The penality is so minimal once you have a trained ranked in the relevant characteristics (INT, WP).

It is only natural to prolong your life a little bit when you face the hordes of chaos.

p78 - Roleplay Rulebook

"Whenever making a Channelling (WP) or Spellcraft (Int) check, an arcane caster must add one misfortune die to his dice pool for each point of soak value provided by any armour and shield he has equipped. Soak values from other sources, such as magic spells, do not impede spellcasting.

The penality is so minimal once you have a trained ranked in the relevant characteristics (INT, WP).

It is only natural to prolong your life a little bit when you face the hordes of chaos.

Well, in my eyes it is just horrible rp to wear armor as a wizard. You might want to prolong your life from a meta player perspective but in character the idea is just really weird. But as long as people play super physically strong wizards to min-max the flamy sword that happens. For me a wizard in warhammer will always be a physically inferior being with immense mental capabilities that can shape reality itself with its mind. Not an armor wearing melee power house. But in the end ... each one their own.

The rules (Tome of Mysteries) mention that some mages prefer a sword over a staff and even get them attuned (+white dices on channeling/spellcraft checks).

Warhammer battlemages that I'm familiar with typically aren't allowed to carry a shield or buckler but are often times seen with one-handed melee weapons like Spellblades and can wear plate or chain mail. I don't see an issue here. I have a feeling the aesthetic preference for magic users is heavily based on what game systems, novels, or timeframes you've been exposed to.

Add to this the completely broken order ability of bright wizards, and you have 45 damage flameblasts, and later on flamestorms, thrown after a few rounds of channeling, taking out even greater daemons in one round.

How in the world does one get 45 damage flameblasts?

You can only Channel Power if your current power points are less than twice your WIllpower. So you can't even Channel unless your current power is at most 11, with a 6 Willpower. Channel Power then gives you another 7, max, for a total of 18 power. Flameblast costs 6 to cast, so a maximum Bright Wizard modifier of +12 damage, unless I'm mistaken.

Can you tell me where this is stated? I wasn't aware there was such a restriction. This would be a good find, as we have been looking for a proper way to restrict a wizard's channeling capabilities. Until now I was certain it was ruled so that a wizard suffers 1 stress and has to use one maneuver each turn to keep his power from dissipating, if he has more power than twice his willpower. Never seen it stated that a wizard can't channel more after that.

A wizard (especially a bright wizard) is actually designed to be using armor when they reach epic levels. There is a 5th rank spell for bright wizards to summon a fire armor (4 soak and 2 defense) and there is the cerulean armor spell for celestial wizards as well (these don't affect spellcasting at all). Taking a breastplate and chain early on is simply giving the GM a taste of things to come.

Add to this the completely broken order ability of bright wizards, and you have 45 damage flameblasts, and later on flamestorms, thrown after a few rounds of channeling, taking out even greater daemons in one round.

How in the world does one get 45 damage flameblasts?

You can only Channel Power if your current power points are less than twice your WIllpower. So you can't even Channel unless your current power is at most 11, with a 6 Willpower. Channel Power then gives you another 7, max, for a total of 18 power. Flameblast costs 6 to cast, so a maximum Bright Wizard modifier of +12 damage, unless I'm mistaken.

Can you tell me where this is stated? I wasn't aware there was such a restriction. This would be a good find, as we have been looking for a proper way to restrict a wizard's channeling capabilities. Until now I was certain it was ruled so that a wizard suffers 1 stress and has to use one maneuver each turn to keep his power from dissipating, if he has more power than twice his willpower. Never seen it stated that a wizard can't channel more after that.

One of the requirements for channeling power. It's written on the Channel Power action card, if I'm not mistaken.

One of the requirements for channeling power. It's written on the Channel Power action card, if I'm not mistaken.

You are not mistaken.

If you don't have the card itself and only have the players' guide then it's on page 239, which is a duplicate of the action card.

Thanks! My GM will be grateful indeed. This will reduce the flameblast and flamestorm damage from 45 to 25-30 (max), which will stop greater daemons from being killed off in one hit. (flamestorm can still kill them in one round, if you can trigger the effect multiple times) It also gives the player some reason to take the higher level damage spells. I should probably read these basic action cards again, in case I have missed / forgotten some other things.

Thanks! My GM will be grateful indeed. This will reduce the flameblast and flamestorm damage from 45 to 25-30 (max), which will stop greater daemons from being killed off in one hit. (flamestorm can still kill them in one round, if you can trigger the effect multiple times) It also gives the player some reason to take the higher level damage spells. I should probably read these basic action cards again, in case I have missed / forgotten some other things.

If your GM has problems why doesnt he just adjust the stats? Use sorcerers that use counterspell. Give them actions which counter that. You can even freestyle abilities. The problem is always that players know after some time how tough the opponent is and then combat loses all it's meaning. There are so many things he could do so I cannot see why that is a problem.

If you do combat you should adjust the stats/encounter so that it is a challenge. If it is not a challenge just go the narrative way. Why waste time on an encounter that is won by the players the moment it started?

My GM did do things to make the fights more challenging, sometimes in the middle of a battle. If a boss character was about to be killed in one hit, it would get a sudden buff in power (a frenzy state), additional wounds, increased stats and things like that. A very effective way was to simply put multiple weaker opponents with bows against us. No matter how high a soak value I had, one wound would still be gained on each hit. Enemies who cause stress/fatigue were tough as well.

The problem was when the GM got caught off guard, as happened during the first combats the bright wizard was in. No one knew what he could do (not even me), and it just so happened that a well designed fight our GM had planned out, turned into two rounds of one sided butchering. Afterwards the GM increased the difficulty of the battles. This has the danger of turning into an arms race between the players and GM. The GM wants to have challenging fights, and the players want to be able to win them.

As has been discussed on these forums before, designing battles can be difficult if the group is not balanced. How to challenge everyone? Having the difficulty increase based on the capabilities of one player has many risks. If the GM counts on one player to kill most opposition, what happens when he doesn't? It is inevitable that the character will once miss the massive flamestorm, bad rolls happen. The players will be suddenly overwhelmed, when their meat grinder is malfunctioning.

This causes high fluctuation in the tempo of the game. It's going to be one sided, one way or the other.

On the storytelling side, it is problematic as well. Storywise, how do you explain the sudden increase in difficulty? If you bring an opponent with stats equal to Archaon the Everchosen, shouldn't it also have the story value equal to Archaon? It would be weird if the players encountered such an opponent on each session. This would make boss characters seem an everyday ordeal. Sure, you can make the bosses "story mode only" and make them different that way, but this system has a heavy emphasis on combat, so it would be a waste to not make use of the many creature cards this game has to offer in combat.

Anyway, these problems aren't really game breaking, there are ways around them. I just thought they would be worth discussing nontheless.

Certain types of characters can cause the arms race as described above. Ironbroken's and swordmasters go that way. Trollslayers have a weakness: no armor. Even though their soak can be higher, it's not Ironbroken high.

I've found that high soak is the hardest thing to deal with. I've already nerfed other stuff to keep it from spinning wildly out of control in favor of only 1 player in the group, but it can happen.

Anyways, dealing with a high soak PC is harder I think because you've got to escalate damage in general, which only punishes the people who didn't twink out their characters. Then, when a PC dies, the player is always tempted to make something tougher in order to survive. Then what happens is the game degenerates into an over-detailed version of the fantasy battles game.

So, I still think that's why it is so important to use all the other stuff to wipe one-trick characters off the map (so to speak, so that it is not encouraged): insanities, disease, mutation, curses, traps, and long-lasting conditions work, but I still think that more benefits to social interaction, investigation, and creative combat solutions are my favorite carrots over just trying to attempt to balance an escalated kind of arms race.

jh

On the storytelling side, it is problematic as well. Storywise, how do you explain the sudden increase in difficulty? If you bring an opponent with stats equal to Archaon the Everchosen, shouldn't it also have the story value equal to Archaon? It would be weird if the players encountered such an opponent on each session. This would make boss characters seem an everyday ordeal. Sure, you can make the bosses "story mode only" and make them different that way, but this system has a heavy emphasis on combat, so it would be a waste to not make use of the many creature cards this game has to offer in combat.

tl;dr:

If you use bosses make them either smart/witty or into a crazy powerhouse. The boss is the boss afterall because it is standing out of the masses that are just there to do his bidding. Powerful pcs need enemies that are player smart by the GM, therefore the powerhouse of the party can do something but the rest can also get involved because they need to have a plan that might as well involve more steps than 1:shoot 2:kill 3:loot.

A boss isn't a unit that just has high stats for me. A boss is a unit I designed to be challenging. If you kill something in 1 or 2 hits the chance is at 99% you killed a grunt in my campaign.

If you have characters that are powerful and want to create a challenge don't go about throwing lots of units at them. A good example is shadowrun. You have a lot of enemies but they are just cannon fodder after all. The enemy runner team is the real threat. Not because they are outnumbering your players 10:1 or are just insanely op because they maxed out everything. They are a challenge because you play them smart.

Using this as a basis my bosses usually aren't the big bad. Sometimes the big bad is okay, mostly depending on the story. But in the end it is more satisfying for the players if they won because they outwitted their enemy not just because they rolled good on their actions or read the rules carefully to pick the best/most broken cards.

Another thing for Archaon the Everchosen and any other big bad: If you really want the big bad as the enemy than you increase the stats. The idea of the big bad shouldn't be "I have spent 5 hours on him to perfectly balance him so the fight is epic and takes 5 rounds". The idea should be that the big bad is not the smart plotting guy but just the all powerful monster that is almost impossible to stop if you do NOT have a plan. In addition the frequence of encountering strong enemies should increase in a campaign with high ranking pcs. They should face more difficult problems and the odds should be higher. Therefore the enemy is also stronger.

Another example for high ranking player enemies: Avoid always focusing on adventures that are solved by killing someone. Maybe have some detective adventure or the plot leads them to a city into the gold tier where you cannot just kill someone because you think he's the bad one.

In addition I would just tell the player that his character kind of lessens the fun for me as a GM and that he should maybe think about a challenge for his character and then tell me what he came up with. It is not the duty of the GM to try and try and force himself so everyone else has fun. You are not riding the rollercoaster you are playing a game together.

Emphasis on combat: I do not feel that wfrp3 is very combat oriented. It feels more like they threw all the bs out that slows combat down in other games like hitzones and precise movement and so on. It is still interesting to play but you do not have the mechanics slowing the game down. You just the bare essentials that are needed to have structured combat. But I am not fond of combat anyways and often have no combat encounter in a session at all.

ps: Characters that are really tough and use crazy amounts of armor. Use the environment to the enemies advantage. If the enemy units aren't retarded or have a leader they might know that the guy in the full plate will sink like a stone in marshes, swamp, water, terrain that is wet or slippery and so on.

My PCs hit their 34th advance. It is quite some work now to beef up the NPCs and add them Action cards.

I started to play my NPCs opponents as Nemesis ones - otherwise they would die like flies.

I have an Amethyst wizard in my group with mailshirt and hand pistol. The 1 black die per soak penalty is laughable when

you have spellcraft properly trained

Our Marksman is also a killer. He now has an Action Card which allows him to Attack on the Initiative Roll followed by "Me First".

The "Rapid Fire" and using Marksman ability "remove all defense modifiers from pool for one attack". Needless to say that noone stands against this.

The dwarven engineer is also ranged and "invented" crude explosive bolts for his repeating xbow.

The first big baddie (no spoilers) in TGS was killed in 3 rounds (beefed him up to 9 TOU) and 35 wounds due to 9

crits (including a permanent servered leg). CARNAGE!

Better get the bloodthirsters out so...