With all of the rumors of a 3.5 or 4th edition of WFRP what are the common predictions of the games mechanics? I have only ran the game for 5 people, all of which have been roleplaying for no less than 16 years, most of us for more than 24. All of us Love the game, mechanics, and even the components.

For those of you who have Ran/played the game what do people complaine about the most and why? If you HATE WFRP 3rd having played it or not, what about the following kept you from trying the game? Action Cards, Talents, Stress/Fatigue, Party Sheets, Action Counters, Stance Track, The Dice, Cardboard Standups, Corruption Tokens, Disease Cards, Insanity, Etc.

I admit that the game gets very expensive quickly, in that all of the expanded material is pretty much vital to the game, almost forceing us to purchase everything. While other games like D&D produce metric crap tons of expensive books and expansions but beyond the 3 main books everything else is optional. Not as much the case with WFRP 3rd. While it is totally posible to purchase just the core box and run the game forever, it is unaceptable that the Skaven, Ruinouse Powers along with some others I may have forgotten are absent from the game. Not Cool.

Gary

The game doesn't suck. Not even close. I have been playing it extensively - now along side Star Wars Edge of Empire for years. I've even proxied a number of other games to this mechanic.

The biggest complaint I hear is the action cards. It is the source of 90% of the "fiddly" bits as people like to call them. The other one is the stance meter. It is also another "fiddly" mechanic. I largely disagree that these are fiddly, just a different way to do things than most people are used to.

It's a great game, we'll just have to see what the future holds.

I've run 80+ sessions and like the game immensely. I've confirmed with players they want to keep playing a new campaign when current ones ends. I've asked "anything to houserule or change" and they've not suggested anything. They agreed with my effort to find a different approach to Party Card, that's about it.

There is sadness at lack of more elf support, and I still growl at the mess that is Creature Guide, but there is no hate for the system at our table.

Rob

if you go to gitzman's gallery he has an enhanced character sheet which makes it possible to track just about everything but the non basic action cards on a character sheet.

the negative rap on Warhammer 3E is complex. The warhammer community is very passionate and 2nd edition was beloved so 3rd edition came a long when people were hoping for a cleaned up 2nd edition. Warhammer 3E also came out right around the same time dnd 4th came out and roleplayers everywhere were raging that wizards had dumbed down dnd and made it into a board/video/card game so warhammer 3E got lumped fairly and unfairly in with DnD 4th. Fairly in that both games were trying to drag us roleplayers kicking and screaming into the future instead of living perpetually in the early 80's and unfairly in that warhammer 3rd was not a roleplaying game.

for those new to roleplaying warhammer 3E is brilliant especially if you introduce players to descent 2 first. descent 2 is like a light light version of warhammer 3E. i tried to introduce 6 new players to pathfinder and it was difficult. i tried warhammer 3e later and the new players loved it because they knew exactly what they could do in combat.

valvorik said:

Same here. We have great fun with this version and are grognards that started playing with V1. Nobody wants to go back.

Remorhaz said:

I agree with this. I was dreading a 'cleaned up' version of WFRP 2, or something based on the 40K line, even though I know it's been very successful. I had a lot of fun with WFRP 1 and other games using lots of crunch rules like DnD back in the day. But - although it's possibly become so big and popular that it's now cool to hate it - White Wolf's Vampire, the Masquerade changed all this for me. If you bought all the thousands of books, there were an awful lot of rules you could add, but at it's heart, the system was simple, expressive and full of variety. Plenty of other (Indy?) games have also come along with wierd, wonderful and innnovative rules (Try Unknown Armies for the brilliant madness meters!).

So I was very pleased that WFRP 3 set out to radically redesign the sytem. I was less pleased with some of the outcomes. For me personally, there are still too many rules. Combat being a good example: I'm not interested in 50 different cards for 50 different actions. I'd rather have a 'combat' skill/attribute/talent/whatever and use narrative storytelling to describe whether the fighting involveds shield slamming, twin strikes, etc.

As a GM I also find that there are far too many rules for NPCs. I personally would like everything I need to know about an NPC (rules mechanic-wise) to be able to fit in a short and simple stat block - with possibly a few bullet-pointed special rules. And I'd like to be able to resolve NPC actions as quickly and simply as possible, without referencing cards, books, etc.

I also would have preferred the books to have been a lot denser when it came to setting material, even if in practice, a lot of the material that was written for scenarios for older editions would never be accessed by players. I also was uncomfortable with the tendancy to emphasise more of the high fantasy setting of the wargame over the low fantasty grittiness that WFRP is famed for. Although that said, it's easy to romanticise material published for past editions: there was plenty of rubbish stuff published for WFRP 1 and 2. I miss the black and white pictures too. In fact, I think the art goes some way to explaining why I feel that WFRP 3 was higher fantasy than previous editions even though I suspect that empirically it's not necessarily true.

So, I agree with Commoner: the game doesn't suck, even though it's not perfect.

I think it's unlikely there'll be a new edition published any time soon (i.e. for years). If FFG really don't want to continue to put effort into supporting the game, they can use POD supplements to keep it on life support. But if it dies out because of a lack of customer interest, I can't see that they or anyone else is going to go to the expense of producing a new edition until some time has passed.

Interesting. This could have been the plan behind the POD's from the begining. Not only to test the success of the POD model, but to create an avenue of low cost low effort support for the game. Basically costing for the next few years.

LIke Valvorik I have run over 80 sessions of this game and introduced it to somewhere close to 20 players and virtually everyone has liked the game (and I run it pretty much as writen with all of the cards and stuff). One person was a bit "meh" but no one has actually disliked it. Some people have issues with elements of it. Mostly old 1st edition players who think characters are two powerful and miss the old "swing and miss" type fights. Or they are people who have a very fixed ideas on what the warhammer setting is all about and don't like the way FFG have tried to bridge the gap between the old rpg and the wargame (although these are usually players who for some reason forget that it was possible to play powerful characters in 1st and 2nd Ed and will insist that everyone played a beggar).

However none of the players I know have every brought any of their own books. This is in stark contrast to any other game I run. If I run Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, any of the 40k games etc then most of the players will sit at the table with a least one rule book. I am not sure why this is the case but it must reduce the number of products that FFG sells if they can only sell to GMs.

The thing I like most about the system is that FFG tried to do something different. Given that it was a first attempt it was bound to make errors but I think they realised this and countered the problem by making the game pretty modular and by having lots of GM fiat built into the rules. I have just checked my library and I apparently own the core rules to 86 different systems. I can think of a couple of playing card based games and a couple of diceless games but I am guessing 80+ of those 86 game all have a system which is either "roll dice and get more or less than this number" or "roll a number of dice and count successes". Whilst I play that type of game a lot it is nice to have an alternative. So thank you FFG for trying something new and, in my opinion, pulling it off with some style.

There are a couple of aspects of the game where the benefits/value of the 'fiddly bits' has not been well sold. Take the cardboard standees. I really like the standess and I notice that Paizo are producing inferior ones and selling them in big boxes (they call them 'pawns'). With paizo you can buy the adventure path and then buy the 'pawns' for all of the creatures. With FFG the standees come in the box as part of the game. However I dont think the players view these as valuable items because the game uses an abstract range system. I like the asbract range system as it means you don't need a battle map and don't need any miniatures as everything can be described in simple terms. So therefore the standees just become more 'stuff' that increases the cost of producing the game but not the percieved value of the game.

The other problem that FFG has with this game is that the setting and the system are so closely interlinked. 2nd Edition only recently produced good quality fluff on the empire, the major cities, chaos, the colleges of magic, the cults, the skaven, the vampires, Kislev, bretonnia and the border kingdoms. This fluff is all still valid and all available on drivethrurpg so would anyone buy it if they released a 3rd edition book on Middenhiem? A good proportion of the fans they were targetting would have been 2nd Ed players who, like me, will already have a shelf of books on the Old World. They are clearly aware of this because they have set the default setting of 3rd Edition around Ubersreik and the next big release is set in Averheim which was largely avoided by 2nd Ed. I suspect as a result that the Elf players might finally get their own source book in 3rd Ed because they were avoided by 1st and 2nd Editions.

Just weighing in here-

My group has been RPing for about 15 years together, and we've played every system under the sun. We even developed our own completely homegrown system over the course of about 5 years until we decided this year to put it on hold and try something new. When we switched to WH3rd, everyone loved it. I as the GM especially love it because the game mechanics make everything interesting - even a few skill checks can tell their own story because of the ingenious dice mechanic. As an above poster stated, this game is great because it tries something new. Playing it was like a splash of cold water to the face, and immediately highlighted the weaknesses of many other systems I'd thought just fine for years. Even if the system ceases tomorrow and no more products are ever made, me and my group will be sticking with this system for the long haul.

Just to show how much my players like it, 3 of them have forked over their own money to buy expansions for me to use as GM. They get cool new careers and action cards, I get cool background fluff and new challenges for the group. This has never happened in my group before. The system is just that good.