One problem I (and my group) having with the game is the number of bits and pieces. At first, when I bought the game, I find it really nice to have all those gaming tools but now that my game time never extends more than 4 or 5 hours I'm always looking for ways to speed up and make the game more simple and less bookeeping. I dislike the fact that you have so many sources that could apply to certain situations and have to look at eveything to make sure you dont forget something.

My initial idea were to drop some subsystems (or merge some) but I want to know if other people have done the same and what impact they think it will have on the game.

- No party sheet.

Never used it much anyway. It's certainly not a vital part of the game and I'm not the first to think about getting rid of it.

- No stance meter.

Instead, a player can decide to transform a number of stat dice into stance dice (only one stance at a time, obviously) equal to the number of stance he bought with advances. So, if the player bought 1 conservative and 2 reckless, he can exchange1 stat dice into 1 conservative OR 1 or 2 stat dice into 1 or 2 reckless dice. I won't limit the number of dice he could exchange while in one stance. If he bought 4 reckless dice, he could go from neutral to full 4 reckless dice in the first round of a battle (berserker rage!!!! lol). There's a cost for each stance dice anyway (fatigue, bane or delays).

What's important to get here is that you don't need to keep track of where you are on the track ("That's a lot of tracks!" lol) and manage manoeuvers and free actions to get into a certain level of stance and all. You're either reckless, neutral or conservative.

A character must take 1 turn with neutral stance if he wants to go from once stance to the other.

Cards that affects stance, such as Ritual Dance action cards, would need a little bit of tweek.
Most Ritual Dance cards plays with going from one stance to the other, so they would allow one's to skip the neutral stance turn when shifting from once stance to the other when the card says to adjust your stance 1 step into a stance.
Cards that would make one's stance to shift in an opposite direction would force that character to take a full turn in neutral stance. That character wouldn't be able to shift into a stance until the start of his next turn.
Cards that would normally push deeper into a stance a character was already in (or was at neutral stance) would force that character to adopt that stance at full strenght for a full turn.

- Merge stress/fatigue.

Only one pool that affect all stats at once. How could fatigue affect fellowship or stress affect endurance, you ask? Well, go run a marathon and then try to, say, coordinate a football team match plan. You'll see how fatigue affects psychological capabilities. Or try to walk on a beam that stands1 foot high from the ground, then try the same exact beam that stands 10 meters high and see how much difficult it is.

I'm not sure yet as how you'd recover at the end of an encounter, either the best of your Tou or Will or both.

Problem is I'm not sure it worth the effort to change few rules about it for the few time it could save at the game table. It could result taking more time if you need to convert some rules on the go each time and risk to brake some game mechanics. What do you think?

- No universal effect (that is, on 2 boon or bane you gain/remove 1 stress/fatigue)

Makes less playing around with stress/fatigue tokens.

- Humans' favored by fate modified. They get up to 4 fortune token instead of 3.

I always keep forgetting using that power since it's not on a card and I don't need yet another card for my character so here's an easy way to fix that.

If you have other suggestions of things you've dropped/modified to make the game runs smoother, please share !

I'm looking forward to comments about those, if you think some of them could be game breaking or don't make sense or even if your neighbor's dog keeps yapping, keeping you from sleeping each night, making you pissed and want to swear at my stupid ideas lol

We dumped party sheet and socketing of talents (they're always available). We've reduced "bits" so we're tracking fatigue and stress with pencil. I decided to keep fatigue, stress and stance because I just don't feel they're that big of a hassle and they don't slow down game play.

I think when you go too overboard trying to houserule the game, you risk the "why bother" syndrome. I always start with a lot of house rules, but it seems I'm the only person that isn't completely confused by them so I've learned to minimize

jh

For talents, do you drop the recharge aspect of them as well or keep that in and just drop the socketing part?

We haven't been dropping mechanics, we've just been handling some of the game's accounting tasks the old fashioned way (scrap paper and post-its).

The only time I throw down a wound (or some of my custom severe wounds) is during criticals.

Stress and Fatigue are hatch marks on a piece of paper instead of a pile of tear drops.

Trackers tend to be bubbles drawn on a piece of paper and filled in, but sometimes I'll use the actual trackers.

Stance meters have been replaced with the R1, C2 notation used in creature entries rather than adjusting the stance meters.

We've also taken some of the componentry and come up with ways of making them more useful (to us).

We use the basic action sheet instead of piling "melee strike" and it's basic action friends alongside a character's individual special actions.

I have my career cards sleeved into poloroid picture archival sleeves, and all the other cards sleeved up in FFG gear. Then we take simple pin head sized dollops of adhesive putty and use that to stick talents, diseases, insanities, mutations, inventions, etc to the current career card or party sheet. I also use that for the creature group cards to track the various details located there. We've found that simply keeping things from getting wrecked by a open door's cross-breeze goes a long way toward keeping us enjoying the game rather than rolling our eyes and counting to ten.

We don't use the standups. The movement system is so abstract that we've never found much use in minis for 3rd edition.

I also only pack the gear that will be needed for the session we're playing so I am not flipping through piles of cards or pages upon pages of sleeved cards.

I've been reviewing few ideas in the forum for a week. I've revised my list to the following :

- no initiative. All characters of the same party (by party I mean friendlies and enemies) go one after the other in the order they chose. The situation dictate which party goes first.

- no party sheet

- no universal effect

- no stance meter. Characters can convert their ability dices into stance dice any way they want (only once stance at a time, obviously). Though, you're not using default stance. Every character starts with 1 reckless and 1 conservative and only stance buyed with advancements increase the ammount of stance dice you can convert. You also need to stay in neutral stance for a round if you want to go from conversative to reckless (or vice-versa).

- favored by faith : humans can have up to 4 fortune tokens. (my players, including myself, kept forgeting to use this ability)

- can't exchange talents while in an encounter (limits the number of things a player can do so they decide what to do faster)

- no tokens on talents card. It refreshes whenever feels right in the story (end of encounter, end of act, rally step, etc).

- no basic action cards. Attacks are basically get 1 success or more = do normal damage. Perfom a stunt is just a skill test anyway. Guarded position, you can just use the assist manoeuvre to help someone to defend (add 1 <b> to next attack targetting him) and Asses the situation is just : regain 1 stress and 1 fatigue.

With all these adjutments, I should speed combats considerably.

Current "deviation" as follows

- Party-sheet: keeping it for the tension-meter & slotted talents. Fortune points are awarded to the player directly however.

- Stance meter. Definitly keeping that. I like this aspect, letting you go deeper & deeper if you want. Plus it invalidates playing a berserker, if you wish, since everybody can go all-in at any time. As well as extra fiddling with wardancer cards and others would be necessary, so it's here to stay.

- Stress/Fatigue: I track them on the char sheet with a slider. Pretty much like others do it with hatches on a piece of paper.

- Wounds: only give out cards when criticals are involved. If not: I track them on a slider on a character sheet as well.

- Corruption: tracked on a slider again.

- Basic action cards: remade into 1 big card, saves a lot of table-space. Back of that card is the career-history, so you'll never be using both sides at once.
- Basic Divine/Arcane cards: same, saves a bit of space.

- Talents: Refresh at a rally-step in combat, or end of a scene/combat. No tokens, just flip them over if used.

- Combat: Adapted the movement from Mordheim/Tabletop. You have a ruler with notches for your manoeuvres. So absolute positioning without a grid. I put some terrain features on the table as well when possible. No difference in manoeuvre-distance between races.
- Combat: FIXED, static initiative. No discussions about who goes when and why. Fast chars go first. Delay-results on conservative rolls lower your own initiative.
- Combat: everybody decides their action at the same time. Push that card forward in front of you. You've got 10 seconds to decide. If a chosen action becomes invalid when a player is up, he can swap it for a basic action, or a manoeuvre. Discussing what to do *next turn* can be done when you're not up. It makes combat a bit more unpredictable, but when a player is up, he already KNOWS how many dice he needs, and will have taken most (if not all) of them, apart from the challenge/misfortunes.
- Combat: No "engaging", if your standup's base touches, you can attack.
- Combat: No using those cardboard rings to show your conservative/reckless, ever
- Combat: No reslotting talents during combat. You can freely slot any talent(s) when rolling for initiative.
- Combat: Disengaging -> roll scatter-die (d6 with 1 arrow on 1-5, and HIT on 6), you back away your first manoeuvre in that direction. On hit, you choose the direction yourself. Reasoning is: Engagements are counted as not absolute according to RAW, so you can't predict where your back is turned at all times. If you're backed against a wall, you're not going anywhere anyway.
- NARRATE your combat. Don't just go "I hit, for standard damage." Ham it up, and ask your player to do so as well. It will make combat feel more alive, instead of a slugfest to get through. This doesn't make you gain time, but makes you enjoy the spent time a little more, which amounts to the same thing for me

- Keep universal effect
It's something that makes some rolls easier to interpret, it makes me gain time if anything.

- Humans' favored by fate modified. They get up to 4 fortune token instead of 3.
Agreed, will start doing this as well.

General tips:
- Get MORE dice! Have your players buy the package of dice if necessary, but make sure you've got your own set behind the GM screen and enough for 2-3 players in front.

- Make sure you've got some cleared space on the table in front of every player, so get yourself a table that has enough room. If you have to move the chips & dip every round, you'll lose time, and end up with smudged action cards.

- depending on how often your play with your group: before play, run through the way to build up your dice-pool for:
- initiative checks in social / combat
- attack

Nisses said:

Oh, yeah, Never used it in the first place lol.

Silverwave said:

We used them before, but once we started to use a grid for combat, they proved rather annoying. They serve no real purpose anyway. Everyone knows their stance. The only reason I liked them a bit was that is was easy to see the player characters. But they are really pointless.

Do you got an modified character sheet for tracking all those wounds/stress/fatigue etc? Nice rules btw.

I did something similar. I just keep track of initiative, monster wounds and stuff like that in a notebook. Fatigue/Stress/nomral Wounds is recorded on the charactersheet. All information about XP, advances, actions, talents etc for the players, is kept by me in my notebook and is brought out when they need to spend exp.

I searched for custom career sheets that had:

* ALL relevant information needed during play.

* NO information that wasn't strictly needed during play.

I wound up having to make my own by heavily photoshopping one I found online.

I bought a few packs of the small d6 used in battles and we use them to track our stress/fatigue and active cards on the table. Each player has his or her own pile of them, as do I for tracking creatures. Paper/pencil tracking of wounds for creatures and various other things is still my go to place as a GM. Quick scribbles on the fly is the fastest way to keep things going. The d6 however work far better than all the tokens and they are easy to read across the table.

I built new character sheets that have a permanent stance bars at the top with check boxes for a players current reckless/conservative stance capabilities. Then we place a miniature on the tracking bar and they move it up or down depending on stance. I can't get rid of the stance bar, its awesome. Nor will I get rid of stress and fatigue or combine them. Talents we track lightly, but I let the flow of the game determine how they recharge. I stick very close to the rules of tracking of all things and once it all becomes familiar, it all works very well and dynamically. You need to give it time, but as a GM be flexible and know when it is time to bend the rules to let the game flow.

I found that the biggest aspect of the components that slows things down is a lack of orgnaization at the table. With soda cans, chips, candy, player notes, pencils, dice there is already a lot of stuff on the table before you even add any WFRP components. Initially I eliminated certain components like the party sheet, counters and trackers and I discovered that the result was an even slower and considerably less defined game. In the end the components really weren't the delay, quite to the contrary they helped to speed the game up but how you we used them made all the difference. So here is a few tips I can offer for players who don't want to eliminate things but still get some efficiency and speed going

First and foremost I asked everyone to remove anything not absolutly vital to the game off the table. Aside from a bowl of chips and a couple of soda cans this made the table a lot easier to see. Second I asked everyone to organize their player area in the same way, so that each players area was identical. This REALLY helped a lot, simply by being neat and organized the components where suddenly much easier to manage. Next I placed myself in the middle of the table on the side rather than at the end of a table and I made sure we had really good lighting. I found the players where more engaged in the game when I was sitting "with them" rather than "oppossite" from them and that by having a closer visual of all the components it was easier for me to access information and use it for the game, it made the GM more accessible as well. Finally I slowed the game down. It may seem strange but by constantly trying to push the game forward we where accidently skipping a lot of the interesting aspects of the mechanic, sometimes glazing over it and it made the game less dynamic and ultimatly slower because we constantly had to correct and discuss the things we skipped. By slowing the game down and allowing it to naturally pace itself combined with the improved organization the game actually paced a lot better.

Every GM of course has to make his own call, but I noted a couple of things posted here that I felt where really kind of "at least think about it" kind of things.

Party Sheets: I found it very suprising to see people eliminating party sheets from the game, I find this to be one of the most inovative and colaboratively awsome mechanics in the game, an answer really to the age old question "why are these characters together and how are we doing?". One of the tough things to do in a role-playing game is to justify the grouping of adventures. Realistically speaking adventuring groups only join together if they have a common purpose but when you have 5-6 players in a game with characters from all walks of line the reasoning becomes really thin. I find simply having the party sheet, with shared talents, shared fortune pool generation and the added tension meter creates a sort of willingness and desire to be "grouped". Players tend to seek less confrontation and more collboration as a result but only if the GM makes heavy use of the party sheet. I am constantly looking for reasons to add fortune points to the sheet and find "tension" changes either positive or negative. This constant flux has created a rather unusual situation where good role-playing is not only appriciated by the GM, but greatly appriciated by the other players who are not just content to allow another player to play out a seen well, but encourage them because they want that player to have a great scene and get rewarded with fortune points and positive tension changes. Its made a dramatic difference in the group very noticable from other games. Its something I really think everyone should give a second chance, but its worth noting its impact is only as good as the GM's dedication to use it as a reward system and incognito communication tool. I created a house rule that everytime players aquire enough fortune on the party sheet for it to "pay out", they all recieve 1 XP as well. So now not only are they getting fortune for good role-playing, they are also being rewarded (seeing the progress of the reward and feeling the contribution of other players) via XP. Hands down one of the best and most inovative mechanics I have seen added to a game in years.

Get More Dice: I'm very much against this as well, though I understand its a time savor. I find that the more dice you have the less people care about other peoples results and since the purpose of the dice in WFRP is to help embelish and support the narrative, I go even further by creating a central place where dice are rolled and reward heavily for anyone translating the dice narratively. In my games when the dice are rolled the room goes silent because everyone knows "here comes some more awsome storytelling". Its amazing that WFRP has managed to encourage role-playing through dice, but its awsome. If everyone has their own sets or is rolling dice off in the corner it becomes considerably faster and more effective, but loses much of its personality and purpose. This is one place you don't want to speed the game up, but do the exact oppossite and slow it down. The goal of the dice is not to get results, but to get us information about what happens next in the story and thats something you do not want to breeze through.

Initiative: This is another one Im a stickler about. The initiative order is a big part of the dynamics of a battle. When people act has not only impact on the order of things but on decesions people make on their turn. When you have one side and than the other acting the battle becomes extremly one dimensional. Strictly speaking as well this saves very little time, it takes a few seconds to set it up after that its no slower or faster for players/Monsters to act in a certain than it does in a sequantial order. But without it you really lose a lot of dynamics.

Stance Meter: Another really cool and dynamic mechanic that creates a variety and limited options depending on the stance and often players are not able to act how they would like because of the stance they have put themselves in. By eliminating the stance and allowing dice conversion it breaks this dynamic. Personally I don't care for its elimination, its a core part of what makes WFRP tic.

NARRATE your combat. Don't just go "I hit, for standard damage." Ham it up, and ask your player to do so as well. It will make combat feel more alive, instead of a slugfest to get through. This doesn't make you gain time, but makes you enjoy the spent time a little more, which amounts to the same thing for me

I found it interesting here (not trying to pick on you or anything) that you have eliminated many of the components and rules of the game that create dynamics which is short for fuel for the narrative, but than ask the players to embelish the combat narrative. There is a game that "streamlines" combat with many of the same time saving concepts you have introduced here (4th edition D&D) and believe me when I say that there is more role-playing in a game of Monopoly than in 4th edition D&D. Be careful about what you take away and what ways you are speeding up the game. Many of the rules that your pulling and situations your creating (like adding more dice) do in fact speed up the game, but the price you'll pay for that efficiency is a game of "Hurry up take your turn" which is not at all condusive to role-playing. Role-playing is a story based game and good story's require attention to detail, embelishment and in a role-playing game in particular focus on the "condition" of the player so that they know "who they are, what they are doing and what the status of things is" so that they can appropriatly navigate the narrative. This really is opposse by speed and efficiency. Its a fine line between trying to speed up the game without stepping over into the "rushing through it" zone.

Lots of great comments here. I've only run one session myself, so my experience is limited. However, I've already had quite a few thoughts on streamlining.

Firstly, I've designed a new character sheet, influenced in part by Gitzman's great work. It includes a stance meter on it, with a paperclip used to record current stance. It's not exactly pretty, but it is easy and doesn't get knocked about by rolling dice. It also includes career ability and basic actions (although all players at the moment want the basic action cards in their hands - I suspect this will change once they've bought another 3 or 4 action cards). No career card or career ability card at the table saves a chunk of space.

Secondly, I agree that structure of the playing area is important - snacks went to either end of the table, and players laid their sheets out in the same way, with recharging actions above the character sheet, talents and wounds at the side. Made it easier for me to see what was going on, which is tricky enough when you're reading upside down.

Dice are important. I've bought 2 extra dice packs, and with 4 players I felt like I *just* had enough. It will be better next time, though, as I've written an Excel dice roller so I won't need to bother with any at all. One or two of my players need to learn to exercise more control over their dice pools though, as flying counters, tokens and stand ups in the middle of a battle can be a bit distracting!

One thing I am going to do after just 1 session is get rid of the wound cards for non-critical wounds. It's just so much more hassle to count up the wound cards every time, rather than reading a single number written on the character sheet.

Ya on the topic of dice, its true that dice rolling is problematic in WFRP in particular because components go flying everywhere. I think this is one game that could definitily benefit from a dice tower.

We take clear plastic tape and put it over the fatigue, stress and anything else that the players want to track and just use an erasable vis-a-vis marker.

jh

Bigkahuna is right, organisation on the table is key. If you have a dedicated rolling place, then knocking stuff over doesn't happen. One of my players brings his pencils and stuff in a small decorative box and he rolls all his dice in there. That's cool. He's the priest of Morr of my group and he brings a stuffed raven as a prop too…true story…also he bought himself little skull beads to use for his Favour Pool. He's a great player.

I actually have a table top I built for a production but now use for gaming. It's shaped like an X (imagine two 6 foot fold out tables crossing over each other) and each player sits in one of the nooks, me included, and that gives us a portion of table on our left and our right and a centre part of the table for all of us. Because we are sitting in the nooks we are actually sitting quite close to each other, which helps in general for all things. Character sheets go on a players right, dice and "soda cans on the left. The center of the table has the party sheet and is used for any maps, location cards, combat pieces etc. We also have additional fold out tables to keep binders and any extra player garbage. My table is limited to 3 players but that's all I want anyways. It's the best gaming table I've had since my moms round kitchen table….20 years ago…

The sheets I've made for my players are placed the same way on the table. I started by setting up the whole table before any of the players arrived and trained them to so. Like many, I've made a character sheet, a single piece of paper mounted on some stiffer black board that has all the need to know stuff on it. Character history, career card, equipment details etc are held in a binder on their own fold out tables, not on the gaming table. I've glued card protectors along the side of their character sheets for their talent slots and career ability cards, that hold them in place. They are easily pulled out, flipped over and slid back into their sleeves when used. My next gen character sheet will have protective sleeves mounted on the under side of the character sheet so that the names of the action cards will poke up out of the character sheet on all sides and you just pull one out when you need it.

Gallows said:

I use it on badguys standups to make them "henchmen" groups.