I will admit upfront I have yet to actually run a game of WFRP, but I am quite excited to get the opportunity to soon. I've read the books over, gathered some research material and whatnot, and have even made characters so I understand the creation process. But when I was doing beyond rank 1 characters and wanted to enhance my character's stats, I sort of felt like, because they take up so much of your career advances (can take up all, really), that it really isn't all that interesting.

Again I haven't really played any, so... I'm asking here at the forums! How do you guys feel about granting a 1-point, free characteristic advance at each new Rank? The usual rules would still apply -- nothing over 6 -- and you could still raise through normal expenditure of advances, the only difference is you'd get 4 points at the new Ranks to advance your characteristics.

How badly would this upset balance, you think?

Well, I've run two campaigns. In the first two of my four players increased characteristics. In my current campaign one of my three players has allready increased a characteristic and they are still rank 1. So for my players it's obviously interesting to increase characteristics.

I think a free characteristic advance at each new rank would mess up the game a lot actually. But it all depends on how you want your game. If you want heroic action where the players increase a lot in power quickly you could give them a free characteristic advance. The players wouldn't be bad at anything after a couple of ranks though, and to me that doesn't feel like warhammer.

A middle ground could be to make characteristic advances a point cheaper (or two), for example paying only 3 advances to increase a characteristic to 4. That might encourage more purchases.

I'm guessing the reason you had to use most of the advances to increase characteristics is because you either tried to increase a characteristic to 5 or 6, or because you increased a non-career characteristic that was allready 4.

The thing you probably don't realize yet, is that having a characteristic at 5 or 6 is very powerfull. It affects a whole bunch of skills and other mechanics in the game. Increasing the characteristics is much more powerfull than buying one new skill, which is why it's so expensive. It's supposed to really cost you because it's supposed to be very rare to see a character with 6 in a characteristic.

This isn't like other systems where characteristics go up to 10 or 20 or 100. With only 6 levels of a characteristics, increasing it by 1 represent a very large increase in the characters abilities in this area. Going from Strength 5 to Strength 6 for example, would be like an athlete making a big progression in his overall strength. That doesn't happen often and demands a huge amount of investment on the athletes part. On the other hand, going from Strength 2 to 3 is an unfit person getting out and getting some proper exercise for a while. It doesn't take as much effort as it does for the allready strong athlete to make the same kind of strength advancement.

Increasing a characteristic to 5 or 6 should be looked at as a reward for comitting the time to get it. You have, after all, avoided using your XP for quite some time in order to afford it. While the other characters have been picking up all kinds of more or less handy skills while adventuring, you haven't paid attention to any of that, as you've spent all your free time training to become the strongest of the strong.

I would say that getting advances in WFRP should be looked at more like broadening your area of competence rather than increasing your area of expertise. Notice that the game keeps putting up walls to stop you from increasing your character in one specific direction too fast: You can only train one level of Skill per Rank, you can only freely use 6 of the 10 advances listed on the career sheet and you have to sacrifice a lot of the advances if you want to get even better in a characteristic you are allready good at.

For me, the most interesting thing to do with your advancements is to buy a little something after each session (or adventure). What is nice in this system is with 1 advancement, there's a lot of little things you can buy : ability fortune dice, skill, action card, talent, stance, wound threshold. Having to save advancements to be able to increase an ability isn't much fun for me as you can't buy anything for a few sessions. The only time I consider increasing an ability is when an adventure rewards 2 advancements points at once (when you accomplish some sort of bonus objectives or the like). Then only I consider not buying anything so I could raise a 2 into a 3 at the next advancement gain. I would probably never consider increasing a 3, a 4 and even less a 5. That means that at character creation, I focus more on raising stats and buy very few actions, skills and talents because I know I can get them after each advancement, which is more fun for me.

Giving a free 4 advancement points at each rank is a huge boost. Characters will get high stats very fast and they'll be very powerfull, generating a lot of hammers on almost all their checks. I like the gritty side of WHFRP so I would never do that. I like the way about anything is very dangerous. But if you want your game to be more heroic than gritty, go on. You'll have more powerful characters but you can easily compensate with facing them with very challenging encounters, increasing the number of monsters or making them face more powerful foes, making them work against the odds like climbing a very steep and flat mountain while in a thunderstorm, things like that. Really, it's just a matter of scale at this point.

Mechanically it makes perfect sense to raise a characteristic during your first chareer (if u plan to complete it) since you cant buy your skills a second time ...IMO in second-third careers unless you are going for a very narrow focus for your character buying the maximum number of skills and actions are usually pretty important - which alone makes it quite difficult to increase a stat beyound 4. - that being said if you are thief / archer - getting Ag up to 5 is pretty much a no brainer ...not to mention if the character is playing a leader type / social guy - then simple due to the rules regarding opposed roles having a 5 in your stat means you will be soo much better off ...

Since the game already plentifully rewards high stats ...sorry characteristics .. giving out free stat increases is IMO completely over the top, that would just encourage even more min maxing since - hey if I get a free advance, it might as well be from a 4 to a 5 to a 6 right? IMO everything which rewards building balanced characters is a good thing !