So, I'm soon to be engaging in my first session of WFRP. I've long been a fan of the warhammer setting, and of warrior priests in particular. I've taken a trip through the player's guide, and I'm ready to create my character. However, cheating a warrior priest seems... difficult, as compared to creating other characters. Because warrior priests are spread so thin and because they want to be in melee yet need to spend action to bless things (insofar as those blessings aren't melee attacks), the warrior priest of Sigmar is a touch nut to crack. I've gone back through the forums to read a few threads on the matter, but most were pre-Signs of Faith and none came to particularly concrete conclusions.

My thought is this: I'm going to present a starting character, some thoughts on choices, some questions, and hopefully this will generate discussion about how to go about priesting, Sigmar style.

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The Character, so far...

Career Skills: Invocation, Piety, Weapon Skill, Discipline, Education, First Aid

Characteristics: Strength 4, Toughness 3, Agility 3, Intelligence 3, Willpower 4, Fellowship 3

Skills: Invocation (Acquired; Trained; Sigmar), Piety (Acquired; Trained; Reckless)

Abilities: Thunderous Blow; Curry Favor, Blessing of Health, Minor Blessing, Minor Ward

Talents: Sigmar, God of the Empire

Equipment: Great Hammer, Chainmail, Comfortable basic equipment

Chargen Point Expenditures:

25
22 Strength 3
19 Toughness 3
16 Agility 3
13 Intelligence 3
9 Willpower 4
5 Strength 4
2 Skills 4+2
0 Comfortable
0 1 Ability

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- One of the major issues we encounter with the Sigmarite Initiate has to do with skills. First, I swamped Charm and Intuition for weapon skill and discipline. Ditching Charm was an easy choice; Sigmar wasn't a charmer. I decided to drop intuition as I want my character to be educated (eventually), though Intuition is nice in that it's a basic skill. I wanted to swap in Discipline and Weapon Skill for that signature Sigmar feel. My thought would be to use two of my open career advances on skills... perhaps train Weapon Skill, Discipline, and First Aid and save Education for my next career? This is a tough call, and I would appreciate input. It makes more sense, I think, for the character to have access to Education at the start of the game, but I could imagine him getting a fine education when moving to Disciple. You'll see that I spent 3 chargen points to acquire, train, and specialize in Piety and Invocation. This is a heavy investment, but these are critical priest skills... thoughts? The game I'm going to be joining has, I believe, nerfed Weapon Skill specializations, making them much less worthwhile.

- The vast majority of chargen points went to characteristics. I started by raising everything to at least three... I detest the notion of a dump stat... it's just not how I play. Also, three's allow access to several free actions, which is always good. I purchased two 4's and put them into Strength and Willpower. The idea for strength is to hit things... fairly straightforward. Willpower got the nod because it determines favor capacity. I'm hoping that the training and specialty in Invocation will help me successfully bless things as I couldn't justify raising Fellowship. Hopefully I'll be able to take a mix of actions and blessings such that I don't have to burn favor on attacks if I don't want to do so (also, so I can still hit things without have to successfully invoke a blessing). This is why I went the whole way with spending chargen points on skills. Also, upon career completion, I'll get free specialties in the three skills I train/acquire during the career and be about as skillerific as an initiate could be (I wish that they had access to a better range of skills!).

- I took Thunderous Blow for the free action as it is a solid strike, loves crits (as does Sigmar), and doesn't take favor. I'm more than open to suggestions here. I'm thinking about Berserker Rage!, but I'm having trouble imagining how that will interact with having to spend action blessing and such... maybe I'll say that for later. Still, I love the idea of a Sigmarite priest going nuts in battle

- Having spent two points to get up to Comfortable, I used the 2g to buy a Great Weapon (hammer... obviously) and Chainmail for armor (totaling 2g).

-In terms of advancement, my thought is to spend two open career advances on skills, two on actions, and the last two on ?? Perhaps buy the Righteous Servant talent for favor management? A fortune die in something? A Reckless token for Berserker Rage!? I would love advice on how to spend actions, especially in terms of splitting them between blessings and other things. The Inspiring Words action catches my fancy for flavor reasons, but it's hard to see when it would be best to buy it. This action issue is another tough nut with the priest... do you still to melee attack blessings? How do you divvy action slots between blessings and others?

Ok, I've thrown a lot out there. My hope is to get discussion started again in the warrior priest of sigmar *** initiate as well as on this character in particular. I've excluded any sort of background or vision for the character (for the most part) since the game I'm joining is ostensibly a one-shot (or the first in a series of one-shots), and so it isn't clear how much the character ought to be fleshed out. Hopefully it will turn into a full campaign, and creating a person rather than just a bunch of stats is what makes RPGs so awesome for me. Anyways... discuss?

I'll keep considering this and will give more thought later. On first glance, I see that you've gone heavy on the ability to cast blessings ... Invocation and Piety both trained and specialized, but are stuck with the most basic blessings to use. I would suggest that it might be better to either reduce the points spent on skills, or spread your skills out, or else purchase a solid Blessing or two to use.

I'm with Dvang.

Right now you have a warrior-PRIEST, and really the only warrior thing about him is 4 points of Str (which isn't much). No Weapon Skill training. One Attack action. No advanced defenses. The priest side is pretty weak also since, as Dvang pointed out, he doesn't have many blessings to cast. Those trainings seem like a waste.

Spread out the skills, or convert some of them to actions.

First, I should mention two house relevant house rules: Advanced action cards can't be taken until second career, Weapon Skill specializations apply one to one action card, and humans cannot begin with a characteristic above 4.

Chargen options for skills, assuming that you want to bless, involves spending 1 (2 skills), 2 (3+1), or 3(4+2) points on skills. Spending one point gets you Invocation and Piety acquired and nothing more. Two points gets you Invocation (acquired), Piety (acquired), and Weapon Skill? (Trained) with a specialization in one action card. Three points could get Piety and Invocation acquired as well as two basic career skills trained and specialized (Weapon Skill and Discipline?). Spending only one or two points on skills frees points for actions, though. What would you recommend specifically? Remember, Initiates get a maximum of three skill advances (2 open career skill advances) within the career.

In terms of having more blessings, I guess Righteous Strength and Sigmar's Hammer would be good targets? Those combined with Berserker Rage! seems like you could at least begin to build a good offense. I worry that it would be problematic to have only blessing actions considering that they require a dice-related resource to use. I've yet to play the game, so this could be very much mistaken.

Lastly, as it comes to characteristics, would you move the 4 from Willpower to a combat stat like Toughness? That get's you one wound and natural soak at the coast of lowering you favor capacity by one, max capacity by 2, and lessening your ability to curry favor. I don't have any idea about the relative values of being able to carry more stress vs. fatigue as I don't know how stress/fatigue is distributed in practice.

I appreciate the replies... I'm just not sure what to do in response to them.

I think you need to sit back and think about how you want your character to start and where you want him to go.

You essentially have 3 options:
1) More Warrior focused
2) More Priest focused
3) Try for a balance between the two

#2 is mostly what you have right now, #3 is the most difficult to pull off, but seems right now to be what you are going for overall. #3 is also more difficult to do at character creation.

That weapon specialization restriction is tough ... so I would certainly worry less about specializing in Weapon Skill.

One thing you could consider, is that Piety is not necessarily *needed*. Granted, if you don't acquire Piety you won't get Curry Favor for free. However, with just Invocation you *can* still perform blessings, you just need to wait for equilibrium to restore your Favour. So you could, for example, train Weapon Skill as well as Acquire and Train Invocation + specialize (invocation). That would give you a reasonable balance between priest and warrior. Really, having weaponskill trained is pretty critical to being decent in melee combat ... and the free specialization from the dedication bonus is less important with your houserule, so training weaponskill during Rank 1 is less desirable. The downside, of course, is having to acquire the Curry Favor action card later.

Alternately, spend the whole thing (3) to get 4 skills + 2 specializations, and train WS, acquire both invocation and piety, train one of those two, and get two specializations in whichever one you trained (Invocation is probably the better choice to train, as the effects are linked to the invocation success).

Don't forget, though, you have Melee Strike as a backup melee action, as well as Guarded Position which is pretty handy too. My 'concern' is that, as you have listed so far, you have spent the points to not only acquire but also train and specialize both invocation and piety ... large investments at creation, yet all that effort and the only blessings you can invoke are the unimpressive basic minor blessings. Even with a melee action card, without being trained in weaponskill your chances of using your hammer are pretty reduced. I cannot stress enough how powerful the yellow expertise die is. It is the only way to get a Comet, and has a 5/6 chance of getting something good, PLUS it has a 1/6 chance of providing an additional Expertise die to the roll. If you want your priest to wade into melee, you will want weaponskill trained. Especially with your house rule on weapon specializations, training it at creation seems better, leaving skill training for invocation or piety (for the free dedication specialization) a better prospect. Keep in mind that, along with all this, focusing on blessings early on can be difficult because it depends a lot on the blessing action cards, which are limited early on, whereas even with just the basic Melee Strike card, a St 4, WS trained, Greatweapon-armed PC is still pretty dangerous and useful.

My suggestion is this:
If you want to do #1 (focus on warrior) then I would leave both Invocation and Piety for skills to train (if not acquire) later. Blessings will end up being an occasionaly augmentation for your fighting abilities, and the occasional healing, etc. not a main function.
If you want to do #2 (focus on priestly), then you'll want more Blessings to start. Don't worry about Weaponskill at all until much later (maybe). It's worth even dropping your wealth and forget about the Greatweapon to get more Blessings if needed.
If you want to do #3 (balance), you're probably better off focusing slightly more on the Warrior side at creation IMO. Start with WS trained at least, and if you can, acquire invocation and piety (but don't worry about training them yet). Having an additional blessing is handy, as is another melee action card, and I would try for one of each if you can. It's difficult, and as I said, if you must choose only one I'd take a melee action card, then gain a useful blessing or two as my first advances. You'll be a decent fighter, and your utility through blessings can grow as you advance.

I like your distribution for stats, and probably wouldn't change it. However, if you are looking at #1 (warrior focused) Having 4 To might be better than 4 WP. If you're looking at #2, then you might want to consider 4 To or 4 Fel instead of 4 St, as you'll be looking for more damage from blessings rather than your hammer. For #3, I think what you've got is a good balance.

Anyway, enough rambling. I think making a clear decision between the 3 'types' will go a long way to helping shape what you need to purchase.

I appreciate the post, dvang. I'll reply a bit later with another character.

I also wanted to say that I'm really not trying to be difficult, haha. I'm making a large number of abstractions given the limits of my knowledge about the game, having never played it and having read only the Player's Guide. The mechanics of WFRP3E are quite unlike the games with which I am familiar (Exalted, D&D4E, etc), so much of my impression of actual gameplay comes from posts on the forum which are... conflicting, at the least.

Anyways, I'll be back... as they say.

OE:

Wanted to throw my 2 brass pennies in here.

I actually had a post similar to this one a while back when I started playing, and I too (for similar reasons) picked up the hammer and stand at the forefront of my group leading the charge and being all righteous and priestly in the name of my hammer wielding deity.

A couple things for you that I wanted to throw out.

I dumped most of my points in stats. I started with a 4 Str, 3 Agi, 4 Tgh loadout with a 4 Will 2 Int 3 Flw. I know you don't like 'dump stats' but honestly the points are not always there to do what you want to do. The 4 Str will be fueling most of your cards, and the Toughness keeps you up (adds to soak, lets you suffer more fatigue as your highly reckless stance requires). Will will give you the initial 'Discipline'-like focus substituting for the full on training that comes later, and the Felowship has to be a 3, leaving Int without enough points.

As a comfort though, I plan to raise it (meaning Int) to 3 with out of career advances (3rd career, down the road, but it's on the list).

I'll share the rest of my build then hit some reasons and how it affects my roleplay.

Caveat: We play with the rule that you can sell the stuff at creation to shift things around. For example, I don't really see a Sigmarite shouldering a crossbow, but you can sell it to help fund your hammer at a lower 'financial' level. Also, I wouldn't worry about your WS spec only affecting one 'card' as you should be picking up a WS spec every career (via the rule that at 'dedication' you gain a free spec in all skills purchased during the career), which should reflect on your combat-actions purchased in the same career as you go along (I doubt you'll have more than 1-2 attack actions at that. Try to build a 'rotation' so that every round you can use a card, you'll find you need far fewer than you thought.).

So to finish out the build I started with 1 action card (Hammer of Sigmar), no talent (Wish the sigmarite card would let you slot Reputations like Fearless... but it is not to be), and I took 3 skills which I used to gain Piety, Education and Invocation (mind you not trained). Wielding priestly robes and the classic Sigmarite Hammer.

My first purchase was Weapon Skill (required Skill advance), Invocation Skill (class skill advance), followed by Divine Perserverance (required Action advance), Healing Hand (class skill advance), and Fortune Dice in Will and Fellowship.

The reason Piety isn't as important, and is coming later in my build (and possibly only being trained once or twice throughout all my careers) is because the classic Sigmarite combat action (Hammer of Sigmar) and other attack actions require you to have the Favor BEFORE you cast. Meaning that you won't be channeling all that often until at least rank 2 (when you want the AoE healing buff, and the Str/Tgh buff). Also your combat actions will refuel your favor with crits. So you want invocation for those comets on your buffs, but mostly you end up relying on WS (which also helps parry) and Str.

This build is a little risky for the first couple sessions. A more conservative point total ending up with some armor will help you survive early on, but ultimately the heavy stat build sets you up for being more of a hybrid (as Dvang calls it balanced) later on. I did end up with an Int of 2 which doesn't really affect much (will is determining for Stress etc) except for being able to notice things, and quite frankly the Sigmarite priest is not the Investigator (witch hunter) nor is he the scout, he is the beat-stick and moral compass. So knowing that I don't always notice that ambush, and I move my lips while reading I travel with a roadwarden and an amber mage both of whom slot keen eyes and intuitive in the party sheet and have more dice on spotting stuff than we usually need. I know that I need them to do my job well (root out infidels, find cults, fight corruption) and it helps the bonds of the group not to make a char that is good at everything. By taking this sort of gaping hole, they help me and it works well to have everyone have a niche and cooperate more effectively.

But your will is high which means that you're the bulwark when the crazy stuff starts happening, your toughness lets you take the hits, and your strength dishes them out (plus your agi helps you function in an adventuring setting, and have dodge on the side). Your felowship isn't bad, and a few fortune dice make all the difference. You end up being somewhat social, and capable of intimidating effectively, as well as preaching the word and getting your ideas across in an effective manner.

In my original build I think I took Sigmar's Strength (I don't have my cards onhand but its the +damage card) for roleplay reasons, and a few times when I buffed others with the golden flaming corona it ended up being kind of epic, but I think Berserker Rage is probably better if you're trying to crunch/min-max.

Anyway - enough rambling - hope that helps and feel free to ask any further questions you may have. The one bit of advice I would suggest to you is to try and plan out your build a ways ahead. Some of the choices you're agonizing over go away once you realize how your advances will work out over time (even if it is 2-3 careers worth of time). I know mine did.