That's right. I think of the location cards as labels rather than as terrain (as in a board game or war game) or as a map.

So, you can have the party walking in a street, on their way from the gates to the temple. If action / a fight breaks out, you can put the character stand ups down as a group in the centre of the table. We all know they're in the street, because we've been discussing their journey. So we put the 'street' card next to them to remind us all that that's where they are and what special rules apply while they're there.

We can put the city gates card down to one side and the temple card at the other. The distances don't matter: they're just reminders that if the players want to go there, then they can, and if they do, what rules special effects there will be.

I wouldn't use very many range markers. Perhaps a group of NPCs that they bump into in the street / a gang of thugs they're fighting with can all be placed next to the PCs, no range counters needed. They're all in close range, unless any of the players do anything odd, like run off as fast as they can. Okay, perhaps that's not odd...

And another NPC can be seen standing at the end of the street. I would just put the stand up somewhere convenient and some distance tokens to remind us all that he's 'at the end of the street'. I don't need to specify that he's '250 meters away'. 'At the end of the street' is descriptive and cinematic.

If the players ignore him, he'll stay there. If one of them runs towards him, then I might just move the PC stand up to the middle of the tokens, to show his approximate progress, but I'd describe it as "you charge up the street, dodging the merchants' stalls and refugees' carts. The NPC leader looks startled and..." (either runs away or stays where he is and summons a few more henchmen from the surrounding alleys to back him up!)

I just thought I'd update this original post for all those who contributed several months back. Since the first session I had commented on we've ran three more. The group has totally turned around on what they thought about the game and I'm much more confident with running it. The last session was complimented heavily by all of our players who are seasoned gamers.

So, thanks to all who told me to stick it out a few more sessions! I did and I am now convinced this is the best system I've ever had the pleasure of running!

Peas,

wOOkie

Nice to hear it. Thanks for the update.

I'm doing up a series of pregens for the LF8 and the one thing that still seems unnecessarily complicated is the career changing system. All I can say is WHAT THE NURGLE?!?! Does it REALLY need to be that complicated? My house rulebook pretty much reads the following for career changes: 1) Compare traits to see how much it costs to switch (considering reiklander); 2) you have to have completed advances in the original career options and/or the fixed advances 3) If you complete the last career you get to pick two of your career skills and take a specialization in them. All the other crap about training/starting without skills/etc is now gone.

jh

I've run two sessions. One was a one night, short story with big combat. The other was my first session for The Gathering Storm

Couple things I've used to make things easier.

I like the counters. When I've GM'ed other games, I like the ability to see what resources the players have. i use cocktail toothpicks in shot glasses for arrows, fake coins for money, chips for rations, etc and this all before WHFP. A couple of suggestions...

Tell you players how you want them set up. They may bark at first, but it will help you run the game better and they'll appreciate it.

For WHRP I ask

• not to keep their actions cards laid in front of then, but in a deck. When they play one the lay it out
• I have small red six-sided dice for everyone to keep track of recharges. I give everyone six dice and it seems to the right amount. Every knows the red dice are recharge dice
• I bought at the container store, small plastic trays with four compartments. Folks keep them in front of their character sheets. in this they store, fatigue, stress, power/favor in each separate compartment. (I'll probably label them) All then eventually put their little red dice in the fourth compartment. I keep wound cards to the right of the box.
• I've went old school with initiative and use index cards marked, PC's, and NPC's with different colored markers. I hang those over the GM screen. The reason I did this was because I confused myself when using the progress chart and initiative tracker together.
• I've made multiple range markers and laminated them. Removed any confusion about what counters are for what and everyone can clearly see where they're at
• I used small chips (from my axis and allies games) as NPC wound markers. I place any conditions under the unit stand.
• I've made a simple encounter sheet listing basic characteristics, and place all cards and stands in an envelope prior to use
• We roll dice on the table, but a box would be helpful if space was an issue

While it may take a bit on your part to organize. It will help make play easier.

Also, I sold the dice concept to my players. In a D20 system, it's succeed or fail. Here its degrees of success and degrees of failure. Just like life!!! During a session I had a player who tried to intimidate an established tavern owner. He had a strength of four, and was acting recklessly. I threw all the cunning dice (all four of them) against the roll, an expertise dice, and of course the two challenge dice. At that point he realized he may have gotten himself in a difficult situation. He used a fortune point for an extra white dice, and rolled 12 dice! Everything cancelled everything out, or was blank. He said I failed and was awaiting a good ass kicking, but because there was really no success or failure he caught the innkeeper on a good day and the innkeeper admired his spunk. The innkeeper asked him if it's courage or stupidity that allows him to act that way. The PC replied both and the innkeeper laughed and said, "I wouldn't tell my friends my business, so I'm not certainly gonna tell you. The next time the PC entered the tavern, the innkeeper said jokingly, "It's the great detective and a friendlier conversation ensued.

The PC did not get the information from the Innkeeper, but that one die rolled created 10-15 minutes of fun roleplay and I'll now have the innkeeper possibly play a more important role in the PC's future. Maybe offering them work if he needs someone brave. I can tell you if I was playing a D20 system, I don't think I'd would have taken it that far. The PC would have failed and I'd probably would have thrown him out of the bar.

There are certain parts of the game that I agree with you. I found it challenging at first, but after dropping the old mindset, I really enjoy it. Plus, there are no need for tons of books on the table. That helps to. And if this is an indicator of the success of our first session, a player dropped out of two D&D games so we could play twice a month, instead of one.

Cheers

Just as a side note:

My group also struggled with distances. One of the big problems with such was what happens if enemies start at long range and try to close. They don't have enough 'movement' for free to move entire ranges, so you in essence have to build a track for them to approach on. It also got a little wierd in scenarios 'so if the tavern is close, is outside medium? Can I move to the door or all the way to the other side of the street? How about into another house?'

We ended up switching to a FATE based 'zones' system. IE you can draw a rectangle and divide it in 2 and say 'this is the inn' it's one maneuver to get to anywhere close to the bar, or one maneuver to return from there to the door. Draw a big 2 rectangles outside. 'this is the street'' So basically things are maneuver based, and we use some common sense for ranges and line of sight (if you have to move more than 3-4 zones it's probably long etc). A maneuver can get you through a room on average and so on.

Also location cards are huge. Remember that challenge dice have 12.5% chance of throwing up a chaos star. One of the problems is that you can't have people falling onto their swords etc every couple seconds since any complex rolls will often come up with at least 1 Chaos star. So many times the chaos star will have a specified result as per the location rules.

We like locations so much that I often will whip out an index card and sketch one out just so we have a scene framework and some additional rules. If it's a bar where people know you maybe there's a white die on charm/guile checks to pick up tips/rumors. Or if it's a dark dank dungeon, you can produce fatigue from slips and trips on the cold, slippery, untended stone. Etc.

Be flexible, don't limit yourself to what's there. Learn from the cards and implement your own. Also, don't forget fortune points and the pool refresh. Rewarding awesome with fortune points is great fun.

In encounters where enemies where just moving towards the PC (i.e. from long to engaged)

I allowed the NPC's to take another maneuver and suffer fatigue just like a PC. However, fatigue on an NPC equates to a wound. So that allowed me to covered distance quickly with some - knowing that I'm doing damage - keeping some back, maybe taking a little damage and some moved without taking an extra maneuver

Problem with that idea is that you have to 'push' too much. So if monsters appear 'down the road' at extreme, they have to 'push' 3 to get to long. Push 2 next turn to get to medium. Then push an extra 1 to engage once they get to close. So you're looking at each monster in a unit being 6 wounds down from trying to close gaps. So you end up making out the 'steps' inbetween and having the monsters put forth 'X moves' towards reaching long etc. At which point you're pretty much running a grid anyway.

I mean the rules are ok with number of moves, but it gets kind of silly especially if you're moving sideways. If you have 2 groups appear, and one is coming from the north and the other from the west, the PC that engages the ones to the north (or NW) has to gage his distance to the west group. Then you have to wonder how many range increments is the distance north worth, etc. Or worse yet, what if the PC's split up. X members are in the 'close' zone, one is about 2 maneuvres past medium with a bunch of gobbo's on him, and one is in the opposite medium with some snotlings. Who is close to what. Is the close on the gobbo guy inside the long, medium, halfway, both? It's doable, but you end up drawing grids anyway, even if they're simpler grids than the usual 2E/DnD4e fare.

So we just got tired of having very sloppy increments, and just switched to easy-to-understand simple zones for movement. It's cleaned things up significantly.

You can always use the creature's Agression or Cunning budget instead of taking all that wounds.

Agression if the creature is charging as fast at possible against the party. Or cunning if the creature uses sneaky tactics to close distances. Like wolves I use their cunning to navigate closer and possible flanking the players so that any combat will start at closer ranges.

Good gaming

That's not a terrible idea Mal. I know aggression is optionally used that way (optional rule in the GMs guide) and while I have used it in such a fashion, I find I need the aggression dice for defense to put a kibosh on the first-round smashings. But cunning is not a terrible idea (since outside of social encounters it rarely gets used).

Shima - you may be right. I guess I'm so disappointed in 4E. I like the idea of roleplaying without grids. I like getting through my session without using windex and without having marker all over my hand. I'm reminded of the good old days when I first played in junior high. We had graph paper, a notebook and some dice. (D20's that we rolled so often they were almost round) No grids, and no mini's. But I don't blame them. As a business man I would also adjust my product so that I have line extensions. And certainly that's what wizard is doing. D&D is now a mini's game and if the market supports it so be it.

I just find WFRP refreshing from that perseptive. And is the case of NPCs being in extreme range when I want them to be in long range I just say, ok now their in long range. My sessions feel like their back to being theater of the mind, which is how it all started for me.

When I want mini's I'll play 40K.

BTW - must have missed the optional rule about using aggression dice. Very helpful.