I have a group of players who are also my best friends in life. Two of them play WFRP mostly for the atmosphere and the stories. The third one really loves combat and always plays as a heavily armoured dwarf (we've played other games before, where he also invariably chooses this role).

I've found Warhammer can sometimes be extremely lethal. My party really doesn't enjoy that. More than that, they absolutely hate it. None of them likes rolling up a new character at all. In fact, they dislike any form of character creation. They just want the adventure to go on and have fun.

I've been considering making a very simple adjustment to the combat system that would give the players a huge advantage over their adversaries. Quite simply, the idea is that the heroes stay exactly the same, but the NPCs and monsters are severely weakened by not adding toughness to soak or strength to damage. In other words, they only use the icon values on the cards from the Creature Vault. To at least compensate a little bit for this heavy loss, I would stop using henchmen. All NPCs and monsters are 'normal' versions. I do like the simplicity of it, but it might be a bit extreme.

I wonder what the effects of this approach might be. I know combats would be much shorter, perhaps so short that a lot of monsters will die before they can even act. On the other hand, our dwarf will love pummeling enemies into a pulp and the other two players can concentrate on what they love most about the game: investigation, decision-making, acting out their characters. Is there anyone else who has tried this?

(PS: Yes I am aware that Warhammer is a gritty world where you're supposed to fear death and life is tough ans short, etc. But I'm just thinking of what my group would enjoy most. They want to be heroes…)

I don't find the game all that lethal. yes, critical wounds and insanity etc. which is what reflects the grimness.

As long as heroes (a) realize when to run; and (b) don't leave unconscious friends to mercy of zombies or other "just want to eat you not enslave or capture for later torture and sacrifice" sorts, then lethality is pretty low. So go easy on zombie hordes or make sure they have a necromancer or vampire master with use for live bodies etc.

I would go for more "dying left for dead and means automatic permanent critical" sort of approach if still finding it too lethal after all that.

Easiest solution as I see it is dealing less critical wounds to the players. That way, the combats won't feel easy, since the players are still damaged, might fall unconsious etc, and they will still get a few critical wounds from time to time. Use the boons, comets etc. for other stuff than dealing critical damage. As long as you (secretly) make sure that they won't go over their critical wound threshold, they won't die, try keeping them on one or two criticals as a maximum. Primarily pick actions for your creatures that doesn't deal critical wounds. The criticals are what kills the players mostly. If they are all knocked out, have them abducted by the bad guys rather than killed outright, giving them the chance to escape.

Furthermore, you could increase bonuses to resilience rolls due to staying at inns etc. Making sure that they recover from the criticals they do have, so that they are fresh for the next fight. You could also increase the avaliability and decrease the price for medical services and healing draughts.

Furthermore, you could recommend Improved Guarded Position to the players. It severely reduces incoming damage.

It's fairly easy to keep the illusion of dangerous combat while making it practically free of character death with this system if you want to.

This game is lethal. Yes.

Here's how you solve the issue of players getting upset:

1. Set expectations: Tell your players that their characters WILL die, WILL get disease, WILL get insanity/madness, WILL get curses, WILL get critical and permanent wounds and that if you make it through a campaign without some/all of that, I as a GM have failed you.

2. It's OK for a character to die. Here's why: My house rules don't punish you for death/madness. You simply create a new character at the same xp and with starting gold.

3. I WANT your character to die in a spectacular fashion. If I kill off your character in a non-memorable way, again, as a GM, I have failed you.

Players shouldn't "enjoy" having their characters die off, but let's be realistic about establishing expectations before hand and help players understand that it's ok and it's a new opportunity.

[rant-on = nothing personal] Molly-coddling whiny-ass, push-the-win-button players is a real pet peeve of mine when I'm at a game table. Characters DIE PERMANENTLY in REAL rpgs. Many players have never had to deal with character death, are just to lazy to have a back-up character, and need to get over taking it personally that a game that involved MORTAL COMBAT/INSANITY/DISEASE/MAIMING would be an absolute joke if there weren't consequences..and completely random and cruel consequences at that.

If they don't want their character to die, have them play an MMO. They can resurrect and push the win button all day long without any effort whatsoever.

[rant off]

jh

Emirikol said:

Everyone plays differently. I too enjoy a good character death, and prepare my players for it and make sure they have back-ups. I also find myself planning the perfect death for my own characters. I for one think it adds to the drama, and that without risk of death/madness/mutilation the game would be less exciting for the players and GM, especially in a Warhammer game. But some groups might just enjoy the story without the risk of death. Therefore I would not tell the players that I plan on never killing them and still hurt, mutilate, drive insane, infect them with disease and corrupt them. Keep the illusion of danger for the players but keep them alive.

I've played RPG's where your character explicitly can't die (if you do not choose to yourself), and it works very well and other things are highlighted to add tension, risk and "danger" to the game such as the social humiliation of your character (which could lead to the player choosing to end the characters life) or the risk that NPC's that are important to the characters die (such as their characters spouses, lovers, children, friends etc). It makes for really good, enjoyable stories even if the players know that they can't die. I for one believe that this could work really well in a WFRP campaign focusing on a group of noble characters.
I've also played games where you have extra lives and re-spawn after being killed in combat, that was also enjoyable and worked well in that game setting.

But it's all about expectations.

I understand what Emirikol is saying but I'm just happy they want to play at all. I'm not going to push them into playing a certain way. In the end, the goal is to have fun, isn't it?

Some good suggestions here, by the way. I like the idea of different risks such as insanity and mutation coming to the forefront rather than just getting killed by beastmen.

Sometimes its a matter of the right system, right theme and right type of game for the right group. To me it sounds like you need to try a different system to be honest with you. Just from what you wrote I would go with something like Vampire (either or or new world of darkness) or possibly (swallows the pride hard), 4th edition D&D. With world of Darkness style games your game is only as deadly as you decide to make it, as the system itself is not inherently deadly and its a very story focused game. While Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, I don't know how else to put it other than to say its not possible to kill a player character unless you cheat as the GM and even than, you would have to do so blatently. Its very much a munchkin game but may be right for your group.

The World of Warhammer is inherantly based on the concept of war and violance and the system reflects that by being extremely deadly. In fact to date I have never managed to run a session where someone didn't ultimatly meet some horrible fate, death or worse. I have to very often "cheat" to save characters, so your experiance as it being a very deadly game is quite accurate if you run it honestly which it sounds like you do.

To keep players from dying and keep the dwarf happy, I would ONLY use Henchmen. That way our group can kill 10 orcs and hardly break a sweat. Death would be very unlikely if you kept the numbers reasonable and the dwarf still gets to hack up lots of baddies.

Another idea you might want to look into is Fate Points. 2nd Edition had these- every character has a few, and they can spend one to prevent anything really horrible from happening, be it death, insanity, maiming, mutation whatever. Like lives in a video game. If you give your players a decent helping of them, they have something to lose, but they know they can never die until they've used their last fate point. Then you give them one occasionally after they accomplish awesome stuff, like saving a town.

With either of these techniques, the basic rules of the game don't change. If you remove soak or strength or anything like that, certain cards and creatures don't make sense or won't be balanced.

Or, you can let them "die". If the characters would die, you only have to take them prisioners or wake in another place with injuries been treated by shallyan priestesses, due to been ultimately saved by a roadwarden patrol (which of course, would have taken some if not all of their money for the trouble of taking them to the healing house) if the opponent would have been flesh eating beasts. Besides, as it is, the system says that you could and would die, if you take bad decisions. The characters can always ran away, and if they don´t, well, they should have to accept the consecuences.

I would rather have them die, but you can twist things a bit. those are my two cents.

PS: BigHakuna, i´m currently playing D&D 4e in the DarkSun setting, and i can tell you, without DM cheating, that it´s not too difficult to die in there. Obviously it depends a lot on the willingness of the DM to let characters die.

Use FATE POINTS as per v1 and v2 of WFRP. Each character starts off with 2 or 3, and gets one more after each main adventure is complete.

FATE POINTS are used to save your ass when you die. They can be interpreted in a number of ways. Blow knocks you out and you are left for dead. Fall off cliff but are luckily caught in mid air by overhanging branches. Etc. GM fiat. Basically, each FP is an extra "life".

I find this system is the best. Keeps the game lethal, scary, unpredictable. But rolling up characters is pretty much avoided all the time.

Good gaming!

We do something similar. Players can permanently reduce their maximum fortune pool by either three points or five points. Three points means they live, but something permanent and nasty still occurs (one character had his son sold off to pay his debts, instead of being executed). Five points means they get out relatively unscathed, but are still out of the current combat or situation. Players can burn five points because we don't use the Fortune advance for fortune dice to characteristics, but rather as an increase to their fortune pool. One player has burned three and another has burned five. I like it because it keeps a long-standing character around, but either with some ugly reminder or with a big fortune burn that is hard to get back without falling behind.

- deleted content of double post -

I think i would go with at least a one point reduction in Wounds and in highest stat (e.g., yes your near death experience does weaken your willpower or intellect etc.). This can still be bought back with advances but makes the experience have more direct effect. You want to keep rolling 6 characteristic dice - don't get in place you need to invoke the death protection. It also doesn't mean a character "runs out" of a limited number of "didn't die that times".

BJake said:

+1

I think this is for sure the best option.

Yepesnopes said:

The problem with using only henchmen will mean that the illusion of danger in combat will disappear entirely (at least it would totally break the illusion for me). Lowering the number of critical hits (since they're the ones that actually kill you) inflicted and otherwise using normal combatants would decrease lethality while keeping the illusion of danger, at least to a certain degree, since you can still be knocked out and suffer a good amount of wounds.

I guess it depends on if Ludlov Thadwin of Sevenpiecks want to try to keep an illusion of danger, or just have epic but easy combats (epic for the PC's as they could hack through a lot of enemies). Using only henchmen would make combat shorter and relatively safe, while lowering the number of criticals inflicted by the enemies would keep the length of combats while making them safer for the PC's.

Guess it depends on what you want from combats.

Ludlov Thadwin of Sevenpiecks said:

Having played at Emirikol's table for a year, I think I'm now on my 5th or 6th character. Definitely learned not to become too attached to a given character!

Funny thing is, I now actually enjoy random rolls to determine what sort of character I'll play next. I was playing a Dock-Worker who was pretty well fleshed out and advancing along quite nicely--almost to rank 2. But then of course he got eaten by swamp zombies. I didn't mind too much 'cause I had a Dwarf Rat-Catcher as a backup ready to bring into play. And I was pretty excited to try him out because I got to spend 8 or 9 xp bringing him up to my dock-worker's xp level.

If your players think chargen is a pain in the butt then maybe you could have a few backup templates for them to pick from. Liber Fanatica VII has a bunch of pre-gens too.

I can understand your player's perspective. I was annoyed when I could no longer play my scout--I really liked him--but it has been fun playing other characters. Talk with the players about this. Too me it's not fun if there is no real danger to the characters. Maybe if you have your players try an adventure with alternate characters that might wean them away from their current mentality.

Anyways, Ludlov, good luck with your group!

Eradico Pravus said:

Can you give me the statistics in terms of sessions or playing hours?

It is purely for the love towards scientific research.

Cheers,

Yepes

As much as I'd like to take all the credit, we did play Blackfire Pass and the additional, mandatory TPK occurred there (actually E.P.'s character survived b/c he went unconscious, so my Ironbreaker put him in a coffin, buried alive, so we could come back for him). Woe to the dwarfs finding that coffin..probably clawed on the inside, with a dead Sigmarite priest within.

Otherwise we usually have a character death or retirement about every 4-5 sessions (we usually play 2x/month). There have been some spectacular deaths of some very likable characters, and some early retirements of some ordinary characters who suffered permanent and maiming wounds. My players didn't whine about it. They didn't complain. They're toughskinned at this point and cynical about death in the Old World..just as they should be.

One measure of irony though: E.P. bought Hero's Call for the group and was the first to suffer the "Mortal Wound" card when the mystic character tried to heal him..and killed him with a chaos star

jh

Emirikol said:

Did you saw the diploma before loosing yourself to the treatment? You have to learn to only use officialy approved physicians!

Yea, the Mystic says,"Oh, I can heal you..I'm not trained or anything, but I'll make the check for your criticals..while you're unconscious!"

jh

Well, thanks for the replies everyone! For the moment, we've decided to play Dragon Age, which is a fun, fairly straightforward system that ticks all the boxes of the groups' desires. It's grimy and European and it allows for investigative scenarios but combat does also allow the dwarf of the group to wade through enemies with his axe. I hope we'll return to WFRP at some point, though, since I'm so fond of it myself. While I enjoy Dragon Age as a GM, I do miss some aspects of WFRP, especially the setting. Dragon Age is inherently nowhere near as atmospheric in my opinion…