Hi.

I was wondering are there any max on characteristics, skill training and fortune dice with characteristics for human, dwarf, elf, halfling, ogre, ect. pc characters? I have looked in the rule books but i cant seem to find the answer. (Perhaps I have starred myself blind?)

If there aren't any rules about it does anyone have some house rules I can borrow? I just think it would be strange if fx a halfling could rival a bloodthirsters strength. Even though I dont think any of our group would create such a character its good to guidelines on the subject :-)

Since you only have 6 open career advances, there is no way you can rise a characteristic above 6 unless you house rule it. Ogres can rise St and To up to 7 because they pay one less xp and one less open advance to rise them.

The maximum training per each skill is 3 levels + a fourth level which is call Mastery. You can find the rules for Mastery in Hero's Call or in some of the PoDs.

Cheers,

Thanks for you answer. It was a great help. And I found the FAQ (page 3) it also helped.

But I still cant find any ruling on the fortune die advancement. Are there fx any max for fortune on strength?

i don't think there really is a limit to it.

in my group the limit for fortune dice is your character rank.

You may only buy the fortune advance as many times as the number on your career sheet. Also, I seem to remember that you can only buy it for the career primary abilities (that may be wrong though). This limits the amount of fortune you can put into your abilities to roughly 1 per rank, same as how nephtys is playing it.

gruntl said:

In my group the Mystic bought 3 fortune dice in Int at rank 1. A bit game breaking in my opinion. Though as long as the rest of PCs are ok with it, I allow it.

In a previous discussion many months ago on this topic, the general consensus of GMs was to limit fortune dice to 1 per rank maximum like training. There is nothing specific in the rules regarding it, however.

maxium is 3 expertise dice (yellow) - the 4th rank (=mastery) doesnt add a 4th yellow die.

Yepesnopes said:

I'm not sure what is game breaking about it? It's very easy to build "one trick ponies", this may be good or not depending on what the GM throws at the players.

To get the players to branch out more the GM needs to be creative, and, in some cases, perhaps even punish them for being munchkins.

gruntl said:

The Mystic has Int 5, after 3 xp she had Int 5 + 3 fortunes. Int governs 9 out of 26 (tradecraft is left out) skills in the game, with some very important ones like First Aid or Observation. You can do a few numbers and see which is the check success ratio for someone with this stats, 65% for a Hard check and 80% for an Average check, and if you do a bit more numbers you will see that this means that with a merely 3xp this player has boosted his success ration in 9 (ok not 9, because some are advanced) skills by 20%!!. I have always found fortune advancements without regulation totally game breaking.

gruntl said:

Try to ask PCs to branch out in WFRPG 3 when you have a party of 8 players and they have 20 xp.

I understand I amb the GM and I have to be creative about resolving conflicts and that no system is perfect, but in wfrpg 3 I start to feel I have to be creative to the point of inventing my own game system. I have paid a huge amount of money for a game and I want a finished and play tested product. And for sure I am not going to punish my players for being "munchkins", because this is a rather natural thing to do in a game. If you are a fighter, you want to be strong, good with the sword and kick the ass of as many orcs as possible. I would rather prefer that ffg has produced a more solid system (like others in the market) where the possibility of behaving as a "munchkin" is rather complicated or impossible at all because the system does not promote /allow it.

The other day a player of my group did a reflexion that left me a bit shocked. The comment arised after playing a game where his 10xp character, was able to convince with charm and guile half of the population of Ubersreik to lick his boots. He said "In this rpg PCs start the game as real bad asses, and they progress really fast, with 10xp they are near heroes. On the other hand combats are very deadly and it is easy that you die. It looks like it is made to play for a few sessions and hoops, create a new PC. It remembers me of the concept of boardgames like Advanced Hero Quest".

Yepesnopes said:

Well, sure, the Mystic will be really really good at those intelligence checks. But how is his fellowship? Or physical stats for that matter. By punish I didn't really mean that you should do this in a meta-game sense. I meant more that you should put him in situations where the intelligence is not the stat to check. Of course, sometimes you want the player to have a chance at shining, then it's fine. That aside, try using more opposed checks where the opposition is someone with at least 5 in the opposed ability. Perhaps his observation check is not always vs Stealt(Ag) but could be vs Stealth(Fel) for someone trying to hide in a crowd (if the NPC has a higher Fel score). Or perhaps his Observation check is not Int, it could be argued that you have to use Willpower for long stake-outs, or Fellowship for noticing aberrant behaviour. Use the ACE budget liberally. Almost never allow the players to use stance dice in story mode.

Using http://laakmann.free.fr/wfrp/ with a pool of 5 blue, 2 yellow, 3 white, 2 black (from opposed training or cunning dice) and 2 purple the prob. of success is 83%. This looks perfectly alright to me, the mystic should succeed often in the area he specialized in. Without the white dice the success rate is 70%. The precise effect of 3 fortune dice will vary with how the dice pool looks, but 13% increase for 3 XP does not seem to bad for to me.

I can totally understand the problems with branching out and having 8 players. But the game isn't really designed for that many players, I'm not surprised you have to use houserules to make it managable. I can't really think of a RPG which would not have these issues though, then again I've never played in such a large group. The large group you have probably also affects how easy the published adventures are since your players can specialize without any risk, other players will always be able to cover for any lack of branching. In my 3 player group, even the wizard has been thinking about taking a non-wizard career just to cover some of the skills the party lacks.

One easy way of making the skill checks harder is to demand 3 successes for a complete success and that you only get a partial success with 1. The prob in the hypothetical situation above then shrinks to ~50%. I used this kind of method when running an investigative adventure and it worked really well.

gruntl said:

Here you got the idea of the problem!

wfrpg 1st and 2nd editions didn't have this problem becuase PCs started at a much lower level and the progression of their habilities was slower. With this I am not saying they were better games, they where just more scalable. Wfrpg3 is a game really designed for 3 to max 4 players and a GM, in that sense you are probably alien to all the problems that arise in this edition if you play with a large party, keep on enjoying the game

Yepesnopes said:

Oh, how much do I agree with you on that…

This response is only to the "Max fortune dice with characteristics" portion of the question. Sorry ahead of time if I'm being redundant, as I did not read everyone else's posts before I wrote this. Let me also say that I really do not like "House Rules" but with this issue, at least as I understand it, there seems a need to be addressed in my opinion.

I've made the following adjustments:

• Fortune dice associated with a characteristic must be less than the characteristic itself. For example Str 3 may have up to 2 Fortune dice associated with that characteristic, a Str 4 may have up to 3 Fortune dies associated with that characteristic, ect..

• In order to advance a characteristic you must first fully advance the Fortune dice associated with that characteristic. For example if you wish to advance a Str 3 to a Str 4 you must first have 2 Fortune dice associated with the Str characteristic to do so.

•The number of advances needed to raise a characteristic is reduced by the number of Fortune dice associated with that characteristic. For example if you have already maxed out your Fortune dice associated with a Str 3[2] and wish to advance to Str 4 it would cost the normal number of advances(4) minus the number of Fortune dice associated with the Str characteristic(2), making the total number of advances needed 4-2=2. This off sets the extremely high advancement cost of increasing characteristics. Characteristics still have their normal maximum value by character race.

•When a characteristic is increased all Fortune dice associated with that characteristic are reset to 0. For example if you have already maxed out your Fortune dice associated with a Str 3[2] and wish to advance to Str 4 you would pay the above-mentioned reduced advancement cost of 2 advances and reset your fortune dice total associated with Str back to zero giving you a Str 4[0]. If you then wish to advance to Str 5 you must first advance the fortune dice associated with that characteristic to 4[3].

This may all seem complicated when reading it but the idea is actually very simple and straightforward. The math works out well from rank 1 all the way through rank 5. It also makes for some more interesting character advancement choices when trying to balance career and noncareer completion advancements, prompting a more diversified career path.

@PlayerFlayer: Some time ago I saw someone in this forums applying a similar house rule. The problem I saw to it is that from the probabilistic point of view, 2 fortune dice are better than 1 characteristic die, although you can still justify that the characteristic die gives you additional advantages like higher thresholds, more damage, better chances in opposed checks etc, but for example 3+ fortune dice are so much better (probabilistically speaking) than a characteristic die that is difficult to justify the change.

How do you handle this?

Ok, just read everyone else's posts. I agree with Gruntl. Moreover 5[3] seems like a perfectly fine characteristic/fortune dice combination for any given characteristic, even Int. The number of skills associated with a single characteristic is still only relative to the characteristic being used at the moment. Intelligence governing the largest number of skills still does not mean that those skills are the ones used most often, that is in large part up to the GM, and it seems natural in my opinion for the more intelligent character to be the more skilled character. As far as unrealistic, 3[6] and combinations like that are the problem for me, and the dice pool they create are also unwieldy. I love the 'deadliness of combat' aspect of this system. With most of the other popular systems the character's health or hit points became so high that they can fall from a plane and get up without even being half dead. What a childish movie that is. Realism is something that can make a fantasy setting believably interesting for an adult, and I think Warhammer has taken more to that audience. Who is really held in suspense reading a story or watching a movie where they know who is and who isn't going to die, or where main characters pull off rediculusly difficult or impossible stunts without any believable explanation whatsoever? I mean if you want to play Mutants and Masterminds at least there's some explanation there, albeit a bit more of a childish one in my opinion. With other systems, like D&D for example, there's no mechanically realistic explanation for the survivability of say, a 15th Lv human Fighter. Trying against the odds to use smart tactics so as to 'Not get killed' is the backbone of any realistic and exciting action. Even a brute Orc or Gor should have to be shrewd if he wants to be long-lived and combative at the same time. This system has that part down I think.

@Yepesnopes: Yes, Characteristic dice are more valuable than Fortune dice for a list of reasons. Yes, two Fortune dice produce both a greater probability for success and a chance for more successes when compared to a single characteristic die. At average characteristic levels (Like Str 3) the small number of Fortune dice involved in the exchange(2) make the transition of nominal effect, out-of-game mechanical loss smoothed out by the few mechanical gains. In-game it's a barely noticed growing pain. However when you get up into above average characteristics the cost of characteristic advancement becomes much greater. From 4[3] it can really be a tough decision to advance to 5[0]. 5[0] can do things 4[3] can't, in addition to being able to gain more future Fortune dice in that characteristic in total. The increasing difficulty to advance a characteristic was by the original rules illustrated by the fact that it cost more and more advances to gain the next level in a characteristic. That way may seem preferable to having to take on a statistical alteration(or partial penalty if you look at it strictly in terms of successes in the dice pool) but not only in my own experience but also in the experiences shared with me on sites like this, Players are not interested in spending those high numbered advances to increase their characteristics. This way gives them the option to do so at reduced advancement costs while eliminating fortune dice overkill, or to keep their 3[2] and work on another characteristic instead of paying the cost of trying to be so specialized. Kind of like the exponential curve in a point-buy mixed with a sort of off set level ajustment like the 'Bloodlines' in 'Unearthed Arcana 3E'. Maxed out Fortune dice in both Career related characteristics? Might want to diversify your career path. Or not, and pay the costs to really become focused and follow all related careers and have all related characteristics climb to their maximum heights. If that's the case, the player needs to keep in mind the characteristic scale. Roughly 1 through 6 with a few exceptions. That means theres more of a power gap than systems with a broader scale. There is a huge difference between someone with Str 3 and someone with a Str 4, not just mechanically but especially in in-game rarity. It's exceptionally rare for a human to have any characteristic score a 5. A 6[+] should be Legendary for a human, even at PC rank 5. Back to the out of game mechanics of it. In coming up with this I thought about these main points. 1-Fortune dice need to be limited. 2-In order to not run into a dead-end during career advancement Fortune dice need to be limited by something that increases. 3-Limiting the Fortune dice by character rank does not add up without other rule changes, some of which I think take away thematically from the careers, like letting them put Fortune dice into characteristics that are not associated with that career. 4-It seemed natural that the sub parts of a characteristic should be governed by the greater part. 5-With the limitations on Fortune dice being based on Characteristic dice in a corresponding Characteristic the need for that characteristic to advance becomes much greater, with the extremely steep advancement cost for characteristics this can put a dead-end in front of a character. That's why the cost of advancing characteristics is now included in the cost of purchasing Fortune dice. 6-With characteristic advancement now at a reduced cost, PC characteristics raise in level far too quickly. 7-'Resetting' the Fortune dice allows for a steady progression of advancements the reward the PC along the way instead of requiring them to accumulate several advancements before purchasing an increased characteristic. The problem that you are saying is that there is a sort of shift-shock. And there is. However the alternative is still available to the PC. Save up your advancements just as you would if you were trying to increase your Characteristic using the normal rules, then spend them in whole or in part between Characteristic dice advancement and Fortune dice advancement. The more they save up the smoother the transition. But no one's stuck with the dead-end with their career advancements.

Yepesnopes said:

You do change sheets. However, in order to change careers you have to fill up all 10 slots in the current sheet. There won't be any open slots on that sheet available to use any more. So, there will only ever be 6 open slots available at one time … so 6 is the maximum value for stats (excepting the aforementioned Ogre bonus which allows a 7 in a couple stats)