since Wardancers don't use armor. He will be a million miles from the Ironbreaker in that respect.