This is an attempt to ditch all the boardgame elements that pervades the current edition of WFRP, and introducing more flexibility to character development.

Talents: No longer slotted. Use them all the time, when appropriate.

Initiative: Act in order of Agility or Fellowship as appropriate.

Stance: Players may freely choose what stance they wish to choose each round, but if you want to go from Reckless stance to Conservative Stance, or from conservative stance to reckless stance, you must move through Neutral stance first.

Reckless: You may use Reckless actions, and may use Reckless dice.

Neutral: You cannot add dice, and use actions associated with your Dominant Stance

Conservative: You may use Conservative actions, and may use Conservative dice.

Actions: No longer recharge. Instead, subtract Recharge rate from Initiative, to determine when you act each round. If the action penalty reduces you to 0, you dont actually take your action this round and must use initiative from additional rounds. Therefore a character with Agility 4, who attempts to use Accurate Shot (-6 Initiative), would act next round on Initiative 2 (4 from 1st round, 2 from second round). If they used Immobilising Shot, they would act on Agility 4, next round.

Advancement: Award 1 to 5 Experience points each session, based on the characters performance - 3 should be considered an average. You may trade in Experience for advances:

Advance Costs:

Actions: 5 Experience points each

Career Talent: 5 Experience points each

Non-Career Talent: 10 Experience points each

Wound Threshold: 5 Experience points each

Career Skills: 5 Experience points each to acquire or to increase by one level of training. Specializations cost 2 Experience points each

Non-career Basic Skills: 10 Experience points each to increase by one level of training. Specializations cost 5 Experience points each

Non-career Advanced Skills: 20 Experience points to acquire or increase by one level of training. Specializations cost 10 Experience points each

Fortune Points: 5 Experience points for each , associated with one of the characters Primary Characteristics

Stance Rating: 5 Experience points each

Characteristic Upgrade: A number of Experience points equal to the new characteristic x 5. If the characteristic is not a primary characteristic, add 5 Experience points.

Careers: Characters are no longer limited to 10 advances in each career. You can stay in a career as long as you wish, and may, if you want to , obtain all of the available advances, such as actions, stance, fortune, wounds and skills. Specialisms do not count towards your Skill limit. Career transitions cost 5 Experience points for each "advance" required.

John`s player is rather enjoying playing a thief and doesnt want to switch careers. He could, if he wanted to, eventually take 2 actions, 1 talent, 2 career skills, any number of non-career skills, 1 fortune point (for Agility and Fellowship), 2 reckless stance die, 2 wounds and any number of Characteristic upgrades - that`s 100+ Experience points!

Rank: This is now ignored. Instead, Rank requirements from spells and blessings are replaced with Divine or Arcane Ranks. As you fully complete each Arcane or Divine career (Spending at least 50 experience on a careers general advances, with 20 of those being spent on the fixed advances), the appropriate rank is increased by 1.

For example, a player has spent 60 experience points on their character`s Apprentice Wizard career, taking the required advances. They have now acquired Arcane Rank 1, and so may choose the more powerful Spell actions.

For Skills, you are now limited to increasing each skill once per career, rather than once per Rank. Therefore, while following a particular career, you cannot increase any skill by more than one level of training. If you want to gain any further levels, you will have to change into another career.

Those all look like fair house rules. I've used most, if not all, of those.

For careers that dont' have an official follow-up career, we just allow the character to take the career again, and again, and again. For example:

Thief

2nd - Master Thief

3rd - Grandmaster Thief

jh

Actions not recharging:

What with spells that have duration, I suppose you keep them as is?

What with spells that have recharge 10 and don't have a duration.
Say a wizard has agility 2. Does that mean he gets to cast his spell in round 6? Combat will pretty much be over by then.
In fact, enough abilities have recharge 3. That means you're limiting these players to doing something every other turn.

Stance: are you still using stance-depth as well? Or the player can decide how deep he goes?

With those rules for recharge no one is ever going to use any action with recharge greater than agility. Agility will also become the most important ability. I can't see that any of high recharge cards are good enough to actually skip an extra turn to perform them.

I would go with something even simpler to get rid of recharge:

Recharge 0: As usual

Recharge 2-4: You may use these as many times you want, but if you perform the same action in the next round you have to add a number of misfortune dice equal to the recharge.

Recharge 5+: You may only use these actions once per encounter. You may ready one of them during the rally phase (if the encounter is ongoing)

Active defenses: You may use active defenses whenever you want, but you have to add 2 misfortune dice to the dice pool of any action performed the same round. If you act before having had the opportunity to use an active defense you have to add 2 misfortune to "ready" the active defense.

Actions with duration 2: As normal.

Actions with duration 3+: Will last until he end of the encounter or until the next rally phase.

Actions with recharge number of "charges": Play these as normal, use pen and paper to track.

Added to this I would probably warn my players that excessive use of recharge 3-4 actions (i.e. using them every second round to avoid the set penalty), may mean that the opponents start to get used to them (causing more misfortune to be added). In principle one could even do away with the set penalty and just do that on the fly.

gruntl said:

Would you do the same for a PC which is not especialized in melee and only have the basic action card Melee Strike? would you give him misfortunes because the enemies are getting use to his attacking movements which he does every single round?

Whatever works for your game.

Peraonally, I don't find WFRP 3 at all boardgamey just because it uses physical tokens and aids. I find those speed play and let it be about roleplaying not erasing hit points etc. To me a boardgame is "your options are limited to the designer's choices" not "there are physical components" etc.. I don't find players feel choices constrained in my own game at all. My players have been "trainwrecking" the "railroad" of Thousand Thrones using 3e (and having fun doing it, me likewise).

Yepesnopes said:

Nah, all recharge 0 cards should be unaffected. Melee strike is a very generic action and can be roleplayed in a lot more different ways than, say, Trollfeller strike.

Of course there are some problems with this approach for effects that add recharge to actions. Not sure what to do in that case, maybe just increase the category one step. E.g., a recharge 3 card that gets any amount of recharge added then become unusable for the rest of the encounter.

Just fyi, we dropped the recharge for active defenses (block, parry, dodge and their advanced counterparts). It saves a lot of, what I call "unnecessary" recordkeeping. I'm not worried about "realism" (or I'd be LARPing instead), or the fact that it's just a holdover from prior editions that a person is only coordinated enough to block/parry/dodge one attack each. I'm sorry, but it's just not that big of a deal that its worth slowing the game down.

We originally conspired to make some of the recharge "at will with a penalty die (e.g. dual strike)", per rally step, or per encounter. If the recharge is 7+, well that's per encounter. No need to track that one.

Just fixing a couple of these things, without rewriting the whole game, has made it a lot more preferential for my group.

jh

Emirikol,

Have you tried using no recharges at all?

Here's what I'm thinking:

You're free to use any and all cards.
Cards with a recharge lower than your To/WP are essentially free to use.
Cards with a recharge >= To/Wp cost 1 fatigue (or stress if mental action)
Cards with a recharge >= To/Wp cost 2 fatigue (or stress)

additionally,
Stress/Fatigue symbols on the reckless dice would have the same effect.
Delay symbols on the conservative dice would be: Either pay 1 fatigue/stress to be able to do the action, or skip your action this turn.

The main problem I see is how to use cards that add recharge tokens to others, or make you count the number of recharging actions you have like many of the wardancer & greatsword actions. I guess for classes that heavily use them, they can keep playing as raw, and classes that have 1 or 2 cards like this, could be reworded to take the amount of fatigue you have instead.

I'm sure there's bound to be other issues that I missed however?

Nisses said:

Hi Nisses,

That sounds quite nice and clean. We were thinking to moving towards action points, but it will need more remodelation of the system, while what you propose seems easier to adapt. Still, you are facing the same problem as we are. There are some actions cards which have a long recharge time beacuse they are meant to stay in play for a long time, some spells and support action cards. Any idea what to do with them?

Yes, recharge as duration is the main issue, and I can't seem to get a simple solution to that.

It really is a separate mechanic that was merged with the recharge.
The standard one is to keep the action out of the game,
the second one is to keep it IN the game.

Best so far I could come up with, was to put a chit on that recharging action to indicate it was active, and while it was active, to count your To/Wp as 1 lower for purposes of the other action cards. That way, it was a drain on your personal energy, it required effort to keep it going. The player can then freely decide at the start of his round to end the effect or not.

Just that you know what are we handling:

We were thinking on changing recharge by action points. For example a character has as many action points as To + Wp (which makes for something around 6 to 10 APs for most PC, although it can go higher for some NPCs).

The game basic mechanics stay unchanged, that is:

-A character may only perform one action per round

-A character may perform as many reactions as he has

-A character may perform as many manoeuvres as he wants

Each action cost a number of APs equal to its recharging rate

Each manoeuvre cost for example 2APs

Each reaction costs for example 1Aps

And then for example, for each 1AP more that you spend above your threshold you suffer 1 fatigue.

But as you see, with this approach we are also dealing with the same problems you are facing.

What I like from this approach is that it limits through fatigue the amount of reactions or active defences you do in one round.

What I dislike is that we change traking recharging tokes for traking APs

I'd gone through this exact idea myself too.

However, like you, I found actions such as certain spells, that have a recharge of 9-10.
They would become impossible to take without some serious action-point tracking across multiple turns.

May be…Have you checked if all the long recharging actions cards that are meant to stay IN play and not OUT of play have the ongoing trait? we could tweak the house rule through this if it would be the case.

I just went through the spells arcane/divine.

It does not always say "while recharging," there is sometimes a different wording, but Ongoing does equal: stay in game with X amount of chits, remove 1 each turn. (example of different wording: Flamestorm. Each time you remove a token from this card, it does X damage in an area).

In reverse however, I did find 1 card, Ulric's Howl, where on the reckless side, double boon means the card gets an ongoing effect, but the standard effect is not an ongoing one. Consequently, you can't find the word "ongoing" anywhere on the card. So that one's an exception, but it means using the Ongoing trait at the top of the card, will not be 100% watertight.