I like several of these dice ideas in narrative theory but I'd want to run some probability numbers to really see the impact on the game. It's nice to suggest these kinds of things on a thinktank, surface or aesthetic level but I'd be curious to see how the actual, real math hums under the hood. Also, the delay and fatigue side-effects of the reds and greens comes into play quite a bit with my games. Are you guys just ignoring these effects completely, or finding other ways to represent them?

No that is why i suggested using the stance dice as the upgrade instead of the expertise dice. That allows player choice when making a check and leaves the delay and exertion effects in play.

I like several of these dice ideas in narrative theory but I'd want to run some probability numbers to really see the impact on the game. It's nice to suggest these kinds of things on a thinktank, surface or aesthetic level but I'd be curious to see how the actual, real math hums under the hood. Also, the delay and fatigue side-effects of the reds and greens comes into play quite a bit with my games. Are you guys just ignoring these effects completely, or finding other ways to represent them?

No that is why i suggested using the stance dice as the upgrade instead of the expertise dice. That allows player choice when making a check and leaves the delay and exertion effects in play.

That makes a bit more sense to me once I went through it again. I see what you're going for now.

I am starting a new campaign with a group of friends and we are making pretty big changes to the game.

Some background. This group has been together for a long time. And we've played several different games (D&D 3.5, a totally home brew system using BRP rules, WFRP 3 (when it first came out), Pathfinder and most recently Hackmaster). Pathfinder is what we generally revert back to. It just seems to stick because the regular GM (not me) likes all the source material he has available to him (plus conveniences like Hero Lab, etc).

I personally don't care for GM'ing Pathfinder, so when I GM it's always something else. I love the Warhammer mythos (I played 1st edition back in the day - I'm old). I like dark, gritty, low magic fantasy as a general rule.

A few things I didn't like about the Warhammer system when we played it the first time (I was GM and I ran the original Enemy Within campaign converted over):

1. Action cards - I hate them personally because they slow things down. Combat takes a long time in every system, but it's just made that much worse when the table is littered with cards and guys are reading each every turn trying to figure out what to use. It's even worse when you have guys trying to min/max with way of the sword action cards and running mini games that overshadow the actual role-playing experience. I'm just not a fan. The social cards were cool, but the combat ones were more negative than positive.

2. Lethality (or lack there of) - I don't make a point to actively try and kill PC's, but I do feel let down if we go a full 6 month campaign with no casualties (that happened). That was impossible in 1st edition. Now, part of this was my own failings as GM. I was lazy with monsters and didn't load them up with action cards (so I did not crit as much as I should have). I went light on the corruption rules and didn't even use the disease rules. Total failings on my part. But still, without a lot of crits, you basically can't die in this game if you have a decent toughness. And that never settled well with me. I shouldn't need all my monsters to have reckless cleave to actually kill PC's.

3. The game felt incomplete - I was an early adopter and at the time there felt like a lot of missing things. No halflings (I don't like them personally, but really??). No Khorne or Slaanesh (in particular, the former - I need me some Khorne). This really disappointed me (much of this has been fixed with later supplements, all of which I now own).

There were a lot of super positive things though:

1. Dice pools - the narrative aspect of these in particular is wonderful. I love it.

2. Simple rule set - I like crunch in limited quantities, but over the years I have really come to appreciate simple systems. It focuses more on role-play vs roll-play and that just makes the time pass in a more pleasant manner. At the end of the night, I feel like I had an adventure instead of working math problems for 3-4 hours.

3. Style - IMO, this game oozes style. The art is wonderful, the presentation (though maybe not organized well) looks fantastic. Just the right amount of fluff without putting me to sleep with novels of crap I don't care to know. I wish it was all in one big book and not spread out all over the place, but it really is well done.

4. The bits and pieces - as much as I did not like action cards, I actually really like most of the other bits and pieces. Simple mechanics that can have reaching effects. I know not everyone loves talent cards and slots, but I think it's wonderful. Being able to SHARE an ability you have with the group via the party sheet, is brilliant. Every implementation of this I've seen in other games (team feats and other such things) all sort of suck. But in this game, I think they work. Critical wound cards. Miscast cards. Disease cards. All this stuff feels really nice to play with IMO. I don't miss rolling on tables honestly. Give me a deck of cards to draw from anytime over a table.

On to the modifications we are making to the game. Some of this may or may not appeal to the audience here - much of it is catering to things my group likes. Long story short, this is not all intended to be an evolution (I am not claiming it is such). It's really about customizing the game to better suit what I want to GM and what the group I game with wants to play. The rule set for WFRP3 being so simple really makes for an easily moded game IMO. I would never attempt some of this in more complicated systems.

1. Action cards OUT / Feats IN. Of all the mechanics in D&D 3.5/Pathfinder, feats is the one that my group misses the most when we play another system. Adding them into Warhammer wasn't hard. I needed to replace action cards with something anyway, so it was an easy substitution to appeals to everyone in the group. Feats are basically super talents (they do more than talents and they are always "on"). Right now, each skill in the game has one feat associated with it. In order to take the feat, you must train the skill and you must have a "4" in the associated attribute. This prevents players from cherry picking the best feats and it puts more importance on skills (training them - especially some skills that rarely get selected). With action cards out, there is now a generic attack action that everyone gets. For active defenses, you can choose to do one against any attack (block or parry or dodge), you no longer track recharge on these. Improved Parry/Block/Dodge is now a feat under the appropriate skill (for all intents and purposes, this is practically RAW you just get it as a de-facto ability instead of an action card you have to manage in combat).

2. Second by second combat. This was the best takeaway from our time with Hackmaster. That system proved too crunchy overall for our group (even if it was well done), but the combat system it employed was pure genius. There are no rounds or turns. You start at 1 second and you play out what happens as each second goes by. Initiative is rolled on traditional dice (lower dice if you are more prepared or have a higher agility). What you roll is the first "second" you can act. The true brilliance of Hackmaster's system is how fluidly it flows (everyone stays involved because you are never waiting for "your turn" - you can alter what you are doing at any time) and how well it handles weapon speed. Bigger weapons do more damage but the swing speed with them is slower. That is the trade off. It's really the first system I've seen that had a really great and logical way to balance daggers with great swords. Why would you ever use a dagger in a game like D&D? It's damage is crap versus larger weapons (and in those games, they both attack at the same rate - stupid). In a speed based system like this, there is a very good incentive to use faster weapons since you will end up getting more attacks in (though they will each do less damage - from a practical standpoint, this means faster weapons are better against lightly armored opponents as a general rule).

3. Lots of other little house rules to deal with things that annoy me in Warhammer (like a rule for bleeding out if you take a hit that drops you to a large negative hit point number - why are you technically KO'd but "stable" if you got hit for 20 and are now sitting at -15 wounds??? Makes no flippin sense. In 1st edition, you would have rolled on a critical hit chart and at that negative number you would have rolled "your head lands 2D6 feet from your body")

This is all still very much a WIP, but let me know if any of you are interested in more details. I'm happy to share. It will certainly change over time. I'm also open to suggestions, especially if anyone has gone down this path before.

Cheers

Concerning dice:

I’ve been looking a bit at LordBobman’s excel calculator. A few thoughts:

- If we ignore boons for a while, the expertise dice are actually only about 5% more likely to generate one or more successes than characteristic dice. The main advantage is the possibility of one of those being a comet, which has additional uses.

- If I were to use misfortune dice as the “basic” difficulty dice, I’d lean towards challenge + 2, so that average difficulty would be four misfortune dice.

- Stance dice (especially reckless) would actually be a good choice as basic difficulty dice, if you were to count successes as failures and boons as banes.

This would make even more sense if Chaos stars also counted as failures (in addition to cancelling comets), so that challenge dice became really bad news.

Both types of stance dice produce 0,7 failures/die on average, while challenge dice produce 0,88 (including stars, which might also do other bad things).

This made me think of the following system (which will have to be play-tested):

• Characteristics determine the amount of characteristic dice rolled
• Skill level upgrades characteristic dice to expertise
• Specializations add an expertise die.
• Difficulty is the same as before, but with the appropriate stance dice
• Stance dice may be upgraded to challenge dice when appropriate (in a way similar to EotE)
• Fortune and misfortune added as normal
• If a character attempts to use a basic skill he/she isn’t trained in, the difficulty is upgraded once (this is an idea from 2 ^nd Ed).

@NicoDavout: Thanks. Maybe if this turns out well, it might be just what you are looking for. But I certainly understand going back to 2 ^nd Ed. I personally don’t like the combat in 2 ^nd Ed at all – but otherwise I think it’s a fine system

@ahadabans: Funny you should mention it; I’m currently running the old Enemy Within, using 3 ^rd Ed rules, as well

In general, I agree with much of what you’re said, but then again, I was also raised on 1 ^st Ed WFRP (It was actually the first system I GM’ed).

A few thoughts:

I agree with you on lethality. In my experience, this mostly stems from many creatures, especially NPCs, being very underpowered as written. When you have a background in 1 ^st or 2 ^nd Ed, you kinda expect basic NPC’s to be about as powerful as new PC’s, which simply is not true in 3 ^rd Ed. For example, a “soldier” NPC is way less powerful than a new PC in the soldier career (and for some reason he doesn’t seem to have a weapon). This trend is amplified by most NPC actions being way worse than PC actions.

I’m doing a few things to change this:

Characters have five less creation points, to bring them more in level with NPC’s

NPCs have access to PC actions (I already do this)

I give my NPCs weapons! Three damage won’t get you anywhere.

The new rules for dice pools generally make PC’s less powerful – especially as they level up.

Concerning your rule modifications:

1: I don’t want to remove action cards. I do, however, agree that they’ve been misused and over-emphasized in 3 ^rd Ed, so I’m changing how they work.

The way I see it, actions + talents = feats, with talents being passive abilities and actions being active.

By removing the recharge mechanic (except for in persistent effects), the action cards no longer take up space on the table. They effectively become small play-aids, telling the players what they can do.

My philosophy is that non-basic actions should represent extensive training in specialized areas. Take Sniper Shot for example. Everyone can use Ranged Strike to shoot a crossbow, but Sniper Shot represents someone who’s spend a lot of time practicing the art of setting up “that perfect shot”.

I’m going to dramatically reduce the number of different actions, on the basis that each one has to do something fundamentally different. For example, I only want one “backstab” and one “hit things hard with a two-handed weapon” type of action. I’ll also limit the amount of actions the individual character has by removing the forced “action card” advancement.

Regarding active defenses, I’m a bit uncertain. Under “vanilla” 3 ^rd Ed, I’ve actually house-ruled them as you describe, but I’ve play-tested this modification with active defenses causing strain, same as all other actions, which worked very well.

2: That sounds like an interesting system, but for now I’ll try to stick as close to 3 ^rd Ed as possible, to make the conversion as easy as possible.

I like the idea of “weapon speed” and I’ll certainly have to figure out what to do with the “fast” and “slow” weapon qualities. Additionally, what actions can be used with the different weapons should matter a lot? For example, the “melee strike, but with Ag instead of St” action can only be used with rapiers, daggers and the like. Also, block should be much better than dodge or parry, to make not having a shield a real sacrifice.

Finally, if you’ll pardon the cheekiness of misquoting Sean Connery; “Don’t bring a knife to a zweihander-fight”. I don’t believe that every weapon must be equal, and while a dagger certainly should have its uses, there’s a reason why the two-handed weapons (swords, halberds, pikes etc) ruled the battlefield of this (approximate) time period.

3: That’s a good point. A solution might be to make excess damage cause additional critical wounds. About one per damage/To in excess of wound threshold, rounded up. So if a To 3 character with 1 wound left took five damage, he’d be KO’d and suffer three critical. One for the KO and two for excess damage.

@Croaker13

Very interesting take on the dice. Let us know how that plays out. I see flaws in the Warhammer dice that I think EoTE dice fixes, but I'm not willing to make the change. It's too drastic. I feel like it will have too many ripple effects and get me too far away from the core game. Which is sort of ironic since I'm making probably equally sweeping changes just in different areas.

1. I like your approach to the action cards. And I originally thought of doing something similar. But I abandoned it for a couple reasons. One, the combat action cards are poorly balanced. Some of them are clearly better than others and some of them are straight up broken (especially without recharge). Secondly, no matter how simple I get the action card selection and how to use them, they still slow things down. I don't need a sniper shot action card to illustrate a carefully aimed shot. IMO, that should narratively come out of the dice rolls (you rolled 5 hammers and a sigmar's comet! that arrow went straight through the goblin's eye socket. he drops to the ground dead). I don't want decisions made before the roll. I want guys to just roll when they attack. And then when the dice are interpreted, that is where I want decisions made. A single action card accomplishes that for me. All the fluff that goes along with it I can get from feats and/or a single action card. Take backstab for instance. I've tied that to a feat which is associated with Skullduggery. Attacks with a "Fast" weapon do additional damage if you land a clean hit and either your opponent has not acted in this engagement or you have advantage and are attacking with an ally. The big advantage to making these effects after the roll is guys waste less time. You no longer have to look at cards and decide you can make a backstab because of certain conditions (only to miss and it not matter anyway). Just roll. If you hit, then determine what was done (oh hey, a buddy is attacking with me and I have advantage right now. That was a backstab!). My 2 cents for greatly speeding things up while still getting to eat your cake.

2. After having played a second by second combat system, I would have a hard time going back to turn based. It works so much better. What has always driven me crazy about turn based is how unrealistic it is. I roll first initiative. I use my maneuver to close range, I take a fatigue to close range again, I then use my reckless cleave action and hit you for 15. You are dead. All this happened before the other guy got to do anything. And the encounter started with you 20 feet from me. How does any of that make sense? It doesn't. With a second by second system, everything takes time. And because of this it plays out so much better. That scenario I just described can still happen in second by second combat, but the more likely scenario is this: I have initiative and move, but while I'm moving your initiative comes up giving you time to either retreat, take a defensive stance, unsling a shield, charge to meet me in combat, etc.

It comes together so well and it really isn't hard to implement. You only need to decide how long actions take. Hackmaster has a fairly detailed list, but I'm keeping it simple (if something would take time, it takes 5 seconds - Standard Action. if something should be instantaneous or very quick, it takes 1 second - Quick Action. Weapon speeds are based on their DR. 4 or less = 7 seconds; 5 = 9 seconds; 6 = 11 seconds; 7+ = 13 seconds). If you are delayed for any reason, add 2 seconds to whatever action you are performing. If you get a free maneuver or spend a fatigue to do something more quickly, subtract 2 seconds from whatever you are doing (though nothing can take less than 1 second).

On the topic of using Agility versus Strength for "Fast" weapons. That is exactly the rule I'm following. 'Fast" weapons instead of adding one less recharge to an action (which no longer applies), you use Agility for your dice pool instead of Strength. No action card required to get that effect. It simply becomes part of the weapon property. Agility based characters now have a real incentive to use fast weapons. Spears look a whole heck of a lot more attractive now. It suddenly makes sense why Goblins use them.

3. Here is the rule I'm following. When you are KO'd, you get one critical automatically (RAW). Then every 10 seconds, you make a resilience role. If you fail, you convert one normal wound into another critical wound. This continues every 10 seconds until you stabilize, which happens in one of the following ways: Someone successfully administers first aid on you, you are magically healed, or you no longer have more normal wounds than your wound threshold (do not count converted crits in this calculation). This means that someone with a high toughness and who is only a couple points below zero will stabilize on their own. But if you are at -10, you are eventually going to fail resilience rolls and bleed out unless someone helps you.

@NicoDavout: Thanks. Maybe if this turns out well, it might be just what you are looking for. But I certainly understand going back to 2 ^nd Ed. I personally don’t like the combat in 2 ^nd Ed at all – but otherwise I think it’s a fine system

In the end I did not give up! Tomorrow hopefully I will run the first session using EotE system. The skills are a mix of EotE+WH3, but I use all the Characteristics from EotE. Careers from WH2, most talents and some skills became talents. Critical Hits from WH3. Items from WH3, but I reduced damage by 3 for now as each success will give extra damage as in EotE. No mages/priests yet. Paragon and Chaos Fate Points like in EotE.

The game went well. I see that the skills from EotE are enough and I don't have to create a new one. Of course some had to be change, a lot of more Knowledge skills, but the EotE base is enough. (Un)fortunately there was no combat so I can't say anything about adjusting damage because of different damage rules. Will see soon. Playtesting on the Conspiracy adventure, perhaps anyone played it? Set in Marienburg.

A player dropped out from our WH EotE playtest game and we are in need of one. Perhaps someone here will be interested to play as a rogue? We play "Conspiracy" scenario printed in Warpstone magazine. The next two games are scheduled on the19th and 25th, 8pm GMT+1.

If you know The One Ring, you could also check out my wfrp conversion - The One Hammer. Stupid name, but it sounds a bit like warhammer

I posted a thread on the main forum page, lots of work finished already, so apart from the spells it will be playable soon.

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/122330-the-one-hammer-conversion-project/

I really dislike the recharge mechanic too. At first it was refreshing, but then it turned bothersome. I like a more risk/reward approach, where for instance, when you try a special attack you need a certain number of successes or miss altogether. The successes will still count towards damage, but if you don't get a certain number, it won't happend. Besides I agree very much that they went overboard with different actions - too many that are similar.

Recharge on an initiative track. Like feng shui rpg. **** brillant

I love necroing threads, to life to life !!!!!! Mwahaha!!

Any updates, thoughts to add? I agree that characters should be weaker in the beginning, make the payers make difficult decisions at the start.

Ah ha,

What if you could group the actions together, two handed, long range, close range, etc and limit the pc to a certain number.