I would like to start out that I do not have the core box yet and am buying it this Friday, I am very excited about this. I have a small history of Roleplaying Games having started out 3 Years ago with D&D 3.5 Edition Which was good at least the group was good but I found the game system to be wonky if that makes sense so early on I made the switch to 4th Edition D&D which was'nt wonky and the rules were clearer, but the Classes were very similar and combat took way way way too long.

So a few questions I have

+ How long do Combats generally take? I know this is a sort of general question as it is dependent on enemies ect however I just want an estimate on if its close to D&D length I swing miss you swing miss I swing hit do 10 out of 60 Damage that sort of thing.

+ How many different Mage and Priest options are there in the starter set and if appropriate what are they? I know Bright Wizard is an option I just want to know the broadness of options

+ Is there any other races besides the 4 starter ones for players I know that they just came out with Ogres and Halflings but I am unaware of any others, the reason I ask is I may run a game with 1 PC playing a pet Gnoblar to the Ogre and was thinking of stats

+ Does the DM guide clearly state how to interpret the dice, the only person warning me of this game says he tried it and disliked it cause he didnt know what to do with the dice, however I said isnt there a guide to how to interpret them he answered no. I think the dice mechanics look amazing so I dont know what he meant the dice really make the game for me.

+ How different is each career?

+ How easy is it to switch from the battle map to no mat at all? I mean say a Dwarf stumbles upon Beastmen what determines how far away he is?

Thanks, as I said I am massively excited I have DMed 1 Campaign in D&D 4th ed and just started another one which I will replace with this system because everytime I DM I use Warhammer world since I am a avid Warhammer Fantasy Player and Know nothing of the actual D&D stuff which is odd to me (no offense)

Timofeo said:

I am also running a 4e game at the moment and find the combats way too long. I can answer most of your questions though.

#1. I have yet to run a combat with this game yet, but from what I hear, combat is quite fast and deadly (the way it should be).

#2. There are basically 3 different priests and wizards (3 each) you can play from the core set. If you want more priest or wizard stuff you need to get either Signs of Faith or Winds of Magic.

#3. No, there are only dwarves, humans, high elves and wood elves in the core set. Halflings and Ogres are in Hero's Call, but that is all the races so far.

#4. The dice have guidelines and examples of what you can assign but it really boils down to banes, boons, comets and chaos stars. Those are the ones that the GM needs to be able to think up on the fly. The other symbols are usually very easy to interpret and a lot of them cancel each other too.

#5. Each career is as different as you want to make them. They are all similar in certain ways but each has a certain set of characteristics, skills, and other stats that count as career advances. They also each come with a unique career ability and I am planning on using the trappings rules from WFRP 2e for my game when characters want to switch careers.

#6. Not sure on this yet as I have not run a game yet, but this game can be played with the battle grid and hex maps. There are forums threads all about that here.

Combat is fairly quick, once people learn how to assemble a dice pool and what their actions do it's fairly fast. It's not like D&D though, were everyone plays some kind of combat monster (even if you are slinging spells in D&D, you are mostly there to do damage). In WFRP you could have a group of normal citizens who would get eaten in combat by fairly weak opponents, or you could have a group were taking more than two turns dispatching of your opponent will make the other players ridicule you. I'd say the first fight I ran took maybe 15 min, tops. It was the first fight in the introductory scenario from the Core set, so you can judge for yourself when you get that. In that fight we had two combat centric characters and two who thought about hiding under the wagon.

You get three of each wizards are bright (fire, mostly combat spells), celestial (prophecy and such) and grey (illusions), priests are of Morr (death and dreams), Shallya (healing) and Sigmar (patron god of the empire and religious fanatics everywhere)

Races are fairly easy to create, but no those are the only races available at the moment. I'd look at the halfling for a start when creating a gnoblar.

The dice are meant to be interpreted creatively, but the books do give you a lot of ideas abouot how they work. Talk it over with your players and see what feels good to everyone, invite them to make up stories about the results of a roll. As long as you're fair they should accept it.

The careers themselves aren't very different, but you're not playing a soldier, you are playing YOUR soldier. IMO D&D felt like it stifled the roleplaying, while WFRP feels like it doesn't.

It's not really a problem, WFRP does not care about how many feet away your opponent is, only if he is close, medium, long range. The game uses standups and tokens to indicate a rough position and distance. I believe there are some players who have created battlemat systems for this game though, check the house rules section if you miss the battle mats.

The two posters before me have anserwed your questions very well, but I just felt like adding my 2 cents.
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here is a good (lengthy) article that includes deciphering the dice pool. you really are only limited by your imagination when describing the results. javascript:void(0);/*1331848160733*/

as for the abstract distances, i find it liberating. there are examples of what a distance is, listed in the rulebook. i simply work out in my head what range seems appropriate and the encounter commences.

when the battle gets complicated with players, allies and enemies all over the place i always think of the distance to a target (be it enemy, ally or terrain) from the active characters perspective, ignoring the other elements. rarely that leaves a little inconsistency but hey ABSTRACT. none of my players have complained. we all seem to enjoy the freedom the abstraction allows rather than counting squares and re-evaluating an action because i'm one square short.

Wow alot of great feedback, that guide was a great help. I think I actually like the abstract system better since I could potentially just set the stands in an area middle table with sort of guesstimated spots, also 15 Minutes for Combat is wicked fast in 4th edition it takes usually 40-60 Minutes minimum it seems. My only barrier now is that one of my potential players who wants to play an Ogre seems to be against the system and wants to on Saturday suggest other roleplaying systems which are his favorites that can give the same aspect of the Warhammer dice but better. My problem is that I love the components and style and the fact that the game is already set to the Warhammer world so I really hope I can convince him to change his mind. We will see

Timofeo said:

No matter what system he suggest, WFRP has one advantage: It's designed from the ground up to represent the Warhammer setting. You easily end up making a bunch of house rules to make another system properly fit Warhammer.

I'd tend to agree with that actually. I was planning on doing a Birthright game using WFRP3 but looking into how much work that would entail, I have since decided to just focus on the Warhammer world, and tweak it a bit to my group's tastes.

i.e. some of my players don't like the humour in some of the naming conventions and creatures (squigs, snotlings, the whole greenskins evolving from plants stuff) but these things are just fluff and can easily be tweaked to match more conventional serious fantasy settings.

I'm having no problem converting WHFRP3e for playability with other fantasy canon, especially more gritty, "low" medieval fantasy settings.

Here are some ideas for straightforward conversion of d20 material to WHFRP3e mechanics:

d20 Attribute scores to WHFRP3e Characteristic dice:

3 = 1 charactertistic die

6 = 2 characteristic dice

9 = 3 characteristic dice

12 = 4 characteristic dice

15 = 5 characteristic dice

18 = 6 characterstic dice

Add Fortune dice to match to middle tier scores.

Modifiers from d20:

+1 or +2 = Add 1 Fortune die

-1 or -2= Add 1 Misfortune die

-4 or -5 from one single modification source = Add 1 step in difficulty challenge

Skills to Expertise:

1 to 4 ranks = Basic Expertise

5 to 8 ranks = Intermediate Expertise

9-14 ranks = Advanced Expertise

15+ ranks = "Legendary" Expertise (use 4 x Expertise dice during test)

Superchunk said:

I personally don't really like using the greenskins. Partly because they easily slide over into the overtly humorous end of the Warhammer scale, that I try to keep away from, and because there is an alterantive that I allways find to be better: Beastmen.

Any scenario I've seen for WFRP having to do with greenskins could very easily be converted to Beastmen and right away get much more of the type of Warhammer flavour I like.

There's a niche in fantasy settings that's usually filled by the orcs: the deformed brutish thug/warrior race that's often used as enforcers and cannonfodder for smarter villains.

In Wheel Of Time, for example, it's the trollocks. In The Sword Of Truth it's the Gar.

In Warhammer it's both the Beastmen and the Orcs. Which makes the niche a bit crowded.

Timofeo said:

This was a draw for me to WFRP3 as well. D&D 4e combat just plain sucks IMO. Having seen it in action at the heroic tier, the paragon tier, and the epic tier now, it is getting to the point where it is just a resource management challenge and at best, a tactical board game. We use maptools to run our fights which is pretty much necessary since I suck at drawing by hand, but the amount of prep work that I need to do for a published adventure is still quite large. The fights generally degenerate into a long drawn out grind of who can deplete the other side of hit points and daily powers first. It's pretty lame. WFRP3 takes away the square by square minutia of combat, focussing everything into one roll per character per turn and all the needless shifting around and attacks of opportunity baloney is removed.

I may provide my characters a printout of certain key maps, or maybe plugin my laptop to a tv to show characters on the map when the fights get more complicated, but I will be totally using the abstract rules as a starting out point.

Ok I have aquired Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay core set and the GM Tool kit, I got it Friday and we made Characters today I have formed a group of 3 players, we also tried a few play around duels and than I ran a mission just to try out the mechanics I was sort of making it up as I went.

The Heroes

+ Jonathan the Burgher (Who has died and been replaced by a new player)

+ Magnus the Reckless Fire Mage *Human

+ Azrael the Duelist Dillentante *High Elf

+ New Member Sebastian Storm Watcher *Human *Witch Hunter

The player explored crumbling ruins, we messed around a bit had a good time. I love the components and the rules and am excited to start learning more as we winged it for the most part. I am not sure how to determine soak value for the players and I am not sure how critical ratings work on weapons IE Great Weapon CR 2 does that mean with 2 Success one Critical is flipped from the wounds?

I will post more about my findings and our next game which will be set in the Eye for an Eye story

CR 2 means that iyou can use 2 boons to convert one normal wound into one critical.

Soak is Toughness + armor + special (talents and such)

I would reccomend looking online for pdf rules summaries. I have found them to be a huge help when running the game, and to understand the rules better. While I love the WFRP rules, I hate the rulebooks. They're allmost impossible to use for looking up rules on the fly.

I believe there is at least one of them in Gitzmans Gallery (just Google it)

Now after reading the rules I feel I know all I didnt know before, Once you read everything over it all makes sense.