Hi,

I have been GMing for a party which includes a Wood Elf Wardancer, Middenheim Mercerary, Hochland Bounty Hunter, Dwarf Slayer and an Apprentice Death Wizard.

This party were high rank 1 characters. After the first session in which they fought multiple trolls which they defeated with more ease than I hoped. This is when they first meet "The Beast" which is a creature that they are planned to fight in the finale. The Dwarf Slayer playing in character rightly agitated the beast. The battle which occurred nearly saw a complete party wipe however, they were able to defeat the beast with some amazing at the death rolls.

This now has left me with a dilemma and need some help. I will now need to rework things to make the situations more difficult for them. Knowing that there will be a confrontation with the witches fenbeast and seeing the way that they dispatched 2 trolls with little effort. I need ideas on how to make this more challenging for the PCs… As well as some ideas to make my final confrontation with the Dark Elves more challenging for PCs.

I sometimes wonder if I am too easy on my PCs.

I guess any ideas how I can challenge my PCs would be appreciated. I must admit I am rather new to GMing however my PCs are quite competent players with within social aspects of roleplaying as well as bring in combat sequences. They work well as a team making it difficult to completely challenge them.

Any tips and ideas would be greatly appreciated.

This game in my opinion has a virtue that is at the same time a flaw. The designers decided that it would be better to have a game that was highly customizable by the owners (or you can also think it saved them hundreds of hours of play testing).

You will read in this forums people saying that their parties slices through enemies like butter, while others say that the game is super lethal. Why is so?

Simply and easy, creatures contrary ot other RPGs are not fully fleshed. They have DR, Soak and Def and one action card mostly. Which gives the GM a lot of freedom (or a lot of work), giving them weapons, armours, extra actions…

Your party killed the two trolls easely? Next time give them some decent action cards like Reckless Cleave, Throw into the Wall, Double Strike, Crush'em Good… give them also a weapon, instead of their claws with DR5, give them a chunk of tree and rise the DR to 7.

The virtue is that you have a lot of room for modification to adapt challenges (I am talking now about combats only) to your party. You have to know your party, which comes with play time. The flaw is that you will have to work pretty hard, sometimes, one or two bad placed action cards combined with a certain weapon and oops! party wipe.

Cheers,

Yepes

I had the same issues with the first party my PCs ran, they were very combat focused.. So I had to simply test their limits.. I introduced a charging Minotaur.. It fully took out a dwarf pitfighter in one swing.. Yepes is definitely on to something though.. Give them actions instead of just the basic stuff.. Regarding the corsairs in the end of the adventure, iirc they do direct damage not regarding soak of defense.. Simply by rolling fortune dice, just add more dice so their first PC to get hit will be floored - or close.. Another thing you can do is spend more of the A/C/E dice the monsters have.. Oh and fudging the rolls

IMO, 2e suffered from the same problem: When you hit, the game is very lethal..except in 2e, you had the inverse of the chance to hit. 3e has a n 80% chance to hit. 2e had about a 40%.

Soak is all that matters..soak and a good reckless cleave.

Remember: Extra criticals KILL characters. I'd go with damage increases instead if you want it more dangerous, but less lethal. Somtimes you may want to take the reckless cleave and nerf it to "extra damage equal to thenumber on the card."

WFRP1e, 2e, 3e are designed to have a LOW wound threshold so that getting stabity-stabbed in the gullet isn't something that you can just shrug off with some mascara from your D&D cleric

jh