Hi all,

I really love Warhammer world, and I really love this 3rd edition of the RPG.

However, after a few time of buying the core set and all the expansions I have a strange feeling of dissapointment... dont you feel the same?

I mean, for example, it seems that a lot of things could have been developed far more....

-Enhancement cards in OoW.: There were only about 7-8 enhancements cards... I think this is an aspect with a lot of possibilities and could offer the possibility of infinite PC customizations. The same with combat style cards... will they make more of these cards?

-Rune cards in Dwarf expansion (Black Fire Pass). There are only a few rune cards and in the book there is a list of other runes but without any explanation (it leaves it up to the Dungeon Master disctretion). There is nothing about Master Runes...

-In BBP there is almost any explanation about dwarf artillery or other stuff (Gyrocopters, dwarf beer,....). In 2nd edition there were books with a lot of explanations and details. why didnt they use this information and stuff and improve/expand it?

-Dont you think the adventures are very short? what about a big campaing like Paths of the Damned (2nd Edition)??

-PC beyond 3rd level?? Yes, this has been discussed several time in these forums, but still I think that FFG should have given some explanation to this issue.

Well, these are some examples.... I still love the game, but I dont know if you have the same sensation after all the new expansions.

The main worry I have is that at this moment I can not imagine which is the future of the game and this makes me a little bit upset. What will happend after the Slaanesh expansion?? Maybe they are going to sell sets of separate cards (new runes? new enhancement cards?) Or maybe separated books with more descriptions about each race?

Well, maybe you feel something similar....

regards!

Naw. I didn't expect an encyclopedic catlogue reproduction of previous editions (ok, I did, but that was unrealistic). I would like to see a couple long campaigns though and my own gaming experience finds me using less and less of the clunk and more of the roleplaying anyways. Perhaps if Strange Eons didn't exist, I may feel differently about it.

jh

Undeveloped Mechanics

In regards to undeveloped mechanics, I get the feeling that these initial releases are expanding different mechanics of the game, with the idea that an individual playgroup can build its own variations of enhancements, runes, mounts, companions, etc. FF has done an excellent job of giving what really amounts to a preview of each mechanic without fleshing out those mechanics. This is a good and a bad thing.

Having only 8 enhancement cards, for example, allows min-maxing players an opportunity to tune their pools. It provides less mechanical players with ideas of how to flavorfully integrate combat into their character. And most importantly, it remains concise enough for the time being to be understood quickly, while leaving room for both locally-created content and FF-created content to be sold in the future. Obvious niches for further improvement are great for the shelf life of the game, even if it hurts the wallet. It also alleviates the problem of a particularly overpowered card to slipping past play-testing and becoming "Canon" within the rules.

Dwarf Fluff (not a euphemism)

As you mention, all of the fluff is in the previous editions books, and that's what it is... fluff. It varies from person-to-person, but a splat book that does nothing but "translate" the fluff of a previous edition into the modern rules is far from a must-buy -- especially with a game in its juvenile state. Ideally (from my perspective), the focus of the game should be the characters, the characters development, and the vision of chaos unfolding and revealing itself over the course of the play group's experience. In this respect, things such as the movement speed of a Gyrocopter or the Damage Rating of a steam tank seem like a logical choice to put on the back-burner while samplings of mechanics are brought to the forefront.

Every mechanic that has been translated to the current edition transcends a single adventure. I can't imagine more than a single adventure being centered around dwarven artillery, and in that case I would be providing them plot-related story-mode effects rather than concrete mechanics.

Adventure Length (tl;dr time)

Adventures as-witten are pretty short. This is true. But every adventure also has additional plot hooks and clean up that the DM can utilize to expand the adventure or integrate it into a larger campaign. As a DM, I like massively epic tales with plot reveals only every few sessions. My players, however, appreciate the instant gratification that was playing Eye for an Eye in a single massive 16-hr session. They talk fondly of the good ol' days when their reckless attitude had them blow through a whole adventure in a night. I have to balance their desires for closure with my own desires to expand and provide obstacles at every turn.

I have found more often than not, with campaign books, the the time between their release is filled with other adventures and returning to that plot with the new book is more effort than it's worth. NPCs have reappeared anachronistically and events have transpired for the players that any sort of flow is lost. If it was a massive campaign released at one time, I would feel railroaded as a DM into completing it before moving on to a new adventure, even if the story has grown old.

Character Advancement

As a fan of the previous edition, my greatest qualm with this system is that it isn't grim enough. My players are just coming up on their 3rd careers so I haven't had to deal with complaints just yet. I find it amazing, and disheartening to find all of them still in fighting condition after what they've been through. The career system, from my point of view is lateral -- and if a player sees no advantage to branching out and becoming better rounded, it shows a weakness in the psychology of the character's development and a detachment from world's goings-on.

Ongoing Development

I foresee race-specific adventures to follow the theme of the dwarves, each fleshing out the individual races and their roles in the Empire. I foresee career-track centric adventures, fleshing deeper into the career tracks (e.g. a Wizarding college focused adventure that includes the next tiers of wizardry named in one of the existing magic books. Beyond those, I foresee geographically centered campaigns focusing on different provinces and their unique troubles. FF has a lot to work with, and are doing well (if imperfectly) at fleshing out a single foe at a time. If you want to run greenskin adversaries, you have the tools to do so, because they have been fleshed out. By contrast, they haven't even touched on mummies as they haven't fleshed out the rest of what makes Khemri unique -- same with Lizardmen an other less common adversaries of the world.

The release schedule, to date, seems designed to introduce players to the world in manageable chunks. For those of us that have been playing Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, previous editions of WFRP, and have read all the Gortrek and Felix books, the new content is coming so very slowly. But for my players who knew nothing of the world, coming into the game, the releases are allowing me to present different aspects of the world in chunks that they can process. Given free reign and materials, I would easily overwhelm the players with too much lore at once, or focus only on the parts of the world that interest me most (coughSkavencough). Easing through the chaos gods and small adventures works best for both worlds.

Conclusion

Please don't take my lengthy responses as shooting down or invalidating your opinions in any way. You have legitimate concerns that I share and will come to fruition if support for the game does not continue. My... theses just show my opinions from what I see FF doing. I gladly take this short Adventure+Adversary+Rule model over a massive splat book of "combat rules" from which I would take one part of one rule and ignore the rest the book (as is the case in my experience D&D splats).

Every roleplaying game that is successful has enough simple mechanics to get a player into the game. Once a player can play, the game thrives when more and more of the rules can be... modified to plot and towards character development and games tend to become more social, more role, and more house-ruled. WFRP 3e has the cleanest transition from the former to the latter of any game I've seen (thank you, numberless dice), and FF's "sampler platters" of rules lead towards a strong player-driven community. The community is still small, but Liber Fanatica and Gitzman's maps prove that our small following is creative, skilled, and dedicated towards making this game thrive.

Amehdaus said:

Amazing insight, i believe the same! But, can you explain a little about you perception that the game isnt Grim enough? I feel the same, mostly because it feels that for reaching younger target groups, they are doing WFRP more similar to D&D, and more heroic than grim. Can you explain me you point of view?

> Isn't grim enough.

I've really started liking and using more insanities, chaos effects, diseases, permanent injuries, scars and non-chaos marks, and temporary mutations. My players know I'm just dying to use my stack of cards

jh

I don't know about it not being "grim enough" - my players and their allies are beset by all manner of injuries, diseases and other debilitating conditions. Life is very short, they've been backstabbed a couple of times to the point where they're completely suspicious. What more do you need?

Yamusha said:

Well, I certainly hope that there will be some social enhancement cards in the Lure of power, but for combat purposes I think that 7-8 enhancements is enough, it's not like all players want them, and it's not like you have a ton of advances to spend on actions. So as far as I've seen there are enough of those.

Yamusha said:

Agreed, there could be more of both runes and inventions also. But this way there are some things open for the GM/Players to customize as they want.

Yamusha said:

For adventures I'd say they are kind of a good length, but I really hope for an epic campaign after Lure of Power.

Yamusha said:

This is an issue that bugs me as well, however my players seem to feel that it's good to branch out from their main "career path" at times (something I encourage them to do), so they'll probably not reached their desired rank 3 career untill rank 5, so in my gaming group the issue pretty much has not been a problem. So while they are rank 3 at the moment, their highest training is at rank 2.

But it would be great with some high-level content from FFG.Yamusha said:

I truly hope that there will be an epic multi-box campaign after the slaanesh box, from what I've heard there were some comments from FFG at GenCon suggesting that there might be, however there were no promises. (I weren't there, but from what I recall from forum threads here they said things like "a big campaign for WFRP3e would be cool right?")

But I agree that it would be great to know more about the future.

2nd Edition felt less heroic. There were a very very small number of careers that included Weapon Skill, and what is now the Dodge Action that is (90% of the time) a gimme was the equivalent of an Advanced Skill. This is a large part of it to me. There is a higher probability that the player can hold his own in a fight with baseline stats. Further, the extra actions of a player give a considerable hedge over opposition as written (few, if any monster cards can easily inflict critical wounds).

The Ulric's Fury of the previous edition also meant that a single Snotling swing could end up with fully lethal damage or a permanent loss of limb. It wouldn't happen often, and likely wouldn't happen at all statistically, but it could happen, and that made combat all the more menacing (encouraging more encounters to be resolved with combat as an absolute last resort).

As a GM, I tend to pull punches, fudge rolls in favor of players, and do everything with the assumption that the players will be successful. A system that is mechanically harsh such as 2e is good for adding that challenge that I tend to lack. Third edition is less mechanically harsh. It can be played as difficult as 2e, but then I am house ruling/using GM's fiat to increase the difficulty, and that leaves me feeling guilty.

===

On the fluff side, 2e provided numerous samples of fantasy racism, stereotyping, bigotry and superstition that I feel are less developed in this edition. I ensure tidbits such as Shank's Levy and the Ear Tax are common wherever my players go. For a gritty world, fluff is better spent dealing with how people are infighting and not how they are pulling together against common threats -- or, at least, use the latter as the exception that the players need to work to achieve and not the norm.

Amehdaus said:

I agree with that, i want that the gmaes shows more of this too. In warhammer mostly the alliances are of convenience, and the world more grim. Too much of it is bad, as also is too little. Anyways, i really would like that FF release more books with fluff, a la Dark Heresy, that can explain the world better. As it is, it is kind of mandatory for anyone to search for fluff in the past editions, at least for me. There is so much info, that i only hope more is developed in 3rd edition.

I definitely foresee a "big box" campaign setting in the very near future got WFRP. It's the one thing that could alleviate all of these types of woes. If such a campaign could take the characters through various provinces with the "end game" being perhaps in the Chaos wastes, all sorts of expansion material (both fluffy and crunchy) could be included.

The big problems I see are there is nothing beyond 3rd career for most characters, really. We need to see something in the line of epic careers since, even at one point a session, you rapidly start running out of places for the players to go.

PC's can be very "epic", nothing really stops a STR:5 trollslayer once he gets in the mood.

Crazy Aido said:

between diseases, insanity, criticals, permanent injuries and corruption i feel there is enough potential for characters to hit the end of the road before they get so high that the game cannot support them

I do agree that the fluff content in v3 has been more generic warhammer than the darker, more textured stuff from v2 (nevermind v1 which to me is the true setting to this day). I also miss the exploding dice from v1 and v2, but I feel like combat is much more tactically and narratively rich in v3. I also think some of the variant rules from the GM's Toolkit help - e.g. increased damage for greater successes. As well, unless I build an encounter stating otherwise, most enemies have hand weapons and therefore rely on the standard critical threshold for these weapons.

New Zombie said:

I definitely agree with this though!

I guess the "grim" factor is a matter of preference. Personally I'm completely and utterly sick of fantasy racism and general nihilism in fantasy. I love the darkness of the Warhammer world, but I absolutely hate it when fantasy comes too close to real-life social malaise, at which point it doesn't feel like fantasy anymore to me. I guess what I mean to say is that the darkness I enjoy are the Faustian themes of chaos and the general gothic atmosphere of the world, but always with some slight, slight ray of hope, rather than the "everyone hates everyone's guts and no one has any morality" feel, which turns me off completely (The Witcher being the best example).

So in that sense, version 3 has been the best for me.

I have to say I agree with Ludlov,

It's one of the things that keeps me from really connecting with the current 40K roleplay, where you still do have that feeling of utter uselessness & the fact that everybody hates everybody's guts.

A little hope from time to time at least keeps you going, otherwise, if I identify with my character enough, I'd probably end up with suicide after the second session.

as far as the original post:

- length of adventures: no, I like them short. We're a group of players that are not in college anymore, and campaigns of 20 sessions will simply never be finished anymore... Something that can be wrapped up in 4-5 sessions TOP, I find is best for the players. They can take notes all they want, but at 1 session every month, that would mean 2 years of playing. All the notes in the world can't help you remember something like that.

- too much cards of a specific thing I find not necessary either. With StrangeEons as an option, I take the cards we have now, and they are usually enough, since I promote the "perform a stunt" fairly often. I tend to base myself simply on the mechanics of existing cards (take away a die, but add damage, or pierce, or add temporary conditions)

- no info yet on the dwarven box, have yet to find/buy it myself.

PS. I never knew Ludlov had a lastname? Great piece of audio drama though, do you know if that group is ever going to attempt a second story?

Nisses said:

Thanks! I'll be honest, the last name is something I added for a roleplaying character, Ludlov in the audio drama is just Ludlov of Sevenpiecks.

We are in fact working on two new projects: one is a fairy tale, more PG-rated, but I hope people of all ages will enjoy it. I'm thinking of Pixar animation movies as an example of what I mean. The other is a swashbuckling space fantasy with flying pirate ships and stuff like that But that one is still in an early writing stage.

Back on topic: I do agree that shorter adventures are nice in this busy day and age when it's harder to bring anything to a conclusion. Nevertheless, I don't think our group has ever had more fun with a campaign than we did with The Thousand Thrones, which was pretty long. But yeah, we did that in college.

I do agree that there is less "fluff" (although I don't like that term very much) in the core products than there was in second edition. The expansions sure help with that but players who are entirely new to the world could probably use a bit more of an introduction.

Something akin to "Sigmar's Heirs" would be nice, but I think at least some of that will be addressed in the Lure of Power expansion...

Even if the "grim and perilous" aspects aren't to your liking...or at least come in at second place to "heroic fantasy" aspects of 3rd Edition, you have to understand and accept that the mechanics, the system itself is based on the idea that most characters are not meant to be played beyond a third career as the core rules currently stand...but are meant to have gone insane, or been chopped to bits whilst at least attempting to fight back the forces of desolution and Chaos.

Now of course this doesn't prevent us from house ruling our way to 4th, 5th, and even 6th tier/level campaigns, but it does make doing such with the core rules very difficult if not downright impossible.

I for one, and happy with both types of campaign style...and am even thinking of having my players "retire" their current characters in order to play those characters "underlings" for a while before bringing their older and more powerful characters back down the road for some epic with a capital E heroic roleplay that might just take them to the warp gates themselves!

At least that's my two cents.

-Enhancement cards in OoW.: There were only about 7-8 enhancements cards... I think this is an aspect with a lot of possibilities and could offer the possibility of infinite PC customizations. The same with combat style cards... will they make more of these cards?

I hope they will. Keep in mind, though, that OoW was pretty recent and Enhancement cards were only introduced in that expansion, so they will be few for now.

-Rune cards in Dwarf expansion (Black Fire Pass). There are only a few rune cards and in the book there is a list of other runes but without any explanation (it leaves it up to the Dungeon Master disctretion). There is nothing about Master Runes...

FFG cannot come up with every Rune. WFRP3 has a tendency to "show the way" for GMs, with a few examples, and then leave a lot of the details up to the GM. It favors a more story-driven and less rules-driven ruleset. As far as Master Runes ... Master Runes are extremely rare and no PC at this point will be able to create one. Perhaps when FFG makes a "high rank" supplement, with a runemith career able to actually make a Master Rune, then and only then might they talk about Master Runes.

-In BBP there is almost any explanation about dwarf artillery or other stuff (Gyrocopters, dwarf beer,....). In 2nd edition there were books with a lot of explanations and details. why didnt they use this information and stuff and improve/expand it?

Space, most likely. There was a lot of information to cram into the supplement.

-Dont you think the adventures are very short? what about a big campaing like Paths of the Damned (2nd Edition)??

Not really. Most adventures take 3-4 sessions, sometimes less depending on how fast your group is. There is always the 'short' campaign "Gathering Storm". I'm sure at some point a larger, more detailed campaign will get produced. For now, since the majority of supplements provide additional rules and information, a shorter adventure is more appropriate to pair up and produce.

-PC beyond 3rd level?? Yes, this has been discussed several time in these forums, but still I think that FFG should have given some explanation to this issue.

You mean "rank", not level. I expect a "high rank" supplement will likely be produced at some point. Potentially also high rank adventures and/or campaign. This edition is still pretty much in its infancy, though. They are still producing important content for the lower tiers and primary enemies. Beyond that, WFRP is much more unique than, say, D&D. Rather than advancing linearly "upwards", most PCs are quite able to "advance" horizontally into a different career. That Hunter can move into a Soldier career, and then into a Pit Fighter career, and then into a Thief career, and then into an Envoy career, and so on. Horizontal career changes can easily allow a PC to attain high ranks without needing any additional expansions with higher rank careers.

The main worry I have is that at this moment I can not imagine which is the future of the game and this makes me a little bit upset. What will happend after the Slaanesh expansion?? Maybe they are going to sell sets of separate cards (new runes? new enhancement cards?) Or maybe separated books with more descriptions about each race?

I cannot say anything specific, but there is lots of exciting stuff in the works. I do wish, like last year, that this year they had provided a "hint" roadmap of upcoming products for people to see what was being planned.