I would like to hear your opinion upon then house rules I have developed for my games regarding armours .

The idea behind is not player centered, but more an attempt to move towards a more "realistic" armour wearing approach.

What I try to achieve here is to justify why people in this dangerous world that is warhammer is not simply carrying the most protective armour they can afford. Within the rules of warhammer, it is not possible to justify why nobles doe not walk around in plate armour or why inkeepers do not serve you the drinks in chain mail. While most GMs will use a narrative approach to address this, and say -well this is because wearing a chain mail is tiring, it bothers and makes you clumsy- and they will add a few misfortune dice here and there, there is indeed nothing in the raw rules that reflect that. The narrative approach is a very valid one, but sadly I need rules to support it because I am very bad at improvising narrative rules (although since the 3rd edition I have the feeling I am improving).

I will appreciate if some of you have the time to look through them and comment /criticise them. Notice that I added two new armours, renamed a few more, and changed some encumbrances.

Thanks

Optional Advanced Armour rule - Very good idea. This is definitely more realistic look of armour penalty. Also it is very simple rule, that nicely gives more advanced warrior-types more bonuses when using armour. Like it very much.

Couple of ideas:

• I would take the Weapon Skill penalties away. These are armour, made for combat. Armour could be bulky and you might get easily tired using heavy mail, but that is taken care with extra fatigue. Armour should not give penalty to actual weapon use.
• Also I wouldn't give penalty to Mounted Combat either.
• You could divide physical skills to two different categories/groups. Most heaviest penalties should go to skills like: Swim, Dodge, Acrobatics, Jumping, Trick Riding, Silent Move … And next penalty category/group would have skills like: Climb (maybe this should be in the heavier penalty category), Rowing, Running, Lifting, Balance, Juggling, Dance, Hide, Pick Pocket, Pick Locks … - Simple example: Think about person with Full Plate (and with weaponry…etc) swimming. Now, Armour Training 3rd lvl would only gain 1 Misfortune there. So, the first class of those skills should get more penalties. That second group could get what you now have.
• One more detail - If you want to make armour training little harder, maybe Armour Training 3rd lvl could only be available to Combat and Military ADVANCED careers (now you can take second basic careers to get the 3rd lvl).

Well WFRP doesent account the fact that Plate-armor not only replaced chain/chainmail becouse it offered far better protection but also costed a lot less time and money to manufacture. Its the superrior armour on the field of honor or was…when the longbows and later on the gunpowder-weapons were introduced and made armor kind of useless.

Is it realy harder to hide in armor ?

Well you could say so, to balance the far better protection of plate vs leather but ! It dosent mirror reality at all. You can hide in plate as well as in leather if your plate isent polished to be shining silver…if you´d want that (and get a bonus on charm checks i.e) you will get penaltys in hiding.

Is it harder to sneak in armor ?

Sure armor will moste likely give you some disadvantage due that the chain might russel or the plate might make some klanking sounds but leather itselve does that too…its more a "gnrall squish" sound but its there and will give away your position just as fine. Leather armor is just as stiff as metall if you use it as armor. True it will bend provided enough pressure but that doesent mean you can sneak better in it.

So when heavy armor a bad idea ? When you climb or swim ?

Well armor wont hampe you when you climb a tree or a wall if you have enough strengh and endurance, it will drown you though when you try to swim in it.

Armor is tiering you out…it fatigues you fast thats why knights used horses for protection and to get them to and through the battlefields. Many knights died not becouse they were clumsy but so fatigued that they passed out and were stabbed through the helmet. So in general i wouldent give the missfortune dice for all checks but let take the fatigue system care of that problem. I would only go for TO and ST here becouse AG has nothing to do with wearing armor, you arent realy hampered, you can sprint as well as dance in that if you realy want to. If your trained it might be rather simpel but as trained as you want to be it will always fatigue you.
So my idea for a rule would be like that :" If the soak value provided by armor in each rally-step is higher than ST or TO one fatigue for each point it excells your lower physical attribute"

And yes that means a fighter with ST and TO 5 wont get fatigued by platearmor anymore….but maybe a PC with that attributes would look a little like Mr.Schwarzenegger and i dont believe he would get fatigue problems in a fight that lasts more than a couple of minutes.

If you dont like that maybe youd go with: : " If the soak value provided by armo is higher than you of your physical attributes, take one missfortune dice for each point of soak that isent covered by one of your physical attributes, for all checks involving that attribute ( excluding initiative)"

So we got a few ideas lets cook something delicious out of that all right ?

Thank you for these first points.

I already realised that some penalties I was attributing to armours should be more general and be attributed to any encumbrance the character is carrying. I see that the worries I have are not enterely only with armours, but with the encumbrance rules, which grant no penalty until you reach a certain threshold which is very high. In real life, this threshold does not really exist (or it is very low), you start to feel encumbrance from the moment zero you start carrying something significant. If you carry a backpack with a bedroll, even if it is under your "encumbrance threshold" you will perform worse than your base attitude at many things.

After reading your post:

1) I have to read more about armours

2) I have to separate encumbrance house rules from armour houre rules.

There are RP games based on % that treat encumbrance in a bit more realistic way giving penalties from the moment you carry 1 encumbrance, but I am not sure how to implement it in Warhmmer, since this game has less granularity; let's say, the minimum penalty is a black die and that is already alot.

Nishra said:

These are very good points. But - You think Chain or Plate (also leather) wouldn't give ANY penalties over not-wearing-them when you do difficult maneuvers with skills like Acrobatics, Climb, Sneak, maybe dance…etc - If your strong and fit enough? Even if you have very fit Character and then enough armour around him, I still would bet he can dance or climb better without the armour. I wouldn't climb high wall with armour or go to dance with it. It is more difficult - Not just long-term exercise. Now, will that penalty come because he/she gets tired eventually… Well, yes and no. Armoured movement is also clumsier. Armour weights easily in wrong places, makes some movements more difficult (not all) and could be hot. It just gives penalty, even most of it comes from fatigue.

Then there are some skills that might be more difficult here. I dont say you cannot sneak or hide with even heaviest armour. I mean man with heavy armour can stand and hide in the shadow as man without armour. But what if that shadowy place is small and tight? If he needs to move little there, even tryin to remain hidden. Its those small variables/things that make bulky extra weight all over your body give little penalties.

But your ideas about the fatigue penalties are also good. It's fine line here is the penalties wearing armour fatigue or actually penalty to movement (or both).

Good points and yes you might perform a little better but then again i did all this in fullplate even did some chin-ups and sure you notice the weight thus you get fatigued faster ! Armor doesent make me feel clumsy at all ? I dont know what kind of you had but a good made plate isent hampering you.

Back to the "cooking" how about we realy do something with the enc. rules and let them take care of fatigue ?
Something like "permanent fatigue" für each 2 soak you carry ? To reflect the permanent strain it gives your body ?
Me and my group always use a movement to dropp the rucksack if we get ambushed bec its mostely what you do if youd like to win.

On the other hand lets look at the "other side of the fence" meele fighters need that heavy armor! Magic-Pc´s all have armor they can cast on themselves and in some cases (bright mage) they are as good as a plate and doesent cost a single gold. In addition they can wear armor a-n-d cast the spell on themselves (the few black dice dont stand a chance against the hughe ammount of white and charactaristic dice mages got normaly) and that´s only for mages, priest cast in armor just fine and get insane soak values !
In my group we discovered that magic PC´s ingeneral are much stronger and get more support actioncard-whise, from dice, talents and of course POD´s so far. Most Magic/Ranged chars can set up the fights in a way that they cant be hurt every other round (immobilizing shot…which we nerfed to a "you can spend movement´s to reduce the recharge tokens rather than "actions but still you get the point).

Id like some rules that arent painfull to track but easy and add to the experience and that wont take away the advantages it gives meele Pc´s that dearly need the extra soak to take the high damage from close combat. In addition i also propose not to punish players for choosing a high soak but reward players who take in account that "other armor" might be more fitting for them. In addition a plate with 20g is expensive on top of that and in our Warhammer world people will look at you if you wear it, some nobles might ask what house you are from ? If you arent noble you are like "the hound" from A game of thrones but worse…and you will feel that in the way the folk treats you.

So we need something that takes encumberence & fatigue into account as well as looks at the "magic side of life" and isent punishing players but rewarding them for taking the right armor for the job

Interesting. I mostly go narrative myself ad libbing as need be. Armour Soak is sometimes a penatly on actions like swimming or anything supposed to be "nimble acrobatics", wearing any armour sometimes will add misfortune penatlies in social situations or just narratively lead to particular outcomes (just as wearing the wrong thing does generally) - e.g., never mind penalties on your social actions showing up to party in armour, first make a check to be a laughing stock.

What do you think about the following approach?

If Enc =< St: Whenever you recover fatigue, you recover 1 extra fatigue. +1 Fortune die to Athletics, Coordination, Stealth and Fatigue related Resilience checks.
If St < Enc =< 2xSt: +1 Fortune die to Athletics, Coordination, Stealth and Fatigue related Resilience checks.
If 2xSt < Enc =< 3xSt: Nothing.
If 3xSt < Enc =< 4xSt: +1Misfortune die to Athletics, Coordination, Stealth and Fatigue related Resilience checks.
If 4xSt < Enc =< 5xSt: Whenever you suffer fatigue you suffer 1 extra fatigue. +1Misfortune die to Athletics, Coordination, Stealth and Fatigue related Resilience checks.
If 5xSt < Enc =< 6xSt: No free manoeuvre
If 6xSt < Enc: +1Misfortune die to all checks per encumbrance point above this threshold.

Optionally: +1 misfortune to Athletics, Coordination and Stealth checks if you are wearing heavy armour (enc >= 6) or full body armours.

It wants to be more general, it does not make difference between a full plate armour of encumbrance 7, or a backpack full of pans, pots, cutlery and a bedroll of encumbrance 7. Although optionally you can include extra malus (small one) to account for the fact that a full body armour makes you inevitably clumsier.

Good to hear from you again ! Yepesnopes

Four your proposed rules i got to say a little to complicated to use ?

How about this "for every 5 enc you carry you get a permanent -fatigue- that will refresh if you lay off the burden" ? You can carry ST x 5 enc if im not mistaken ? That would add up to 3 permanent fatigue (for a ST 3 Char) if you carry your limite enc and above that the misfortune will kick in to smother you further. It wont hinder you right now but shows the permanent strain on your body for carrying so much weight with you. Rough terrain or conditions then would have a negative impact much sooner.
This allows a somewhat general approach and wont need help from a list all the time.
I like the idea of a "bonus" for light encumbered charakters, but here the mages are gaining more advantage again. They dont have to use armor and i dont think its a goood idea to punish nonmagical char´s even further for not beein able to cast magic. Magic chars are pushed enough systeme whise theres no need to make the gap grow.

But back to the "bonus" maybe we should give armor a "bonus" in general do discipline (yes you feel kind of invincible in full plate) compared to "cast on armor"

Fortune-dice for Disciplin :

0 bonus for light

1 Fortune for medium

2 for heavy armor

Coulde be used and will reflect the morale and overall determination a armored fighter gains in combat…

What about light armored archers/thiefs

Well i belive light armor should provide you with a bonus from a high AG score. Yes i know ranged/Ag chars are favored by many skills such as stealth or skullduggery as well as high initiative and dmg from ranged weapons. But a little more def wont hurt in the long run and in addition a above average AG will make it more likely that you actually dodge a blow, when you arent hindered by armor. So I Propose to give light-armored characteres with and AG higher than 3 , one extra defence if they use light armor.

I think we are getting somewere ceep the comments comming and we soon will have a perfect rule !

Indeed I have the same feeling, they are too "complicated", in the sense that you have to keep track if you are at Stx3 or Stx4 of encumbrance. I don't like this too much, they are more inline with games like Rune Quest or Rolemaster than with Warhammer.

They favour mages and lightly encumbrance characters I agree, but I don't care that much. Mages typically have low To and low Wounds. If you want to hurt the mage in your group is typically an easy thing, just a few crossbow shots will suffice.

But indeed, the rules feel clumsy, having to look too often to see which is the encumbrance level you have everytime you change your inventory.

I like the idea of permanent Fatigue, and I like the idea of it being 1 point for ever 5 encumberance. That feels about right, so that an average person who is fully laden is only 1 encumberance or 1 Fatigue point away from a Misfortune die.

Might just need to sense check the encumberance values to ensure that they reflect both weight and bulk, but I suspect they are probably alright as they are. I think it's an important addition, as I'm struggling to come up with any reason why every adventurer isn't permanently walking around with at least a mail shirt on.

It will affect the balance of some encounters, but I think the GM can simply take account of that by being more frugal with misfortune dice or ACE dice, or a teeny bit more generous with Fortune dice and Fortune points.

Opens up the opportunity for a new talent or two. Perhaps a Tactics talent that allows a character to reduce the Encumberance Fatigue penalty by 1, and a Focus talent that reduces the negative Fatigue penalty by 1 (whilst keeping unconciousness where it is).

Yepesnopes said:

I think most WH artwork supports this too.

Nishra said:

The idea is clean, sounds good. But I have to think a bit longer about it. Following this proposition, the stronger you are, the more you can carry, the more fatigated you will be. I have to think if this makes sense.

The permanent fatigue is for sure something we can see deeper into it.

Yepesnopes said:

My thinking is that Strength allows you to carry, Toughness is what lets you carry for a long time. As such, the two interlink on this mechanic. An alternative would be something like 1 Fatigue for every Str+2 encumberance. But that's just a bit fiddlier.

What about decoupling armour fatigue from encumbrance entirely. That way the two can stack up individually. How about something like this:

I just whipped this out of my behind, but I figured it might be worth posting to advance the convo. As the armour gets more "awesome" with soak, you limit your ability to do a lot of "action jackson" rounds where you sacrifice a bum-load of fatigue so that you can murder the evil cult priest on your first go. You also start to see more hindrances to various skill tests. More importantly it doesn't require any constant updates with gear and encumbrance levels to going. You could flop all this data onto a custom item card in Strange Eons and away you go.

I also think it should be possible for a character to advance past the fatigue hindrance so that eventually they get to do all the action-jackson-cultist-murder-on-the-first-round if they choose. Tying the fatigue directly to their Toughness score means that they can improve their armoured combat endurance through characteristic advances.

In addition to characteristic advances you could also allow the player to eliminate some of the above penalties through Skill specialisations. Athletics: Armoured Exertion, Balistics Skill: Mobile Artillery, Stealthy: Muffled Armour, Discipline: Living in Armour, Resilience: Battle Fatigue. Allow the specialisations to either eliminate misfortune penalties or remove the Fatigue penalty somewhat.

If you wanted to cook up some talents to further reduce penalties that'd work too. But allowing the often overlooked skill specialisation system to help out an armoured panzer tank of a character is an interesting way of tricking characters into broadening their horizons.

If only I could play more often to playtest…argh!

For me personally, one of the joys of WFRP is not having a whole load of crunchy tables to look up details like this, so I for one wouldn't use anything like that. But I definitely sympathise with the intent.

However, one thing. Seems to me (and I admit I've never tested this!) that you're erring on the over-generous in saying that a solid metal shirt only adds a single misfortune die to your ability to stay afloat in water.

phild said:

You have a point here. I will think about it, but I like it.

Well you are right yepesnopes your thought :

"Following this proposition, the stronger you are, the more you can carry, the more fatigated you will be. I have to think if this makes sense."

I dont believe that there is a hidden threshold for "how much you can carry" in our physike that can be enhanced. If your muskles improve so will be able to lift/carry more but that doesent mean you can do this for a long time. The endurance is covered in TO in this system and i belive it does it well. So yes you will be able to lift more with more ST and you can carry more if you got more TO than a PC that doesent has those high stats. but it will also fatigue you more thats just right isent it ? Plus you regain those "fatigue" if you throw your backpack to the ground before a fight. Me and my group will test this next session and i will tell you guys how it worked out !

Nishra said:

Indeed, the decoupling from St and To makes sense.

Nishra said:

That is great! I am looking forward to hear the results! Keep me posted please.

Yepesnopes said:

Me too! This is probably the first houserule I'm going to pinch. Encumbrance is the first thing I felt needed adjusting - I'm a relative newbie, but Warhammer World doesn't feel like a place where adventurers walk around in plate armour, carrying backpacks and 10' poles. This rule feels like it has the right balance of being easy to understand, simple to implement and effective in making characters think hard about how much they carry - whilst not overly nerfing any one type of character.

Nishra said:

If it is that easy to work around the hindrance of wearing heavy armour, would it even be worth implementing? Granted there is no way to just throw a suit of armour on the ground to regain the fatigue penalty, but a heavily armoured character will just make sure they travel light and make another character in the party carry their stuff for them.

Also by tying the penalty to fatigue directly into encumbrance you are hitting everyone who carryies anything, as opposed to just the heavily armoured blokes. So in that respect you will have players trying to micromanage their encumbrance accross the board. And given the loosey goosey nature of encumbrance in the RAW, you might have to work in a subsequent pile of house-rules to allow players to really manage their gear outlay.

I LIKE the route you guys are going, so I hope I'm not coming off as a Johnny-come-lately nay sayer. I'm just tossing up some counter points to play Devil's Advocate.

Callidon said:

And that's fair enough. That's what a sensible person should do, drop all the heavy gear once the fighting starts, so it's really evidence of the rule achieving its goal. After all, out of combat, fatigue isn't such an issue anyway.

Also by tying the penalty to fatigue directly into encumbrance you are hitting everyone who carryies anything, as opposed to just the heavily armoured blokes.

Again, that's the intention. Anyone going into a fight carrying a backpack, bedroll, lantern and two week's rations frankly deserves to get it handed to them. So you're describing a feature, not a flaw.

phild said:

So, we tried and tested the rule…and it feels harsh, grim and so much more like Warhammer.
We use the "5enc for 1 fatigue" as a rule of thumb micro-managing to get to 9 enc or 14 isn’t happening and everybody liked the rule from a player´s perspective. Fighters who need to buy movement with fatigue don’t have that many anymore and mages/priests aren’t really that affected.
I might add that we introduced it in a "save" place so we were in a tavern and nobody was in a situation where it could lead up to problems in an instant ( don’t introduce this 3 minutes before a fight…really don’t it kills ppl ^^°)

Id propose you try this out yourselves its really easy to manage and adds to the overall feeling of a harsh world and also will lead to good play from your players since they leave stuff in the base camp (and start building a camp in general since they need to deposit tents etc. there). You now won’t always have a shovel with you, or a rope when you need it since you might have left it in the camp to stay light which leads to improvising.
This reminds me of a scene…or a realm were encumbrance also makes a difference…and there somebody told his friends :
" We will not abandon Merry and Pippin to torment and death. Not while we have strength left. Leave all that can be spared behind. We travel light. Let's hunt some Orc."

Nishra said:

*Like*