4 condition cards: Darkness, Prone, Too Close To The Flames, Pulling Your Punches

By r_b_bergstrom, in WFRP House Rules

Cross-posted from my blog 'cause I'm too lazy to dream up entirely new things to say about these cards.

Here's 4 and a half Condition cards I made for my table because I felt their absence from the core set was troubling. All were created using the Hurlanc and Liber Fanatica 7 extensions for Strange Eons.



Darkness
Warhammer has specific rules for actions taken in darkness. Such actions get a whole bunch of black penalty dice added to them. This should totally have been put on a card in the core set, so I made one:




Darkness-Front-Face.png To the left is my first draft, which faithfully summarizes the official rules.

To the right you'll find my revised version. I swapped out two of the misfortune dice for one purple die in cases where there's literally no light. It better matches the penalty from the Blinded condition, and also provides for an increased chance of rolling Chaos Stars, which is the symbol that generates all the hilarious fall-off-the-side-of-the-location-card effects scattered throughout various Warhammer encounters.

For the record, I totally would have started the purple dice much earlier on that list if not for the existence of the Dwarven and Elven racial ability. The night vision possessed by those two character races cancels two black dice from darkness penalties, but has no impact on purple dice. If not for that, every instance of two black on that card would be replaced with a purple.




Prone



There's a few points where the rules discuss what it means to be knocked prone. Standing up from being knocked prone officially costs a manoeuvre. Elsewhere in the rules they suggest you might apply fortune or misfortune dice to rolls involving prone individuals, but leave the specifics up to the GM.

As flexible and vague as that is, is it would be rather helpful to have at least the minimum effects put on a Condition card for easy reference. So I made exactly that.

I included a specific statement that you can't change locations while prone. That seemed the most elegant way to restrict crawling, which officially has no rules. Per the books only common sense stops you from running while prone.




Fire

Too-Close-To-The-Flames-Front-Face.png After much searching the books, I could only conclude that Warhammer 3rd doesn't actually have any official fire rules. There are, however, a number of location cards for things like burning buildings, barges and cities. Each time an adventure needed to take place inside or adjacent to a fire, they made a card to capture the feel of it. They aren't quite uniform, but they have a few commonalities. They usually slowly load you up on Fatigue points, sometimes give you minor penalties on your actions, and if you roll Chaos Stars near a fire it may well result in actual wounds.

The upshot of this is that I could reverse-engineer some baseline effects for standing in or near a major fire. Since I have a Bright Wizard in my party, this seemed worth putting on a generic reference card.




Non-Lethal Damage

Warhammer 3rd has no official rules for pulling your punches or dealing non-lethal damage. A number of GMs have attempted to address this specifically with custom actions or house-rules that inflict fatigue points instead of wounds. This runs into problems, though, as Fatigue and Wounds are mechanically very different. PCs are generally KO'd much faster by fatigue than wounds, and per the default rules NPCs don't take fatigue.

Pulling-Your-Punches-Front-Face.png
My version of the card is a voluntary effect. The main effect is that it cancels your critical hits on any attack that gets no Chaos Stars.

As it turns out, the normal healing rules are very generous, so once the fight is over normal wounds feel like non-lethal damage. Critical wounds take longer to heal, and are also what determines whether or not a KO'd character actually dies. As long as you take zero crits, you can technically survive an infinite number of normal wounds.

I kept the side-effects of the card pretty minimal, so it'd be worth using when the situation warrants. It adds a misfortune die and reduces damage by 1, just to pay lip service to the notion that you're intentionally not giving it your all.

Those are great. I think there is a scorched card which may be similar to your on fire card.

jh

Shouldn't be more difficult to hit with a ranged weapon to someone who is prone?

It is one of the few things I have learnt from Westerns, this and that you can be punched twenty times without dying sonreir

Yepesnopes said:


Shouldn't be more difficult to hit with a ranged weapon to someone who is prone?

The main way to end up prone is from various actions that knock the target prone when the attacker gets a good role, so I want to make sure it remains primarily a penalty to the person who is prone.

Realistically, at point-blank range laying on the ground is more likely to set you up for an execution than make you a difficult target. Point-blank in this game is Close, not Engaged, because most ranged attack cards say they can't be used if you're engaged. So that's why I included the fortune die on close range attacks.

Emirikol said:


I think there is a scorched card which may be similar to your on fire card.

I should have mentioned this in my original post… there's a reason why my Too Close To The Flames card says "Likely effects of a burning environment" instead of "Dependent Effect". I don't really intend to apply it like a condition card. It's more like a cheat-sheet so the Bright Wizard in our group can get an estimate of the effects if he used Cantrip or some other spell to set a building on fire. I don't generally let my players flip through the unused location cards, but I wanted the Bright Wizard to have at least a rough idea of the strategic application of fire.

Good stuff.

I made non-lethal/pulling punch attack a free basic action, on theory many special actions can't really be "held back on" and applied modifiers to the result based on the CR of the weapon (a poor CR weapon like staff or club being better than a good CR weapon like dagger or battle axe).