Hi there guys, i no this has proberly been talked about elsewhere but ive heard alot about how the 3rd edition of wfrp is designed for 3 - 4 players, i've been thinking about getting the 3rd edition as myself and my group are long time fans of wfrp and have done 1st and 2nd editions and have even converted the first edition stories for 2nd edition, anyways the point of the post is our group currently consists of 7 people including a gm, is it possible to play with this many people? do u need to use the cards that come with it or can all move and career info be found in the rule book?

thanks for any help

7 would be quite a few to play straight, as the game's physical components take up table space in front of each player. You do not need as much common space as in a more tactical d20. The core set supports 3 players so, assuming you respect IP, you would need a couple and an adventurer's toolkit as that adds one.

That is all by the book. Some folks use print offs of the basic actions instead of cards etc. and other house approaches that would be more friendly to larger numbers.

You would have to adjust encounters quite a bit to avoid 7 PCs walking through them, and 7 would be harder put to all be engaged in the more social ones.

I've tried running different games with that many (or more!) players, and it just doesn't work well for me. 3-4 players is the sweet spot (and WHFRP is tailored for that), 5 at most for certain games, if you can get the players to always stick together. Or if you're not enough of a bastard to split the party

But if you want to try:

Tokens and printouts for skills should be perfectly fine to make on your own. Print a few sheets with just skill names and some essential numbers on them, buy a bucket of generic tokens to keep track and off you go. Arts and crafts stores might have something you can use, or you can buy Magic gems, FFG token packs etc. You could also design some simple character sheets with the core skills printed on them. The book-only version of the game would necessitate something like that anyway. You have skills that reset at different intervals, which you keep track of with tokens.

I suggest you buy the core set and familiarise yourself with the components and how they're used. After that you'll see what you'll need. There are a bunch of skills all players can use, and ideally you'd have an extra set for your NPCs too. When you have 7 players it doesn't seem like such a dumb idea to have multiple toolkits either, since you're likely to have some overlap in careers.

A band of mercenaries may have different backgrounds, but many are often soldiers who got tired of their old armies. I doubt anyone would send attack lawyers after you if you copied a few career sheets for personal use.

Adjusting encounters is trickier. It's not necessarily as simple as doubling the numbers for a double-sized party. You'd have to mock up some characters and run tests before you foist it on the players

Less combat-focused adventures could of course work - nobody is as stupid as a group of people acting together!

the max number of players i ever had as 6 as well. we had to shrink the group because of a lack of space on the table acutally.

and i have a huge gaming table...

it also prolongs ombat and any checks extremely as 1 combat round may take almost an hour with as many players as 6...

unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your situation, the game is designed for "smaller" gorups

but there is an option i think it is described in the players guide.

you can play the game without the cards, simply writing your actions and stuff down on a sheet of paper as with other rpgs. we never tried it, but it may be worth a shot to at least make a little more room on the table

Hi,

I was playing Warhammer 3 regularly with 8 players + me (the GM). In general playing role games with so many players is hard, but in my case there is no other option. Said that, there are rpg's that adapt better than other to big groups, and sadly, Warhammer 3 is not one of those.

People has pointed already the physical "problems" that will arise, but in my experience this is the least of your worries. The game has some mechanics that really do not work for large groups.

-The dice: A large group of players mean a lot of dice rolls. Which means a lot of dice pool interpretation by the GM (and the players if you are lucky). At the middle of a session you won't know what else to say about that chaos star, the boons, the Sigmar comet that has been just rolled. For example, Sigmar Comets and Chaos Stars, as suggested by the game, are results that have to strongly influence the plot; but at the same time Sigmar Comets appear in a d6 dice and Chaos Stars appear in a d8 dice, it is just too much for a normal imagination.

-The concept of engagement: The game do not uses a map for combat and uses an abstract concept called "engagement" to define who can fight in close combat against who. Some action cards like Guarded Position use the concept of engagement to interact with PC and NPC. For large groups this simple does not work without modification. A card as basic as simple as Guarded Position is a game breaker if used by a large group of players.

-The NPC typically do not have skills and use something called A/C/E dice budget to compensate for it. This concept of no skills and dice budget is by itself a mess, but additionally for large groups of players it simply do not work. Since you do not know the game, I won't enter into details about why it does not work.

-Opposed to previous editions of the game, the PCs in Warhammer 3 start the game with a high degree of proficiency. They will have easily a success ratio of 70% - 80% on average checks falling in their field of expertise. Additionally, there few skills in this game, like 22 skills or so that cover all the actions the PCs can do. To this you have to add the fact that the PCs evolve extremely fast. The result is that for big groups the game offers little challenge outside combat situations which relates to my previous comment, more often than not, you will find yourself interpreting a huge amount of boons and Sigmar Comets and trying to give them a significance into the story, which is very tyring.

Well, there are other smaller things, but I found these the most relevant in my games. Again, said that, I have played this game for a long time with my group of 8 players, and we had fun for some time. At the beginning we had to introduce a few modifications of the basic mechanics of the game to adapt it to our group. As the game progressed and the players increased in experience and proficiency, we had to compensate more and more aspects of the game. Finally we stopped playing it.

Cheers,

Yepes

If your GM can manage it, try splitting the group up into two separate pc groups. I'm currently running a three year long campaign that has a rotating group of around 7 players, all with characters located in the Reikland (a province located in the geographic center of the Empire), but in different cities and towns and with different backgrounds and agendas, which makes justifying them traveling around in smaller groups more probable.

For example: I have a group that originally consisted of a Road Warden, an Agent, and an Apprentice Wizard, all hired by the same Noble Lord to conduct some investigations for him. They eventually come to the aid of a wayward Wood Elf (player 4) who tags along with them for a time until he can locate his lost Wood Elf companions. After a time, the group settles back into nearby Ubersreik, the Roadwarden and Agent having found permanent employment with the Noble Lord. The Wizard has obligations to his school and the Wood Elf wishes to return to his people, so the two split off and travel a ways together (group 2 is formed). This left the Road Warden and Agent to befriend/hire a local Doctor (Player 5), creating group 1's new lineup. Next, one of my players from group 2 (the Wood Elf player), wanted to play a dwarf as well, so he rolled up one and joined up with a new player (Player 6) with a young Noble character forming group 3. Lastly, the doctor PC has recently been in his spare time, dabbling in grave robbing for his surgeons guild and has had to seek the assistance of a professional Grave Robber (player 7) forming group 4 on occasion.

So, I have at any given time, 4 different parties of PCs roaming around my campaign world at any given time and it works reasonably well, though each group only gets to play once a month at most.

I'd say that smaller groups of players, 3-4 being optimal for most games, helps the game to move much faster, and encourages more players interaction and even roleplaying, as no one is sitting around waiting for their turn for too long.

If you want to play with a larger group, here has been my experience:

• Our sweet spot is now 4 players (considering the personalities in the group do not like combat-monkey-powergamers), however, I've run this game at conventions with as many as 7-8 and done just fine, but that depends on if your group is established and everyone knows their role. If it's just a bunch of people who want to try it out, take two small groups of 3 or 4 and run them through the demo (FFG downloads page).
• The "traditional" player character set-up takes up an inordinate and enormous amount of space. You will want to pare that space down by doing the following things:

1. Use basic action summary sheets. You can download these in several places including the FFG downloads page for this game. This rids you of all the nonsense basic action cards. You can also download condensed versions of this sheet (Gitzman's gallery). Put tape over the recharge area and have people use an erasable marker instead of tokens.
2. Put everyone's "special action cards" into collectable card album sheets. They cost something like $1.00 for 10 sheets at your local baseball card store. You can do this with the talent cards and career ability cards as well. Use use an erasable markers instead of tokens when possible (or use "magic" tape that can be written on/off with pencil.

3. Take the Career Sheet entirely off the table and write your talent sockets on your character sheet. For socketing (if you use that ridiculous game mechanic..imo), just have your player mark it on the album sheet with the card on it once he's learned the game.

4. Track Fatigue and stress with a pencil on paper instead of tokens. Again, this saves space and sanity. Some players may want to use tokens, good for them

• Dice will be an issue. I recommend that any of your players who have smart phones or small computers simply use one of the many WFRP3 dice app's or websites out there and leave the real dice for those without. Unless you've got a 2nd core boxed set, extra dice packs, or make your own with sharpie markers and blank dice(which I suggest), you're going to have very slow turns initially. Once your players get the hang of things it moves really fast, but initially, people will be trying to remember dice symbols and what cancels what.

• SPACE ON THE TABLE FOR COMBAT: this is the beauty of this game. You don't need much space at all as you simply have a tokens to represent space between characters rather than a large D&D-style grid. Remember to tell your players that there are no 5' steps and no flanking maneuvers because you're already considered to be attempting such things. You don't have to go through the D&D-combat-dance every round

• THEMES: This game works great for combat heavy games, but many of the themes are investigative or social-interaction. I don't know how this has worked for your large group in other games, but I find that too many SHerlock Holmes' in the group combined with players who get bored and just want to pick fights with NPCs all the time makes it not as fun as it could be. This is true in most games where combat isn't the only thing going on.

• BlackFire pass and the Crimson Rain adventures would be excellent adventures for a large group btw.