Hi guys

After 5 games of exciting adventure my group and I realized that combat was not as satisifying as it used to be, No parry rolls, no damage rolls, no real hit locations. Düring combat there was no fire in their eyes like we have when we play Dark Heresy or Rune Quest. One of my players said that good description of combat is fine but they did could not shine up to the system. Furthermore the fact that we have to buy extra cards to make the game more efficient pisses us off. So there it is: Going back to 2nd ed with a couple of modifiations taken from the 40k. 3 ed was a nice try but if a system aint broke dont fix it.

Pallomides said:

Well I think 5 games in particular if your an experianced player/GM is more than a fair effort.

I suppose WFRPG is not for the tactical combat oriented group, I think thats the one niche Warhammer Fantasy really doesn't try to scratch and I think that's where a lot of house rules for this game really spawn from. I think this game could use a modular "tactical combat" option, I don't think your the only person who misses things like damage rolls, hit locations… tactical movement and such.

Consider this though, for the benefit of a philosophical discussion. Does rolling to get a random hit locations make the game any more real than if you simply decide randomly? How does rolling for a random Dwhatever die to determine damage improve the roleplaying experiance? or make combat more interesting? I mean the things you point out are so … I don't know, trivial.. picky. They seem completly irrelevant and more important super easy to house rule. I mean you want to have random damage… so make it randomg.. instead of a DR5 its a 1d6-1 there ya go!

Is that really what broke it for you? Seems really extremely picky. Its like me not likely Warhammer 40K because there are to many M's in the title. Don't mean to pick on you, it just seems the points on which your stuck are pretty trivial.

Pallomides said:

I'm sorry but this always makes me laugh. Stating that 2nd edition should have not been "fixed" while using fixes. What I'm not getting why would someone want to use the 2nd edition rules anyway as 1st edition was better in every way in my opinion.

Games are like food, some is awful and some great but other than what's really awful, even among what's great it's mostly it's a matter of personal taste and tastes differ (I'm not so much on over-detailed combat myself for example). So, good gaming to you and your group.

BigKahuna said:

I actually fully expect FF to release another Omens of War (II) sometime in the future. Which will probably include more severe/permanant wounds and some sort of hit location system. Or they could just release a POD set of hit location cards (which I'm pretty sure someone on these forums already home-brewed).

It's funny how FF are really approaching WFRP in a very modular way, similar to how Wizards are handling D&D Next (except for the whole open play-tests thing).

Anywho, best to you and yours OP! Happy gaming!

Oh, what I wouldn't give for a player's guide 2…

I have to agree with Doc Cthul as well. 2e was pretty quiet compared to 1e. 2e just added feats and a grid and, to its detriment, took away the grim and gritty that the previous edition had (heaven forbid we have whores and baby sacrifices). 2e isn't a bad game system though. Mechanical changes forced more balance/fixes upon players who didn't care about game balance. It's just missing the grim and gritty of 1e (some products excepted). If I had to compare my experiences with 1e to my experiences in 2e it would be the difference between Halloween haunted house and an amusement park. One is scary and dark. The other is not.

3e is a completely different game system form 1e or 2e though and is overly complicated in many of it's mechanisms however, and i can see that if you wanted to go back to a simpler game system and are frustrated by all these cards coming out (that you feel you must buy?), I can sympathize. 3e is a very pretty, glitzy game system that is "still in print." It too lacks the depth of "feel" of warhammer, like 2e does to 1e, because it is so slimmed down and condensed. Running 3e with a 1e theme-feel would be my personal favorite game

There's no reason that you "must" buy all these extra character ability packs that are coming out. I don't know how much you spent on 2e in the form of books or whatever, but it's probably comparable in price. (someone do the math for us

The biggest problem with 1e and 2e is they are out of print.

jh

I think you can purchase a hit location dice like this. Just add that to your dice pool and you're all set for attack rolls.

I've never liked rolling damage so I'm glad that's gone. If you enjoy combat that takes forever with all the combatants missing 75% of the time, then 2nd edition is perfect for you.

I really like 2nd edition, had a lot of fun with it, no one will faulty you for staying with that system.

I assumed that 3rd edition would improve on the parts that didn't work very well. So I too, was initially disappointed with the new abstract approach. But as soon I altered my GM style to match the philosophy, I found that the games flowed more organically. Most of my players were not hard core veterans of any RPG system so they took to 3rd edition easily.

It took some expansions to really flesh out the mechanics of 3rd edition however.

If i did go back to 2nd I would totally use the cool stand-ups. They're purdy…

Just finished a 4 hour session of Dark Heresy that featured combat heavily. I really, really would love a WFRP3-esque version of the 40k games because dear God the percentile system annoys the hell out of me. I can't imagine ever going back for Warhammer.

Pallomides said:

Definetely you took a wise decision, you have to play the game that gives you more fun. I have played both, the 1st and 2nd editions and I enjoyed them all, in my opinion, each gave his own contribution to both, RPGs and the warhammer world but; but under no reason I would go back to any of the two.

But I want to use this thread to say once a a pair of things regarding combat in 2ndt (and 1st) edition.

"no damage rolls" That was something that frustrated me to the bone in the previous editions. There you could have a WS of 99%, roll a 01 to hit and then a punny 1 for damage!!! Other percentile games like Rune Quest incorporated critical hits upon rolling below the 5% and 10% of your WS. That was a better choice. From this point of view, in the 3rd edition you strike for damage depending on how good you are.

"no real hit locations": That was for sure one of the biggest disappointments I got when I moved from Rune Quest to Warhammer 1st (and 2nd) edition. Real hit locations? this is a joke. They are not real at all, I mean, why are they there at all? which is the difference from striking someone in the head or in the arm? None. Only in the case he wears some different armour in different parts of the body. Even when you bring someone down to 0 hit points, the difference in critical effects were minimum. Again, in that sense Rune Quest was a much better system for hit locations. In my opinion, the 3rd edition does a better job here as well, the hit locations are integrated in the critical wound system given by far a much better flavour to combats.

And for combat itslef….I was tired of combats in 2nd edition. GM: (after describing the main room of the inn) Declare actions please. Player1: Swift attack. Player2: Swift attack. Player3: Swift attack. Player4: Swift attack.

When I finished plyaing 2nd edition I had a book of house rules of 60 pages!!

When I started playing 3rd edition I had a book of house rules of 10 pages, now it has only 4 and a half.

No way I would go back to it.

Every RPG has its merits I suppose, & its often the trivial things that make the difference. If its your character that got hit, you would still want to be able to parry or dodge by picking up the "bones" (dice). I would add a couple of 40k rules to the fantasy combat because Dark Heresy etc have constant improvements on the combat system that make sense. Its all a matter of taste & style of play.

Perhaps I played Runequest for too long - the character sheet had all the rules on it & there was no doubt what effect it would have if you hit the head for full dmg. The game also eventually suffered the sickness of marketing and by RuneQuest 3 ed the system had become cluttered.

As far asGame systems go Cyberpunk & Rune Quest have been the best combat systems so far in RPG history IMHO

Pallomides said:

What you could try, is keeping the (black and purple) dice that the PC contributes directly to the attack pool against him separate from the rest of the pool (these will be mostly from dodge/parry/block abilities and situational modifiers) and give these to the PC. Then if the NPC hits him, the PC will have some dice to roll to further adjust the pool. And he will know whether his dodge (etc) made the difference.

Respect for giving it a go. BRP/D% games have been around a long time for good reason. At least you are still playing in the old world.

"Man overboard!…..Full Steam Ahead!!!"

Lol Just kidding

I think the problem really with RPG's as a whole is that there are very few that fully comit to being RPG's like WFRP 3.0 does. I think people have grown so accustomed to finding board game mechanics in their role-playing game that this has mistakenly become a new sub-genre of role-playing … the RPG Board Game. For more extreme examples you need look no further than 4th edition D&D, effectively a board game in every definable way. Sure you can "role-play" but the rules are firmly written exactly as board game rules should be written. I can role-play in 4th edition as effectively as I can in Descent the Board Game.

I think the interesting aspect of WFRPG is that its a fully committed RPG and it comes from a company who creates board games. Its almost like their exposure to making board games, allows them to identify the difference between a board game and an RPG much better.

Things like hit location, rolling damage, tactical movement, rolling parry and all these other kinds of fiddly "I need some die results to tell me what happens" type mechanics have all pulifirated themselves from this sub-genre. In more attuned role-playing systems like White Wolfs World Of Darkness for example, or TSR/Wizard of The Coasts Alternity you can find the differentiation between role-playing rules and RPG Board Game rules.

The key difference is the application of story over the mechanics and the weight you give as a player and GM to the story over the mechanics. By design these systems are intentionally dynamic with rules often being vague and suggestive, but not definitive or mathmatically broken down. A spell in World of Darkness is a narration of abilities, suggested possible die roles, but above all else its story importance. Alternity for example gives us more crunch but defines skills (an intrigual part of a role-playing system based in the sci-fi universe) very vaguely, only hinting at possible mecahnics. Again, an intentionally abstract and dynamic system created to ensure that GM's don't run into this very problem, aka, players looking for rules to determine how to play this board game RPG:

You have to wary of the difference. RPG's are about invention, creation, defining things through the narrative. The best roleplaying games allow these things to develop by intentionally not defining things that might affect the story, like Hit Location as an example. This is very stiff… it says "THIS is what happens". This lends itself to random story telling, but not dynamic and believable story telling.

Just my two cents.

I will defnitly be getting the Enemy Within, I will be converting it to to 2nd ed. The old world has & will be my preferred setting. The point actually is that you have to feel comfortable if you are gonna spin a great tale, player & GM alike. I could not help feel that I was buying into another magic the gathering scheme when I got the 3ed game. Too little Cards, if you buy more it will be better etc, etc. The 2nd ed book (same as Dark Heresy & Deathwatch) is complete in itself you dont need all the other stuff to make the game work well. But I guess people have to discover ways to make more money.

Left a bad taste in my Mouth, but please its not that I would want to stifle anyones creativity, there are many good ideas in the book even if its a complicated ruleset. Nuff said I will still be here to collect inspiration.

Pallomides said:

Yeah I think now we have gotten to the bottom of your preference here and I personally think its an extremely valid one. I think WFRP's full experiance requires a considerable investment and I think Magic the gathering is a very comprable game in terms of approach. Try spending 20 bucks on magic and see how much fun it is to play .

WFRP 3.0 is not just a role-playing game, but rather a hobby in its own right, at least in terms of how much time and money you will invest in running great games. It requires the player to make a Paradigm shift, you no longer buy a couple of books to play the game, you are buying a modular, component based role-playing system and you will be spending a lot of money to get all the gadgets, each one improving the experiance. Very much like Games Workshop fantasy battles, the more you put in, the more you get out. As such, other role-playing games that are defined within the confines of a single book (Pathfinder comes to mind) offer great experiances, but if you have experianced the full monty of WFRP I think it becomes very hard to go back to those games (at least it does for me). At this point even if I where to start running a Pathfinder game or something along those lines, I would probobly be fevershly creating components for it as this really has become part of a paradigm shift in terms of how I see the entire hobby of role-playing.

That shift requires both an embracement of the system and a thick wallet. If worth saying as well, personally, it think this format is the future of modern rolle-playing as it addresses a lot of issues caused by the digital era. It also lends itself to bringing role-playing into a computer based interface and we are going to see role-playing game system start to look more and more like PC game interfaces. This game was a big first step towards that. I think in the next decade role-playing games will be designed with "online" play in mind.

This made me think of fights in the first edition. We had played with the same characters for 2 years once a week - an extended Enemy Within campaign - and with the 1st ed. combat system being what it was, the wardancer would slice and dice everything before my monsters could even say 'eeep'. He couldn't possibly be stopped by anything. He had trillions of attacks, his initiative was through the roof and he could dodge anything. After 2 years he had turned into a one-man wood elf army. It didn't bother me much as a GM though. As it has already been pointed out, wfrp is heavy on narration and not combat.

Thinking back, the hit locations never really served a purpose other than to decide if there was 1 point of armor or not. Sleeved chain mail became the armor of choice very quickly among players while mail shirts were phased out. And of course, you needed to decide the right critical to roll a bloody finishing move. Gotta have the blood and gore in Warhammer.

Though it seems the hit location were always a *means to an end* rather than an end itself. An extra step so that you could read up on the critical.

If I may derail the thread a little - how would you guys use dungeon tiles? I'm the proud owner of pretty much every D&D tile set ever published and quite a few of those I have twice or even three or four. Yet I don't use them in wfrp for ideological reasons. I figure this: If I set up a place with tiles, it's described 'as is'. The way the stones look like, the items on the ground (a skull here, a fireplace there). Worse, it also shows what's *not* there. There's no chest that a character could jump on, or no table to throw over. If you pencil out the rough layout, all these elements can be added to the fight in narration.

I'd like to use all that cardboard I own somehow, but I haven't figured out how to stay true to the narrative combat of wfrp while doing this.

Does anyone have an idea?

Pallomides said:

My new campaign starting next week is actually going to be 2nd edition with a few modifiers. This is not because I don't like 3rd edition, it's because I have two campaigns that I play/gm already in third edition and if I spread my stuff over a third I'm never going to find anything! I think third edition does many things better than second, my favourite are the insanitites, social (I love the social system, so many options!), disease, mutations and wounds. I think second edition does careers and finer details better.

I personally think combat sucks in all RPG and so far the most enjoyable is third edition as it allows me to describe and picture the scene better but if you are a numbers man than I see your point. Enemies seem to have more character in third edition as the themed cards really stimulate the imagination, in 2nd ed they look like walking spreadsheets to me and It will force me to act more creatively in my descriptions, lest I get bored of running my own game every fight I come across.

All I can say is at least you gave it a go, 5 sessions is a good run.

Johannes_Tippmeister said:

The problem is the Grid. The defining factor for a tactical combat game and an abstracted combat game really is that damned grid. As soon as people see boxes they get a sense of scale and they start thinking in tactical mode at which point you lose them and the seperation between combat and narrative becomes wider and wider.

My suggestion is, avoid anything that defines distance in anything but an abstract way.

BigKahuna said:

Though I agree with this to an extent, I don't believe that a roleplaying game that uses mechanics to determine things is necessarily worse than a player narrative. It's just different. Different systems allow different folks to roleplay in their own way. As such, the best roleplaying game, at least as far as I am concerned, is the one that I am playing at that moment. Whether that is Warhammer 3e, 2e, Pathfinder, Alternity, Dark Heresy, or some other flavor of the week. As long as I'm having fun and it feels like a good roleplaying game at that particular time, I will remember it as a good game and to hell with anyone that tells any of us any differently.

Cheers,

~cd

Monkeylite, thats what I do with my players. They gather their defensive dice when being attacked (parry/dodge/block/armour and any other modifiers I give them) and roll them at the same time. It gives the Player a sense that their character is influencing the moment and defending themselves. It's great.

cd8dman said:

Well of course, I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Everyone has their own preference, but I suppose I was speaking more to the state of role-playing as a whole and the direction WFRP 3.0 is actually pulling the industry.

I think what we learned from really stringent systems like 4th edition is that they are fun, but have a limited replayability because "The Game" mechanic when stringent and overly defined not only focuses the experiance on that mechanic (in this case combat) but becomes both repetative and limiting to the creativity of the story because it is so defining in terms of "what happens in the game". This is why we get the common complaint that 4th edition doesn't have any role-playing. Game systems like GURPS however have shown us that the oppossite can be true as well, when you completetly dive into the deepest crevices of a mechanic the amount of random (not dynamic) events gives the game a sense of itself. The problem with both systems for me as a GM is that they where very unwieldy to run. With 4th edition D&D I felt my story was controlled by the game mechanic. With GURPS there was too much to remember, there where just too many rules and the game session was 50% finding rules in the book.

Hence I think as a industry WFRPG represents where role-playing games are going to go. More abstraction, easier to manage game systems and above all also a focus on narrative storytelling which really are the roots of role-playing games, roots which many mistake D&D being responsible for but quite to the contrary role-playing wasn't defined by D&D, it was created by D&D. Far better and more creative people are responsible for role-playing than Gygaxx.

We will see if this is where the Industry will go. Abstract does not mean better, a lot of players want a simple, consistant mechanic. Lets be honest about Roleplaying: The main motivation is about overcoming great danger thru violence to gain power & glory. A lot of players dont like the abstract part in the game mechanic of combat. There is no "gamblers" adrenalin rush if its abstract. Lets take a Rune quest example:

Hero elf character running at 75% attack, rolls to hit a measly gobbo and misses (schock on players face) the gobbo pokes back with his spear and rolls a 01 critical (d20 shows its a hit to the head) = maximum damage armour ignored. Now our elf Hero has 4 points on his Head, if he takes double the amount of dmg on his head he is dead, max damage for a longspear in RQ is 1d10+1 which in this case = 11 dmg. The Elf Hero is dead dead dead if he misses his parry.

GM tells the player who has been running this character for over a year to roll parry: Tell me that this would not leave a stamp in that players underpants as he rolls parry (at 75%) to save his characters life. If the GM is worth his salt he would of coarse be narrating & scaring the player even more.

I have expierenced this situation more than once in my 25 years + of Roleplaying & every time when something like this happend the whole group when quiet and all waited, holding their breath to see if another hero dies.

The great thing about Rune Quest 2 is that you never needed to look up some crit table: its all on the Character Scheet.

Pallomides said:

I don't think we are talking about the same thing here. What Im talking about when I talk about abstraction is that I want players to be able to do more than just "parry" when put into a stiuation like that. I don't want his options in combat to be anymore limited by the mechanic than it would be in a social encounter and I want those narrations no matter what they are to have a resolvable set of rules (aka rules on how to come up with rules) which I think is what WFRPG has acomplished hence players aren't limited to "the mechanical rules" in or out of combat.

This is what most systems don't do. The presumption of most systems is "here are the actions you can take in this combat situation". WFRPG asks in combat, the same queston you get asked at any other type of story/narrative situation, what are you going to do now!?

In your above example the player could say "hey I parry with my sword" and thats fine and their are rules for that in WFRPG, but he could also say, "I'm going to grab some sand from the ground and right before he swings at me toss it in his eyes and than try to roll out f their". Now you have to come up with a die roll/action card and mechanic that handles that… and its not a parry. This is why I prefer abstract systems. When you start playing a role-playing game where combat is so defined that it does not allow you to act naturally, it is by definition no longer a role-playing game, it is now a miniatures tactical combat game. This is the direction 4th edition tried to take the role-playing industry, there is no other way to say it other than that it was a self admited failure which was confirmed with the announcement of 5th edition and the complete 180 in development of the systems design goals.

By design any system that says "here is what you can do" is bad, any system that says "you can do anything you want" is good. This is how I usually judge whether or not a game system is a role-playing system, or some other merger of board game/tactical game and role-playing game. I find few actually qualify as full role-playing games because few are equiped to handle narrative actions within rules of a combat mechanic. Usually only game systems that use dice pools like World of Darkness and WFRPG as examples.

I think 3°ed is more narrative, the system doesn't bore me with the physic of the world, it tells me only if an action fails or not.

I can let describe to my players even the damage to the characters. I don't find anything of a board-game in WHFR.

To me a good game is a game that work without "the rule 0" or "the golden rule": as master, I want play, not constantly fixing the game.