I hear people have reservations about characters reaching a plateau too quickly. This however doesn't mean your character stops 'getting better' at stuff.
My question, the opportunity seems to have shifted from upward forward advancement to staying in basic careers. Is this more a design feature than a bug?
Thanks
It could be. There are some ways to give characters more of a delayed 'start." Some ways to do that:
* Characters start at 1 fortune point and can buy to two more regardless of career.
* Characters may have to purchase their career card (or earn it at 5th advancement automatically).
* Characters may start with fewer points (lower powered start).
* Characters may GAIN more as they rank up (15th advance or 20th advance give a bonus ability or something).
Other thoughts?
jh
Offer lower XP rewards...someone had set up something where they broke XP into 10 XP 'units' for one advance and then doled them out in a more traditional sense (achieve X, get 3 XP, roleplay in character get 2 XP and so forth). This can slow advances down as well.
Mostly people lament the lack of what they feel the game 'needs': advanced careers and higher Rank actions. The game does seem to focus more on lateral advancement vs. vertical though.
The RPG has always shied away from any sort of epic career progression. Granted, you could get some insanely high stat advancements in v1, but for example, you never had access to the upper end of the magic spectrum. There is no equivalent to the Epic levels of many other RPGs.
I tend to prefer this version whereby stats for PCs have a max of 6, and you can only max out training to 3x. Where you can continue to gain are things like actions, specializations, and more importantly to me and my group, the careers bring access to intangibles: social access, plot hooks, power.
I would not make a campaign that has more than roughly 20-25 sessions, which should amount to the players reaching rank 3.
At rank 3 the players start transcending to heroes that will get their names in history, which I find somewhat boring. I might use them as kickstarter for another campaign, have them die and use that as a plot-hook for the next campaign.
Emirikol said:
It could be. There are some ways to give characters more of a delayed 'start." Some ways to do that:
* Characters start at 1 fortune point and can buy to two more regardless of career.
other thoughts?
jh
In my game, there are no more flat fortune dices to add permanently to a career characteristic. So, instead of that, as you suggest it, characters START AT 1 fortune point, and spend their FORTUNE ADVANCEMENT to earn MORE FORTUNE POINT.
Other thought ? yep.
In my game, characters begin with only 1 reckless and 1 conservative stance, just enough to use both faces of action cards. They must spend advance to get more pieces of stance. That is really effective : when they begin, players are managing less symbols on the dices (like delays and fatigues, double results on the dice), and they really feel the power increase when they buy stances. More than when we played raw.
I like the progression in 3rd edition and have embraced the RAW rules for character creation because of this. We used to have house rules limiting the creation points, stances etc., but for the next campaign we will follow the RAW. This means that characters will start out more capable and the difference between a new character and an experienced character will be less.
Our current campaign is on 27 experience points and we still need the last three chapters of the TTT (out of nine). So the players will end up being rank 5 if they don't die. But dying is very hard in warhammer, since you need to have more critical wounds than your toughness and be over your wound threshold. The players have gone down from time to time, but survived because they had fewer critical wounds than their toughness. We have had a few fights where it has been very close to death for one of the characters, but they still survived. I don't try to kill the players. When I plan an encounter I set up a plan for the NPCs, a morale and certain tactics they will use. Then I stick to that and improvise situations based on the general setup for the NPCs.
I think 3rd edition really isn't that lethal and players will tend to survive for long unless the GM consistently sets up too hard encounters for the players.
It's more likely the players will die by getting hanged or executed, than dying in combat.
yeah, well, depending on the players, that was always the case.
I'm thinking about a friend of mine, the type of player that, when you have one on the table, you don't need to create much for the adventure (and it is better if you dont', because then you won't get frustrated). they tend to make crossing a street something of an adventure in itself.
once (and this was 2e)they were trying to be doplomatic with a power-mad Witch Hunter in a small town. they were sent there by the Church of Verena with that specific goal. the first reply the character of that player makes to the WH is an outraged "how dare you?"
he ended up, after some conversation lines, being taken by the WH two soldier-henchmen to the centre of the village platz to receive 20 slashes. the character is still arguing in an outraged tone and, after the first slash, he is so mad that he shouts "if this is your work, than I renounce Sigmar!". you could cut the coldness that hit our table with a knife.
I just took one fate point from him and described his character fainting out when he was on the verge of shouting something.
no rolls whatsoever for the entire scene.
Purchasing stance pieces. Character's start with 1 Conservative & 1 Reckless. They can buy more pieces as reflected on their career card.
No characteristic can start above 4 unless it is a racial characteristic then it can increase to 5.
Those two changes, with a slower xp - advancement system slows down leveling a great deal. 1-7 xp a night. 5 xp equals an advance. 2 advances for everything but characteristics which remain the same and skills which are 3 (yellow dice are absolutely, 100% without a doubt better than characteristic dice and talent dice so should be valued much higher in our opinion). Non-career advances add 1 to the cost for each.
Unlike Gallows who tried the lower stance and didn't like it, I tried the reverse and found it great for short-moderate length campaigns, but lowering the number of conservative/reckless dice not only adjusts the power curve, it also slows down leveling as well . My players never complain about it and actually like it.
If I were to run a game that lasted 4-8 months of weekly sessions, there is absolutely no reason to use any of the above methods. The raw works fine. If you are looking at long, long term (as my core group and I have been running the same characters weekly for a year -roughly 48 sessions) They would be seriously above what the game can handle well at this point in my opinion.
But hopefully, this year, FFG will give us some way to better deal with rank 4 and 5 careers and characters. (fingers crossed).
The worst difficulty we have now is daunting.
There is no reason we couldn't have
Or simply have
All very interesting.
Does the game lend itself well to tinkering and house ruling?
I've always used a few house rules. Gallows and Willmanx usually test out a stack of rules too.
My main house rules are just to give PCs more of what they want: character options, gear, and being part of some organization in the world. There's plenty of room for that in this game.
I've messed with other stuff, such as removing the fast quality from the spear when outnumbered, minimizing bonus/penatly dice, making talents a "per encounter/rally" type recharge, and in the 'olden days' we had to house rule rapid fire and two weapon fighting.
Since the game has few modifiers for things like combats and social encounters, I think there's plenty of room there for people who like a more 'rules defined' type of game.
jh
I require 4 non-career advances to be purchased before being considered 2nd rank (and being able to purchase 2nd trained die etc.).
I also map the career tree so that you can't be Intermediate until 2nd, Advanced until 3rd etc.
This is in part just because my group has slipped to shorter session of <3 hours.
There aren't enough intermediate and elite careers yet, but I wouldn't say there are "limited advancement options". There should be plenty of areas even experienced characters can improve in.
If a particular group feels the lack of enough actions or talents to keep things feeling "fresh", and are consuming the content faster than FFG can pump it out, a GM could whip up some custom new talents, actions, or even careers to suit the needs of their group.
I haven't needed to do this yet, but I've cast my eye over the pile of 2e and 1e supplements I have laying around (...and even Mordheim for that matter) for potential things to convert / parallel if the need arises. The ability structure of 3e is very tight and elegant, making it pretty easy to eyeball existing effects to gauge an appropriate power level for a home-brewed ability. Action cards are the most complicated, but a little fiddling to find a good combination of line items, cool off, and stance differences isn't daunting.
Personally, I hope that the next major supplement is aimed at rank 2 and higher play, but even if not I'm confident that advances will continue to be exciting for my group for at least a bit longer.