First let me say that FFG has impressed me with their Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing 3.0 system. I absolutly love it and I imagine Its one of those games I will always want to run. But I like to shake things up, in particular when Im running a long campaign I find that maintaining it (as we game weekly) becomes increasingly difficult so I like to have some 1 shot adventures ready for weeks when Im just not prepared to run our main campaign.

Given my general love for WFRP 3.0, I thought about jumping onboard with some of the other FFG RPG's and Rogue Trader kind of caught my attention as my players tend to make independent characters who like to control their own destinies.

Couple of questions about the system here.

1. Is it more abstract or more simulationist?

2. Is it deadly or more forgiving?

3. Does the game pace well, another words, is it possible to run 1 shot adventures or is it really poised as a more campaign style game? I would be ok with episodic games, but I generally want to start and finish an adventure in the same evening when I run one shots because the time between adventures may be 1 week or it may be 2 months, so I don't want to have the players rejoin games in the middle of a story trying to remember what they where doing..

4. How hard is the system to learn and teach? One thing I noted about WFRP 3.0 is that it took me a good long time to get the rules down and educate my players.

Any answers are appriciated and I would be interested to hear opinions about aspects of the system you like or dislike in particular.

BigKahuna said:

Good questions:

1.) Depends on what you're used to, I've never played WFRP before. The general mechanic is make a skill check to do something. The combat reminds me a lot of DnD 3.X just with less crazy PCs and more deadly combat. I'd guess simulationist over abstract.

2.) Definitely deadly. PCs who suffer a crit from a named NPC badguy can expect BAD BAD things to happen to them

3.) It can pace very well depending on your GM style and what the Players want. It is very, very versatile in what kind of stories you want to tell and how engaged your players want to be.

4.) The basic mechanics are easy. The two trickier parts can be ship combat and regular combat. If you do some digging there was a great guy who posted ship combat cards for players to use for the space combat.

On another note, many feel that ship combat by default favours macrobattery solvos over lances and there are some houserules floating around that are much better.

1) Compared to WFRP 3e? More simulationist. Compared to WFRP 2e, it's slightly more abstract (which is one reason I massively prefer 2e to 3e. Not everyone does).

2) Inherently deadly, but it's pretty easy to get (literally) life-saving gear. It won't always help, but it's available, and the way the Acquisition system works is very much Free To Those Who Can Afford It. …aaand if worst comes to worst, there's always Fate Points: your Get Out Of Death (Mostly) Free™ Card.
That said, if a Rogue Trader or a member of his entourage winds up on the receiving end of the Crit charts and survives, that Acquisition system means that you probably do Have The Technology, so feel free to re-build him.

3) As has been said, it's versatile with pacing. I'm not sure it'd work as a pure 1-night,1-shot system, but I don't know your GM style, or your players' play styles. I personally think it benefits from being part of an extended campaign, but then, I like extended, convoluted campaign plots. It definitely works well as an episodic format though.

4) As much as I hate to say it- if you and your players are at all familiar with d20 (particularly prior to D&D4th), the basic system can be picked up in under an hour. Just remember- it's a percentile system, so rolling low for skill checks/to hit rolls is good .
It's true that starship combat takes a while (both to pick up, and especially to play, as not only does each turn take (notionally) 30 minutes, but there aren't intuitive things for everyone in the party to do), but it's not an inescapable part of the game. I'd also say that the Psychic and Navigator Powers chapters can be something of a pain, but the same can be said for the magic-equivalent in any game.